Mt.

If you guys add a BLOB BRUSH to Affinity Designer, I PROMISE it will be my workhorse forever! 🙏🎨

I've been waiting for the blob brush since 2018.
Thought it might make its appearance in V2, but no 🙃
I've tried to use Designer, I really have, but without a tool like the blob brush my workflow just takes too long. I had to return to the dark side ... Illustrator.
Maybe Affinity will get my money for V3?

If you guys add a BLOB BRUSH to Affinity Designer, I PROMISE it will be my workhorse forever! 🙏🎨

Hi! Title says it all, i would like to be able to distribute or space evenly these selected nodes, but the distribute and spacing options are grayed out. The alignment buttons work great on selected nodes. Obviously distribute left, top, side, etc wont work, but distribute center/spacing seems like it should work just fine. Can you activate this on the next version?

My reference for wanting a BLOB BRUSH (about the only thing I liked about Illustrator) is my experience with the selection brush in Clip Studio paint when drawing comics. CSP also does vector brushes, but on on vector layers. My routine is to draw the line work using vector brushes and then use a combination of the polyline and selection brush to create an area I'd use for "flats". That would be used to mask colour and tone layers so that they don't leak outside the line work. Now I realise that I could just use plain raster brushes to do the same, but using a Blob Brush (and Blob Eraser)  would make things flow very quickly for me, and match house I use vector brushes. I've no interest in painfully using the least amount of points, but in covering areas quickly. The edges would be hidden under the vectors brushwork above (which has multiple brush strokes, not just curves and shapes) in any case. 
I think though one needs to be clear about just how a Blob Brush would work. At the moment you can can draw vector curves  by any means but combining them by expanding the stroke and then adding them (left and middle images in Example 1) but this is  NOT the same as say, how that other program's Blob Brush would combine (right image in Example 1). When the stroke gets expanded in Designer it connects the ends of the curve, and that may not be what you want.
BLOB BRUSH/ERASER DESCRIPTION
A working Blob Brush/Eraser would most likely be a circle or ellipse (a square would be odd but maybe workable) and would have to have a stroke width greater than 0 (otherwise the stroke is not adding/subtracting anything) . If either the Fill or Stroke of a Blob Brush/Eraser has no colour, that part neither adds or subtracts anything to the result. The width of a stroke would be variable like other vector brushes, so a standard width if a mouse is used, or variable with a tablet. .
If no existing curve is selected, the brush would create a new curve that followed the outline of the stroke, and an eraser would do nothing. If an existing curve is selected, the Blob Brush would add a coloured area, and the outline of a coloured stroke (the colours do not matter) to the selected curve, using the selected curve's stroke and fill colours; the Blob Eraser would erase areas in the selected curve depending on whether the brush had a colour fill or stroke. If the fill/stroke of a Blob Brush creates a curve that is not directly overlapping the selected curve, then it adds an extra curve to that object; If the Blob Eraser subtracts one or more areas that bisects the selected curve, one of two things happen (based on a toggle setting): the original selected curve is divided into two or more separate curves (see middle image in example 2); or one object is maintained, but with two or more curves in it (right image in example 2).  A Blob Brush/Eraser that worked in this fashion would add something new to Designer, one extra way of doing something, requiring many more steps otherwise. 
 
 

I never do, because of stuff like this:

 
Call me an 'old school' curmudgeon. 50 auto-generated nodes to draw a curve that should have no more than 3 intelligently-placed ones? It just makes my skin crawl, especially in anything supposed to be commercial-quality vector-based work.
That's why I just don't care much for instant-gratification 'brush-like' features in vector-based drawing programs in general. How many slightly-different tool interfaces trying to emulate free-form scribbling with some kind of analog brush or marker does a vector drawing program need to have? It's trying to make vector-based drawing act like something it's not.
This kind of stuff is way, way down on my priority list. Others obviously feel differently about it, and I recognize that. But my vote is for Affinity development to focus on delivering more sophisticated and elegant implementations of the core intent and inherent advantage of vector-based drawing; not on making its own carbon-copy of every user's favorite feature in every other drawing program out there.
JET

I agree with Mt. It would more than helpful to be able to toggle the visibility of the anchor points. When you draw something the points actually hide details and block your view from the result. That is not just annoying, at some point (no pun intended) it makes it impossible to use the tool for certain tasks. Pleeeeeeease add an option to toggle the visibility of the anchor points!

If you guys add a BLOB BRUSH to Affinity Designer, I PROMISE it will be my workhorse forever! 🙏🎨

I would like to second that: a Blob Brush would be a wonderful addition!  ;)

Hi folks!
It's time to update this thing... 
The same set, suitable for cartoonists, character designers and comic artists.



Now it is composed of:

4 layout tools
1 standard pencil and 3 layout pencils embedding typical colors like blue, red and green (you don't need to choose it from color picker).
Now with tilt for shading effect!

8 Inkers
G pens, trapezoid shaped and Sumi-e variants!
All these tools are sensitive to pen pressure and tilt.
Hope you'll enjoy it!
Grab it here!
 
PS. The old one is still here
 
 
DAUB_Comics Basic Set.zip

Light interface!!! Thank you  ;)

If you guys create this Pencil Tool option in Affinity Designer's preferences, I will say goodbye to Adobe Illustrator.
 
 
 
 
 

ds24a3,
 
Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums  :)
 
A lighter interface is in the pipeline. I am sure that we will not allow the UI to become unusable as hardware quality improves, so I will bring your point up about the UI size.

Understood.
 
 
 
It is not unusual for me to be wordy and I have been criticised for it before. Suppose I try to be accurate and in doing so become more confusing to the reader.  My apologies.
 
Will try harder next time :D
 
Regards    Sharkey

Hello All
 
This is a great thread and I'm adding my opinion here to keep the debate going and help keep it above the fold.
 
I've yet to switch over to AD, for purely practical reasons - no Pantone, no artboards. Still, both of those are hopefully not many motorway junctions away on the roadmap, so all good there. However, just below these in my wishlist is the UI.
 
I struggle hugely with the dark theme – I find the contrast levels between backgrounds and type/icons problematic – I'm unable to reach that wonderful point where the interface disappears and I'm simply focused on my work.
 
And, I have some far less defensible aesthetic problems as well - the darkness makes the application feel "closed in" to me, whilst the candy-coloured tool icons just don't say "Pro" to me.
 
What I do know is that I really wish I hadn't seen Andreas Larsen's great work in Posts #25 and #30 in this thread - those mockups are exactly the UI option I'm looking for.
 
So, I'm disappointed to hear TonyB downplay this issue in post #47, but a little heartened that MEB isn't quite as negative in post #48. And, of course, I'm just pleased that Affinity staff engage so well on this forum.
 
My concern is that, as the Photo beta picks up pace, issues like this one are going to sink further down the list. I hope Serif recognise the opportunity they have here to make a huge step-up in market share, and can find the resources to develop 2 apps at the same time (with a third coming).
 
I'm old enough to remember the giddy excitement of the moment when InDesign 2.0 released me from Quark. It's clear that Adobe, and the design market as a whole NEEDS the competitive push Serif/Affinity is bringing.
 
Thus, I've bought my AD licence, will buy my Affinity Photo licence the day it comes out, and the Affinity Publisher one after that. But if it's a matter of cash, then get a Kickstarter launched - I'm up for an extra £50 if I can get a light, flat UI.
 
Perhaps you could call it the OAP Persona?
 
Cheers, Christian

Hi RPJ,
The only reason i haven't yet commented on this issue is because i don't have enough information about it to give you an answer or anything of value to add to the discussion at this point. This doesn't mean it's being ignored. I've been following it and i'm sure almost all staff at Affinity have read it at some point too. It may not be obvious for a user outside, but we deal with an immense number of requests, bugs reports, questions etc everyday. Some are more easy to address than others and may get solved quicker. This is not a trivial one.
 
The Affinity team already changed several features in diferent areas of the app in accordance to user feedback, i don't see why we would treat this one differently. We are as much interested in having a great application (at all levels) as you. Just have some patience and give us some time. I'm sure we will get there  ;)

+1
Count me in.

I also "just set up an account on this forum specifically to make this request " :)
 
Other users already explained the matter in detail so I won't do that.
Suffice to say that GUI and usability are quite sensitive topics and this it is a really important subject.
Please give the user the option to choose the UI brightness.
 
Thank you all.

Love the program, hate the UI. I too can't live with dark UIs but also, the icons are too small on my 27" iMac screen. Please, can we set our own UI colours and icon sizes?

I've just set up an account on this forum specifically to make this request.
 
I'm an Illustrator user who really resents Adobe's new CC subscription scheme, so I'm interested in software that provides a realistic alternative to Adobe's core products. I've just bought Affinity Designer and so far am very impressed by what I see, feature-wise. There's a lot to like here.
 
However, I DO NOT LIKE dark user interfaces, and I was dismayed when I found that a dark interface is all that's on offer here. Maybe it's a feature of my eyes, but I find the dark colours extremely difficult to resolve and focus on, especially if I'm working on fairly bright/pale artwork (which is invariably the case).
 
UI designers seem to be under the misapprehension that having dark user interfaces is helpful because the tools 'get out of the way' and don't distract from the content. In fact, that's not true (or, at least, it's missing the point). The key thing is contrast: for ideal working conditions, every part of the screen that contains active content (i.e. artwork and tools) should be of a similar brightness to the overall intensity of the artwork. So, if you're designing dark/predominantly black artwork, your eyes need to adjust to that darkness, and hence having dark tools is helpful in that situation. But in the vast majority of cases (particularly when you're designing light artwork for use in print, typically on a white background), your eyes have to accommodate the glare of the bright colours, so the tools need to be similarly pale too. If there's a mismatch between artwork lightness and interface lightness, your eyes are constantly having to adjust as they move between the two areas, which is incredibly tiring.
 
Maybe I suffer from this more than other people, but I'm very conscious of it – and it's the reason why I hate dark user interfaces. It's not that I'm against them in terms of their looking good; it's all about usability. Ideally, the lightness of the user interface, in a design application such as this, should be adjustable on a per-document basis, because – as noted – for the best experience, its overall lightness should be similar to that of the artwork itself. (So maybe it could be tied to the document background colour for any given document.) But at the very least, given that most artwork is either printed or viewed on-screen against a light background, a light user interface should definitely be the default.
 
Frankly it amazes me that Adobe has got this wrong in recent times. It seems to be insisting on dark user interfaces itself, by default, which is barmy. But the fact that Adobe's started doing this doesn't mean that other developers should blindly follow its lead. Dark user interfaces may look cool, but they're actually a really bad idea, especially if enforced. Please, developers, THINK about such things! Take design decisions for the right reasons, rather than just to follow the current trend.
 
At least Adobe does still offer the full range of dark to light in its user interface preferences, so it's still possible to make them look like they used to look (black text on pale grey) – which is massively better than the dark default.
 
Unfortunately, Affinity Designer doesn't have this feature. OK, at least I can set the UI gamma. I've put it up to its brightest possible setting and it helps a little bit, but it's not nearly enough. At minimum, there needs to be a similar alternative to approach from the white end of the scale: i.e. to start with a very bright interface and darken it down.
 
Please think about acting on this as a matter of urgency, Affinity developers. Much as I'd love to see more 'real' features being developed for this excellent-looking product, this UI issue is, to me, surprisingly important because it impinges on the usability of the entire application. While the interface continues to be excessively dark and overly hard to read, it's going to materially hamper my ability to use the software.
 
We don't need skins and alternative icons. The basic look is fine. We just need to be able to lighten it right up so that the tools and buttons use dark text on a pale grey background. Thanks for listening.

I asked this question in another post which was all but ignored. It is very important. Sometimes black/grey UI sucks your peripheral vision away from the workspace.

I'd also like to see a "Yosemite" style UI. 
 
I appreciate the darker UI is better for some situations, but not always.

Hi there,
I'd like to see a lighter/brighter mode for the whole UI. Sometimes it's much better to work in a lighter/brighter UI as in a dark mode (which I also like much!).
 
I think your UI is a lil bit to dark. I like more the dark-look of the native Apple Pro Apps. It feels a lil bit better :)

I would like to request a tiling pattern tool and also something akin to the blob brush, but with more control would be a very useful addition?
 
Cheers!

If you guys create this Pencil Tool option in Affinity Designer's preferences, I will say goodbye to Adobe Illustrator.