nigelch

Please forgive if I'm jumping any guns here, but I'd like to share my thoughts with you. I'm sick of the Adobe subscription model; I've jumped ship back to Quark, and wish to use Designer instead of Illustrator. However... 1) I suspect I'm not alone in using Autotrace nearly daily. This omission in Designer is a serious brake on my adopting it wholeheartedly. I've tried separate programmes, and they range from awful to ludicrously expensive. 2) When you are churning out production graphics daily, having simple commands for Select>Same Fill, and Select>Same Stroke etc. are massive timesavers. Not having these means I spend extra time clicking and grouping to get the same result. It's obvious from your latest book (superb, by the way) that you are looking at some pretty clever stuff, and Designer does it well. However, we daily Joes need the basics to be there, fast, and reliable. I'd appreciate your comments. (Not trying to be contentious, honestly!) Keep up the good work. N (Ooops, just spotted typo...!)

Ah yes, you ARE right... it certainly works unexpectedly! Once I quit and restarted AD it worked fine. Thank you for your prompt reply. Much appreciated... currently drawing geopolitical series of maps of Europe in run-up to WW2. I'm learning graphics AND geography! ;-)

Thank you for that... however, I've come from Illustrator, where you can draw two wiggly lines, finish the end of one near the end of the other, and use Command J to join them. When I'm drawing complex maps, and I need to rest my hand, it works well. How can I do this? This is a real world problem, and I wonder if I'm missing something obvious!

I'm getting the same message, but happily my previous version still works. So near, and yet so far, eh? ;-)

When I export a file to a particular folder, I expect my first export to require me to navigate from the Finder to that folder. However, when I make a small change to the artwork and want to Save it and Export another version, AD always takes me back to the Finder, which makes it a bit of a pain. In practical terms, I think it would be better if the default behaviour when using Save, Save As or Export took you to the last used folder. Maybe you could even have that as a global Preference: Finder OR Last Used Folder. I would be interested in others thoughts... or can I do this but I'm missing something? As an aside: It would also be good if the programme added a filetype suffix, ie pdf, eps, PSD etc. Quite often I have to produce different formats for different purposes and its a bit of a timewaster having to type them in when I Save, so I can sort them in the Finder at distribution time.

That's a pity, as that particular feature is one of the most useful bits of Illustrator. I've personally had it with Adobe, (been there, done that, with Quark...) and I'm looking for a total viable alternnative. The fact you have alternatives to Photoshop and InDesign in the works is in many ways the asnwer to my dream. BUT I need auto trace, and would much prefer to use it within Affinity Designer. I have now switched entirely over to using this to produce my daily graphics, and love its intuitive simplicity. Keep it up! Affinity doesn't provide this functionality yet (auto-trace) and I'm afraid It's not coming any time soon. So the only way is to trace the image manually.

Let's face it, a hell of a lot of our work is quite simple, and PS is simply overkill. That having been said, there are still "simple" things I need them for. One is to be able to constrain the proportions of the Crop tool to, say, 1024x768, then Shift-Drag it to the size/place I want it. Definitely not working here, as is the Cmd-Alt-I shortcut to resize image IN PROPORTION. This is looking really good so far, and I wish you all success against Goliath with your suite of programs. It will benefit us all. (EDIT) Ah, I've now discovered that if you click on the second box in the resize tool, it automatically fills in the new pixel dimension. Pretty good!

I'm absolutely new to this program after over twenty years of Illustrator and PS. I'm looking for an alternative because as much as anything I'm fed up with Adobe, and don't want to give them any more of my money! The above tip was invaluable. This kind of information is crucial to people who know the principles, but want to swap to Affinity. Is there a definitive BIG pdf resource of all its operations and nooks and crannies? It's certaintly needed. Great program, and FAST!!!