Kevin Pöhl

First time using Affinity Designer to design a larger project for web. This draft view attached is of a personal blog site to come.

Thats awesome to hear Matt! I just dropped you a mail.

Thanks Matt! Appreciate you replying. I'm very happy to hear about Artboards going in soon :) I can understand not putting a specific date down for the reasons you mention above. What is scaring me though is that you mention having to work on Photo as part of the delay. Now I'm wondering how you guys are gonna cope with all the needed features when you still have to split the work on Photo and now the new Publisher as well. It seems like we will start waiting for features a lot longer in future. Thank you for your invite to send you an email. I do want to get involved here, so I'll get on top of it right away.

I am gonna get on that Beta right away, thanks! :)

Thanks MEB, I can understand that. Building products is hard. It is also hard for us to keep up with what's out there right now. If for example we need to wait very long for certain features, we tend to just go with what we have right now, whether that is broken somehow or not. When you buy a ton of licences for a design team, then you at least want to know what you will get and by when so that you can make informed decisions.

Thanks so much for your contribution!

I find that straight forward transparent communication about deadlines work much better than keeping everybody guessing. In Affinity Review issue 2, there was an interview with Matt Priestley where he states and I quote "People are generally very forgiving if you're just actually honest and humble". Not answering these simple questions, or broadly just ignoring the topic of release dates is not being honest or humble. In the same interview, Matt says that they will "start looking squarely at UI/UX designers." , this was in May I believe, it is almost November now. Features like artboards & pages, grids and smart guides are pretty much the core of what UI designers need. Affinity Designer remains largely useless (for UI Design) without these. Yet I've already committed to buying this software. All I'm asking for is some insight into when we can expect these features incorporated. At least humour me with some ballpark estimates.

It would be great to get some answers from you Affinity guys about what & when you are planning to ship these features targeted at UX & UI Designers. Obviously you all know that market is pretty large right now, and that we need more than just Sketch. A few months ago I sat down with the devs from Bohemian Coding, they came to our offices to demo some latest features and to get insights into our workflows. I laid down a few things that are essential for UI Design specifically, and specifically in the areas of grid making, nested grids, bitmap tools etc. Unfortunately these guys didn't care to actually implement many of these features they came out to chat about, or even fix major bugs that were holding us back. I hope the Affinity Team will be different. Transparency is key, and the UX / UI Designer community would like to be involved.

Ah awesome, thanks MEB, the roadmap looks good. There is some interesting things in there. Are you guys setting a specific release schedule? What I mean is, would you guys take a similar approach to Adobe and have feature releases every couple of months? When can we look forward to seeing these in the current roadmap implemented? Are you guys involving some industry pro's to consult on these UX & UI Design features?

Hi MEB, any chance on sharing what is planned for UX / UI related features?

I was surprised to see in the second version of Affinity Review that you guys mentioned that the next phase of improvements on Affinity Designer would be focused towards UX & UI Designers. I'm a UX & UI Designer myself, but I find very basic things in Affinity Designer missing, like the ability to layout a typical 12 column grid for instance, or smart guides even which seems left out needlessly, not even to mention artboards. These kinds of features are basic and expected. I was hoping that seeing as you guys are going up against Adobe and Sketch, what you plans are to improve in these areas. Would you shed some light on what's next for us UX & UI Designers?

Hi all, my name is Kevin-Jay Pöhl and I am a UX & UI Designer from South Africa, currently living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I started using Photoshop back in 1998, and these days I jump between many products like Sketch3, Pixelmator and now Affinity Designer. I'm a current Creative Cloud subscriber (by ransom, not by choice). Seeing Affinity Designers' speed and performance for the first time was a dream come true, especially on the iMac 5k Retina. After my trial period I committed and bought Affinity Designer, I'm still in trial with Photo.. I have very high expectations of the Affinity line of products, especially in the field of UI Design. There hasn't been a great deal of action in the Design tooling market for a long time. Sketch was the first major competitor to Photoshop for designers who were using it for serious web, mobile and product Design work, and I hope very much that Affinity Designer can be the second wave that'll blow the others away. A big thanks to the whole team behind Affinity Designer & Photo, you guys are changing lives. Keep it up!