deeds

This might not impact you if you're not using Designer's bitmap effects (shadows, blurs, glows etc heavily), might not impact you if you don't use OTHER OpenGL and/or Metal apps that have live and constant screen updates (think game engines and motion graphics software), don't use the versions of MacOS that I use and/or don't use the same hardware and/or don't work at the same resolutions I do. There is a "bug" in Affinity Designer that causes it to maintain a strong connection between itself and the GPU, through the CPU, at all times, regardless of the state of the app (minimised, on another screen, in another space, behind other apps with a file open that uses their visual effects). Affinity has made the choice of how they run their app, and it's not ideal for effects. Just about all other creative apps are more performant, doing more difficult tasks... mind you... I'm using the visual effects of Designer, a lot. Most people barely use these, so won't notice how poorly performing these things are. If this doesn't impact your usage, congratulations. This has been the case for me on 3 different Macs, across multiple versions of the Affinity Designer releases. I've confirmed this with dozens of other Affinity users over several years, and with other software companies much bigger than Affinity, who've taken the time to check what Affinity does in terms of communicating with the GPU, because it impacts other concurrently open creative apps. One of them (Unity) is positively affected in terms of performance by having Affinity running the background, ironically, as it has similar issues which are reduced whilst Affinity and it are seemingly pinging the GPU, as both of them doing it at the same time forces the OS to do some flushing and/or make decisions about favouring one over the other. If Unity is in the foreground, it gets the favoured treatment and performs better than if Affinity Designer is not open. This is the only case of this. In all other cases the concurrently open apps (even Safari) are significantly negatively impacted in terms of graphical performance whilst Affinity is open.

Lucky you.

No need. These are known issues for workflow. Simple to solve by favouring a few principles that support high output and/or iterative endeavours. Affinity seems to lack care of/for the most immediate, low resistance, smooth workflows and of experience with actual design workflows. Exporting is very important for iterative works, especially for the things created in Designer/Photo that are being used somewhere else, outside of Affinity, or otherwise need analysis and consideration outside of Affinity. MANY designers are working with design software to create textures and elements that go onto/into other systems, and their work needs to be constantly considered in that other environment, which is done by first exporting the artwork. This is an iterative workflow - adjust properties in image, export, switch the utilised environment, refresh to reload this texture/image, and asses what's right and wrong, continue editing... repeat... repeat etc. To this end, exporting should be, ideally, instant shortcuts for any format and location that's going to be repeated frequently, and involve the absolute minimum of ninja-finger modifier usage and definitely not require mouse movement, nor mouse hand to reach for a keyboard shortcut. This includes the confirmation dialog for overwriting an existing file, which is going to be part of this process for a busy worker, dozens of times in a work session. Similarly, Affinity products generating previews shouldn't be slowing down this process, at all. Game art going onto models or used as decals/textures in the game worlds, product packaging and incorporating elements into more complex documents (big InDesign docs) are examples of these kinds of usage scenarios where speed and flow and energy usage are huge considerations for the designer's time and creativity.

UI programming isn't difficult. Designing a good UI ... only difficult when working with programmers that don't/can't/won't deign to the designs of a good UI designer. This is increasingly commonly a problem as programmers have ever more gotten it into their heads that they don't need designers of UI, let alone UX. The limiting factor in export formats is NOT the UI.

Yeah... export is a weakness of Affinity, for sure!

other work arounds: because this has no angles that are not updown/leftright, you can export at lower resolutions and then upscale it in another app without loss... just gotta find the biggest you can export from Affinity without the distortion. Try going down in steps, divide the output resolution by 4, 8, 16, 32, until you get one without distortion, then use another app to upscale by the amount that worked. This should still give you tight, pixel perfect edges, if you use nearest neighbour upscaling.

Absolutely agree! Should not be necessary. But if you gotta get it to a printer or someone else on a deadline, today, whatever you gotta do is what ya gotta do. Can fight with Affinity to fix it if it's a bug later.

very odd. Can you export as PDF, and see if that's distorted, too? If not, then use another app to convert the PDF to png, I'd suggest.

It's been like this on Macs for a few years. GPU, too!

More generally, on 3D text: It's better to start with clean (no brush noise) shapes, and to extrude these in 3D, then add the noise and "texturing" to the subsequent model than it is to attempt extruding a noisy spline. A noise spline will create "grooves" across the extrusion/bevel rather than the (more likely) desired "texturing" of the 3D surface, which will be most easily done with a noise texture influencing normals and "denting and raising" the surface of the beveled/extruded text object such that it's got the character you're looking for. This does, of course, depend on the look you're ultimately aiming for. If you want to look at C4D, they've recently added an incredible feature for doing pseudo super brushes with splines that might be of extreme interest, have a look at this:

Try exporting it as an SVG, then creating a new document in Affinity, and importing that SVG, and then expanding the stroke, as the SVG might have lost the concept of it being a brush. If that doesn't work, try exporting as an EPS and importing that to a new Affinity file, and then expanding the stroke and/or merging the resultant parts so you get a single vector object...

That's a pretty huge bug/regression for almost all kinds of vector work. Baffling how that got through.

Anything that uses its unique blend tools for shapes and gradients, unique effects and other unique features loses its edibility and/or corrupts hopelessly in all other apps.

Unity, the game engine, had this "bug" for a few generations, up until about late 2020, too.

This is the point you could have stopped this sentence, and the more pertinent question. Those that deign to criticise a critic, rather than the critic's offered critique, deserve critical criticisms of their crap.

I'm so old I can write cursive, hold a conversation, change a washer, recite a prayer, drink at lunch, light a smoke, roll a joint, crack jokes and offend everyone.

I aim to please, but often miss.

Yes, missing the very oddly placed "lock content in place" tick box on the context toolbar. If you turn this on with the circle selected, its contents will be locked in place, scale and rotation, so you can do whatever you like with the outside circle without impacting the inner contents. You have to then uncheck this to move the circle and its inner donut. This gets tiring and annoying, fast. There should be a key combo to hold down for switching this on/off like shift does snap. EDIT; Sorry... it's called "Lock children"

if you do ANYTHING with effects... like molasses. This taxes the GPU to the point where the fans kick in and so does the throttling. So gets slower the hotter it gets. If you avoid using any effects, it's fine, until it's not. Also, there's a bug in Affinity where it will use GPU even whilst backgrounded, in a different screen space. So you GPU will stay hot even when you switch away to Safari to keep up with Kanye's latest sermons.

while you wait (it'll be years) you can sort of get this, somewhat, with many limitations and caveats, by nesting a donut inside a circle. So long as the donut is bigger than the circle it holds, the nested donut will always have the fixed hole radius. If you do this as a symbol, you'll then be able to update them all at the same time in terms of that fixed hold radius size.

After you've sorted input, you might wanna check the forums with a search for: cmyk black to see the sorts of problems that can occur on export, too.

it's amazing! Love. Always all love. For everyone. From the heart of Kan to the spirit of Ye:

For light weight vector work, they're unrivalled. Think logo design, illustrative vector work and drafting with vectors. This is a result of getting the node editing right. Everything after that is severely compromised compared to the big A and C products, or missing altogether (Blends). For reasons I don't quite understand, they haven't got bitmap/pixels done nearly as well, despite the dual mode being a super cool idea. Pity, really, as if they'd pulled that off, they'd have been the default choice for UI design and become the new Fireworks, and then some. Publisher feels like the half done distraction that grew into a bit of a scope creep time thief that prevented them ever getting near more fully finishing the pixel tooling and non-destructive advanced vector tooling hinted at with the boolean operations, for both Designer and Photo.

That reads exactly like concern trolling.

Probably can't force you to answer a question, either?