Cristian Dragos

Hey guys, first I want to congratulate the Affinity for all the progress they've achieved all these years. You made such incredible progress with such a small team, regardless of your pricing model compared to the other A-team. So compliments aside, I was really blown away by the StudioLink feature and since I don't work in publishing, this could still be really handy for my workflow while working in Designer and instead switching to the Pixel Persona, just switch to the Affinity Photo module/persona (if it's installed of course), which is a lot more powerful than the old Pixel Persona. This was always my dream, and I see that was yours as well, having a single interface where you can work on anything from publishing to vector to photo editing and best of all use a single file format like .AFF or something which would open in something like Affinity Studio which would be more like a container for all the Affinity apps you have installed. Or just keep one software (Affinity Studio) which when you buy it, you would just buy/activate the modules you need like Publisher and Photo for some people or just Designer and Photo, like in my case, for others. Is this the direction your moving towards? If yes, then you guys could finally pull off something that the other A-team could dream of and would make your company a serious alternative to theirs software, especially for big creative agencies. Good luck, Cristian

My 2.5 cents on this topic:

Works fine for me, both Ctrl and Alt + Drag. Windows 10 1809.

Thanks for the update Sean

There's definitely a bug in the Stroke department! As soon as I check "Scale with object" the stroke width changes from 20px to 0.4px. And if I want to change that width in the Appearance panel manually I can't... it just goes to 0px no matter what value I type in or even if I scroll with the mouse hover or if I pull the scroll trackbar. If I uncheck "Scale with object", the stroke goes back to the original value (20px) in the Appearance panel.

It works on my install... just make sure the layers are all in the same group or artboard.

Just restart Windows and the new icon will show up. Speaking of the icons... looks way too big compared to my other icons on the taskbar like the ones from Adobe for example. It's just flat and boring!

Same boat here! Damn I get man when I saw my workspace all screwed up and all my keyboard shortcuts gone! The setup should have given us a notice or something. Now is there a way to fix this and bring back the old workspace and keyboard shortcuts?

There are other issues with the stroke as well... I've opened up another thread here:

Hey guys... I've been using AD a lot in the last year and I wanted to share with you some of the results. As you can see in these images, my main project consists of creating Windows 10 Themes, which is basically UI design... and in this department, AD has no actual competition on Windows (Adobe XD is far too featureless for what I need and PS is a nightmare to use for UI design). While working with tons of artboards and a lot of exports, this is where AD shines, as the Export Persona makes my life a whole lot easier. But at the same time, I found some flaws in AD, which is not a bad thing because I was able to do my part in the community and offer experiential feedback to help improve the app. Now, what can I say about my work... the theme above is called Simplify 10 Dark Colorful which is inspired partially by the MacOS UI, and bellow I have something for the Linux fans as well, a collection of 10 themes called Maverick 10 which is inspired by the Ubuntu design language. Over time I made many other themes and I also use AD for web design exclusively now and in time I hope to make it my main design tool. If you like my work, then head over to deviantArt and check out my entire gallery: deviantart.com/dpcdpc11 Thank you for making this amazing piece of software!

Thank you for the kind words Windows 10 is still quite customizable, even though it's not what it used to be during the Windows 7 golden age. But when UWP apps will take over the Windows ecosystem (which I hope it won't happen to soon), custom themes will become redundant since the UWP UI can't be overwritten by a Windows custom theme, and then everything will become boring once again

Honestly, now you're just arguing for the argument's sake or either you have too much time on your hands. So I'm not going to give into this useless argument. But I'm willing to bet my money,that I don't have, that most users don't even know that list is there and it's almost never used (see my previous arguments). And if you would know anything about UI/UX design than we wouldn't have this silly argument. Have a great weekend... Please try to loosen up :) There are other important problems in this word and life is to short to argue over some buttons.

Please check the attached video recording. As you can see I'm using Artboard groups to keep everything nice and organized. Now the problem with Artboard Groups is that when I want to move an entire group, it only moves the content inside the Artboards which doesn't make sense! The proper behavior would be to move all the artboards and their content at once when moving the whole group, otherwise what's the point of having a group, right? Affinity Designer 2019-02-15 01-25-32.mp4

Thanks for the "fix" suggestion Gabe! It works... but hopefully it will be truly fixed in the upcoming 1.7 release

Hey Garry, Of course, you can disagree, but my point still stands and your arguments are not very solid, especially the silly example of dropping keyboard shortcuts. First of all, it's not obvious the list is in alphabetical order... this is something you have to figure for yourself and again, it's not hard since there are only 7 items in the list. Speaking of the number of items, they won't grow that much in the future (considering the app's history and direction), so again this point doesn't hold true. Second, how are your settings arrange on your phone, TV, OS and so on? Do you have two layout options at the same time? I guess not. Instead what they could do is to add a filter/arrangement switch button which would change the layout from grid icons to an alphabetical list or something just like we have on online stores, (like a small A-Z icon, for example, to be more intuitive). Seeing the same things twice at the same time it's bad UX however you put it (especially for new users) and this has nothing to do with how someone uses their application since we're talking about the Settings panel which no matter how you use the app, you don't open all day long. Usually, you setup some things at first and then you stick with it so it's not a matter of productivity or app usage. Regarding keyboard shortcuts in the settings panel, I agree, they could be very useful. I would suggest you create a new post about this in the Requests section. Same goes for the Search bar which is not very useful as well since it's doesn't give you much feedback while searching other than highlighting a specific Icon. This as well have room for improvement so why not just add a feature request, right? Have a great weekend, Cristian

Honestly, why have two things that do basically the same thing? That's not very good UX, IMHO! I would just remove the list as it's pretty redundant. There are like only 7 settings sections, not like 100, where you need an alphabetical list to find things easier; plus we have the Search bar if we want to find something specific.

Hey guys, One thing that keeps bugging me when I open a project that I'm working on is that the first thing I have to do is switch to the respective Document Palette from the Default Palette. Wouldn't it make more sense for a document to remember this and just select the last Document Palette you used (in case you have more than one) when opening a .afdesign file? Or at least give us an option in the Palette menu to set that Document Palette as default for that specific document. This would be nice as well. What do you think? Thanks in advance, Cristian

But is there a way of directly selecting a group inside a group without double clicking the first group or without using the Layers panel? I use nested groups in groups a lot since I need the elements to stay together and when I have to drill down through the groups one extra click can select something else and I have to do it all over again which is very frustrating. The solution would be either to have a true isolation mode a la Illustrator or have a way to select a specific group with key combination. I would suggest something like this: 1. Cmd/Ctrl + Click to select and object inside the group. 2. Alt + Click the same object to select the first tier group of which the object is part of, then Alt + Click again to select the upper tier group and so on. This should be also pretty useful for nested groups/objects inside other objects. What do you think?

I'm in the same boat Fernando! There are still many little quirks about AD that prevents me to switch permanently from PS and it's missing a bunch of vector tools that prevents me from switching from AI (the list is pretty long so... yeah). But instead I've switched all my Web Design work from PS to AI since I've got a 27" 4K display which I use at 150% scaling and everything in PS looks blurry at 150% zoom (which simulates the real size of the web). But since the launch of the new iPad apps Serif is focusing more on those than on the Desktop apps which might give them an extra cashflow on short term and I'm guessing they'll switch a bit focus over the Desktop apps once the mobile ones are getting more stable. So we can only hope they get enough money to expand their team and get take care of that old roadmap

I've tested the export using all the PDF options and the result is always the same (specific fonts like Antonio doesn't get embedded unless I install the font in the System folder). Can you please share the AFD file as well? I'm using FontExpert2016 here and maybe that could be an issue?

Hey @Sean P Sorry for the late reply! I've tested the file you attached and I'm getting the same result: all the fonts embed correctly except for Antonio. So it seems there must be something specific about these fonts. I've tried to find some difference between Antonio and the others but can't seem to find anything that makes sense so I'm just stuck. Maybe if you could contact some fonts foundry or someone that makes fonts which might give you a lead in solving this problem. Let me know if there's anything I can help with

@Sean P When installing the fonts it's important to have this option on: "Leave files at their current location" because that's the idea of using a font manager, to keep the files in their location not to copy them to the Fonts folder. Also don't add the font to the Library. Use the Folders tab because again, this keeps the font files in their place on the hard drive. From your screenshot you might have selected the other option: "Copy files to Fonts folder" because the installed fonts are not highlighted in Green. I've also attached my test files (the AD file and the exported PDF). As you can see, you won't be able to select the text in the PDF and if you open it in AD the text will be converted to shapes. Instead if I install the Fonts using the "Copy files to Fonts folder" option in FontExpert, then of course the PDF will be exported properly with the embedded fonts, just like someone else mentioned above. fonts_test.afdesign fonts_test.pdf

Any updates on this issue? I'm using FontExpert in my case and I think most designers are using a similar software to manager their fonts. So this is definitely an issue which has to be fixed.

I know about that... but when I have like 10 slices or more, I have to click each one to export it one by one, then click Save each time, which is time consuming and ridiculous considering the potential of a productivity software like AD. I don't think I'm asking much... the functionality is already there. Just need a button at the bottom that says: Export selected slices. That's it.

+1 I second this... having hundreds of slices to export and then having to update 10 of them and exporting just these updated one is a pain as I have to deselect all of them and then just check these 10. A feature of exporting just the selected ones (not the checked ones) would be awesome and speed up the workflow.