retrograde

yes, obviously off topic for this thread but absolutely all possible - we'll see what we can do in a future update!

I think everyone will come up with their preferred file format to be included in the menu, too. But OTOH I think the idea is not too bad if you take it a little further. Make it a command like 'Quick export to predefined in preferences format'. This way your suggestion would remain a one menu entry thing and could improve personal workflows quite a bit 🙂
d. 

@Ash is it possible to have a feature like: Quick way to Export PNG images from the Layers panel While using Designer or Raster Persona?

Like clicking Right-click over the layer or group and then export seamlessly.

This would save tons of time while exporting simple assets to clients.
I found the need to go to the Export Persona, Slicing objects, then export slices to many steps for simple exports.

I believe this would be a nice simple addition to the Affinity apps

A plus icon next to the cursor when cloning a layer by drag-and-drop would be very useful to have, as @Frozen Death Knight had already mentioned. But other than that, a great and long awaited addition! Thank you! 😃

It works for individual layers and group layers, but the top layer can only make a copy below it. I cannot option drag a copy above the top layer, including inside a group. Also, the bottom layer in a group can only be copied upward and remain inside the group. Dragging downward creates a copy outside of the group.

Not a big deal, it's just a matter of consistency. It would be nice if any layer could be dragged either up or down to make a copy, whether individual or inside a group.

Works as it should on my end. Though, a UX issue I found is that the mouse cursor shows the same icon as if you would just do a regular drag and drop. Maybe add a plus sign next to the rectangular shape that appears just to make it clearer?

Personally, I'd like a separate panel for common brushes altogether so I don't get lost so easily when tabbing through categories looking for different ones to try. I already duplicate what I typically use into a category, but I'm a "tryer" of things so I still get pulled away from that category too much. Essentially a palette made up with brushes I pulled from my library and their current/custom settings, but leave current brush panel as it is so it can still have the totality of brushes so that they're sorted by collection for clarity/order.

Here are some experiments, of varying quality, that I was playing around with at the weekend.
Apart from some (modified) background images everything was done in Designer and Photo.
They’re not what I would call ‘production ready’ but they’re okay as long as you don’t go looking for problems.
(Any resemblance to real movies or organisations is purely accidental.)
 

Hi All,
We're happy to make the second build of the 2.1 beta available today - 2.1.0.1709. This should now be available for you on auto update.
Here's some of the main changes in this build:
Guides
Had a lot of great feedback on guides - thank you. In this build we have:
Added Alt-Click to delete a guide Made Alt-Shift while dragging snap to delta. We had already made holding shift snap to ruler units from page origin. What this new option gives is if you have a guide placed at, say, 35.3mm from the page origin and you want to move it 10mm - you can now drag while holding Alt-Shift to snap to that difference. Of course this also works if you have alt or cmd dragged a duplicate of the guide If guides are currently set to not visible, then dragging out a new guide from ruler (or moving an existing guide from indicator on ruler) will automatically turn guide visibility on in all OSs Crop Tool
Enter as well as return now commits a crop Escape now resets the crop Brush Panel
Generally tightened panel up somewhat so less vertical space was being used. Brush names if you have chosen to show them are now justified to left Light UI should now hopefully look correct Modifying a brush using drag shortcuts (e.g. ctrl+alt+click drag left and right) keeps brush selection in panel (and shown as modified as appropriate). Raster mesh and perspective live filters in pixel persona
Now added correctly in Windows version so the live versions of these filters are available Have now added to pixel persona in the iPad version of Designer. You will have two new options under the + button in Layers panel where you can choose to add either of these live filter layers. Vector flood fill
New icon has been added for tool to distinguish between the raster flood fill tool in Affinity Photo When you are in tool you can now drag and drop swatches directly from the swatches panel into any area the fill tool recognises from your selection If you are in "In Between" mode the additional shapes / fills which are created are automatically added to your selection so if you subsequently change the fill of them again additional shapes are not created. Bitmap fills are now supported. This means you can pick a bitmap fill swatch from swatches to use as your fill colour (or drag and drop a bitmap fill swatch into the appropriate area). Few notes on this: Currently if the bitmap fill has transparency this will be added as an additional fill (in appearance panel), so can be added as a texture over an existing colour fill. It's a cool feature, but we probably need to add a modifier / option in context toolbar about whether you want that to do that vs. replace the fill altogether.  You will notice in the context toolbar some new options for min, max and stretch to fit. These options are only relevant for bitmap and gradient fills and determines how the gradient or bitmap are scaled within the new fill being created.  A nice thing to try is when you are in fill tool you can drag from assets into your active colour on the toolbar to automatically create a bitmap fill to use - as shown in the video below.   Texture Fills.mov  
Blend mode shortcuts
Erase bend mode now available to configure on macOS and iPad Ordering of blend mode list and default keys should now be consistent between operating systems Close All
Apply to all check box now been added to macOS dialog if you have currently open unsaved / modified documents.
Various bug fixes
Of course there are also various bug fixes - you can find the list of these on the second post in the fix list thread.
Thanks again for all your help.
Ash
 

I wouldn't have thought it would be necessary to have a rearrange option during export. Artboards are exported in is the same order they are created, so normally there should be no need to reorder them at all. New document, create 3 artboards Artboard1, Artboard2, Artboard3, and they'll export as Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 respectively.
 
We plan to add proper multi-page support, with a Pages panel, and that should render this issue moot.

We are pleased to announce an update for the macOS release of Affinity Designer 2, version 2.0.3
The changes in Affinity Designer 2 for macOS 2.0.3 (those made since the last release Affinity Designer 2 for macOS 2.0.0) are as follows:
Fixes & Improvements:  (since the last release 2.0.0)
New Document: Custom Document Preset order is not retained between app sessions Shape Builder Tool now has an additional option to delete open curves that were inside a newly created area, plus you can now hold Alt to delete areas while still in Add mode - more to come... Warp Group editing now supports the Shift modifier to lock node edits to an 8-axis grid. Also can be used with off-curve nodes to maintain their angle while dragging them DWG Import scaling improvements Saving to External Drive gives "Failed to Save" error on macOS Ventura Current DPI of selected layer does not show in V2 Using the Select object/ transparency object selects all objects New clearer icons for stroke properties (cap, join, align) Fixed spurious future version error under certain circumstances Update for HEIF importer Colour Panel now remembers user preference for CMYK documents Export Panel UI fixes Pen tool tweaks and fixes Gradients on text strokes don't render unless the fill also has a gradient Fixed hang that could occur composing vertical centre aligned text OpenType handling does not respect lookup flags such as IgnoreMarks Resource Manager updates Fix for disappearing rulers Fixed various issues involving handling of placed document files Placed documents with bleed can fail to render the bleed correctly Many and various Layers Panel updates and fixes Ensure global colour edits update live Select Same Name should only select objects with user supplied names Help & localisation improvements. Licensing and Registration improvements and new help links  
UPDATING TO THIS VERSION (Free for existing customers)
The software version can be seen on the splash screen and the About dialog (in application menu, Affinity Designer > About).
If you’ve purchased from the Mac App Store— updates are done automatically next time you run your software after it is available in the Mac App Store. If this does not happen for you, open the Mac App Store app and go to the Updates page and then Store > Reload page or press CMD+R. This should hopefully force the update to show. Apple sometimes phase roll outs around the world which can mean it may take up to 72 hours for your update to be available.
If you’ve purchased from the Affinity Store— each time you start the software it will check for updates and offer to download and install any available update, or in the application main menu there is an option Check for Updates. You can download the latest installer by logging into the affinity store here and find the order in your account and use the "download" button in there. Alternatively, this new release (and previous versions of Affinity Designer for macOS) can be downloaded from this link (that installer is NOT for Mac app store purchases, which update through the Mac App Store).

It's not a blend tool and agree I think we definitely need one but the new somewhat hidden quick grid feature can help to layout simple shapes from the shape tools.
To use it, grab a shape from the shape tool panel and drag it out, before letting go of the tool press the right arrow key to add copies of your shape to the right of the original. Each press adds a new copy, holding the arrow key adds space between each copy. You can use any of the arrows keys to add copies in that direction. While still pressed you can resize the shape as you make additional copies and they will all resize at the same time. It's not a perfect solution as it's kind of a one way workflow, once you "unclick" you lose the ability to add more copies or make any adjustments. Hence the need for a proper blend tool, but for some cases this quick grid feature will suffice.
Like the opacity/noise toggle feature in the colour panel this one is kind of hidden, once you know, you know, I suppose. Someone should start a thread on these forums of hidden features of the suite, I'm sure there are probably more out there...

I second, third and fourth the above comments. This is definitely still a bit of a housekeeping weak point in the Affinity suite for anyone spending any amount of time using the brushes in Designer or Photo.
Would love to see a new or improved Brush Management panel or an overall workflow re-visit where the Affinity team takes another look at the brushes system and tackles:
- a way to display brush names in the brushes panel...
- a breadcrumb, history or favourites feature to track or store your most used brushes...
- an easier way to duplicate or move brushes around, say into new or existing collections. Generally the ability to move, organize and name brushes in a more user friendly process. 
For example, when a brush is copied or moved into a different brushes panel, it should retain its name, currently it gets renamed as 'brush copy', which is not helpful. This is because to duplicate a brush to use in a different brush panel you first have duplicate it, it then gets renamed 'brush copy' then you have to move it to the desired panel. If you just want to move it, it will retain its name but it will be removed from the current panel. One solution to this might be to have the ability to have a second brush panel open at the same time so that you could move or duplicate, by dragging and dropping your selected brushes to it... 
- a solution to when a selected brush is resized and its highlight in the brushes panel disappears.
Better usability stuff like that. Please, please can we get a little more love in this area guys. 🙂  Cheers!

Hi jg2000,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Select all the paths then go to menu Layer ▸ Geometry ▸ Add to join them all. Finally convert them to a selection.

Hi All,
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week since the launch of V2!
This has been a real labour of love for us over the last year or so, and I can’t even begin to describe how hard the development team have worked on it. Not only getting the V2 apps launched, but also of course finally bringing Publisher to iPad. 
With this being our first paid-for upgrade there has understandably been a lot of feedback / questions around future updates and our pricing policies. I thought it was worth addressing / clarifying our position on some of these personally...
Updates to V2 moving forward
Buying V2 not only gets you all the new features you have seen, but we have various updates planned – including many more new features and improvements – which you will get for free. This will continue until such a time that V3 is released. We’re not sure exactly when V3 will be, but I can confirm we are not going to move to anything as regular as an annual upgrade cycle as has been speculated.
It’s worth saying too that V2 does include many under-the-hood changes to our underlying technology, and we have also been investing in several new areas of research recently. Some of these haven’t manifested themselves into new features yet, but overall V2 does give us a better platform to develop on moving forward and I’m sure you will be pleased with the updates V2 will receive.
Updates to V1 moving forward
While we did say on the FAQ that V1 would no longer receive any updates, I want to clarify that was about new feature updates. We will be updating V1 to fix any critical problems caused by operating system updates in the future. So if the next version of macOS breaks V1 we will endeavour to fix it. There will be a point in time when continuing to maintain V1 in this way will not be tenable, but certainly for the foreseeable future we will continue to patch. In fact, we have an update to V1 queued up for release very shortly with some fixes for Ventura and issues caused by a recent Windows security / quality update. 
We will update our FAQ shortly to make that clearer for everyone.
Offer period
In case you didn’t see, I’m pleased to confirm we have decided to run this initial launch offer until 14th December to give everyone the best chance possible to get it if they wish / have a decent amount of time to trial it. 
Upgrade pricing
It’s been really hard to see some of the comments about us not looking after our existing customers – we’re pretty devasted that anyone feels like that to be honest. But the fact is we felt our hands were tied somewhat with being able to offer upgrade pricing in a fair way. The main reason for this was App Store customers (which make up around 35% of our userbase). The problems with that are two-fold: firstly, we didn’t have a way from within V1 to validate an App Store purchase receipt to reliably ensure customers who were entitled to an upgrade could get one; and secondly, we could not find a good way for people to get that discount via the App Store. Us pushing upgrade customers to go exclusively via our own site (including customers who were previously acquired via the app stores) may also have put us in violation of App Store Ts & Cs which we were obviously concerned about.
I’m not saying that these issues were completely insurmountable, but any solutions we came up with would be messy, and most importantly could have resulted in some bona fide V1 customers struggling to get validated and claim their discount. We certainly don’t have the support resource here if we ended up needing to manually validate tens of thousands of receipts for example.
The only option we felt was safe to move forward with was a general launch offer, which would guarantee that every V1 customer could get the discount, whether they purchased directly through us or the App Stores. We knew a side effect of that would mean some new customers would end up receiving that same discount – but we felt that was a better option than V1 customers missing out. It’s also worth saying that while there has been some good press about V2, all our main marketing has been via email and through social media to our followers. In other words, we felt ok about it because we knew the vast majority of people who would find out about it or take advantage of the offer would be existing customers. I would be surprised if over the offer period customers upgrading from V1 didn’t make up more than 90% of our sales.
Overall I do believe us giving a 40% discount, along with the addition of the new Universal Licence of course, is offering fantastic value for money for those who want to upgrade. 
However, taking on board some of the feedback there is something extra we can do – we will offer a new free bundle of content exclusively for V1 customers upgrading to V2 as an extra thank you for your support. I’ve seen this suggested by a number of customers and it’s a great idea as it does remove the App Store conflict entirely. 
We’ll need a little time to put something together, but all customers who previously registered or purchased V1 and have since upgraded to V2 will receive a voucher code for this via email as soon as we can.
A comment on no subscription
I do want to say that some of the points above are exactly the reason why software companies move to subscription. Whatever you do with upgrade pricing, you still have the issue of customers who bought the previous version 3 months ago vs. those who have had it 2+ years. Offering perpetual licences also gives the additional overhead of needing to maintain the previous version longer than you would if everyone was on subscription / generally always on the latest version.
We are a small team so some of these complications are not ideal — all we really want to do is focus on developing our latest codebase, push out regular updates and continue with our mission to make great creative software accessible to everyone. 
But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.
All of that said, I have to say we have been blown away with the response to V2 - around 3 times as many people have upgraded in the last week than we expected - and we really can't thank you enough for the support you have shown. More than anything the success of this upgrade puts us in a great place to continue investing heavily in development which is ultimately what it's all about, and we’re super excited to crack on with some great updates coming next year!
All the best,
Ash

I noticed the trash button in the designer iPad interface has been replaced with a deselect button. The only ways appear to be the quick menu or the layer menu, which I would pin to keep it constantly visible. This might be a useful addition to the preferences, right next to the toggle for the visible undo and redo buttons.

I tend to support the small guys, knowing they don't offer everything the big guns do. But the big ones are the abusive ones, and Serif has thus far pleased me no end - feature- and price-wise. I'm happy to be Adobe-free, and I'm looking forward to more great Affinity features, while respecting the disappointment of those who expected more. For them there's always Adobe. 
In terms of money, my financial support of Serif is a given, for obvious reasons. I'm grateful Affinity exists, and offers what it does. Here's to more!

Inform yourself before you buy. Don't come and bitch. Express some gratitude for all the effort made. I didn't bitch, and I got with V2 what I needed: footnotes and 3d mesh. Everything else is bonus. Happily paid for this new version. Looking forward to more! 

All editions, all platforms, no subscription. 120 Euro for the coming years. I paid over 200 for InDesign alone - for one year. It's a no-brainer - for me, and thousands of other customers, too.

LOL. nope

There sure are a lot of people wanting to see these products dead and buried, aren't there? What's with that? While it may not work for some, it certainly works rather well for the likes of me - and many others.

All the things you stated in the first paragraph are to Serif's point, a legitimate reason to limit feedback. I agree in general, it is genuinely disappointing to not get more frequent feedback, whether materially or otherwise. However, I would not agree that this is the cause for the kind of frustration you described. There's always a vocal minority who will engender pessimism. Short of a magic wand that solves everyone's issues at once, this crowd cannot be satisfied. (and for all we know, they're working on that hence silence...)
I get it to a degree because many of us signed up early on based on the Adobe-killer aspect and so some are understandably upset/frustrated with the lack of murdering.

And more maps 🙂

Another map.

Another village council board with a map.