dominik

After using Affinity products professionally for quite some time and observing the development team’s patience and openness to new ideas on the forums, I have a few “unsexy” suggestions to enhancements to take the tedium out of repetitive tasks and keep designers organized.
I am truly impressed with Affinity’s products.  In gratitude for that, I am inspired to create this Wishlist with some new ideas, and to chime in with some support for the classic, already-suggested ones.  Thanks for reading/listening!
Most of these suggestions can span all the affinity desktop products some are Designer specific.
 

1.      Organize Assets, Swatches, Brushes, Style Libraries with an edit mode, using an interface like the the "Presets Manager" in Shapes, to allow for re-arranging, renaming, moving between categories.
2.       Stoke Pressure Profiles can be saved on an application level. Organize and manage, with an interface like the "Presets Manager" in Shapes.  It’s all about efficiency, and not having to reinvent the wheel (stroke!) every time.
 

3.       Layers Panel – Select objects and groups and rename them with a multi-rename tool.  Instantly get organized so you and even other people can understand the layer groups and objects in your Affinity document.  Interface would allow the user to add a numerical counter as a prefix or suffix when renaming.  Handy before using Export Persona to create some basic naming conventions.
 

4.       Sort Layer Groups or artboards in the Layers Panel alphabetically, ascending, descending.  Yes, it will change the arrangement order, but properly organized groups can make complex file layers much easier to navigate. Handy for PDF Exporting where the order of pages depends upon the artboard order.

5.       Save selection sets that can select items spanning multiple artboards and also within groups. Often similar objects need to be adjusted or moved, but they are on multiple artboards or nested in other functional groups.  This can quickly solve that problem.
 

6.       Select by object trait (stroke color, stroke thickness, fill colour).  A handy way to quickly select and adjust objects with similar properties.  Otherwise selecting these can be a nightmare in complicated projects.
 

7.       Select and replace non global identical colours. Does your client want all the red elements blue?  What would they look like in teal or taupe?  Play rapidly to your heart’s content.
 

8.       Search Assets Panel ACROSS BOTH categories and subcategories, results displayed as filtered choices.  Do you have multiple categories/libraries and need to find the right icon fast?  This can save you time.  Currently a search has to be made within each asset category, which can take some time if you have multiple asset categories.
 

 9.      Handy Show Grid checkbox in Isometric Studio Panel.  True, you can use a keyboard shortcut, but it would be nice if this button was upfront.  Handy when you are working in Isometric view you have to turn on and off the grid to see the artwork uncluttered.  Chances are you have the panel open to constantly switch planes anyways…
I hope this helps to add votes for the unsexy underdog features. 😊

Hello @rumo,
I appreciate that you rethought your own wording. Thank you, this is to the benefit of this forum.
Cheers,
d.

@dominik
Hi, thanks for the suggestion !
This makes me think that the best way to integrate this feature would be indeed to have it has a Transform Tool toolbar button mode switch. This way it will work with mouse, but also with values entered right in the Transform panel.

Hello @X-Raym,
this is an interesting suggestion.
While what I want to add is a mere improvement of your workaround and not a solution it still speeds up the process in some cases.
Transform the selected items by a percentage value in the transform panel (e.g. type 'w100px*0,8'). This shrinks the group of selected objects to a width of 80%. On the context toolbar of the Move Tool click on 'Transform Objects Individually'. Type into the width field the current value plus '*1/0,8'. This transforms all selected objects back to there original width. This saves you to do this individually to all objects. This of course only works if you know the factor of transformation. It won't work with an visual adjustment only. In this context your suggestion remains valid.
Cheers,
d.

Hello @bad_nerd and welcome to the forum.
I share your remark. I do like the newly introduced 'New Document' window but I think it can become better over time. Just recently someone else suggested an approach that makes the page sizes a bit more visual. This, of course, had to be solved for different media in a different way.
You can find this suggestion here:
Cheers,
d.

Same here. It is not working and most likely it is a bug. Or a missing feature.
d.

Hello @Smileyyy and welcome to the forum.
I'm afraid with these expectations you have to wait a very long time to jump ships.
I'm not writing this to turn down your request. As a long time participant of this forum I have read several statements by Serif that video, animation and the most least audio are not on their list. I do not know about Android but this also will take some considerate time to happen, if at all.
If you have the urgent need to leave Adobe behind I advise you to try and test Affinty apps that are already available. Then combine them with some other applications in the other departments by other manufacturers. There is a lot out there.
Cheers,
d.

It is command on the Mac.  It will resize around the transformation origin instead of the center when the transformation origin is visible.
Same with shear: holding down command shears around the transformation origin when it is visible, or the center when it is not.

Thanks for explaining that use case. I can see some use for this.
Cheers,
d.

Thanks, this is true. But still it seems a bit unclear with the naming of the Move Tool.
d.

Good question. I guess it is named not according to what it actually does. It's more of a rotation center. If you move it and then rotate you will notice that it rotates around this origin.
If you want to change the with of an object around its midpoint then you have to press CTRL (on PC, I think its Command on the Mac).
d.
 

Quite honestly, I don't want to see AD being 'bent' into any of that direction. Keep it what it is and make that (more than) good. I left behind Xara Designer (with a sigh) when they added more and more non vector related features. 
 
Everyone's mileage may vary.... 
 
d.
 
 

Good question. I guess it is named not according to what it actually does. It's more of a rotation center. If you move it and then rotate you will notice that it rotates around this origin.
If you want to change the with of an object around its midpoint then you have to press CTRL (on PC, I think its Command on the Mac).
d.
 

In case any might find them useful, attached are folder icons for each program.  Included are Windows *.ico files, as well as *.png files.
Affinity folder icons.zip

I just want to offer my gratitude to all participants of this vibrant forum. Special thanks also go to the Affinity Team for finding the time to respond to user requests and questions. Believe you me, this kind of humility from a dev team happens to be unprecedented.
I participate in several graphic design forums but I must testify that this forum is the most animated. In some of the forums, it is common to find many unanswered questions. I have to say rarely have I stumbled upon an unanswered question in this forum. 
Reading content posted in this forum has taught me quite a lot during this COVID-19 lockdown. 
The civility, the patience, the eagerness to assist and the expertise... all elements I aspire to emulate. 
Keep on keeping on.👏
 

Even though it seems this functionality is going to come sooner or later I want to suggest a way on how to implement this feature. I do this to add some input to this thread instead of repeating the same things over and over again.
There was another interesting suggestion on page 8.
I want to suggest 'layer labels'. They can be of two kinds: 1) automatically assigned labels that are basically an equivalent to all (or at least a set of) an objects properties. 2) Manually assigned labels, basically keywords.
With such a system we could filter the layers panel to display / select / multiple change all objects of a given property.
Those labels could be displayed in the layers panel or being hidden when not needed.
Manually assigned labels would help those who want to organize their work without changing the stacking order.
Find and replace could be accomplished by filtering the layers by labels, selecting all found (perhaps in one step) and then changing their values.
What do you think?
d.

These are some interesting suggestions that demand quite a bit of a redesign. I wonder if Serif would go that far? Nonetheless I find your thoughts valid and worth a look.
d.

-

Even though it seems this functionality is going to come sooner or later I want to suggest a way on how to implement this feature. I do this to add some input to this thread instead of repeating the same things over and over again.
There was another interesting suggestion on page 8.
I want to suggest 'layer labels'. They can be of two kinds: 1) automatically assigned labels that are basically an equivalent to all (or at least a set of) an objects properties. 2) Manually assigned labels, basically keywords.
With such a system we could filter the layers panel to display / select / multiple change all objects of a given property.
Those labels could be displayed in the layers panel or being hidden when not needed.
Manually assigned labels would help those who want to organize their work without changing the stacking order.
Find and replace could be accomplished by filtering the layers by labels, selecting all found (perhaps in one step) and then changing their values.
What do you think?
d.

Thanks Dominik - it was because I'd been fiddling with the leading on bullets and that had impacted the text box size.  Some great stuff on these forums and really handy.  And being quarantined is a great opportunity to learn new programmes!  Stay safe.

Hello @rumo,
I appreciate that you rethought your own wording. Thank you, this is to the benefit of this forum.
Cheers,
d.

If something doesn't work how you would like it to be, it is not broken. It's just not the way how you would like to have it.
I do not oppose some of the mentioned missing features in the swatches panel. But I find it important (in regard to other forumsters who are reading this) not to give the impression something is broken that is not.
Cheers,
d.

Hello @rumo,
I appreciate that you rethought your own wording. Thank you, this is to the benefit of this forum.
Cheers,
d.

Hello @EmmaH and welcome to the forum.
if you have Affinity Photo you can switch to edit in there. Under 'View > Studio > Info' you call up a pallett that shows several values live. One of them is the length of a straight line while dragging (it's the value 'D'' like distance).
It's too bad that we don't have this palette in Affinity Designer. And apart from that there is no measuring tool.
Cheers,
d.