Raptosauru5

@loukash Thanks for your input, but these solutions require more steps than I think should be necessary. My post is about discussing, how we could skip there extra steps and having things to happen more automatically.

Yes, I think I would like to simply toggle this in main Settings and expect duplicate/copy-paste always appear under 👍 Somehow it really makes more sense to me, that a "next" item should be below and "first" item on top. I can however see a confusion when you duplicate an object (without looking into Layers) and the duplicated item is now hiding behind the original. However, when working like a pro and just duplicating items by Alt-dragging them around your UI you are designing, the "Duplicate below" makes much more sense. So I think the default should be how it is now, but advanced user should have possibility to switch this in settings

When cloning multiple selected items in Layer hierarchy, the copy will simply duplicate above each item individually. What I would prefer is that the items would keep their order and wouldn't mix with the other "group", so I can for example duplicate a UI button with text and icon on it in the same order. Setup: How it works now: What I would prefer: Current workarounds: A: Right after cloning press CTRL+G to group them, then release them from the group and delete the empty group. B: Drag them with the mouse somewhere and then back. Can't always do it right above though. I believe this could be more intuitive. I know I can also solve it by putting everything in Groups, but sometimes I don't want to have nested groups everywhere. I can also imagine that this could become problematic if the cloning layers have other layers between them... Perhaps there could be a new shortcut, that would "smash" all selected layers to the upmost/downmost (<- is that a word?) layer? Maybe users would use it even in different cases!

Please, add an toggle somewhere, so that hitting CTRL+J (duplicate layer) or copy/paste would create copy BELOW the original layer in hierarchy, not above. I usually work my UI design from top to the bottom. How it works now: What I would prefer: Thanks for considering! I believe I am not the only one (please do not post obvious workarounds like shortcuts etc. I am using those currently. I actually use them every single time, because I 99% of time want to clone downwards)

I would really like to help, but can we perform some test without changing my settings? Can I for example have your exact file and follow your reproduction steps?

Actually, for things like this Serif could add plugin support. So people could code their own extensions if wanted. Affinity Photo seems to support Photoshop plugins, but Designer does not. There would be downsides to this though, so maybe they know why not to support this

My bad, Designer: Export: ...it turns out I can't read properly and I mixed up different commands Everything makes sense now! ....and I still think Export Persona would benefit from Arrange keystrokes

Thanks for this. When I said "Folder" I meant a "Group" (created by Ctrl+G), but this is a cool trick I did not know about, so thanks for sharing this! 👍 The reason why I think it is unproductive is that I do not necessarily want these grouped together when working. I would only group them for the exporting reasons and then this would cost more time than just selecting stuff manually (also, there is currently a bug where if you group Artboards, the snapping will stop working). Thanks for demonstration video, but this is not what I was looking for. I was looking for a shortcut how to select your favourite groups (Similar to strategy video games, where you select group of soldiers (A) and press Ctrl+5 and another group (B) Ctrl+3. From now on whenever I press 3 or 5, the group A or B will be selected, because the game memorized it). Changing my Designer layout just to make it nicer for Export persona is not worth it for me. Maybe I am asking for something that does not seem like a big deal, but it becomes a time saver once you have 70 Artboards...

Thanks, this was the problem! I am using ENG (US) keyboard layout with English (US) system language, but I remember this happened to me before. Re-assigning the shortcut to something else and then back to the Ctrl+Alt+] solved the issue. So, this seems like it was a bug in the Default value. ...I still wonder why in Shortcuts Settings in Export Persona this is located inside Select group, while in Designer Persona has this inside Layer group. Why not to make both inside Select group, to make it more consistant...?

Title says it all. This shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+]) just does not do anything. Neither in Layers nor in Slices. It works perfectly in Designer Persona but not in Export Persona. Perhaps I am missing something, because in Export Persona this is located in Select group, while in Designer Persona this is in Layer group. I would however expect the same keystroke to do the same thing... The "Move Back One" and "Move Forward One" would be nice to have too in the Export persona. It could affect whatever window you are currently inside (Layers or Slices)

Well, not exactly, I was unable to group multiple Artboards... Putting Artboards in the same folder would be counter-productive

Designer persona has this way of marking Layers. The Export persona Slices could also use the colour distinguishing (or some other way to put exports in groups, like numbering). Why would anyone need this? When designing App UI, one would create multiple Artboards, where each Artboard represents one screen in the App. Each Artboard would be one Slice. This works great when Designer makes a change and wants to just select all and export SVG to share the whole updated work with the programmer. But then there are also pieces of graphics that are separated. They are not pages, but just UI elements. This means that when Designer wants to update the work, they need to select manually all the slices they want to include in the update and when working on graphics, they need to unselect whole group and select only those graphics. It would be nice to be able to create "Export group", so one would just click the "Select Group 1" button and all slices marked with "1" would get marked for export. "Select Group 2" button would select different set of marked slices, etc. This would also allow some Slices to have multiple groups, both marked 1 and 2... Colours however are nice too, because one could for example mark Slices that are for example just backups etc. Such feature would definitely improve workflow! Thanks for considering!

I have plenty of Artboards for the App UI project and I also have some folders just to contain stuff that is not on Artboards, like Screenshots... But it keeps happening to me, that when I manually create new Artboard, the Screenshots Group will get automatically added to that new Artboard. I understand that this is happening because my Screenshots are all over the place and I am creating the Artboard inside their common bounding box. Here is a demonstration: artboards issue.mkv And my test file: artboards issue.afdesign Even though technically this makes kind of sense. I would expect this to only happen if I would draw the Artboard over an existing object. I do not however believe that this is an intended behaviour with group bounding box, so I am reporting it as a bug.

Thanks Mike, this is very helpful!!

Thanks for your insight. You are right, I actually can't even set DPI with "Rescale" selected - this option is greyed out and only becomes available if I am not using multiple Artboards. I can confirm this is true as well. It seems like there is something tricky happening under the hood when working with multiple artboards, because the behaviour differs. Either it is a bug, or it is an intended workaround.

@MikeTO Thanks for clarifying. I am actually using Affinity Designer, not Publisher. I use Pixels, because I am designing app UI and the developer is working with pixels in his code, so it is best that we use the same units. I think in my case using pixels does make sense, so perhaps it is a bug?

Thanks for your response! Interesting... it seems like this problem is specific to Windows system. All it takes is to change this DPI value, press OK and it will brake the Text Styles.

@walt.farrell Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Do you perhaps know how exactly does Affinity measure the font? And maybe some tips on how should I measure it when designing? (Are professionals measuring the font's position from it's center, x-height line, cap/descender line, ascender/descender line or just cap/baseline?). I am designing an App layout and I am not completely sure how to place texts so they are correctly aligned to other elements

I am still confused about how the Align toolbar works. There is an inconsistency in how it works. When I select two layers and I click for example "Align Middle", it will A: move both layers so they align or B: only moves one of the layer to meet the other to align! I think it depends on the hierarchy order and their parent-child relationship, but the way it currently works is behaving unexpectedly, because I do not want to check it in my complex hierarchy every time I want to align something. So I end up only using the "Alignment" menu: Which works as expected every single time, but requires way more steps. I would be really happy if I could set for example "Align to: Last Selected" as my Default for the Toolbar items (the toolbar on the first picture). This would make my workflow much more efficient! Thanks for considering.

I would welcome if the Snapping Options popup window would feature extra toggles for; A: "Snap only in radius: " + "Radius:" number box B: "Only snap objects in view". The A: Snap only in radius would limit snapping to a distance from an object I am working with and would not snap to any objects that are further away. The B: Only snap objects in view would not snap to anything that is off-screen. I tried using Candidates -> Candidate List, but this does not work very well when designing App UI/UX, because there is often lots of overlapping layers, so I had to go back to Candidates -> All layers which snaps to absolutely everything everywhere and causes bad performance when working with text etc. Radius limitation would solve this and limiting to screen would be a nice bonus, as I could regulate such limit with my zoom. Thanks for considering this feature! You guys are awesome!

As UI/UX designer I am often using same set of dimensions across my layout. Pretty much always they are multiples of 4 but I am also scaling my dimensions in golden ratio (4, 8, 16, 24, 40, 64, 104...). It would be GREAT if I could pre-define my favourite numbers in the Snapping options, so that snapping would favour these numbers (and indicate with colour that it did) when moving objects to achieve precise distances! (Transform window could have similar feature) Thanks for feature consideration!

First of all, I am not sure if this is a bug or intended behaviour, but I would like to bring it to devs' attention, because it confused me and at first I did not understand what was going on. After I changed the Document's DPI, all the texts in my document that were linked with a Text Style got resized. This means the document still looks right, however the Text Styles now sees it as if I would manually re-size these texts. Example above: The "NavBar 2" became "NavBar 2+" where the "+" indicates a modification to a style. Fixing this was fairly easy: 1. Select text on your document, it will get selected in the Text Styles window. 2. Right-click on it in the Text Styles window and click [Update "NavBar 2"]. 3. Do this for all your texts so all your Text Styles get updated. However, I can imagine an user getting super-frustrated if they could not figure out what is going on or if they would not notice this for a longer period of time. Perhaps there should be a popup dialogue, asking user what to do with fonts when changing DPI, or maybe the fonts should be updated automatically to fit new DPI? Thanks for your work, developer team!

@MEB Thanks for reply, I am sorry to hear about your personal issues. I hope you are doing better now! Hopefully the developers will figure out some smart way how to hide the Artboards from Layers. Overall I think the Designer could more include UI/UX designing workflows. For now it seems that UI design field could use more love in Affinity Designer. I know that this is probably not Designer's main target, but the Designer is the best tool out there for Vector graphics UI designers use mostly. Thanks for confirming the bug. You guys are doing an amazing job, developing an amazing tool!

@Return Thanks for response, As I mentioned, this is what I am using right now, but it is much slower to work with than the Bird's eye view would be

There is an ingenious cool feature in other software (unfortunately developed by some evil, greedy corporation you should avoid), called the "Bird's eye view". Nobody really talks/knows about this feature much, but it is really cool! Here is an article about how it works: https://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/photoshop-birds-eye-view-tutorial/ Basically, when in Hand tool, you hold the H + LeftMouse and the view zooms out to show your whole document. Then you can move your cursor somewhere else and release the keys and it will drop you right there with the previous zoom level. This allow you to "eject to the skies and land somewhere else like Iron Man" very quickly! This would be extremely handy when working on UI design, where I often need to compare/copy many different Artboards' elements! I think in Affinity this could work even with a Spacebar + MiddleMouseClick shortcut (or RightMouse for Mac users), because so far this combo does not do anything anyways! So far I am using the Navigator to move around, which is great, but the Bird's eye view would be faster to work with. Thanks for consideration. You guys are doing amazing job with Affinity!