Hokusai

Just a question, is there anyway to turn off the scrubby zoom so that it behaves like the previous zoom tool?

sldx,
 
Hello and welcome to the forums (as I see that you only have a few posts). This has been requested before by some people, myself included. In fact it is the one thing that I sorely miss from Illustrator. You can lock and unlock easily but hiding and showing all is not smooth at all. Lock and unlock can be applied with a shortcut but to unlock an item you have to select it or dig through the layer stack (which wastes time) and it doesn't seem as easy or as fast as Unlock All. If you look through some old posts you will see that there are indeed others who would love to see these features added to Designer but as users we don't know exactly what the developers have in mind, maybe they do have something planned that will be better than Hide/Show all and Lock/Unlock all?
 
Also, I don't think that we should assume that adding any particular feature is "easy". As a designer I have had many customers tell me that something is easy to do, when in fact it was incredibly difficult or next to impossible. I'm sure the same is true for the programmers. What seems easy to you and me might in fact be really tough to do. Don't get me wrong, I too am hoping that Hide/Show All and Lock/Unlock All makes it into a future release or that they come up with something that works better (you are right, the current methods for hiding and unlocking pales in comparison) but until that time, we will make do. Designer is a great program and it keeps getting better and better all the time. There are so many things that Designer gets right and I'm sure that they will work this out too. So be patient and have faith in the Affinity team. 
 
Hokusai

Thought I'd share a project that I have been working on. I have always been fascinated with Meso-American cultures and their art and after reading Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventures I couldn't help but make my own version. Oddly Matt Groening's work reminds me a lot of Aztec art but maybe that's just me. I made it using Affinity Designer and all vectors. Thanks for taking the time to view my work and I hope that you enjoy it. 

People had been asking for Data Merge for years then one day on October 13, 2020 it suddenly appeared from nowhere
It appears those lazy little elves had been working on it all the time
 
Elves aren't that big on conversations; they just toil away as fast and as hard as they can in the hope that (some) people will appreciate their efforts 

Despite many problems, bugs and lack of many essential features, still working in Affinity Designer is pure magic.
I'm working on elaborate design right now and can't even imagine this workflow 5-7 years ago. That I can make quick marks and reviews right on my vector artboards, copy them multiple times for versions iteration and handle this all in one file + everything is still instant quick. Thanks a lot to all developers for the product!

I work more heavily with and I am more familiar with Japanese art but I have a soft spot for all Asian art. In the past year or so I've seen so many beautiful Chinese prints and pictures and when I saw this one some months ago, I thought it would be a great one for me to do in my style. I did this one with all vectors in Affinity Designer and I did two versions, one regular and one that shows the wind but something about the wind bothered me but I decided to present it as well even though I feel that it is distracting and not as good as the one without the wind. One thing I'd love to see added to Designer sometime is some vector brushes or different vector strokes with customizable ends so that I could more easily replicate the look of using a fude (Japanese brush or a similar style ink brush normally used to write calligraphy but is great to draw with too) using pure vectors.
This picture is my stylized version of Lie Yukkou, a famous Daoist philosopher based on an old picture by  a Chinese artist named Zhang Lu. 
Thanks for taking time to view my work.
Best regards,
Hokusai

Personally, I would have started that sentence with "Thanks, " but I guess that's just me.
 

I hated this also, but in the Preferences>Tools>Use shift modifier to cycle tools will stop this.  It stops the toggling of tools so hitting A more than once you will still be in the node tool.  Same for all the tools.  BUT there is an issue with this.  The second A hit will cause designer to search out a layer with a name starting with A and if it is found then it will change layers on you.  Which can be even more annoying.

I think the ability to add a pin to a layer to keep it from moving in the layer stack would be a welcomed feature. I often use a reference layer at the top of the layer stack set to multiply at 50% as a guide for my work. I find myself having to move this layer back to the top often and a way to pin it would be ideal.
The addition of a small pin icon or the option in the layer panel flyout to lock the layer position in the stack would be a simple way to implement it.

If you clear the ‘Embed profiles’ checkbox in the Export dialog, you should find that PDF export retains black as K100.

Before @Alfred asks, yes I have many hats! 😅

Thought I'd share a project that I have been working on. I have always been fascinated with Meso-American cultures and their art and after reading Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventures I couldn't help but make my own version. Oddly Matt Groening's work reminds me a lot of Aztec art but maybe that's just me. I made it using Affinity Designer and all vectors. Thanks for taking the time to view my work and I hope that you enjoy it. 

I happened to read a story about a Gibson Girl the other day and it made me think that I should try to make my own version of one of Charles Gibson's famous girls. These were created in Designer using vectors. The original one was a roughly sketched black and white image and so I made my first one black & white too but with a little more added tone. After I finished I decided to make a color one too just for fun. Thanks for checking out my work. 
Best regards,
Hokusai
 
 
 
Hokusai

Then use Inkscape if that's the better tool for the job which you want to do.
It's really that simple.™

I happened to read a story about a Gibson Girl the other day and it made me think that I should try to make my own version of one of Charles Gibson's famous girls. These were created in Designer using vectors. The original one was a roughly sketched black and white image and so I made my first one black & white too but with a little more added tone. After I finished I decided to make a color one too just for fun. Thanks for checking out my work. 
Best regards,
Hokusai
 
 
 
Hokusai

Marc,
You're right, roughly sketched probably wasn't the best way to describe the original. I love his stuff and I find it interesting that he used rough looking lines to create stunning pictures of beautiful ladies. 
Best regards,
Hokusai

I happened to read a story about a Gibson Girl the other day and it made me think that I should try to make my own version of one of Charles Gibson's famous girls. These were created in Designer using vectors. The original one was a roughly sketched black and white image and so I made my first one black & white too but with a little more added tone. After I finished I decided to make a color one too just for fun. Thanks for checking out my work. 
Best regards,
Hokusai
 
 
 
Hokusai

I happened to read a story about a Gibson Girl the other day and it made me think that I should try to make my own version of one of Charles Gibson's famous girls. These were created in Designer using vectors. The original one was a roughly sketched black and white image and so I made my first one black & white too but with a little more added tone. After I finished I decided to make a color one too just for fun. Thanks for checking out my work. 
Best regards,
Hokusai
 
 
 
Hokusai

I happened to read a story about a Gibson Girl the other day and it made me think that I should try to make my own version of one of Charles Gibson's famous girls. These were created in Designer using vectors. The original one was a roughly sketched black and white image and so I made my first one black & white too but with a little more added tone. After I finished I decided to make a color one too just for fun. Thanks for checking out my work. 
Best regards,
Hokusai
 
 
 
Hokusai

For those not familiar:
Illustrator's awkwardly named Merge performs two basic Boolean operations in one move, based on their color:
It Unions touching (abutting or overlapping) fills of the same color. It Punches (subtracts) overlapping fills of different colors. (Frontmost punches others). So it results in the minimal individual paths around visually contiguous regions of the same color.
One common real-world use case for this is when preparing a design for cutting from sign vinyl. In that common workflow, you don't want any cuts across same-colored regions, because as the vinyl shrinks over time, void slivers appear. So the Merge command saves a lot of time and tedium.
However, it addresses just half of that use case: When different colors of a sign vinyl design need to appear to abut, one actually does need a small amount of overlap for the very same reason: It's very difficult to physically perfectly abut different-colored pieces of vinyl when applying it, and even if you could, the eventual shrinkage would again cause slivers between them.
The practical fix is analogous to that of color trapping (chokes, spreads, and overprinting) in print.
So this is yet another opportunity to improve upon an Illustrator feature by addressing its shortcomings instead of just mimicking it in 'me, too' fashion: Such a command should incorporate an Overlap setting that would default to zero, but could be set by the user whenever a trap (parallel to the shapes) is needed. That would address the tedium of having to manually apply Offset Path (in AI) or Contour (in Affinity) to the results of a Merge operation. In other words, the suggested new feature function should incorporate three basic operations (union, subtract, and offset), not just two (union and subtract).
Illustrator could have long since addressed this by providing a checkbox in its Merge command: Respect Manual Traps or Respect Overprinting Strokes. But it doesn't. And its 'Pathfinders' generally ignore strokes anyway. Expand Appearance 'sees' manual traps built in Illustrator, but treats them as 'third' colors instead of as the same color as the spread or choked color.
Another low-hanging-fruit opportunity to surpass Illustrator's functionality by avoiding its endemic characteristic of too many grab-bag standalone features being 'unaware' of each other.
JET

Thought I'd share a project that I have been working on. I have always been fascinated with Meso-American cultures and their art and after reading Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventures I couldn't help but make my own version. Oddly Matt Groening's work reminds me a lot of Aztec art but maybe that's just me. I made it using Affinity Designer and all vectors. Thanks for taking the time to view my work and I hope that you enjoy it. 

Thought I'd share a project that I have been working on. I have always been fascinated with Meso-American cultures and their art and after reading Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventures I couldn't help but make my own version. Oddly Matt Groening's work reminds me a lot of Aztec art but maybe that's just me. I made it using Affinity Designer and all vectors. Thanks for taking the time to view my work and I hope that you enjoy it. 

Fantastic tribute to the culture. Well done!

As a Mexico City born guy myself, I find this really well done.
Best regards!

Breathtaking comes to mind. I'm impressed by just about any vector artwork and then there's masterpieces like this. I'm not technical enough to comment on that aspect, but this is just perfect.