smallreflection

Yes, but Apple's current icon thinking is a mess!  You've got the simple style of icons like Messages, iTunes, iBooks, etc. - which I like - through the Final Cut, Pages type style - which I'm not keen on, to the absurd style of something like the Mail.app postage stamp - which is horrendous, IMO!  Mixed message here I think.

Hm.
Audio guys do it differently then.
 
Cubase
Cubase2-300x192.png
 
ProTools:
ProTools_Logo.png
 
Nuendo:
Nuendo.png
 
reaper:
34655.png
 
Presonus Studio One:
474214058_175.png
 
Sonar:
sonar_256x256x32.png
 
iZotopeRX:
icon-64.png
 
Cycling 74 Max7:
max7_logo.png
 
 
Not all of the above are good icons though.
 
IMO Cubase, reaper and Max stand out.
 
Also, Evernote for example?
 
I think a strong logo outline can be powerful, more than suggestive icon.
 
Frankly, apple doesn't need strong app logos. They have the apple. None of their apps really need competition - you get them for free with your computer.

I would just say that many designers (including myself) hold the opinion that a good logo (and, often, a good icon) really isn't for the purpose of identifying function much at all. Sometimes, it can. But ultimately a good icon gives a product a unique visual identity, with a fitting tone of voice. Most of the icons in my dock right now are highly abstract, yet I recognize most all of them quickly at a glance from their form, color, and subtle styling. The whole trend away from skeuomorphism reflects this changing attitude. Chrome is a tri-colored disk. Adobe apps have an ultra-minimal consistency and simplicity that makes them clearly part of a brand unit. Sketch is a golden jewel (that certainly doesn't seem to be trying represent anything other than uniqueness and quality to me). Microsoft Office apps are generally simple, stylized letters—they aren't trying to be a page, a tiny projector, or a list of grid cells. Yet as icons they work excellently.

I way over-generalized in my earlier email, saying gradients irredeemably date an icon. The use of varied brightness in Plokhi's versions here are subtle and effective – just enough to suggest light. These are starting to look closer to 2015.
 
The only thing I still don't care for is all the sharp corners. My unfortunate association with these shapes is with the cover of a 1990's math textbook. :^/ 
What about softening the contours with that jiffy new corner tool? 

I'll jump on with ronnyb and say I very much like the new icons. In some way, I appreciate the depth of the originals in my dock, but I think the new ones are much more current and enduring from a graphic design perspective in their simplicity. Flat design isn't just an Apple trend. ;) I also don't think subtle use of gradients is a bad thing—I love using them cautiously. I think the lightened focal point areas + the gradients, along with the unique interior compositions creates the needed differentiation to recognize each app at a glance—without them it would be hard to tell. If it were me, I may have added some additional subtle alternate tone overlay in each to add a bit of gradient depth actually, but too much blending of color would make each less distinctive, likely. I always liked the basic b/w "Affinity" shape a lot, and I think the new icons create a more cohesive set that emphasizes the Affinity parent brand with the outside shape. It has a more "pro user" look, in my opinion. :)

Nice work guys, the new icons are MUCH better from a graphic design perspective. I'm not a fan of icons that are illustrative or literal representations. As an artist and designer, I appreciate a certain level of abstraction. Of course it will also fit in much better with Yosemite and it's "flat" UI — a term which I think is actually misnomer; the changes are actually about moving away from skeuomorphic or representational design. I like the use of gradients, which I don't believe date anything inherently, as gradients or subtle color shifts are necessary to add some detail and depth to the icons and the color palette.
 
I think out of the 3 icons, the APhoto icon is the strongest; the use of the aperture (although "representational" is really nice and still carries the abstract, geometric language of the other two icons. However, I would consider making the center of the aperture dark like the outer triangular border of the icon. The Publisher icon is also great; it suggest to me the concept of "series," or "multiples" via the repeating diagonal shapes on the right of the icon's inner triangle. It's an abstraction of a stack of papers, the multiple pages in a document, etc. I also like the Designer icon. I like the smaller triangles inside and seeing the smaller, inner triangles creating a larger one suggests to me a certain level of "design thought-process" and construction / assembly techniques. However, I think it needs more detail, perhaps more bifurcation within the triangles...
 
Overall it's a great direction and I think it modernizes the apps tremendously. The previous icons were very clichéd in their literalness and representation quality. Great job again!

It would be great to get your feedback on our new branding for Affinity, All feedback welcome both positive and negative.
  http://www.creativebloq.com/software/affinity-new-branding-61515327    

Fantastic News .. great work .. I'm sure there's more to come..  ;)
 
I've have never come across such a responsive and awesome team of developers ..
 
thanks for making my life easier  :)

Now on Apple's website at https://developer.apple.com/design/awards/, with some photos from our office.

Hi everyone
 
We're over the moon to announce that Affinity Designer has been recognised by Apple with a prestigious Apple Design Award at WWDC 2015 in San Francisco. Congratulations to the whole SerifLabs team for such a remarkable achievement, 5 years in the making.
 
It's the stuff of dreams, thanks to all our fans and forum participants for helping to make it an awesome reality.
 
Read more at https://affinity.serif.com/blog/affinity-designer-wins-prestigious-apple-design-award
 
Dale, on behalf of everyone at Serif.

Purpose: Improvements, Features, Fixes
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download: https://s3.amazonaws...stomer Beta.dmg
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
This beta is another small update to the previous one. As I explained earlier this week, our public-facing efforts are currently concentrated on the impending release of Affinity Photo and making sure that Affinity Designer works alongside it smoothly. For anyone that missed my earlier announcements, you can them here and here...
 
 
Improvements, Features, Fixes
 
- Further improvements to vector export and export options.
- Added a button to the context toolbar of raster brush tools to force Pressure to act as the controller for size variance.
- Tweaked slider look.
- Fix for text composition issues on multi-lined Art Text objects.
- Attempt to make the colour picker work more effectively with tablets - it was tricky to release the stylus without moving and hence picking a colour that wasn’t the one you wanted!
- Fix for SVG export of selected region.
- Numerous bug fixes and stability improvements.

You guys make me happy much. :D  I'm using Designer 90% for UI work right now, so all this stuff sounds great!
 

Art boards are going to be tiled in the normal view pretty soon... no need for an extra Persona - you want to see them all the time anyway, so we don't want to hide them away. Plugins are tricky - it depends exactly what we're talking about? Most of the time we could do a better job in the software because we have access to everything and know the software inside-out so we will be able to create something much more optimised and efficient if it's something our users want... CSS attributes... well, in my build I've been able to get it to dump me the CSS attributes of a selection for a couple of years now, but we don't know where to put it at the moment, so that's why you're not seeing it yet - we'll get this and many more things added soon... UI templates are definitely coming - we were waiting for the announcement of iOS 9 before making some - and that's not far off now! :) A 'mirror' style app is interesting but first and foremost I'd want it to work reliably! :S We've had our iPhones and iPads connected to Designer for years with research projects that let us control the application and we've also written a full-on version of Designer that runs on the iPad very fluidly - I'm more tempted to say that we'd prefer to just charge the users a small fee to get a full version of Designer on their iPad and use Hand-off to pass documents back and forth? It actually works very nicely in reality...
 
Basically, all I'm trying to say is that we are very focused on delivering in those areas in the coming months - we've set the stage by making our app work well for illustration and now we're going to gradually take on more and more use-cases and get them properly sorted. :)

@Mediafuel,
 
1) Overall Lanczos is the best resampling option if you want to scale down your images since it's able to get a sharper result than Bicubic.
 
2) The progressive checkbox creates a jpeg that will render on screen ("fade in") while it's still being loaded by the browser. This helps to create the perception that the page is loading faster since the images are being immediately displayed as soon as the browser starts loading a webpage.
If this option is unchecked, the browser will render the image in blocks, one after another until it completes the image. 
Here's a demo displaying the differences between the two options.
NOTE: Apple Safari may have trouble displaying progressives jpeg's. If that's the case check the demo in Google Chrome.

Requesting to have a progressive -checkbox in the Affinity Photo export window. I see that the Export persona already have it. It is just that I very often export a JPG or what ever simply by pressing ⌘⌥⇧ + S.

Ben is currently working solely on the Designer changes that will allow lots of little niggles with a number of our core tools (move, node, etc) to be easily resolved (it looks like a small change, but he's basically ripped everything apart and is putting it back together again with new functionality!), Dave is busily writing our PDF exporter and AndyT has implemented a really cool customisable keyboard accelerator window :)  I've been doing some Photo-related stuff to try to help out where I can and will soon be back on with looking at boolean ops, expand stroke and a nice idea we have for artboards - then I might see what state symbols are in... There is a lot of good stuff already hanging around our codebase that just needs pulling together to make the features we know we want - and a lot of it is achievable in the not-too-distant future... but that's after Photo goes live - it has to be our priority right now to make sure it goes out strong and stable :)

Couldn't agree more! Designer wouldn't be half as good if it weren't for this forum and the fantastic input we get from our users! :D

A_B_C
I´m afraid "cmd + space" will bring up the search toolbar of OS X ... 
...and I personally would not want to loose this functionality even if the devs could disable/ overwrite it :D 

>> - Fix for slice layers occasionally doubling in size!
 
 
Hurray! Thanks for fixing this!

Purpose: Improvements, Features, Fixes
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download: https://s3.amazonaws...stomer Beta.dmg
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Improvements, Features, Fixes
 
- Improved export options for vector formats with better control over output.
- Fix for file export not including metadata or colour profiles.
- Fix for setting blend options and ranges occasionally overwriting each other.
- Command+W now hides the application frame if there were no documents open, just like pressing the red cross in the top left of the window.
- Fix for incorrect line weight being applied when exporting objects inside a container which has been scaled. This applies to vector export types only.
- Pixel marquee tools can now automatically pan the view when you reach the edge of the view with your mouse.
- Tweaks to text tool logic - hopefully a more pleasing experience now.
- Fix for slice layers occasionally doubling in size!
- Enabled the Space+Command zoom modifier logic for all brush tools.
- Enabled Ctrl+Option drag modifier for resizing in the vector pencil and brush tools.
 

Hey Guys,
 
I was going to post a list of feature requests on the Feature Request Forum, but insead I think I can somehow ask it in one question...here goes.
 
Will there ever be a robust UI persona for UX/UI work (maybe something a little similar to Sketch 3 where all the artborads are tiled next to each other, plugins support, css attributes, UI templates, maybe something for prototyping like Mirror or a plugin that would allow this, etc)?
 
I use Sketch for some of my work, but I really wish that I could just use Affinity for everything since I pretty much mastered the software already. I just wanted to know if this is something the Affinity team have thought about, since a lot of designers are now moving to a lot more UI type of workflow.
 
Thanks in advance guys. Keep up the awesome job!! And I cain't wait for Affinity Photo to finally make it in the app store. :)
 
Marc,
 
 

It's all about what the PDF specification allows for... and that differs based on version of PDF that you're targeting. At present we use Apple's built-in PDF output, so we have very little control, but we're already typing away at our own PDF export with support for user-selectable target PDF specification so we should be able to improve things a lot in the future :)

Hi PaulW. Not yet, but it's on the roadmap under Usability. 

I am also of the same opinion that I would much prefer to be able to drag on the label to achieve this and also never (intentionally) use the scroll wheel to change values in text fields... I'll ask again if we can look to change this behaviour... :)

First off,
  I'm really in love with your software.   I bought Affinity Designer in an instant and will do the same as soon as Affinity Photo becomes available for purchase.   Having said that, here's my BIGGEST gripe with your software:   Being able to adjust any value with your mouse while it has focus is a big showstopper.   I know that this is probably by design, but I have never EVER wanted to shoot/scale my objects in random directions, just because I moved my finger on my Magic Mouse by 0.05 cm.   Another Person (I don't remember the thread, sorry!) suggested that it would be neat if we were just able to drag over the value label we intended to change. For example: If I wanted to change the opacity, as soon as I moved the cursor over the word "Opacity", my cursor would change to a double-headed arrow, and if I wanted to change that value, I could just hold and drag.   I would really prefer that option.   Best,   Meils