WhiteX

R C-R, the "Erase" layer mode seems to resolve 50% of the issue. Thank you for the tip. With a little extra work I can achieve visually what I want, and I suppose it works perfectly with raster exports like PNGs. The remaining 50% would be to find a solution to get correct vector output. See examples. Hopefully what I'm asking can be resolved with a simple change in my workflow. Thank you for your time! Logo v3 - Transparency - Vector.pdf

R C-R, actually you're right, I don't care how many layers are there, but to "burn" the desired look into the design I often need to merge all layers into one. This happens when I work on a logo with transparent elements (while designing I use the background's color for those). See the example below, the full color version I can export it as is, but for logos usually is a must to provide pure black or white variants for different applications. Now that I used different shades in the color version, and I do want to keep most of the features of the logo in the monochrome version too I need to use delimiter strokes. When I set the correct stroke widths and I'm happy with the result I want to expand the design (all corners and strokes, etc are converted to curves) and I want to merge all the layers so the white areas can be deleted - to become really transparent. If you have a better idea how could we deal with this it would be great to see. As I said earlier, using tens or thousands of boolean operations manually is not the preferred way. Thanks :)

Thank you for your replies :) In other software I use "Flaten" and "Rasterize" are different things, flattening operations generate vectors, while rasterizing converts to pixels. I do not really wish to rasterize my vector later directly in the editing software, only when I export in various formats, which works good in AD. But the feature I'm looking for is to reduce the complexity of a detailed artwork with many layers into a single layer with transparent sections with just a few clicks. Ideally this action would expand all the strokes, effects (like rounded corners) and distortions on shapes (for future releases) and would remove any construction areas which are not visible - similarly to "Divide", just the hidden geometry would not count. This can be achieved with consecutive "convert to curves" and different boolean operations as you said, but the necessary amount of work is unreasonably high just to make a design deliverable. When you design you're doing it non-destructively, so you can't really do this along the way while you're designing. When you're done ideally this is just a few clicks and you can send the design to the client, but doing this at the end is very troublesome, especially when the client comes back for a "last change" if you know what I mean :)

Hello, I'm going to send a detailed feature request soon, but this Flatten feature will be on the top of my list. Since the Designer is a vector creation app it would be very important to keep the flattened layer in vector format (not rasterised). For brand designers the final deliveries are often flattened artworks. +1 for this feature. Cheers!