biscuit

Ok, Here are some videos to demonstrate all the snapping that I've added for handles.  Please note, I'm not talking about snapping to grid, I am talking about snapping to useful construction angles relative to the opposite curve point and handle.
 
So, the following snaps are shown:
 
1) Snapping to smooth a cusped node - SnapToSmooth.mov
2) Snapping to inline, and 90 degrees to inline - SnapToInlineAndNormal.mov
3) Snapping to reflected angle - SnapToReflected.mov
4) Snapping to parallel direction - SnapToParallel.mov
5) Snapping to 90 degrees of parallel - SnapToParallelNormal.mov
6) Snap to logical triangle (useful for square corners?) - SnapToTriangle.mov
 
The useful thing about these snaps is that they will enable you to perform common curve construction, completely independent of grid or set axis.  You can use them in tandem with a second action while holding Shift to snap the handle lengths to match the preceding or following handle (while maintaining the direction you already snapped).

You can change the default text styles for new documents by using Text > Text Styles > Save Text Styles as Default. Will that do what you want?

Another option would be to space horizontally with 0mm. (Uncheck auto-distribute first.)

This last one was actually finished with the official release of AD. Printed it as a poster as a present for my younger brother. I'm not an illustrator so getting human poses right or working with perspective are not my forte. With just two shades of each colour it was quite tricky to keep al the objects distinct. And I had difficulty keeping the amount of detail consistent. Especially the face and the hair seem a bit off to me.

Hi there,
  I'm a graphic designer mostly working in InDesign and have been playing with AD since it started in beta. Following some presentable experiments along the way.   I'm quite typography-oriented so tried out typesetting and opentype options first.   Here I was trying the pencil tool and path handling. The texturing is done with a grunge texture with layer blend ranges applied, set to erase blend mode.   Continuing with power duplicate and layer masking in the pixel persona. 'Refine selection' should be useful here but couldn't get any helpful results.   Here I was getting the hang of gradients and symbols with the leaves at the bottom. The geometric background pattern wasn't created by me.   This capital R started out as a comparison between node types: manual brezier curves vs auto smooth nodes.   Combining brushes with a photo. I don't draw well and haven't found my smooth AD inking groove yet.   Next full vector illustration. I already appreciated the technical abilities of AD. But when doing illustration I noticed the ease of use compared to Illustrator. Just drag to clip, everything clearly laid out in the layers panel and not getting stuck in the transparency panel.   Playing around with gradients and blend modes. Could be an abstract book cover.

Hi there,
  I'm a graphic designer mostly working in InDesign and have been playing with AD since it started in beta. Following some presentable experiments along the way.   I'm quite typography-oriented so tried out typesetting and opentype options first.   Here I was trying the pencil tool and path handling. The texturing is done with a grunge texture with layer blend ranges applied, set to erase blend mode.   Continuing with power duplicate and layer masking in the pixel persona. 'Refine selection' should be useful here but couldn't get any helpful results.   Here I was getting the hang of gradients and symbols with the leaves at the bottom. The geometric background pattern wasn't created by me.   This capital R started out as a comparison between node types: manual brezier curves vs auto smooth nodes.   Combining brushes with a photo. I don't draw well and haven't found my smooth AD inking groove yet.   Next full vector illustration. I already appreciated the technical abilities of AD. But when doing illustration I noticed the ease of use compared to Illustrator. Just drag to clip, everything clearly laid out in the layers panel and not getting stuck in the transparency panel.   Playing around with gradients and blend modes. Could be an abstract book cover.

Nice abstract gradient in the space ship flame! How did you achieve that effect? Drawing to a grid and then rounding of with the corner tool?
The ship itself looks a bit light and flat imo.
 
Regarding the astronaut: the purple helmet looks a bit void, A darker base with highlight or planet reflection might give it a bit more depth. The composition could do with a bit more hierarchy, I think. As it is the planet and the astronaut are about the same size and sit next to each other in the middle.

I've also spotted something else about this document which will hammer snapping performance.  A lot of the layers are made up of other nested "Layers" or "Groups".  There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but this pattern is unfortunately bad for snapping in this scenario.
 
If you have a top level Vector object, such as a rectangle, with child objects inside of that, the snapper can work out the bounding box of that layer by just calculating it for the rectangle (since its children will be clipped to it).  For "Layers" or "Groups" the snapper has to work out the bounding box by summing up the boxes for all the child objects.  This works recursively until it reaches a vector or pixel object for which it can calculate the real bounds.  Snapping in your document would be loads faster (with the options I mentioned before) if your top level layers were Vector objects (even if they are just used for clipping, with no fill or line colour).
 
This also applies if you have a surrounding rectangle with lots of objects as sibling objects in your document tree (such as your control panel images).  This would snap better if the details layers were children of the surrounding rectangle object.
 
For people making reusable symbols, this will be a good approach to follow.  We may release some "good practice tips" for forming Symbols and Assets when we have a few more snapping features in 1.6.
 
I also have some ideas for caching bounding boxes which will help performance, but a combination of this with well structured documents will give the best performance.

If you paint black all color information will be black (left side of levels graph), it's the opacity that's different. If you select the alpha channel instead of the master your levels should work fine, I think.

Hi,
 
I don't know what the mac behaviour is, so I'm not sure if it's a bug or feature request:
When placing an image AD uses the DPI of the image and not of the AD document. So images are usually placed at 72 dpi in 300 DPI documents.
 
-Using hi-res images this is annoying because the placed object extends far beyond the canvas. Requiring to zoom out to resize and put the image into place.
 
-If setting up your document for printing, placing images at print DPI honours the document intention and requires the user to willingly override those standards when using an image at lower DPI.
 
Therefore using document DPI would seem desirable behaviour, but maybe I'm missing something.
 
(Another option could be images fitting to the canvas when placed. This is helpful for the first point and less dependant on paper size, but ignores quality control.)

I've tried a lot of fonts in the Windows beta and discretionary ligatures always work fine for me. I do think it would be more useful if the second button in the character panel would be 'discretionary ligatures' instead of 'contextual alternates'. The former are well-known and widely implemented in serif fonts, the latter rare and unclear. Even for fonts with a lot of stylistic alternates or contextual swashes the button 'contextual alternates' usually doesn't work. That way the button can even be misleading. So you have to open the typography panel any way and that's fine for advanced opentype-settings. A 'discretionary ligatures' button is more straight-forward and would improve workflow because you wouldn't have to open the extra panel.

I've tried a lot of fonts in the Windows beta and discretionary ligatures always work fine for me. I do think it would be more useful if the second button in the character panel would be 'discretionary ligatures' instead of 'contextual alternates'. The former are well-known and widely implemented in serif fonts, the latter rare and unclear. Even for fonts with a lot of stylistic alternates or contextual swashes the button 'contextual alternates' usually doesn't work. That way the button can even be misleading. So you have to open the typography panel any way and that's fine for advanced opentype-settings. A 'discretionary ligatures' button is more straight-forward and would improve workflow because you wouldn't have to open the extra panel.

Is this by design? When adding a gutter in the grid manager, the vertical lay-out starts with the gutter and then the cell, whereas the horizontal lay-out starts with the cell and then the gutter.

Neither a bug nor a feature request (I would say), more basic functionality:
 
When switching font families Designer switches to the top style of that family. And can switch from italic to regular or bold (or even black, since Designer doesn't seem to sort the families at all). It should stick to the same font-style when available. And if not available probably switch to regular as default setting.