R C-R

Found on the web, white text made more <ahem> impactful with Affinity Photo:

Have you tried converting the letters to curves & using boolean subtraction with a rectangle (or whatever) to "cut" them?

The tone is likely the Mac's warning beep that (among other things) you hear when you type an invalid keyboard command. That suggests that you may have accidentally removed the CMD J duplicate keyboard shortcut from Affinity's Keyboard Shortcuts preferences. For Affinity Photo, that will be in the Photo Persona > Layer section, near the bottom of the list. For Designer, it will be in the Draw Persona > Edit section, about ½ way down the list.

The Option/Alt key is used to temporarily ignore snapping of control handles & nodes, not just with the move tool but also for every other item in the UI with a snapping feature. There are more of them than you might think, including the pen & node tools, the parametric adjustments of the shape tools, the control points on the gradient & transparency tools, & so on. (It is also used to invoke drag-duplication with the Move tool, to click to remove handles with the node tool, & to subtract from the selection with the pixel select tools.)
 
This is consistent throughout the UI's of both Affinity apps. Changing this to the Command key for the Move tool would break this consistency & changing it everywhere would create conflicts where the Command key is already used for something else, for example to temporarily toggle to the Node tool when the Pen tool is in use.

Also, Affinity has some stroke styles which SVG does not support directly, and those have to be expanded to keep them looking the same. Examples include mitre joins, and inside/outside stroke alignment.

The tone is likely the Mac's warning beep that (among other things) you hear when you type an invalid keyboard command. That suggests that you may have accidentally removed the CMD J duplicate keyboard shortcut from Affinity's Keyboard Shortcuts preferences. For Affinity Photo, that will be in the Photo Persona > Layer section, near the bottom of the list. For Designer, it will be in the Draw Persona > Edit section, about ½ way down the list.

Opens fine here, too.
 
However it is a tiny file, only 21.1 px x 14.8 px. Drew, have you tried "Zoom to fit" from the View menu? Is it possible you are just at some zoom level that makes it difficult to see it?

It won't make any settings "sticky," but you can use the View Menu > Customize Toolbar item to add dedicated blur, burn, etc. tool buttons to the Toolbar so at least you won't have to use the multi tool fly-out button to select the ones you use the most.
 
You can also create dedicated keyboard shortcuts for various specific tools in addition to or instead of the ones that cycle through different tools.

You should have both the trial & retail versions of Affinity Photo in your Applications folder.
 
When you purchased the retail version it should have automatically been downloaded & installed, so there is no separate step for that or need for you to do anything to install it. To confirm this, you can open the Mac App Store app & click on the Purchased tab. You should see AP listed there with an "Open" button next to it. If it has a "Download" button instead, click on that to download & install it.
 
What most likely is happening is that the trial version is still set to open your AP documents, which is why you get the expired notice. The simplest solution is just to delete the trial version from your Applications folder. That way, the retail version will open any documents that previously opened with the trial.

Me too!

Hi Chaz,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
As Callum said this feature is currently only available in Affinity Photo (convert paths to selections and masks).
Here's a tip to work around the problem in Designer: draw your shape with the Pen Tool as usual, fill it with any colour and no stroke, then to "convert" it to a selection press and hold ⌘ (cmd) and click over the object's thumbnail in the Layers panel. Affinity will create a selection from the layer contents.

In the Mac Affinity apps you can use CMD + spacebar to zoom in & out with the mouse pointer but you have to press the spacebar first for this to work.
 
If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel you can set it to zoom the display in Preferences > Tools. This is really useful because with this enabled you can zoom at the same time you do other things with the mouse pointer.

I think you should be able to do what you want by changing the Fill Mode at the bottom of the Layers menu to "Winding (Non-Zero)" for each of the shapes.
 
However, while that works great for each shape, when they are combined (with the Add operation) the holes reappear, because the Fill Mode is set back to "Alternate (Even-Odd)" & greyed out so you can't change it.

Enable "Scale with object" in the strokes panel for the vectors that are not doing that. (You can select more than one vector layer to do this more quickly.)
 
You can scale by percent in the Transform panel. Enable the lock icon if you want to scale by percent in both X & Y directions.
 
For vector layers, holding down the shift key & dragging the control handles should constrain scaling to retain the X & Y proportions.

Ian, I can't reproduce this on my Mac running OS X 10.11.6. I tried it with both the Layers panel docked in the Studio & undocked, & with different System Preference > General settings for showing or hiding the scroll bar.
 
Maybe resetting the app would help?

Why can't you use a larger artboard as suggested? Why must you export more than one artboard at a time?
 
Without knowing any of the whys it is hard to suggest anything that would help you with your project.

I think you should be able to do what you want by changing the Fill Mode at the bottom of the Layers menu to "Winding (Non-Zero)" for each of the shapes.
 
However, while that works great for each shape, when they are combined (with the Add operation) the holes reappear, because the Fill Mode is set back to "Alternate (Even-Odd)" & greyed out so you can't change it.

Since technically "erasing" part of a vector shape is equivalent to changing its path, I usually draw a new shape with the Pen tool outlining the part I want to remove & use the Subtract boolean operation to remove it.
 
But since this is a destructive operation what I sometimes do instead is to switch to the Pixel persona, use one or more of its selection tools to select the part to be "erased," invert that, & convert it to a mask. No only is this non-destructive, I can refine the mask in the usual ways to add things like a featured edge or paint out part of it or add to it with a pixel brush.

Hi Alfred,
Yes, in some cases (if there's already few nodes) it isn't much effective. It mostly useful to remove nodes from an expanded path with several superfluous nodes.
Hopefully this should be improved in the future.

This topic, & in particular this comment & several of the posts by A_B_C, got me thinking: what exactly is a spiral, & how could I make a "true" one? This very quickly led me to the Wikipedia Spiral article, where I was reminded of something I was previously only dimly aware of; that being there are a lot of different kinds of 2 dimensional spirals.
 
If I am not mistaken, all the techniques mentioned here produce Fibonacci spirals. Wikipedia tells me they are approximations of the Golden spiral, which is one of the many continuously expanding true spirals.
 
At this point I realized something: a true spiral (one with a continuous "growth factor") would require infinitely many Bézier nodes; otherwise it would be a stepped approximation, right? If that is indeed true, there is no way Affinity could provide a true Spiral shape tool (& it makes me wonder how other apps with that tool handle this).
 
Anyway, I started thinking about ways to create "truer" spirals in Affinity & I have an idea about that I want to hear what you think of.
 
The basic idea is to create a two node line, set its center of rotation to one end, duplicate it, slightly rotate & lengthen the dup, then power duplicate that a bunch of times. The nodes opposite the center of rotation look to me like nodes on an Archimedean spiral, so by snapping a new line drawn with the Pen tool to each of those nodes in turn, this produces something resembling a stepwise approximation of that kind of spiral.
 
To make what I am talking about a little clearer, I have attached an afdesign file (in 1.5 format), with the history included so you can step backwards to see what I did. I only extended the new line through about one turn of the spiral -- it is a tedious process, but I hope this gives you an idea of the procedure.
Archimedean Spiral?.afdesign

What is obvious & to whom is a ... wait for it ... gray area. 
 
(Somebody had to say it. It might as well be me.)  :lol:

In the digital realm, grayscale images are defined as those having only one value per image pixel, which specifies its intensity (also known as brightness, grayness, luminosity or luma). They have no color channels, no color space from which color information can be extracted.
 
Without some other external reference for this information, like a neural network AI that has analyzed thousands of color images & can recognize the similarities in the grayscale image to make an educated guess about what its colors should be, there is no way this would be possible.
 
In short, you can't manufacture information out of nothing.

Matt,
 
You might find the Shapes video tutorial worth watching:

Also, for one more 'bonus' shape, try holding down the Alt/Option key when clicking on the flyout.