GarryP

I think I’ll keep my version to myself. I didn’t get very far with it and, looking at it just now, it was even more basic than I remembered. I got some of the background done but as soon as I started on the robot I saw that I simply didn’t have the artistic ability to get anywhere with it that I would have been happy with. I’ll keep my eye out for Electra Glide in Blue just in case I spot it being shown on a movie channel somewhere; thanks.

This would be great as a prog-rock album cover. I’m already imagining Rick Wakeman wearing a gold cloak and a top hat behind a stack of keyboards. Nice work.

Yeah, it’s probably not for everyone. I watched it back in the late 80’s – late-night UK Channel 4 if my memory serves me correctly - so there’s a chance I might not like it now either. You’re welcome. When I first got Designer I tried to make a replica of the original poster but I quickly got to the stage where I realised that I didn’t have the skills/talent required to make it look good so I gave up. (Designer is the sort of application that inspires people to make stuff but some of us just don’t make the grade when it comes to artistic things.) Your version is far superior to mine and very much deserves all the praise it’s given.

Lovely stuff. It’s all great, but I especially like the lighting/shadows on the buildings. P.S. The 1984 Giorgio Moroder restoration of the film with a pop soundtrack was a good version from what I can remember. (It sounds weird but worked strangely well.)

As a ‘quick fix’ you could use a single-cell table. That way you can use the table cell border formatting for the whole frame.

Welcome to the forum. Some interesting ideas there. The default, when placing a new object, is to put the new object above the currently-selected layer. Your first suggestion – if I have understood correctly - is to replicate this behaviour when adding a new ‘empty’ layer. This seems reasonable to me. Always having a new empty layer added to the top of the stack can be awkward sometimes (the Auto-scroll function doesn’t follow it) and, as far as I know, there’s no inherent reason for that behaviour. Your second suggestion sounds quite reasonable also. If you have multiple layers selected then it’s usually because you want to do something with them together, and adding a ‘wrapping’ layer when they are selected – rather than just putting the layer at the top of the stack as usual - sounds like it could come in useful. Unless there are good reasons why these two suggestions shouldn’t be considered, they sound like good candidates for inclusion to me.

There is a Leading Override setting in the Character panel, in the “Positioning and Transform” section. You can use this to set different leadings in the same paragraph but, naturally, it only works on a line-by-line basis.

I agree that the Help icons are much clearer than those in the application but the arrows – in this case – are necessary to show what happens. One of the issues some people had was that the application icons can look the wrong way round to people who read right-to-left as there was no way to see ‘which way round’ they were.

But why would I want to draw an invisible curve around/between an object or objects, or for any other reason? That’s what I don’t understand. I can understand why I might want to see where the curve started if I wanted to draw a closed curve but I don’t know why I would want to draw a closed – or otherwise – invisible curve in the first place. I’ve been playing around with graphics software for quite some time but I’ve never drawn an invisible curve because I’ve never needed to draw one and that’s why I don’t see the use of being able to see the path of an invisible curve. If you could give me an actual real-world example - what you would use an invisible curve for and why you would need to use the Pencil tool to draw it - then I might be able to understand, but at the moment I just don’t see the purpose of it.

dutchshader: My first attached image shows how the buttons look on my screen: Break; Close; Smooth; Join; Reverse. The Close and Break buttons icons are not the same as in the Help, which is a little troubling. The little lines coming out of the single node on each are confusing to me. Also, the icon on the Close button doesn’t look like what it actually does. The icon looks like the function will join two nodes whereas the function actually puts a curve between the two end nodes. So Close should look more like my second attached image. haakoo: I agree that “Open Curve” and “Closed Curve” are better descriptors in the Layers panel. PaulEC: At first I thought a toggle button might be a bad idea but I can’t – off the top of my head - think of a reason why. One part of me is saying “That won’t work” while another part is asking “Why won’t it work?” Maybe someone can give a good example of where it would reduce functionality.

Surely the path of an invisible curve drawn with the Pencil tool is irrelevant? It doesn’t matter if the curve is a simple straight line, or squiggles all over the page, or anything in between, the result is the same: a curve you can’t see. And if you can’t see the curve then the path it takes is irrelevant. Maybe, instead of just saying that the functionality is different or missing, if you gave a concrete example of when a user would want/need to draw an invisible curve with the Pencil tool it might help to clarify the situation. Simply saying that it should work the same as another tool – which does a different job - or that another application does it isn’t a good enough reason for me to agree that the Designer Pencil tool should do it. If you can give a good enough reason then I’d be happy to change my mind but, at the moment, I haven’t seen anything that proves that the Pencil tool should work any differently to how it currently does. So, to clarify, please: 1. Give a real-world example of when a user would want/need to draw an invisible curve with the Pencil tool, and; 2. Give some idea of how often a user would want/need to do this, and; 3. Explain why this process can't or shouldn't be done with another tool which already has the different/missing functionality.

Closing a straight line seems a bit strange to me, I wonder if that’s the correct and expected behaviour. Maybe it’s useful for something that I haven’t come across. Now I’m wondering: Should the “Close” button be disabled for a closed curve? That sounds reasonable to me. Anyway, attached are another two icons to throw into the mix. Neither is fantastic but they may give people some better ideas.

I think the Assets panel will probably do what you want from the standpoint of building up you own standard sets of ‘things’ to put in your documents. (Everyone will have their own ideas about what ‘things’ they need.) As for including a set of ready-made clip-art with the Affinity products, I don’t think that’s something which is needed these days. (E.g. Just do a web search for ‘clip-art tree’ and you will get more vector trees than you can shake the proverbial stick at.) The “Resources” section of this forum also gives people plenty of ideas for places to get quality stuff from. (Edit: haakoo just got in there before me.)

I think the “Break” button should be disabled when an ‘end node’ of an open curve is selected because there’s nothing to break, as it’s already the end of the curve. I also think that the “Close” button should be disabled when you have a straight line with only two nodes as there’s nothing to ‘close’ in a straight line.

How about something simple like this? (I won't say which is which as it should be fairly obvious.)