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Designer is indeed a great software, but it is still not suitable for pixel-perfect work

If you look closely, you'll notice that there is a clearly visible distortion appearing on circular objects when you expand their strokes. It may seem OK from afar, but if you use those icons in an app on a small screen with high pixel density, it'll look veeeeeery bad...

Designer 1.7.1 I created a file that clearly shows the amount of inaccuracy after expanding strokes. I took white icons and grouped them on a black background. I duplicated the group on top of the first one, painted it black, and expanded strokes. The white color of the original, non-expanded icons that is visible, shows the difference between expanded and non-expanded. Each icon is about 40x40 pixels. The original afdesign file is attached to this post. icons.afdesign

This bug has been reported in Designer 1.6 as far as November 3rd, 2017. Since then, nothing has changed. In this post I even compared different vector drawing software with Affinity Designer (Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, and the opensource Inkscape). All perform way better than Designer at expanding strokes... :(

2019 here, version 1.7 released, bug is still present. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/49241-designer-16-expand-stroke-tool-overly-aggressive-with-rounded-corners/&page=2

A year has passed, Designer 1.7 is out, and the bug is still with us, nothing changed. I opened the very same file I featured a year ago (you can download the original file right in my comment above, the one with the many previews, and test it for yourself), and expanded strokes. Left is the original, non-expanded icon. Blue is the result for expanding strokes in Designer 1.7. The red underneath is the expanded stroke result in Designer 1.6 So... I'll stick to Figma for icon design and overall UI design then, while patiently waiting another year for 1.8 to make Designer great again... :(

It looks like to fix this bug, they'll have to re-write a big chunk of the program's code, so this bug is probably here to stay for quite some time. I sure hope it gets fixed asap, but I'm not holding my breath...

I went to the Mac forum and read what Mac users are saying there, and similarly to this thread, it's full of frustrated UI designers that purchased Affinity Designer, but cannot work in the app because of this major flaw. Personally, it's been 7 months now since I last opened Affinity designer to create something in it. What's the point of creating a UI in Affinity Designer, and then having to switch to some other app in order to create icons for this UI? For now, I decided to stick to Figma (which has flawless expanding strokes at any size, even as small as 1x1 pixel). And since Affinity doesn't seem to have a clue about when or in what software version this problem will be fixed, I probably will not be switching back to Affinity Designer any time soon... I have to admit that purchasing Designer 1.5.2 was, in my case, a mistake. I am however quite happy with Affinity Photo, even if it has its own set of annoying bugs though...

Yes, when transitioning from outlines to filled objects, Designer messes up rounded corners in unpredictable ways. A real bummer for logo design and especially icons... We're all in this thread eagerly waiting for a fix (the whole point of purchasing the app for me was icon design) but it seems that it's not something that can be patched rapidly.

Hey everyone! Have things gone better in the latest Beta, or is the Expand stroke tool still producing weird results? I didn't really had the time to download and install the latest Beta in order to test it, so I thought I'd just ask here. I'd really like to finally move away from Adobe Illustrator for UI and icon design...

This sneak preview is a nice Christmas present from the developers. Looking forward to testing and buying Affinity Publisher!

Here's a screenshot of Inkscape as well, and surprisingly, this open source software deals with expanding a stroke way better than Affinity Designer. 00001.svg

That is a HUGE bummer for me, as I purchased Designer mostly for creating icons and other UI elements. The Expand Stroke command in 1.5 wasn't all that bad, but in 1.6 it's just unusable (I even reported this problem during 1.6 beta testing). I will head back to CorelDraw and Illustrator for the time being, and hope for this bug to be fixed in 1.6.1... Also, I really see absolutely no logic in the way Affinity Designer generates nodes in an object created by expanding a stroke. It just seems to randomly slap them all over the place along the stroke line, and the result is a massively distorted object. Here are screenshots comparing the same icon and its expanded result in Corel Draw X8, Illustrator CC and Designer 1.6.0.89. I highlighted the nodes in Outline view, Designer's results are a real mess... P.S.: I also attached the original CDR, Ai and afdesign vector files so you can check for yourselves. 00001.afdesign 00001.ai 00001.cdr