n0b3dience

First, let me thank everyone at Serif for the amazing job they've done creating Affinity Designer - you're awesome! I would really love to see the addition of transformation effects - scale, shear, rotate, positional adjustment, cloning with recursive transformations, path offset, geometry manipulations, shape distortion, etc. - and, before you tell me that these requests have already been made ('cause let's face it, none of those requests are very original ideas), I'd really love to have the ability to create (and save for later use) a stack of transformation effects that can either act on an object in a specific order according to where they are placed in a hierarchy or can be independently applied where possible (kind of like the way an effects-pedal loop on a guitar amp can apply an effect to the raw, "dry" signal without it directly having an effect on or being directly affected by another effects-pedal). Then, let these transformation stacks be chained together with other transformation stacks. This could be an incredibly powerful and useful tool. I'd suggest also including an option to randomize the variables for those transformations within a user-set range. If anyone else agrees or has additional ideas on this, please post a reply.

I second this! And let me add that the ability to make adjustments to a symbol's effects/style be an option too. To be honest the symbol sprayer is not a tool I use on a regular basis, but when I do need it it will literally save me hours of work. Today I was creating a bokeh effect for a background and, without the Symbol Sprayer and it's various adjustment tools, I would have had to make adjustments to the size, opacity, position and amount of blur of hundreds of objects individually. What could have taken over 2 hours took me about 25 minutes - and it only took that long because Illustrator chugs along when it has handle that many objects using effects like Gaussian blur (it actually crashed on me several times). It wouldn't necessarily have to be an exact clone of the Symbol Sprayer tool set, just some way to quickly adjust different variables for a set of objects with the ability to add a degree of randomization to the adjustments.

I noticed this while trying to add a vertical guide on a node's exact position. I pulled the node's X coordinate from the transform panel, but when I pasted the value into a vertical guide I created the guide's value got reset to a negative value and the guide disappeared entirely. I realized that while the coordinated for the actual artboards reset the rulers stayed constant across all of them - so, for example, if there are two 100x100 artboards side by side with a gutter of 50 between them, while a point at the center of the 2nd artboard will read as x=50, to put a guide at that exact point by typing it into the guide manager, it would have to be set at x=200.

I know there has been a few posts about snapping to intersections and I know that you plan to add it in a future update. I definitely want to see this implemented since it's an essential feature for my workflow, but there are a couple other snapping options I didn't see mentioned (I may have missed them, and if so, I apologize). First, and this one I consider almost as important as intersection snapping, I'd really love to see the ability to snap guides to nodes as you drag them. Unless I'm missing something (and I very well could be since I'm new to Affinity), guides can't be snapped to anything when you drag them. The guide manager window is an AWESOME feature that I was very happy to find, but, when I'm working, having to open up a new window and type in exact x and y coordinates for 2 guides really breaks up my rhythm and can seriously slow down my work if I need to create a bunch of guides. Having the ability to snap a guide to any node I mouseover while dragging would make things far easier and faster. Second, I'd really love to see the ability to snap to the midpoints of guide candidates. The ability to snap an object's midpoint to other snap points is great, I'd just love to see it taken one step further. If anything I mentioned here isn't clear, please, post a reply and I'd be happy to clear up any confusion. Also, let me say that in the short time that I've been using Affinity Designer I really enjoy it, and I've probably only scratched the surface of what's its capabilities are! Thank you all at Serif!!!

Masks do not work on an object and it's effects as a whole. For example, say you have a doughnut shaped vector (like an "O") and you want to add a drop shadow that only appears within the doughnut's hole; so you add the outer shadow effect to the doughnut and make an oval (without a hole) that fits perfectly on top of the doughnut and that use it as a mask on the doughnut. But, instead of cutting out the drop shadow that lies outside of the mask, the effect now acts on the mask and object as a whole. This might be an easier way of explaining it: What is should be: (object + fx) - mask What it's doing: (object - mask) + fx Hope that makes sense.

YES, YES! Please add this! For all of the gripes I have with Illustrator (and I have a lot), the Appearance Panel is something that they definitely got right - and not just for multiple strokes of varying weights, but for multiple fills with different opacities & blending modes and for fill/stroke-independent effects. When, for example, you need a semi-transparent, multiplying gradient-fill on top of a semi-transparent, screen pattern-fill on top of an opaque solid-fill to get the effect you're looking for, it can really save you a headache to need only 1 object per instance rather than 3 grouped together. Can't wait to see what you all at Serif come up with. Thanks!