BYE

+1 possibility of resizing icons :)
 
And i agree with Richard above, when having to work with a clear canvas it's difficult to see and focusing on the icons...

Love the program, hate the UI. I too can't live with dark UIs but also, the icons are too small on my 27" iMac screen. Please, can we set our own UI colours and icon sizes?

I've just set up an account on this forum specifically to make this request.
 
I'm an Illustrator user who really resents Adobe's new CC subscription scheme, so I'm interested in software that provides a realistic alternative to Adobe's core products. I've just bought Affinity Designer and so far am very impressed by what I see, feature-wise. There's a lot to like here.
 
However, I DO NOT LIKE dark user interfaces, and I was dismayed when I found that a dark interface is all that's on offer here. Maybe it's a feature of my eyes, but I find the dark colours extremely difficult to resolve and focus on, especially if I'm working on fairly bright/pale artwork (which is invariably the case).
 
UI designers seem to be under the misapprehension that having dark user interfaces is helpful because the tools 'get out of the way' and don't distract from the content. In fact, that's not true (or, at least, it's missing the point). The key thing is contrast: for ideal working conditions, every part of the screen that contains active content (i.e. artwork and tools) should be of a similar brightness to the overall intensity of the artwork. So, if you're designing dark/predominantly black artwork, your eyes need to adjust to that darkness, and hence having dark tools is helpful in that situation. But in the vast majority of cases (particularly when you're designing light artwork for use in print, typically on a white background), your eyes have to accommodate the glare of the bright colours, so the tools need to be similarly pale too. If there's a mismatch between artwork lightness and interface lightness, your eyes are constantly having to adjust as they move between the two areas, which is incredibly tiring.
 
Maybe I suffer from this more than other people, but I'm very conscious of it – and it's the reason why I hate dark user interfaces. It's not that I'm against them in terms of their looking good; it's all about usability. Ideally, the lightness of the user interface, in a design application such as this, should be adjustable on a per-document basis, because – as noted – for the best experience, its overall lightness should be similar to that of the artwork itself. (So maybe it could be tied to the document background colour for any given document.) But at the very least, given that most artwork is either printed or viewed on-screen against a light background, a light user interface should definitely be the default.
 
Frankly it amazes me that Adobe has got this wrong in recent times. It seems to be insisting on dark user interfaces itself, by default, which is barmy. But the fact that Adobe's started doing this doesn't mean that other developers should blindly follow its lead. Dark user interfaces may look cool, but they're actually a really bad idea, especially if enforced. Please, developers, THINK about such things! Take design decisions for the right reasons, rather than just to follow the current trend.
 
At least Adobe does still offer the full range of dark to light in its user interface preferences, so it's still possible to make them look like they used to look (black text on pale grey) – which is massively better than the dark default.
 
Unfortunately, Affinity Designer doesn't have this feature. OK, at least I can set the UI gamma. I've put it up to its brightest possible setting and it helps a little bit, but it's not nearly enough. At minimum, there needs to be a similar alternative to approach from the white end of the scale: i.e. to start with a very bright interface and darken it down.
 
Please think about acting on this as a matter of urgency, Affinity developers. Much as I'd love to see more 'real' features being developed for this excellent-looking product, this UI issue is, to me, surprisingly important because it impinges on the usability of the entire application. While the interface continues to be excessively dark and overly hard to read, it's going to materially hamper my ability to use the software.
 
We don't need skins and alternative icons. The basic look is fine. We just need to be able to lighten it right up so that the tools and buttons use dark text on a pale grey background. Thanks for listening.

+1
 
I can't understand why do some designers do not attent to just a possibility or optional way of having the color in the interface when a dark mode can't be seen well by some people.

I'd also like to see a "Yosemite" style UI. 
 
I appreciate the darker UI is better for some situations, but not always.

Yes, I know this - but this is not enough - there are not that big different with the gamma-slider x__x

Hi there,
I'd like to see a lighter/brighter mode for the whole UI. Sometimes it's much better to work in a lighter/brighter UI as in a dark mode (which I also like much!).
 
I think your UI is a lil bit to dark. I like more the dark-look of the native Apple Pro Apps. It feels a lil bit better :)

Hello Affinity,
 
I'm so glad to see an app like this in the marketplace. However, I can't use it for digital painting and illustration yet because of one MAJOR missing feature: Tablet pressure controlled opacity with the paint brush. As it stands you can set pressure on brush size and flow (among other things) but for digital painters opacity is the most important pressure control you can have. I'd say it's pretty darn important for retouchers as well. Please add this feature soon, because as of now Affinity Photo is unusable for me.
 
Thanks!

Another suggestion, not a very important one: Under OS X, most document-based applications support right-clicking the titlebar, which would open a menu with the parent folders of the document. I use this quite often in other applications to open the containing folder. It would be nice if AD and AP supported this, and it would be more OS X-conformant, too!
 
Cheers
 

This is an issue I touched on a long time ago.
As a technical illustrator I use ellipses almost all the time it the nature of the discipline. When deciding on what proportion of ellipse to start with in AD one simply draws an ellipse that looks OK. It is very unlikely that the illustrator will enter a height and width. The problem is that there is no way to repeat that ellipse if you have not made a note of its minor and or major axis. If there was another box in the Transform tab that told you what degree the ellipse was then it would be easy to remember and repeat.
 
By degree I mean the angle that a circle makes with the horizontal plane. e.g. a circle viewed on its edge ( a straight line) would be 0deg and when viewed full face  (a circle) would be 90deg, a circle tilted 45deg would a 45deg ellipse and so on.. As you increase either the height or width the 'new' degree box would show its angle.
 
Deciding to start with say a 35deg ellipse is much easier than trying to remember a width and height for a given proportion. The width and height boxes come into their own in specifying either major or minor axis.
I have attached a drawing which I have submitted before and think it won't do any harm to resurrect it again. 
 
I would suggest that the degree of an ellipse would simply be calculated by AD using the tangent of the minor axis divided by the major axis or the smaller size divided by the larger size size as height and width boxes would be interchangeable.
 
Since more people are now using AD than when I last mentioned this suggestion I would be most interested in how many 'Likes' it gets.
 
Ellipse proportions.afdesign

I love the possibility to stretch a curve directly (no need to control both handles). And I like the “organic forms” we can achieve with that options.
 
But there are situations where we would need to stretch curves maintaining handles direction (even if that handles are not horizontal or vertical)
 
My suggestion is:
 
— Direct manipulation of curve ---> actual behavior
 
— SHIFT + direct manipulation of curve ---> modify curve maintaining handles direction
 
Next capture shows a practical case maintaining HV handles (very useful for corners):
 

Just a BUMP to this :-)