vonBusing

Hi vonBusing :)
 
Thanks for those files - very interesting to see! I definitely agree we could and should be doing better with the PDF export of that document - but the reason it has increased dramatically in size from the output of the App Store 1.2.1 version is simply that the PDF created by the 1.2.1 version for this document was just one large image! The output created from the current version is separate items, rasterised where necessary, so it ends up inflating the file size as a result. We're in the middle of completely replacing the PDF export of the application to use our own exporter (rather than making use of Apple's built-in PDF support) so we will have much greater control of our export soon - so I would hope to see this file improve dramatically in the future :)
 
Thanks again,
Matt

Thanks for all the feedback. As always we have been listening and we are working up some new Icons that we will show soon.
 
TonyB.

Overall I quite like the refresh, although I do have a couple of minor critiques:
The colour gradients are a touch too extreme, and a subtler graduation might be more effective. I wouldn’t get rid of them entirely because a well-done gradient does a great job of adding volume to a shape. In fact, most “flat” design actually uses subtle gradients and very slight borders and shadows to imply depth! Compared to the old icons the highlight colours are a bit washed-out. More vivid colours would in my opinion would be more attractive. The purple for Photo is closer to lavender now, but the colour that stood out to me in the old icon was the magenta in the top corner of the triangle.  
I have a few thoughts on some of the other criticisms posted in the thread.
 
Firstly, I don’t think the argument that an icon should demonstrate the app function holds water. I have in my dock right now a mix of OS X defaults, design apps, web dev apps, and communication/chat apps. A few have obvious descriptive icons (iTunes = musical note, Transmit = truck, Mail = postage stamp), some have more abstract descriptive icons (Safari = compass, which you can sort of extrapolate to be users “navigating” the web), but the rest are a mix of logos (Tweetdeck, Blender, Slack) and totally random graphic elements (Coda is a leaf, MAMP is an elephant and Finder is, well, a face).
 
Most of these apps are recognisable to me and to the others who use them. We figure out what apps do and how we use them not by the icon, but by actually using them, or by hearing or seeing others use them. People discover apps through word of mouth or by searching online, not by dissecting icons.
 
So what purpose does the app icon serve? Recognition. When I’m looking for my app in my dock (or Finder, Launchpad, cmd+tab app switcher), I look for the icon. It’s a visual anchor, so I can quickly spot it and launch or bring into focus the right app. This means that the main feature of a good icon has to be its distinctive visual qualities – and what qualities do people usually notice first? Colour and silhouette. We don’t tend to focus on fine details because we aren’t stopping to look, we’re just finding the icon so we can get to the app and get to work.
 
Now when I look at the old Affinity app icons, something else I notice is how the small details don’t show through very well at normal size. While they may look great on a website promo, in the dock/Finder/Spotlight the details are obscured. Designer’s pentips and Photo’s camera lens are just sort of blobs of colour in the middle of a coloured triangle.
 
--
 
It’s easy to see the old and new icons isolated on a page and then get caught up in examining the details – the old icons have more depth, they’ve got better descriptive elements, the new icons are flatter and more abstract. But it’s really important to consider how the icons will be used before making snap judgements on which is better.
  This is why I think the new icons are more successful. By stripping out the details and focusing on simple shapes and bright colours, Affinity’s icons will stand out from all the other icons they’re surrounded by and catch my eye much quicker than before.

Er... I know that it will be to late as these are released and I am sure that the new logos attain what you set out to do however in my opinion... the old logos were much better. I can understand wanting to jump on the flat bandwagon but maybe could have been implemented in a different way?
 
If I approach the new logos without knowing what they signify - I am no wiser after looking at them. Designer, as said eleswhere, looks like
mountains or a geographic mapping solution, Photos is pretty much the same but with an emphasis on tunnelling, Publisher looks like a speaker and sound waves or a spotlight shining out.
 
On the old logos the black background/edge served a purpose and the cut-out on the left was very clever allowing the "graphic element" pens. aperture etc to bleed out of the suite code triangle, what do the edges do now and now what is the cut-out on the left doing? They could have been left of without detriment and then the flat icon colud fill the bounding box better.
 
If the pens, aperture and the pages could be flattened and returned at least it may give a clue as to what the programme does. A bit of a fail, in my opinion.
 
Love the rest of what you guys are doing and desperatly waiting for the Publisher beta... Keep on doing the great work with the coding just leave the logos alone!

I think that gradients are "over-designing" the thing.
 
 
Perhaps you could achieve the emphasis with a subtle transparency instead?
 
and perhaps just a subtle highlight over.

 
 
edit:
the highlight i had in mind:

 
edit2: also, the lighter parts are transparent. You can try it yourself, its a transparent PNG, just copy/paste over something

I too much prefer the original icons. The icons give a visual message of what they do, especially the Publisher icon compared to the new version. Why does AFFINITY have to follow a trend? Most thing come round full circle and only dead fish swim with the current.
I hate to criticise as I am a great fan of AFFINITY and the way you guys interact with users.

After all this discussion I am still trying to make sense of my feeling that the old logos were stronger, although I would like to second Ronny and Smallreflection that the new design points in a more "professional" direction, so to say. I believe the main issue is the decision to drop the folded triangle in favour of a form I cannot make sense of.
 
In my opinion the folded triangle was a perfect metaphor for the three applications (Designer, Photo, Publisher) working seamlessly together on a common code base. And it was “iconic” in the sense of conveying just this message. I mean it was as “iconic” as the periodic system of Adobe, which shows the all-embracing claim to provide “elementary” tools for visual design.
 
But I wonder a bit, what metaphor is hidden in the present form? Though I don’t believe an app icon should be illustrative in a superficial sense, I also believe there should be a deeper contentual motivation behind the chosen forms. Any ideas?
 
Cheers, Alex  :)

Congratulations! Absolutely fantastic news.
Slightly disappointed by the Serif office pictures on the Apple website, though: Only humans working there. Where are all the cats?  ;)

Hi everyone
 
We're over the moon to announce that Affinity Designer has been recognised by Apple with a prestigious Apple Design Award at WWDC 2015 in San Francisco. Congratulations to the whole SerifLabs team for such a remarkable achievement, 5 years in the making.
 
It's the stuff of dreams, thanks to all our fans and forum participants for helping to make it an awesome reality.
 
Read more at https://affinity.serif.com/blog/affinity-designer-wins-prestigious-apple-design-award
 
Dale, on behalf of everyone at Serif.

Hoping it's OK for me to say this.... it'll disappear if not!
 
We're in a great position with devs that have far more autonomy than most. It's their call with the head of dev what to add/pull/prioritise, when to submit to Apple etc—and of course they would rather have everything in the app too but then it'd would never get released at all (because perfection is unachievable!) :)  It means they have tough decisions and cannot please everyone, but it also means they are working harder than the average dev to produce something very special. Just so you know, it's rather refreshingly not a financial or sales director making the calls in team Affinity.

Purpose: Improvements, Features, Fixes
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download: https://s3.amazonaws...stomer Beta.dmg
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Improvements, Features, Fixes
 
- Improved export options for vector formats with better control over output.
- Fix for file export not including metadata or colour profiles.
- Fix for setting blend options and ranges occasionally overwriting each other.
- Command+W now hides the application frame if there were no documents open, just like pressing the red cross in the top left of the window.
- Fix for incorrect line weight being applied when exporting objects inside a container which has been scaled. This applies to vector export types only.
- Pixel marquee tools can now automatically pan the view when you reach the edge of the view with your mouse.
- Tweaks to text tool logic - hopefully a more pleasing experience now.
- Fix for slice layers occasionally doubling in size!
- Enabled the Space+Command zoom modifier logic for all brush tools.
- Enabled Ctrl+Option drag modifier for resizing in the vector pencil and brush tools.
 

Thanks for being understanding - I do realise the inconvenience and we will do our best to make it happen as soon as we can.
 
Thanks again,
Matt

Hi Matt,
 
Thank you for the reply. Off course, I would have preferred a slightly different answer, but It's still good to know what to expect (and what not to). There are also quite a few other goodies on the roadmap of AD that I can look forward to.
 
In my current case I have loads of older graphs that are in eps format where I need to update a few things like colors but also fonts and fonts sizes and save them again both for printing and web purposes. It would have been great to be able to have the file properly editable in AD right in one step. There are some workarounds (like the one you suggested), but they add on a few steps in the workflow, which have to be multiplied with the number of files to process...
 
Meanwhile, keep the good purr ongoing!
 
/Miro

Purpose: Improvements, Features, Fixes
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download: https://s3.amazonaws...stomer Beta.dmg
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Improvements, Features, Fixes
 
- Support for the new Force Touch trackpad on new MacBook and MacBook Pro
- Added support for Yosemite’s “Photos” app in the media browser
- Added ‘Polygon mode’ to the Pen Tool which acts like Line mode used to and changed Line mode to draw individual line segments
- Improved translations in all languages
- New algorithm used in the Pixel Tool so that you can more reliably paint beautiful, narrow pixel lines
- Blend ranges can now be non-linear
- LAB/CMYK blend mode improvements
- All pixel tools can now use the Ctrl+Option drag size modifier
- Grid manager improvements - now has a basic and an advanced mode
- Pressing the red close button no longer quits the application
- EPS import improvements
- PDF import improvements
- PSD import improvements
- Text no longer draws stroke outline if there is no stroke colour
- Text tool selection behaviour improved
- Many new keyboard shortcuts (see Issue 2 of Affinity Review for a full list!)
- Numerous stability improvements

We'll hand it to the Giraffe team... they can almost reach that fruit.   ;)

Thank you for the compliment- It's an old comic that I'm redrawing into vector. what I had was okay for paper print, but the digital comic shop makes it easier for customers; and more difficult for artists. When you can zoom in on each panel, you want the line to be as smooth as possible.
 
The solution that MattP mailed me fixed the problem, I set the document size to 1200 dpi instead of 300 dpi.
(I suspect my drawing style forced the app the shove ten pounds of information into a five pound sack.)
I can then resize the pdf in Preview to make the required 300dpi size.
I am definitely going to have to invest in more RAM, but I know I've needed to do that for quite a while.
 
I just exported to a PDF using many different aspects of pen, brush, pencil, gradient, shadow. and got the pdf looking like the original.
Thank you so much, Matt. This will make it easier for me to actually get into the swing of inking like I did with real life pen and ink.

An "Add arrowheads" feature is the only thing that is stopping me from purchasing Affinity and moving completely away from Illustrator. For scientific figure making, this feature is essential.
 

Just wanted to reiterate our intentions here: We are aware that users want arrowheads, so we are aiming to put them in as soon as we are able to. I'm very sorry if this deficiency is affecting your productivity and fully intend to get this addressed.

Haha! Ingenious! (but I'll put proper arrowheads in soon, don't worry!)

Purpose: Improvements, Features, Fixes
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download: https://s3.amazonaws...stomer Beta.dmg
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Improvements, Features, Fixes
 
- Fix for incorrect rendering of AI/PDF imported objects with blend modes and passthrough option
- Hide the tool UI during numerous interactions (stroke width, pressure profile, layer effect interaction)
- Fix for vector export of objects which had thin strokes and either pressure profiles or inner/outer alignment
- Added support for cmap table format2, used by Asian languages. Also added support for most Apple text encodings to all the cmap formats
- Fix for numerous strange Zoom Tool and View Tool consistency issues
- RGB and CMYK sliders can now be linked by dragging while holding Shift
- Improved PSD import including support for reading in guides
- Fix for embedded documents not correctly honouring the option to ‘prefer aspect ratio locked resize’ in the same way other images do
- Context menu in Layers panel now includes ‘Rasterise…’
- Fix for colour buttons in ‘box’ colour controls not drawing correctly for the current profile
- Fix for loading certain optimised PNGs
- Added Hue range support to HSL adjustment and also option to enable HSV
- Fix for miscellaneous problems with the Open Recent menu item
- Added label-dragging of text fields to adjust the value in the field
- Improved accuracy of the new text on path functionality
- Fix for not being able to cut/copy/paste in certain text fields in the application
- Improved PSD export file size and support for writing out guides
- Changed Text Tool logic - Escape now deselects the current object if there is no text selection highlight but remains in the Text Tool
- Improved vector file import of curves - they should now have useful curve node types automatically set in order to help with re-editing them
- Fix for unexpected behaviour of frame text objects at certain angles
- Changed the default for ‘Text in Points’ to be enabled
- Added .abr PhotoShop brush file import
- Improved EPS import
- Fill/Stroke context toolbar flyouts now support noise/opacity slider for colours
- Improved user experience of ‘Open in Affinity Photo’ - no longer requires a previously saved document so should be more transparent
- Improved PDF import of opacity on bitmap fills
- Fill Tool now works on raster selections and on masks/adjustments
- Colour panel sliders can now be set to edit values in 8bit, 16bit or percentage
- Fix for non-square textures being stretched when used in raster brushes
- Improved RTF import - fixes a bug seen by pasting certain characters from a Microsoft Word table
- SVG import improved to include ‘symbol’ tag support
- Fix for sliders not automatically disappearing when activated and used through one mouse down -> drag procedure
- Added default page setups for iPhone 6 Plus documents and Apple Watch (38mm and 42mm). Cmd+8 should show you the correct physical size of the device's screen on your display
- Fix for PDF export of lines with miter join type causing unnecessary line expansion
- Fix for boolean operations involving text only considering the first character in the result!
- Added ability to switch views by using Cmd+`
- Forced our popup panels to always appear on top of other UI
- Improved SVG export file size
- Improved on-document object selection logic
- Fix for intermittent crash coming out of Separated mode
- Miscellaneous other tweaks and improvements

One thing I don't understand : when you copy/paste a group or a object, sometimes, the copy is inside the group, sometimes outside. I have no rational explanations for that, it's a complete mystery.
I would like to see the same behavior like in cinema4d : in the objects manager, select a group or an object, move it with cmd, you get the arrow with a "+" (indication for copy) and you can place it where you want in the hierarchy.
 
Another thing : How can we make patterns ? I know, I can do it "old school" with duplications but it takes to much memory, I would have the same thing like AI.

… in the objects manager, select a group or an object, move it with cmd, you get the arrow with a "+" (indication for copy) and you can place it where you want in the hierarchy …
 
Cannot but repeat to say that this would be great …  :)

This sounds like a duplicate of https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/8347-textbox-copy-paste-changes-font-size/. That one happened when the document had changed DPI or been scaled. Thus:
New document at 72dpi. Create text frame. Change document to 300dpi. Copy and paste text frame. If this is the same or related, it should be fixed in the next build.

Sorry for bringing this up again, but afaik, there are no immediate intentions on adding measurement tools in AD, which saddens me. I gave up iDraw for the much more feature-rich Affinity Designer but I really miss the measurement tools. 90% of my drawings are somehow technical, as I said above and I don't know how to overcome the lack of a measurement tool. An obvious workaround would be to draw an arrow with tips at both ends, then those small lines, then the label. Something similar could work for measures of angles. But really, this is much too complicated this way.
 
So please guys, I don't know much about programming, but I can assume there's not a lot of work into implementing such a tool, at least in its basic form (e.g. adding a new "shape" or ends to a line to include two arrowheads plus those lines). Please take into account this feature and hopefully there will be more people here supporting my request.
 
Thanks.
 

Hi,
 
If you specify the decimal point, the edit control will respect it, even though it doesn't display it.