mpstaton

Probably like a lot of amateurs that use Affinity, I download a lot of art from commercial libraries and modify them. I'm not that good at drawing them myself, and it takes forever anyway. I'm always ending up with images where I need to batch change colors. The Select Same Fill was a game changer for sure. However, a lot of this art has dozens if not hundreds of colors. I just want to brighten them. (Note, it would also be cool to be able to select curves that are DARKER than a certain range, or LIGHTER than a certain range, and then change those in specific, or actually just delete them (as I'm usually trying to remove backgrounds anyway.) Here's an example of art I need to modify.

And now I'm installing illustrator.

Basically whenever your canvas gets out of hand. Which happens for me all the time. You can just grab everything and press Tidy. I think anyone who ends up working much in the same file rather than in many different files would agree. Maybe I'm the only idiot who does stuff like this, but here is a screenshot of the primary file I've been working in for over three months. I'm trying to create pretty detailed yet easy to understand graphics for data modeling (I don't know if you've looked into it, but they're still using basic shapes and it doesn't represent even a fraction of the concepts that come up all the time in engineering and in UI Design. I take that back, this is a much cleaner version after I moved all kinds of Icon sets to a different file. I don't even know how to to tidy this. Everything is in different sizes, it's all over the place. (I know it's my fault, but all I have to do in Figma is press Tidy. Magic. And for the record, I'm a founder CEO not a designer. So when I say three months, I mean three months of 20 minute chunks of time I do not have.

Hi There, My Artboards get super out of hand, I am getting to the point where I needlessly create new files. I end up doing gymnastics to try to use the alignment tool across wide canvases. Please just steal these two features from Figma: Resize to Fit, and Tidy. Here's a GIF of the Resize to Fit option.

So, in designing for the web, a lot of what I need to do is have a big gradient give a feel to several (if not many) components that are acting as layers on top of the gradient. In some cases, you want the front layer to have it's own background. But in many cases, I'm actually trying to stretch the gradient across many smaller objects. I'm used to the idea of "collapsing" a grouping or layer. Usually, I think, in a mask collapse it pulls the color and style from the object being masked. burst-cal-evaluation-row-days.svg burst-cal-evaluation-row-days.svg Vector-4.svg Vector-3.svg Vector-2.svg Vector-1.svg Vector.svg

@NotMyFault constraint groups are a thing?

Hi there, I'm doing UI design work rather than illustration. I have this repeat pattern of lost time where I need to replace an object in some kind of grouping with a new one I have created, and I need it to inherit the dimensions of the object I am replacing. This is kind of "pre" using Symbols. Right now, I have to either drag it around the long layer panel, or I have to drag it around a long canvas. Then I got to do all the resizing and what not. While this doesn't take forever, maybe say 20 seconds to a minute, when I have to repeat it over and over potentially 50 times a day. Well, that's a half hour I could be doing other things. Is it possible? If not can you put it in your feature request que?

@R C-R hey there. Before I answer your question, I want to wrap it in a theory. While there are no one size fits all anything, there are frameworks, patterns, templates, etc that emerge and inform what you might call "consensus best practice." If you're a n00b, or like me you juggle a lot of different types of work (I'm a CEO, so I spend a month on brand and then I have to go spend a month on finance....), you don't have the opportunity to develop your own elegant systems. You just want to copy what works from someone who's smart and put a lot of thought into it. As for the project I'm doing, TBH I'm just coming up with a pattern language for communicating the core ideas that are required to lead remote teams. This is not what my company does, but it is what my company has needed. I have written enough long documents and given enough presentations and had enough meetings to know that there's something missing in conveying meaning in the context of remote work. So, I am primarily building an Icon library that has symbolic icons for common patterns in conveying meaning. I'm then taking that Icon library and building standard, responsive components that can be used in documents, presentations, infinite collaborative whiteboards. I came up with a little term for this -- Convey-UI. It's based on a theory of action I've been cooking called Visual Leadership. I will post some of it here later, kinda working against a self-imposed deadline right now.

Okay, so, I'm still a bit of a n00b but I've been using Affinity Designer 2 relentlessly for the past few months. My files are in shambles. As someone with the point of view of UI work and software engineering, the entropy to complexity multiplier is unmanageable. And I'm one person with only about three months of work. When do you use Artboards. When do you use Groups. When do you use Layers. When and how and why do you put one inside the other. What naming conventions do you use. At what point do you use Embeds from other files rather than keeping it in the same file? What is an Asset? How do you reason about what should be an Artboard, what should be an Asset, and what should be an Embed? Assuming you are using all these different doohickies with aplomb, how do you structure the files(directories for nerds) and have naming conventions so you can sort and find and then not mess up all the dependencies between one files and the many files that are called upon? Not to plug Figma, but they're slightly better about this in very steal-able ways. There's the somewhat recent "Section" feature that is radically simple but has made life SO much easier. Not to mention, they have a little button called "Tidy" which then magically organizes all the included objects that can be tidied and then suddenly they are looking rather tidy. Then of course the famous Autolayout which still misbehaves if you are going deep, but is actually elegant to just make a compelling display of your asset/component library. This all could be solved through some kind of consumer or small team "Digital Asset Management" tool, but they all seem to be enterprise and ugly and expensive anyway. Even if I was using one, then there's the issue around the Embeds and Assets and what not. I'm starting to feel like once designers get the hang making visual designs, the majority of their time gets chewed up on this kind of mundane work. What version, what variant, where is that file I was just using yesterday, of the hundreds of layers I now have in this one file, where did I put that little leaf pattern I made a week ago. Someone help!

I want to bump this up. Large files become unusable. This is probably a "need to have" -- I would switch off Affinity Designer for almost anything that had that functionality. Figma makes search easy. But, it alas doesn't have some of the wonderful bells and whistles. To boot, I can't find any good tutorial on how to ideally organize large files for manageability.

Would love to scale by area, rather than scale through width and height. I have irregular shapes. They represent some number, usually a population. I need to be able to scale by area rather than by width and height. So, if 3 million people live in some city, and that city is represented by a random shape, and what I am proposing affects half the population, I want to scale the whole shape area by 50%. Using width and height doesn't have the right visual effect.