BONES

Thanks for the interface tips but they don't really help. And if anyone can tell me how to get panels back once I have closed them, I'd be grateful because I've lost a few things I'm probably going to need again at some point. What I really want to do is get the toolbar from the left edge and put it horizontally across the top with the other toolbars.

I don't think you can be looking at the same image as me. There is certainly a clear hierarchy, although that may not be clear in this instance because what you are probably confusing for the application UI is, in fact, just the UI for one tool within the application (which used to be a whole application of its own). Mostly it's icons in the toolbar, text in the panels, except where it makes sense to do otherwise (particles, paint). And the Toolbar itself is context sensitive, only displaying tools relevant to what you are doing. The colours are mostly default, to comply with a SMPTE standard for working with image files, which specifies neutral tones and low contrast, although every colour can be customised if seeing your buttons is more important to you than seeing what you are working on. I can also tell you for a fact that Adobe would still have their awful OS generated colours if it weren't for Combustion. It's kind of strange but Adobe always seemed to take Combustion far more seriously than discreet/Autodesk did. Far from "years of organic development", it was a whole new UI. Previously it looked like the image Paolo posted earlier and the only thing that changed during it's lifetime was the addition of the panel in the top-left (easily hidden with ALT+F10). Ultimately, though, it is not about how it looks, it is about the workflow it enables and no application I have ever used in my life enables such a slick workflow. I can get from brief to render hours faster in Combustion than I've ever been able to in After Effects or any other competitor, and I've spent twice the number of years using Adobe's tools as my primary than I did with Combustion. As for Affinity's UI, I've made it quite clear why it is poor - having tools on the left side, across the top and down the right side means you are constantly moving all over the screen, instead of being able to concentrate on what you are working on while your cursor only has to move around a small area of the application window. That's why you have to learn so many hotkeys to be proficient in Photoshop - so that you don't have to constantly move you cursor all the way across to the left side toolbar all the time. I assume you are a UI designer? If so, whatever design principles you are using explains why so many UIs are so poor and why great UI design seems to be a thing of the past. Look no further than how far off-track Windows 10's UI is compared to the purity and simplicity of the original Metro design language.

That's not true at all. If you think these applications are complex, wait until you check out a serious 3D suite, yet 3DS Max looks and feels very, very different to Maya. And this is how Combustion looks - very, very different from Designer or anything of Adobe's. You need to change your workflow to get the most out of it but once you get into it, it is much, much better than the way Adobe or Corel do it. One question about Designer's UI - is there any way to customise the Windows version like you can on Mac? By that I mean move elements around so that I don't have to move from one side of the screen to the other all the time. I'd also like to get rid of the big panels down the right side until I need them but they seem to be stuck there full-time.

As an absolute hater of floating windows, I cannot help but see this as a good thing.

... except, for me, the reason I would be looking for something other than Photoshop is for a better workflow and UI. By copying Photoshop's UI, you are also inheriting all it's worst traits. Copying Photoshop's keyboard shortcuts makes perfect sense - which is why I wonder why After Effects doesn't do it - but just regurgitating it's UI puts me off. After all, I already have Photoshop, why would I spend money on something that is just a Photoshop rip-off, right down to the Refine Edge tool? That said, having been a product specialist for Combustion, and then Toxik/Composite at discreet/Autodesk for six years, I understand completely how conservative the industry is and how resistant to change everyone in it is. I did a demo install and some training at Animal Logic, just after they had finished working on 300. They showed me the hardest bluescreen keying job they had done for the film - six separate keyers and a lot of masking - and in ten minutes I was able to get it about 80% done, with just a single keyer and no masking, in Toxik. After about half-an-hour, one of their guys, who was a Flame guy previously, had finished it to the same standard as the original, still with just one keyer, but they didn't care about any of that. All that concerned them was that the project management side of it was confusing to new users - Toxik had an Oracle database back-end that took care of everything which did a lot fo people's heads in. They accepted that Shake was finished but they wanted something they could just put in it's place with zero disruption. That's why Nuke succeeded where Toxik failed - they hired the former Shake UI designer to make Nuke look and feel like Shake and that was that. I have done some Nuke work as well, even a few demos, but I never liked the way it worked, it is so much less elegant than Toxik. Nuke is literally why I stopped looking for film work and went back to broadcast.

It's main discipline may not have been illustration but that doesn't mean it isn't perfectly suited to it. It was used quite widely in Asia for cartoons at one time, as a much more usable alternative to Flash. It is probably far less intuitive to someone used to Illustrator but anyone with a bit of technical understanding can squeeze a lot out of it e.g. If you want to create highlights and shadows on an object, you paint in RGB, instead of RGBA, and your brush strokes use the alpha of the underlying object. No need to clip them by setting up a complex hierarchy. The raster features in Designer are quite clumsy by comparison. Paint also received some fairly good upgrades during Combustion's life so it has a completely new text engine, retaining the sharpest looking text in the business, as well as B-splines and spline-based feathering, which are handy for illustration work. I worked for discreet/Autodesk for a while and I got to meet the guy who founded Denim. He and his two mates only wanted to make something good enough to get bought out. They figured it would be Adobe and were surprised when discreet made them an offer. Last I heard, he was still working in sales for them. I'm not looking to start any application contests, either, just genuinely curious. I've watched a few of the tutorial videos on Vimeo since I posted yesterday and I kind of see what you are probably getting at. My interest is more in integrating vector with raster, rather than switching between vector and raster on the same object.

Cool, thanks. I would never have thought to look in Web for anything.

It would be great if there were new document presets for TV and film resolutions. You wouldn't need too many, just a couple for HD - 1080p and 720p - and a few for film - 2k, 4k.

Why wouldn't you build a website in Xara? I built my band's website 100% in Designer Pro - http://www.novakill.com- it beats the hell out of making all the little image files in Xara, exporting them all one by one and reassembling them into a website in another application, which is how I used to have to do it. Combustion is well suited to illustration. After all, it started life as two stand-alone applications, one of which was a vector art program called Paint. It's vector tools are as good as Illustrator, Xara, Affinity Designer, Flash or anything else I've used for the kind of work I do, at least. It's lightning fast and the vector tools themselves are intuitive and easy to use. And things like a vector magic wand tool give it unrivalled vector/raster integration, which is the context in which it was mentioned. Autodesk may have discontinued it six years ago but it is still one of my go-to applications, moreso than Photoshop, After Effects or Flash, even though I have been using those applications for many years longer. And it works fine for still images. I'm not seeing this at all. Masking and adjustments in Xara are just about the best I've ever used. Could you point me to some examples or tutorials that illustrate Designer's raster prowess because I'd be very keen to see it if it is even better than Xara? Mind you, the new Select and Mask features in Photoshop pretty much make everything else obsolete now. We only got upgraded at work this week and I am blown away by how well it works.

I can't say I like the UI. I noted above that it is quite Adobe-like but I have always thought Adobe's way of doing things was absolutely bloody awful and they've done little over the years to change that. I work as a broadcast designer, so I am used to truly elegant software UIs like that of Autodesk's 3DS Max, the sadly discontinued Combustion and their now free downloadable Composite. The latter two applications put everything in one place, where AD has a toolbar down the left side, a smattering of buttons across the top and big, fat panels down the right side. It's only by using lots of hotkeys that it becomes workable, which increases the learning curve considerably. It probably depends what you are used to but I don't feel that at all. Combustion remains the high point for vector/raster integration - even the magic wand tool is a vector point that can be animated over time - but Xara comes close, especially with tools like content-aware scaling/masking and the like. One thing I do like with AD, though, is the way it clips to the edge of the artboard. That's a very TV/film way of doing things that would instantly resonate with everyone at work. In fact, you know what? I've just realised that one feature is enough for me to justify buying the product... ... only when I go to purchase it, I don't seem to be getting the promised discount. Oh well, I shouldn't have waited 'til the last minute, I suppose. Wow! You are so lucky. Nothing I use takes longer to start than Xara. Just today, I ended up opening three instances because the first one took so long to even display a splash screen that I thought. Sometimes it can be two minutes from when I click the icon to when I see the UI. It's all because it wants to contact the Xara server before it will open so if I switch my modem off first, it opens quickly. Otherwise, forget about it. The things everyone complains about with Xara are the things I tend to appreciate most about it. Like you, I don't do a lot of freehand work but I really appreciate things like the web functionality as it allows me to maintain my band's website without needing any third party software. And the photo tools mean I don't have to bother with Photoshop (which is something I really appreciate).

Ah! That makes it better. In fact, the UI widget is also much better, I just need to get used to going to the fat side panels instead of the elegant toolbar. i.e. It's a more Adobe way of working, which makes sense if that's whose users you are going after. No, that definitely doesn't work for me. If I have a straight line, for example, and I want to push it out/in to make it curved, I absolutely have to change tools to do it. I tried SHIFT, ALT and CTRL but none of them work. It's a really fast workflow I've developed in Xara for cutting out objects from photos - quickly go around and click everywhere you need a node, then come back and push the straight lines into the required shape for the final cut-out, all using the same tool.

I'm not sure if you care at all but I thought you might like some feedback from a long time user of Xara Designer Pro, who also uses Adobe CC eight hours a day at work. To be fair, I have not spent a lot of time with Affinity Designer but a few things are immediately apparent to me. The UI is very Adobe-like and I just can't see that as a good thing. Some things are just too fiddly. e.g. Creating a transparency gradient. There is plenty of room in the context toolbar to show all the options but you have chosen to hide it all in a tiny dialog window that drops-down. Sure, it feels familiar but in an "oh, no!" kind of way. Same with fill and stroke options. Too many tools with restricted functionality. If I want to create a complex shape, I need to use the pen or pencil tool to create the shape but if I want to fine-tune it, I need to change to the node tool. In Xara I can just select the Node tool and do it all. Saving colours either doesn't work or is much harder than it needs to be. I created a dark blue-grey and wanted to save it for later re-use. The help says there is an "Add Color To Swatch" option in the drop-down but there is not. I tried some of the other options but it always just saved a black swatch. I like the option to save transparency with a colour, though, it could be very handy, as could the palette export feature. UI re-draws aren't very smooth. I put a 3D effect on a shape and then moved it around and rescaled it. I could see the re-draws happening, where Xara moves much more detailed objects around on screen completely smoothly. There are a lot of things I think Affinity Designer does really well. The way grouped objects get put into a single layer is clean and intuitive. I also like having transfer/blending modes available for all layers and layer effects seem instantly familiar although, again, I'm not sure it's a better option than separate toolbar buttons like you get in Xara. Overall, Affinity Designer feels a lot more fiddly than I am used to. With a few UI tweaks and greater functionality within tools it could be really good. Obviously it comes nowhere near close to Xara's very mature featureset but for a version 1.0 product, it is quite promising. For the moment, though, I won't be buying it, I'm afraid, even with the very generous offer we've been given.

As a new product, why wasn't it developed on the UWP? I'd have thought it would be a no-brainer.