michacassola

When the image size is reduced, the resulting display is degraded. What you see in Designer is just a preview.

Try the different settings in the Export window in the Resample list. Your Nearest Neighbor option is not the most appropriate for the selected image type.

Hey @Ash, is Variable Fonts support for the V2 Desktop and/or iPad Apps being worked on for any V2 version coming in the future?

No, you didn't miss it. Still not possible.

Yeah, no. I’ve just been contemplating the use of vector brushes for some artwork I’m making that needs to be output at different resolutions - including ‘huge’. Vector objects are resolution neutral - they’ll be crisp no matter what size you output them (you probably know this and I state it for all readers).
"Vector" brushes are a bit of a misnomer in my view. The path is a vector, but the brush effect is raster. This means they’re not resolution neutral and beggar-up the whole point of a vector illustration. If you’ve the one output size and can create a document to scale, it’s not an issue of course.
Vector brushes allow you to alter the path after drawing, where you’re committed with a raster brush. From that point of view they’re good.
However.. as you’re realising, you cannot then convert the raster element of a vector brush to outlines. Boy oh boy would that be useful eh. It’d need a trace engine built in and Serif have not done this (yet.. fingers crossed).
I’m currently contemplating whether to export the texture I’ve just created to put it through a trace app I’ve downloaded... or whether to just construct some "raster-vector brush" vector texture (keh!?) myself using the pencil tool ....or download some scribble vectors.... Think I’m going for the second option... just need to ponder the use the artwork will be put to.

The funny thing is, I was begging Adobe to implement the level of image based brushes that were in Serif DrawPlus.  Adobe implemented a very basic level of image brushes a few years back that is practically unusable and they've never revisited it.  I keep DrawPlus around just for the image brushes.  Both image and true vector brushes have advantages, but one big disadvantage of the true vector brush is that they can be so complicated that they are too slow to use.  If I convert one of those to an image based brush for use in DrawPlus, it is able to work smoothly.  Affinity Designer of course also has a lot of catching up to do to match the brushes in DrawPlus but that's not even on a roadmap so I don't expect that to happen.  For now, the best image brush game in town is sadly in two discontinued programs!  DrawPlus and Microsoft's Expression Design.

Yes, I found it misleading that they call them vector brushes. When I watched tutorials on creating them I then realized it was not at all what it claims to be. Disappointing.

I would like Sreif to bring back "real" vector brush from DrawPlus to Affinity.
Affinity's vector brush is actually a raster brush stroke with a curve, pseudo vector brush.
Why this has been changed when Affinity was developed?

They should definitely rename them and make it obvious to the user that they're not vector, it's very misleading. I don't see the use for them at all; I think they should be removed from the application entirely or perhaps only be employed in Photo where you might expect raster painting on an editable path.  The least they should do is develop some simple calligraphic-style vector brushes; those things have been in vector apps for decades. Obviously it would be nice to have Illustrator-style brushes too, although this isn't a big deal for me..

Version 1.8 of OpenType was released in 2016, it included Variable fonts. The feature is mature and widely used nowadays. 
It would be great to have support for variable fonts. 

Gimmicky? There are many gimmicky typefaces of every sort, and I suspect some variable fonts will follow the same path. I have noticed that the demos of variable font capabilities often show the gimmick potential of variable fonts.
However, there's nothing inherently gimmicky about variable fonts. I increasingly depend on them for dealing with tight space requirements or adjusting display-sized type, such as headlines, to achieve exactly the right balance of weights and widths. As someone with a self-described conservative outlook (on type and design, I suppose), variable fonts will enable you to fine-tune those classic typefaces to their best advantage for the job at hand.

I'm a somewhat new user of Affinity Design. I signed up to join this forum just because of this issue involving OpenType Variable Fonts.

I've been working in the sign industry for nearly 30 years, mainly designing outdoor electrical signs but also lots of other things too. I've used at least half a dozen or more vector graphics applications over the years, but have done most of my work within CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator. I haven't considered Affinity Designer as an acceptable replacement for either one of those applications at this point. But I have been experimenting with Designer because I think the potential is there for the application to become more popular, particularly for anyone doing design work on a limited budget. Lots of small businesses and individuals will try to "home brew" their own logos and other graphics materials. Just in case I start receiving customer provided artwork in Affinity Designer format I want to be able to handle it properly.

For my own design purposes OTF Variable Font support is very important. I really like variable fonts that offer weight and width axes. Such typefaces will give me more flexibility to create a design that has to fit in a fixed space, such as a replacement face for an existing tenant sign cabinet. There is a lot of truly horrible quality sign design out in the field. Quite a bit of it features default Arial artificially stretched and squeezed to cram into a spot in the layout. The "designer" can't bother to scroll down the fonts list to find a typeface with styles whose proportions fit in the space. I think sign designers have a certain civic duty to not visually poop on the commercial landscape. A badly designed sign may be visible on a building or next to a street for many years. Badly designed signs and poorly maintained signs help fuel public backlash and inspire severe anti-signs ordinances. Variable type can allow designers to deal with space limitations far more gracefully. A variable font that has a width axis can be "squeezed" yet maintain the proportional balance of its vertical and horizontal strokes.

I spend a pretty decent amount of money on commercial type. Most type families I've purchased lately have included variable versions along with a folder filled with many static instances. Some purchases had only variable fonts in the package. For instance when I bought a copy of Proxima Vara I downloaded just one font file. I was pretty happy to see the arrival of the OpenType Variable format. I remember using Type 1 Multiple Master fonts in the 1990's (within Adobe Illustrator). The OTF Variable format brings back the Multiple Master concept, but with the much larger OpenType character set capability.

I really don't care whether Variable Fonts are supported by PDF or not. With a lot of the design work I do I tend to convert the type objects to outlines during the design process or when I finish it. But the Variable Fonts have become an important tool for the design process.

It's worth noting Adobe recently added more than 140 Variable Font families to its Adobe Fonts service. Out of vector drawing applications I think Adobe Illustrator has supported the OTF Variable Font format the longest; it's also one of very few that support OpenType SVG (aka "color fonts"). CorelDRAW has supported OTF Variable since its 2020 release IIRC. Even Inkscape supports OTF Variable Fonts now. I think it's pretty important for Affinity Designer to add Variable Font support sometime soon. 

Hi there!  New to the forum, long time user of design software.  I thought I'd throw my $0.02 into the ring here as this has recently been a pain point for me.
Variable font support isn't only about what cut of a typeface you prefer using, it's also massively helpful when authoring typefaces.  Whereas users get the option of interpolating between different axes, typeface designers no longer have to create and maintain as many individual letterforms and can also rely on interpolation to generate different cuts of the font, either statically or through a variable font file.  Don't need that when designing?  That's cool!  Stick to the regular weights from 100-900 or use static exports (currently the only option we have in this software), but variable fonts are unquestionably the direction the industry is going in because of the flexibility offered to users and lower effort required from type designers for the same product.
Another key advantage of variable fonts hold over static cuts lies in web design and animation, two fields that aren't currently served by Serif's software.  These use cases don't matter when exclusively using the Affinity suite of tools, but it's not acceptable to be unable to match styles used elsewhere — especially when required by brand guidelines.  On our website, variable fonts allow us to serve a single .WOFF2 file with support for both sans and semi-monospaced text at any weight we choose while using a fraction of the size that would otherwise be required when serving static cuts.  We also get to smoothly interpolate between weights for things like hover states.
In this specific example, we use Recursive as one of our brand fonts.  Currently I am unable to use the Affinity suite to set text with Recursive's monospaced axis set to 0.51 (semi monospaced with added slab serifs) due to lack of variable font support.  We use Recursive set to mono=0.51 for the better spacing afforded in instances where a monospaced font is good to convey information (this text is data or for branding reasons, we use it for titles), but doesn't actually benefit from actually being monospaced.  It's become such an issue when creating graphics for our brand that I'll probably have to buy Illustrator again, what a bummer!
In closing, I feel like I read somewhere that this would require a fairly significant overhaul to the entire type rendering engine.  As somebody who works in software I understand that changes like this may seem small to end users but can actually be quite a large undertaking to implement.  Something that I've been very impressed with regarding Affinity's suite of tools is the care put into creating a software package that is both cohesive for end users while remaining technically consistent, generally with a focus on doing things correctly — especially regarding colour.  All I ask is when prioritizing future features, maybe consider bumping variable font support up the list?  I'm excited for the day your already pretty good type rendering engine becomes best-in-class!

Oh no...
Just struggled with my design and found out Affinity does not support variable fonts.
Affinity, please. Anything, even predefined weights would do. I need specific typefaces that are available only in variable font.

THANK YOU!
The main topic suggesting this was written in 2018, there are lots of people asking for it and the only answer is they "hope to implement this in a future version".
Is it even coming in a future version? Maybe in the 6.0 upgrade?
 
It would be great, every one wants this, I don't know what's up with the Affinity devs when they think it's more useful to do the "shape builder" tool than to make people use fonts the way it's intended to do.

@michacassola
This is something we're offering to customers who ordered V1 apps very recently. If you ordered one of the V1 apps from us in the last 90 days, please email affinity@serif.com so we can look into this for you.

The same keeps happening to me since 1.8.5. This is a major stability issue and costs me a lot of time. This should be fixed with priority.

make a version for linux?

I feel your missing opportunity not developing for Linux. I don't get it? Chromebooks are versions of Linux. They run Linux applications pretty flawlessly. Who runs chromebooks? Lots and lots of students. A potential army of new Affinity users eager to learn graphics design without taking out a second mortgage. Affinity wont compete with Adobe for years unless you step up. Don't think you folks understand that Linux users ARE creatives and sooner or later Affinity will miss the buss. Someone will take your money you lost. Forward thinking is something needed from Affinity. Look forward to response from you from your windows phone or blackberry. Oh those are obsolete. Don't become obsolete Affinity. Break the mold, do you, be a leader. ramble, ramble and yutta yutta. You get the point.

More than a year has passed, Google Fonts now supports variable fonts. It is time Serif team @Dave Harris.

If the only thing people are adjusting is the font weight and possibly slant, then their primary advantage is in the web domain: if your site calls for a specific font to be downloaded, without this feature, you download a light version of the font, a normal-weight version of the font, a bold version of the font, an italic version of the font...  that chews up bandwidth and thus slows down the page load time, plus can be a problem for people on metered connections (where they might pay by the byte).  With a variable font, you download one font and have all of them, so it can reduce page load times (resulting in a faster site) and reduce the burden on those with limited download capacity.
For print, it can save disk space, but beyond that it allows for finer control of the parameters it offers.
However, the technology can allow the fonts to be customized in ways other than just weight and slant if the font is designed to allow for it.  The problem right now is that there are few apps taking them seriously enough for the font vendors to put much effort into offering other parameters that could have provided a much more rich set of ways to customize the shape of the fonts.  Currently the focus seems to be on weight and slant - but more would be possible if the technology were actually being taken seriously outside of its primary benefits for the web.
 
Here is a site with demos of a number of such fonts: https://v-fonts.com
A few of the fonts offer a "width" option to create narrow/wide flavorings.
At least one of them (Belarius Var) has an option to control serifs, allowing one font to morph between being a serif font and being a sans-serif font.
Another (Whirly Birdie & Whirlybats) has an "Animation" parameter that you can drag back and forth to animate the characters of the font (not useful for that purpose in print, but still shows some creativity and demonstrates that there is potential to do a lot more with this technology than most people currently seem to realize).
There are one or two others with some creative parameters as well.

I guess a beta for ver 2.0 will be next.  
this was posted on Twitter today. 

It hasn't been a year yet since 1.10.5 so there will probably be something soon. Heck I am still discovering things in the current release and whenever the next update arrives I would hope there are updates to the core features like more path and node editing options etc.

+1 to add variable font support across the range of apps, starting with desktop.
I'm having to seriously consider abandoning Affinity apps and returning to Adobe Creative Cloud apps. I love Affinity apps but variable fonts aren't just a novelty any more.

Happy Publisher user, but variable font support is increasingly becoming important. So +1 from me for support

Hey, I'm adding a + for variable font managing ! It's the only feature that hold me to switch from Ad**e to Affinity ! 

Thanks !