Aammppaa

I asked for the numpad to be recognized over 4 years ago. Never had any recognition from Affinity team that this was even noted or considered 😞

You can edit the gradient on the canvas itself, and can therefore zoom to any level of detail, which is far more flexible than a pop-out window. Just use the fill tool, and click on the gradient line to add a new point.

Fingers crossed. It is terribly basic at present.

It's a really good start, but to improve I'd suggest looking at some reference photos. Also... Consistency in lighting. The reflections should all be pointing towards the same light source. Contact shadows. Whenever two things touch there is going to be a shadow at the join. Variety. All the droplets are exactly the same shape, and in a flat plane parallel to the viewer/screen. Which looks too perfect. Specular colour. The reflected light on the droplets is too white. It should pick up some of the colour of the material itself. Here's an example of an illustration that shows these points in action... https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/lollipops-set-colorful-cake-pops-on-570081067

Use the Alignment Handles...

Oops. Forgot I was testing the 1.9 beta. Here is a version for 1.8 However, this version seems to leave one letter on the preceding line, no matter where I put the handles...? A bug that has been fixed in 1.9 perhaps. Text Path Multiple Curves (Retail).afdesign

This looks like a glitch, perhaps caused by having multiple nodes at the same / very similar locations. I would have to examine the file to be sure. I am not sure why you have so many short straight lines approximating a circle. Was this shape exported from a different piece of software? I'd recommend redrawing this part of the image with the ellipse tool so that you get a clean line with as few nodes as possible.

If you have Affinity Designer, you may be able to use a textured image brush... Draw the repeating section of your path. In the Candyland example that would be a series of rectangles: Orange, Purple, Yellow, Blue, Gold, Green. Export this row of rectangles as a single PNG image. In the brushes panel: Create new textured image brush. Choose the PNG that you exported as the basis of the brush. Use the Vector Brush tool to draw the path for the rectangles to follow. Ensure that your vector line doesn't have a coloured stroke (must be set to transparent) or it will overwrite the colours that you exported.

Draw your curve. Duplicate it a number of times. Select all the copies. Layer > Geometry > Merge Curves. Add text to path. Use the handles to limit the text to the top of the path. The attached file has history saved, so you can step through what I did. Text Path Multiple Curves.afdesign Worth noting that the curves remain editable, so you can add / remove lines as needed, and reshape.

I'm getting very poor performance as discussed in this thread...

Just worked in the same file switching to WARP and found the performance significantly better than using my GFX 1660 as the renderer. Something seems very wrong!

I have found the Designer beta very slow this week. Perhaps it is something to do with my current project, which uses a large number of symbols. I have no other machine to compare with, and I can't load the beta project back into 1.8, so can't say with any certainty why the poor performance is happening. But there have been many occasions where simply typing a letter into a text frame takes 5 seconds or so to update the screen. I did look in Task Manager and Designer was only using 16% of my CPU, and there was memory to spare.

The transparency tool, looks like a wine glass on the Designer tools, has several modes: linear, radial, elliptical etc. You choose these on the context toolbar. Once applied you will get two handles and a slider on the object to which you applied the transparency, that will allow adjustment. Styles will let you save the vignette so that you can reuse it easily in the future.

Here's one way to do it... Draw a rectangle. Fill it black. Add an elliptical transparency. Optionally move the slider to bias the transparency to the edges. Save this as a Style in the Styles panel (and call it Vignette). To use it... Zoom out and drag a rectangle over your entire project. Apply the vignette style. Tweak with the transparency handles, blend mode, fill colour etc. For example, setting the fill to white will fade the project to a white page. Optionally lock this layer so that you can continue to work through it, to the document below.

Glad to have helped 😀