gdenby

Your document structure is misguided, Luveau.
 
As soon as you make an object a child of another object in the Layers list, you will essentially clip this object to its parent. Therefore, if you move the child object out of boundaries of the parent object, it will disappear. Disentangle all curves in the Layers list, and you should be fine.  :)

Hi, MikeDuf,
 
Yes, Designer is still young. 
 
Deformations are in the version 1 roadmap, so should show up in the not too distant future.
 
Auto trace is also in the roadmap, but it seems iffy based on comments from the past few months. Serif would like to do soething better than what is already available. As you note, the available tools are not always very good.
 
There has been mention of a scripting language addition.
 
I don't recall reading anything about a mirror function. Current capabilities require a bit of work, but not too much. Likewise, exporting specific layers is not a 1 click operation. Takes several steps.
 
Not sure what you mean when you mention turning shapes into guides. There are lots of good snapping options to grids, guides, and object geometries, but I don't know how others might be able to use them w/o having their own AD app.
 
So, yes, bunch of stuff that are yet to be available. But what is there works quite well. 

I think I may have figured it out. When you have the vector brush object selected, change the stroke color, not the fill color. A vector brush object/layer is only a stroke. While the history record says "set fill" it would be clearer if it said "set stroke fill color."
 
Hope this helps.

for full time freelancing, that'd be the way of the Dodo... ;) ...for a passion / hobby, that pace could be even fast...With a mix of equal satisfaction and concern, I could say am sort of in the former group... Some projects tho, or even a stage in a project can take weeks...My major time hole is client revisions, tho... worst ones are just changes of heart...but hey, we're all human.

Wow! That is manic! What fun.

Hi all, thought I'd introduce myself, as I predict I will be posting here every so often to help or get help
 
I'm a hobby graphic designer, and by that I mean very much a beginner. I've done some police badges and car designs, and I'm looking to up my skills and software. I cut my teeth on Inkscape, but it runs a little slow on my mac, and the UI isn't as pretty as all the other apple stuff so I bought affinity designer.
 
Immediately I was frustrated with trying to join two nodes, but I figured it out. I have a feeling if i put the same time into this as I did with Inkscape I'll be better off with AD.
 
I look forward to learning from you guys and searching first, and maybe one day contributing!
 
Jon

uploaded!! 
ready!

Nice work. If its not a problem, might you upload an outline view of the file? Or a split view screen cap of the vector and outline? 

Thanks gdenby and reglico. It's not a simple process (except in something like AutoCAD which handles it easily). I actually managed to do what I wanted (file attached). From memory, I think I created the circles and and all the intersecting lines then probably converted to curves. Then I added nodes at strategic points then went around breaking the curves and deleting where needed. Now I just want to get rid of the white background or make it transparent somehow. I'm sure I'll figure something out. Thanks for your suggestions.
 
..... Well I attached the file but I don't see it anywhere I'm sorry.

I looked at several facebook pages, and after using the page element inspector, all the images used as banners and identifier were .jpg. My assumption that is the facebook standard. Jpg's are typically much smaller than .png. Jpg doesn't handle transparency, so if you want the logo floating over a background, it will need to be a composite.

As a former NeXT evangelist, one was pampered with vector-bodied processing (Display Postscript, EPS, PS L2). Those times a lot of apps appeared on the market, like Altsys Virtuoso (aka Freehand), AppsoftDraw, StoneDesign Create, Lighthouse Design Diagram, Illustrator ... etc. Later when moving over to Win, from those former well known NS/OS apps only the major big field players where left over and available on Win too, namely Freehand and Illustrator. Personally I always prefered and liked Freehand much more here, since it offered the things I was used to (no surprise) in the same manner as Virtuoso.
 
However, nowadays I use mostly Xara on Win as a rapid vector drawing app, since it combines most things I need feature wise and mostly have to deal with in one package. - Recently I was looking for something similar on the Mac side, so to say something which may resemble Xara here for the Mac side and so discovered AD. Though being feature wise actually by far not on par here, AD mostly also works quite fast (at least on MacOS) and will hopefully evolve over time into a major alternative.

Hi- I'm Dave (Dave2017). I have worked with computers for many years - perhaps too many, and written software, though not so much in recent years. Actually most of the time I taught other people maths and computing in various countries, including the UK, but also the USA and Sweden.
 
I gave up official work a few years ago, but am still active in other areas, including making recordings and films of concerts - now settling on Final Cut Pro X - but have use Adobe Premiere, and other tools, such as Quicktime.
 
I generally don't like Windows much, and have been using Apple kit since 1985, and in recent years have become fully committed to Macs once more - having scrapped my two most used PCs last year. I did have the Serif software - PagePlus and also the Photo Plus software - sorry - probably no way they're going to get used again as I'm probably not going to set up another Windows based PC.
 
I have quite a lot of software on my machines, including basic photo editing (Apple Preview), GIMP, Photoshop Elements, but recently I bought Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer which seem easy to use and mostly very good.
 
Mostly I do photo editing, but sometimes I have to annotate photos or even make up graphics. I still miss Claris/AppleWorks for some tasks - and indeed I still keep one machine running in Snow Leopard (OS 10.6.8) for that reason. For some very quick figures that was much the best I ever came across. It's all very well having tools which will do everything, but if they're hard to learn or tricksy to use that's no good for most of us. What I really liked about the Claris/Appleworks package was the ability to link together shapes and text boxes etc. with connectors. It's possible to do similar things in Powerpoint, but it's really just not so nice.
 
OK - that's me done for an intro. Now onto the forum and questions.

Make the blend mode "erase."

I used Corel intensely for a number of years, ending about 2003, when Draw was no longer supported on a Mac. I was quite unhappy, and shifted to AI. When I got AD a few months ago, the habits were still so strong that I kept trying to use CD/AI shortcuts, etc. Fortunately, AD is well laid out enough, and consistent that I've mostly stopped using the wrong keys.

Are you wanting to use things you have already written, or drawn? Or do you just prefer to work that way on a tablet?
 
There are several handwriting recognition apps that do a pretty good job on a demo iPad I tried. Didn't think to see if graphic shapes were converted, altho I've read there are some that will do simple shapes, squares, triangles, etc.
 
It's been years since I tried converting scanned handwriting to text. My recollection was that even as a 2 finger typist, it was faster and more accurate to just type.
 
If you have a Mac, and a graphics tablet, there is a built in handwriting system feature called "Ink." I just tried it w. AD, and it worked OK. Again, not any quicker or easier than just typing.

Hi, Robotbenjy,
 
It seems there are quite a number of people who show up on the forum expecting the Affinity apps to be a replacement for other, more mature, and generally much more expensive software. And often they are disappointed. I think its more a matter of expectations being let down (I too have read the PS-killer stories) rather than the software being flawed. As MEB noted, the apps are quite young. Give them a few more years.

Hi, Robotbenjy,
 
It seems there are quite a number of people who show up on the forum expecting the Affinity apps to be a replacement for other, more mature, and generally much more expensive software. And often they are disappointed. I think its more a matter of expectations being let down (I too have read the PS-killer stories) rather than the software being flawed. As MEB noted, the apps are quite young. Give them a few more years.

AD allows bitmaps to fill a vector, and then if the vector is broken into parts, the portions of the bitmap in the pieces remains attached. The OP's sample suggested that he wanted the Mass. map to be surrounded by transparency. I suspected, and found that if a bitmap was brought into a vector as a nested child instead of a fill, geometric operations of the parent vector also applied to the child.
 
Here's a 1-2-3...
 
Open a transparent background document.
Create an unfilled rectangle.
Drag in image onto the document window, and nest the image layer in the rectangle.
Make the "bars." I made a long thin rounded rectangle, rotated it, duplicated it enough times, and used combine to put them all together. 
Position over the rectangle, both in the workspace and in the layer palette. Select the layers, and subtract.
The image is now broken by thin white stripes.
 

Hi, Robotbenjy,
 
It seems there are quite a number of people who show up on the forum expecting the Affinity apps to be a replacement for other, more mature, and generally much more expensive software. And often they are disappointed. I think its more a matter of expectations being let down (I too have read the PS-killer stories) rather than the software being flawed. As MEB noted, the apps are quite young. Give them a few more years.

Hi, mattjenn,
 
I've been using AD for about 9 months, and I'm still learning. My answers are not definitive.
 
Drawing constraints for lines are vertical, horizontal, and 45 degrees. If you want 30 degrees, set up an isometric grid, and have snapping to grid enabled.
 
The transform panel lets one scale in both x & y by any percentage, or proportion such as pi.
 
At present, AD requires adding a node to break a line. This is something still in development.
 
AD does not have AI-like actions. There has been mention of a scripting language in the future.
 
By default, each new object is its own layer. But it is easy to set the program so that new objects are nested in an existing layer. The term "layer" in AD is different than in AI. 
 
A lot of what AI does can be done in AD, but the program works differently. Learning different methods will be a bit of a hurdle. I think you will find AD quite capable, but there are many features that are still being implemented. It is not, IMO, a replacement for AI but a viable alternative in many respects. 

One cannot claim to have been plagiarized if one discloses a method, either freely or for pay. So if you see it on a tute, or just an blog demonstration, its pretty much OK to use. 
 
Concepts, something like a description for a plot line, can be copyrighted, and assuming the owner protects the right, if someone appropriates it for commercial use, then there is a problem.
 
There are many uses for the term "idea." but the most important one is referred to in the old phrase "You can't stop an idea whose time has come." There are certainly historic records of people w. no relation to each other, working in different places w. no communication, who have discovered or created nearly the same thing. Or as is often said, "there are no new stories." My view is that basic ideas are not the property of any 1 person.
 
The actual expression deriving from the idea is what can be plagiarized, i.e. copied for profit by someone who does not own it.
 
Picasso was once accused of stealing someone's technique. His reply was something like "Everybody steals. The mark of genius is knowing who to steal from." I thought about that "Everbody steals" for years. (I worked in an art museum, and topics like this were part of day to day operation.) "Steal" might be to strong a term, but pretty much everybody borrows from everybody else. People who are honest will admit to being influenced by other peoples' works. In some cultures and schools, deviating from traditional standards is in fact discouraged or forbidden. As a for instance, a big problem with attributing works to Rembrandt is that he had many pupils, all of whom were encouraged to paint like their master. It wasn't a problem, until a few hundred years later when the real things and the students' works got mixed up and were all being sold as a Rembrandt.
 
This is a huge topic, and many facetted.  But "replicating a style seperate from the subject matter/composition etc, transforming old art into something new etc all can fall under plagiarism as well..." is not plagiarism. A style is just a set of conventions, and those are used to help formulate a particular item. Its like a set of words, phrases, syntax. Everyone who wants to can use them.

Plagiarism only occurs when someone attempts to pass off some else's work as their own for profit. Essentially, its an act of fraud, or forgery. 
 
Working in a similar manners just makes the work derivative. The person doing it is a "wannabe," or worse, a "hack."
 
Everyone emulates their teachers. Teachers are happy when the pupil surpasses their work, or at least proceeds from it to something new innovative. Everyone copies works they admire. Its understood that it is just the way one acquires skill and an understanding of the fundamentals.

This is when you inform the customer to supply a better version. Preferably vector, but if a bitmap (which is all that EPS file is) to provide a higher-res version.

Here's an approach.
 
The image took maybe 12 minutes.
 
Create a framework. Use the polygon shape tool, select the number of facets you need, such as 20 in your sample. No fill, default stroke. With snapping on, draw out from the page center. Draw another w. a larger or smaller radius as you like. 
 
Next, define the section for the first shape. Using the pen tool in straight line mode, draw a line from the top most point of on poly to the other. Draw another separate line from the 1st angle to the left of on poly to the 1st angle of the other. The 2 poly perimeters and the lines define a trapezoid drawing space.
 
Using the pen tool in polygon mode, rough out the shape you want, and refine it by tweaking node positions, and changing some to smooth to get the curves you need. Hint: At this step, select the inner poly and make the curve parameter 100%. That way, there will be a smooth curve to help refine the hand drawn shape.
 
At this point there is 1 "tooth" or "cog". While selected, move the center of rotation to the page center. Use the duplicate command and rotate the hand drawn form the appropriate amount. 18 degrees for the 20 toothed form in your example. Then repeat the duplication till you have a complete ring.
 

 
I was inclined at 1st to use the circle tool, and make it into a donut_pie section that would then be modified to get a shape. That doesn't work if the number of desired sections requires and arc that is not a whole degree. Ex.: 16 "teeth" require an arc of 22.5 degrees, and the pie tool will only do whole degrees.
 
Then I tried using the cog tool, and modifying the individual cogs. It gave precise spacing, but requires dozens of node additions and manipulations.
 
So, I ended up doing a hand draw, replicating and adding the dupes together. Much faster.
 
Note. I'm slowing down quite a bit w. age. My elder son moves about 2 - 3 times faster than I, so you might get this done in a bit over 3 minutes.