egypturnash

Illustrator's been a pain in the ass lately so I'm flirting with Affinity Designer. Sadly I'm going back to it after an hour; there's a bunch of things that are either lacking, or work really maddeningly differently in AD. Here is a list of Things Designer Needs Before I Ditch Illustrator After Fifteen Years Of It Being My Main Art Squeeze: * why are gradients and alignments and compound objects only available in the toolbar/context bar? I have this long-standing loathing of 'contextual palettes', I like to be able to put my tools in a particular place and know they're always there. Seriously there should be nothing that's only accessible that way IMHO. * Selection. - is there an 'object selection by path only' switch, not having it drives me insane - why does select>deselect all regularly refuse to work when I have stuff selected? This is maddening. - why can't I drag out a selection marquee with the node tool when nothing is currently selected? - I find myself really missing AI's select>same>fill/stroke/appearance/etc menu items. - is there something like AI's view>show/hide edges, to hide the outlines/points of selected objects? I miss that a lot. * Pencil tool. I have an AI workflow centered mostly around the pencil tool that's super fast. - is there an equivalent of AI's 'keep new strokes selected' for me to turn off - is there an equivalent of AI's 'edit selected strokes' for me to turn on, I'm used to rapidly refining the vast majority of my shapes this way rather than by editing the individual control points. - also is there a switch to turn off the thing where if I hesitate for half a second while drawing a shape it suddenly draws the half-finished shape? Drives me nuts when it covers up stuff I'm drawing next to. - why does select>select all stop working when I'm using the pencil tool * Appearance palette. Is there one? I do a LOT of crazy AI stuff involving stacking up multiple strokes/fills on a single path, and various effects on the path or its multiple strokes/fills. Losing that feels like cutting off a limb to me. *Are there any non-bitmap effects? Like AI's roughen/tweak/transform/pucker&bloat/twist/zigzag/rounded corners? * Distortion meshes. Well those are on the roadmap so I can't say much besides "I miss 'em." * Keyboard shortcuts. - the '!' triangle when assigning a keyboard shortcut that's already in use is unhelpful - where is it already assigned? Can I be taken to that shortcut? Can I say "I don't care about that action having this shortcut, use it for this"? - ain't no search in the shortcuts pane, either, and there's a heck of a lot of shortcuts - can I assign one key to cycle between multiple tools the way 'm' cycles between all the shapes? I really want 'draw above/below/inside' on a cycling key. - what is up with the way hitting the hotkey for a tool twice selects the previous tool, I'm sure there are people who think it's a fine idea but I think it's a terrible one, can there be a switch for that - can't assign shortcuts to transparency modes, just opacity levels * Global swatches. I rely on these a lot. - why can't I build a gradient from global swatches and have it remain linked to the swatch - try this: ---- add a global color ---- draw a few shapes with it ---- press the 'add current color to palette as global color' button in the swatch palette to quickly create a new global swatch ---- edit the new global swatch ---- suddenly everything drawn in the first global swatch is now in the second?!? ---- also I kinda really hate that new global swatches are added at the beginning of the swatches, it makes the entire set of swatches move around on me and that's kind of annoying ---- I also really miss being able to just drag from the current fill/stroke display in the color or swatch panel and drop in the swatch list to create a new copy of the current swatch for further editing. Hitting the dropdown menu on the swatch palette and choosing 'add global color' is super slow. --- and some other swatch menu annoyances: can't shift-select multiple swatches, renaming them is a right-click and not undoable instead of an undoable thing that's part of double-clicking on the swatch to edit it... * Is there an equivalent of AI's 'new art has basic appearance' switch for me to turn off? ---- draw a shape, set it to 50% multiply ---- draw another shape, it comes out as 100% normal, which is not what I want, a lot of the time I want to draw multiple translucent shapes in quick succession. * WHY DOESN'T APPLE-SPACE LET ME DRAG OUT A RECTANGLE TO ZOOM INTO AAAGH I HAVE FOURTEEN YEARS OF MUSCLE MEMORY FOR THAT AAAAAAHHHH - yes I know there is 'zoom to selection', it's no substitute, we are talking about a shortcut buried so deep in my brain after sixteen years of using AI that I will probably happily keep suffering with Adobe's prices and growing instability even if you get EVERYTHING ELSE right. * Layers palette. - I really miss AI's little object proxy squares on the right of the Layers palette to quickly drag stuff up and down the stack instead of cutting from one layer and pasting into another. - I also really really miss having lock buttons right there on every layer, I can have a LOT of layers (especially when I'm drawing comics) and the thought of clicking on every single layer I want to lock, then clicking the lock button, versus just clicking and dragging down the column of lock buttons, then unlocking a layer or three I want to work with, is insane. * is there any way to make the various library palettes (swatches/brushes/styles/etc) come up empty? I like to make myself have to think about every color I add to my work. * I couldn't figure out how to select one of the objects that makes up a compound object without opening up the layer it's in. I just wanna select one part of it quickly from the canvas but Designer only lets me select the whole compound object as if it's been expanded. Some of these probably come off as fiddly and picky; I've been using AI as my main art tool since 2000, so a lot of this stuff is way beneath the level of conscious thought for me now, and not being able to find ways to do them as unthinkingly in Designer kills it for me. Overall I feel like I got a lot further with Affinity Designer before encountering things that made me emit a resounding NOPE, so yay for that. Illustrator really needs some competition. See y'all next version.

IMHO color swatch sets should get stored in the document, rather than being stored in the palette dropdown for all documents to use. I don't need to have all the palettes hanging around for every document I've ever made, but I also don't want to have to reconstruct them when I pull up a five-year-old document...

Ah, thanks. That's... not anything I would even begin to expect as the way to do 'deselect all', after fourteen years of hitting command-shift-A to do select->deselect. (also oh godddd the 'use fill' setting is saved on a per-document basis, ugh, I never want this to come unchecked ever, and oh geeze the pen tool has the same 'use fill' checkbox? man this thing is built by people whose idea of Proper Vector Workflow is like completely alien to mine.)

Oh hey that helps a lot, thanks! Is there any way to make the pencil tool automatically deselect freshly-drawn shapes? Especially given that hitting apple-D doesn't seem to actually deselect anything just drawn with the pencil tool.

I've been using Illustrator since about 2000, and have evolved a high-speed workflow that involves drawing lots of filled, unstroked paths with the pencil tool. When I tried doing this method in Affinity, it insisted on changing all of my pencil shapes to no fill, and a black stroke. Is there any way to change this? If not, this is definitely a feature request, as this is a total dealbreaker for me - drawing stuff once as outlines, then recreating it with geometric shapes and/or shapes painstakingly pulled out with the pen tool, easily takes 3-5 times as long as making a bunch of colored shapes with the pencil tool, then refining them. (See this video for an example of this working method in progress.) I'm also having similar things happen with the styles; if I select a style, then try to draw some shapes with it active, I get whatever basic colors I've selected, rather than the style. It's like Affinity insists that certain attributes can only be applied to paths after creation, not while creating them, which is a real flow-killer for me. I'd love to have some actual competition for Illustrator, but going back to a painstaking pen tool-focused workflow is pretty much not gonna happen. I'm slow enough as is.

Total agreement. Global swatches are a must-have feature for me; they're why I started using Illustrator in the first place. Being able to quickly and precisely change the color scheme of a finished piece is a core part of my creative workflow. I would love to consider switching away from Illustrator but this is really a crucial thing. (Oh and don't forget spot color swatches, which are also a thing I can't leave behind - I do tricks with hand separations and special inks when I go to print.)