matisso

Wow, this place starts to smell old and grumpy. @DarkClown, a solution for you is Figma. It's free – ok, they also have paid plans but the added features are useful for working on large projects involving multiple users, all design features are available in the free tier – browser based (but can be downloaded as an app, too), has extensive plugin support and a very active community developing them. If you output for print maybe leave that for Affinity if you want to, but layout… Oh, man. (I wonder if I get bad rap for mentioning different software? This would go well with the air of this thread. 😒) Cheers, Matt

Switch to Figma, @JHutchinson. Just recently they implemented variable fonts support, among other useful updates. There is so many great things to be written about it, including the community they managed to build. regards, Matt

+1 for true vector brushes, this has been mentioned countless times already! This could be nice, too, especially if it were possible to randomise size, rotation, opacity, etc. Both blobs along the path and a single click blob tool would be useful. Cheers, Matt

Hello there, the picture says it all, I guess, but just for clarity: there seems to be a hard coded Mitre limit in the Contour tool and there are situations where it needs to be adjusted. These are plain vertices, no funky extra ones underneath, yet the obtuse corner is behaving as expected but the acute angle leaves no choice but to either alter the geometry or switch to Illustrator’s Offset tool, where it can be adjusted. Please make AD even greater, thanks! Best regards, Matt

+1 Yes please, fix this, Affinity! I’m just getting acquainted with the Pixel Persona in AD, as I am mostly a vector guy, and this is a real productivity killer here, too. Even the smallest change to some of the tool’s parameters (as basic as width) causes the highlight in the brushes panel to vanish. I did a project a while ago that relied pretty much on brushes (both Designer and Pixel personas) and the only reasonable way to manage brushes was to create an individual collection so I could remember which one is for what, but that is not the way to do it! However, with vector brushes you can always paste properties to a different object like @Jonopen had mentioned – which is a nasty workaround but does the job. Not possible for pixels, obviously. cheers, Matt

Yes, but you seem to ignore the fact I had mentioned already. Microsoft is a giant player, so is Adobe, Corel probably to a lesser extent but still. Which is exactly why they can afford bundling very expensive fonts that you mentioned. Affordable, for the end user. Do you happen to know how much Corel or Microsoft are paying for these? From what I found googling, “Usually Japanese font has 8,000-16,000 glyph so making new fonts means you need to make at least 8,000 glyph, which is pretty heavy task.” Welp. You want kinda premium software (I can’t wrap my head around designing 8000+ glyphs, even if some contain the same components) at an affordable price, am I getting it right?. Serif would probably have to significantly ramp up their sales for it to be possible. But that’s just my wild guess. Have you ever done any type design?

Hello, Sure but I suppose that even the Corel’s user base is far greater than Serif’s, not to mention Adobe’s. Even if fonts are bundled with the software, font designers still must be paid for their work, so the deal is fair for them. Otherwise no designer would agree to that, obviously, as type design is very labour intensive and time consuming. The company releasing the software will then hope that their investment in bundled fonts will pay off with enough licences sold. The question is how many licences Serif can sell, whether bundled fonts would be a factor affecting sales (that would depend a lot on both quality and selection of potential fonts) and whether that would affect the price. Remember how competitive their prices are even without any promotions. That calls for cutting corners somewhere, I imagine, and I wouldn’t hope this changes in the future, unless Affinity prices goes up and / or there will be clear indicators that such bundling will be a strong incentive for potential customers. You’ve got plenty of sites around that sell fonts in bundles already. But 99% of it is probably Latin script rather than Japanese… Which (kinda) proves there is far less supply of Japanese fonts, so logic dictates these would fetch higher prices… But you want to get something which is quite rare (compared to how many Latin script fonts are being released) and also at a low price. Doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid. cheers, Matt

Impressive! Great work there, Isabel.

Yes, please. I have no clue why this has so little activity? This is needed very, very much. If you get some artwork that had all been flattened (i.e. layers and groups removed), picking out the things you need can be really nasty. I personally would opt for Alt for subtraction (also, drag+Ctrl(Cmd) currently selects objects directly within groups, which is handy on its own) and also another mode, Ctrl(Cmd)+Alt for intersection – which would not select anything additional, unlike inversion. 📣 Go, Affinity, go! 📣 regards, Matt

Yay! I launched latest beta only yesterday and thought “heck, this expand stroke finally produces some pretty decent result” and presto, today is the stable release day! Kudos guys and thanks! Regards, Matt

Is there any prospect of this being implemented? I know that many other apps don’t offer this functionality either, but it’s a real game changer. Being able to move multiple layers sandwiched across the stack just by selecting one of them is a massive time saver.

There’s also the Auto-Correct function: Regards, Matt

Hello, Today I needed to colour match a stock picture with the still from a graded video clip so I hoped I could use the said feature. I have a pretty solid background in Photoshop and am no stranger to advanced editing, yet even after reading the help entry I was quite baffled as to why after loading two images no adjustment was applied to my picture. Your video tutorial has finally made it clear – however I instantly thought that this is far from the user friendly solution. There is no explanation which image you are loading first (processed or original), nor any kind of feedback after you pick either (there’s no way of knowing whether you perhaps had accidentally picked a wrong picture, as there is neither path nor thumbnail displayed after you confirm your selection). Right now I’m in the process of reading the “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman and felt that this is a fitting example of a feature designed in a way that doesn’t reveal how it actually works to an unfamiliar user. So I played with this window a bit and made a simple three-step Figma prototype that hopes to improve things a little. Now there’s a (hopefully) clearer indication which images are being loaded as base and processed ones (and an easier way to go back if you want to change your mind). I feel there should be some sort of a message displayed if you load images that can’t be compared – hence the third screen. Thoughts? Best regards, Matt

I don’t know, man. Maybe the wording of the other thread wasn’t clear enough. Maybe it just was added to a staff’s blacklist of some sort, because they don’t seem to give a flying f… about it whatsoever. Probably frustration and apparently a futile hope that a fresh start on it will get at least any response from them. Are you talking about Alt/Opt+dragging? Yes, it doesn’t change adjacent segments but comes with instant cusp nodes. Doesn’t exactly help to keep the flow of your curve. We’re talking about constraining control handles’ angles whilst dragging. PS. I recently noticed, that a (really useful, BTW) Illustrator plugin, InkScribe, offers one of the options that @JET_Affinity was mentioning, i.e. a modifier that locks the the adjacent handles to their original angles when dragging a segment.

That was clearly supposed to say “within Adobe environment” – it’s a busy day. Thanks for an extensive answer. Personally I started to learn all the stuff somewhere in the late 90s so Freehand was already becoming outdated at that time and Macromedia weren’t interested in developing it – or I just didn’t bother. That just goes to show there are even more ways to approach the process. Fingers crossed this thread will spark some reaction instead of ending up as yet another idle talk. regards, Matt