Dave Vector

Adobe just announced their new Illustrator CC feature coming later this year called Diffusion Gradients. It looks like it has the potential to break many of the gradient limitations currently of linear, radial and even Illustrator's mesh gradients. Does Affinity have any plans to explore this type of feature? Here is the short preview:

@mannyc , Here is a visual of what @αℓƒяє∂ is saying. instead if skewing I used Node edit to alter the "shadow" rectangle:

@A_B_C I see the Font Composition Persona like an artist's colour mixing palette, except for fonts. It is important to be able to efficiently compare and contrast a number of typeface choices so the designer can narrow them down to their ultimate choices. I emphasize the word efficiently, because the tool must help the designer do this quickly and thoroughly. I see the "Title-Heading-Subheading-Body" idea as a neutral and effective template for this task, but really it could be any number of layout ideas. I also suggested that there is a way to "Use Current Artboard", assuming the designer had an existing layout already in place with 4 or so fonts, it would allow the quick swapping of the fonts dynamically to see how it impacted the design. I have tried using Text Styles to accomplish this, but Styles are not quite dynamic or quick enough to see dozens of choices between the different fonts. From the Text Style browser, you have to double-click on the Text Style you wish to change, click on the "Font" menu item, click on the font family field, then start scrolling through the un-filtered font list. You would have to do the same click procedure for each style. My suggestion would allow you to dynamically change up to four fonts, with a click and a scroll very easily, and from precisely filtered lists. I may have been too hasty in attempting to create a solution, and to reiterate, I was most interested in brainstorming ideas for tools to make typeface selection more flexible, efficient, and effective. Typeface selection is an important part of the design process and I would love Serif to be a leader in making it an industry priority and consider it in their harmonized suite of tools.

@dominik Last weekend I purchased, and set up High-Logic's Maintype, organizing all my fonts and tagging them. What a wonderful tool! Much better than Suitcase Fusion. MainType actually allows the user to really get control of their font collection. Full of robust and practical options. I can actually SEE what fonts I have! Thanks, dominik for the suggestion. It works brilliantly!

Respectfully, I realize the Serif team is quite busy. I am very excited for the release of Affinity Publisher Would anyone from Serif care to share their thoughts on my idea above? Thanks, Dave.

@Fixx, @dominik, Thanks for your feedback and support. I would love to hear if other's think it would be valuable, and if they can dream up any "must have" features. Also, interesting to hear what other people are currently using to manage fonts and make their font selections. -Dave.

@TonyB, @Andy Somerfield, @Dave Harris, @Ben, @Ash, and the rest of the Serif team, this is a big one... Why let 3rd-party software run the show? It’s astounding that Adobe Illustrator, Indesign, and other such software have never taken font management and font composition seriously. They relegate the tasks to poorly integrated 3rd-party software, essentially turning their back on letter forms and typeface, one of the pillars of great design. The Affinity Suite could change all that. Affinity Type Integrated Font management – Point Affinity Type to your local or online fonts, Affinity Type takes care of the rest. Whether you have 100s of local fonts, or fonts in the cloud (like Google Fonts (Free) and Adobe Typekit) Affinity Type will manage them all, allowing you to see them aggregated in one place. Keep your system fonts lean – All fonts are temporary “activated” and not installed. When you load an affinity file that includes fonts, Affinity Type will automatically activate those fonts, and not install them as system fonts. The automatic activation means you never have to chase down those “missing font” errors. What the use of having 100s of fonts if you cannot find the right ones? – Affinity Type’s Database keeps track of all your font locations: locally, installed in the system folder, on the network, or in the cloud. Create custom font albums. These virtual folders give you the freedom to collect and organize fonts by job, by license, by client, by task, free, or any way you wish to slice and dice your library when you use filters to efficiently refine your decision. The database will be fast and lean – speedy previews, and fast activation. Categorization algorithms – Using cues from each font’s glyph anatomy – Affinity Type can identify typeface and automatically classify them, so you don’t have to. e.g. Modern Serif, Old style Serif, Slab serif, Humanist Sans, Geometric sans, Display faces, Handwritten, Calligraphic, etc. This feature can also help suggest a well-contrasted font palette for you from inside the Affinity tools. How you use it Affinity Type – The Font Curation App – Affinity Type allows you administrative access to your font library database. Here is where you can organize your fonts into albums, select favourites, slice and dice your font library with powerful filters (including installed system fonts) and organize them into filesystem folders of your choice. Tools to identify duplicate typefaces and corrupted fonts. See total number of fonts sorted by different filters, as well as total sizes in MB. Flag and tag your fonts here as well. Affinity Font Persona (Font Selection Interface) – Embedded in all three Affinity programs is the selection interface. Perhaps it is a new persona (Font Persona?). The most powerful feature of the Font Persona is the Type Palette Composer. A clean and nimble interface to compare or contrast your font choices. The Type Palette composer allows you flexible brainstorming when it comes to font composition. Here you can gain access to your whole database. Refine your choices with your powerful filters. See the total number of fonts for each filter, as well as which ones are currently installed or temporarily activated. These ideas and the interface mockup are rough concepts to help generate more brainstorming. I know that the Serif team will greatly expand upon the concept of Affinity Type and greatly improve it. Affinity Type would unify the powerful triad of Affinity tools when it comes to typefaces. It’s time someone in the industry took font management and selection to a more professional place. I hope it will be Serif. Thanks, Dave

@MattP, at the risk of sounding geeky, you made my week! I am pleased to hear that you will implement it as soon as you are able to, and I appreciate the complexity involved, so yes, please don't rush it. Gratefully, Dave

I have been craving some select same features on almost every project. Especially ones where you have to salvage objects from someone else's PDFs. I don't know about other graphic designers out there, but this happens fairly frequently. The ability to quickly select out certain pieces from thousands of objects would save me so much time.

Yes, I can see how this would be a problem when you accidentally create a number of unintended assets that mix with your category of intended ones. At that point, one would hate to delete the entire category or subcategory. I like the idea of mimicking the file system file selection functionality (CTRL-click, SHIFT-click, etc.). Nice one.

I see where you are going with this and I agree. I used to use 3DSMax quite a bit and I would miss ability to create parent-child relationships when manipulating objects when I would use Adobe Illustrator. It always annoyed me that such a valuable feature was not very well implemented by the Illustrator team, and I was very excited by Affinity Designer when I first saw it. In fact, when I first watched their promo video, I bought AD right away! I had no idea those manipulations were possible in MS PowerPoint (unless that is only in the German version ). There are a lot of features to learn from MS-PP. Being able to quickly manipulate multiple symbols/assets/objects would create a faster and more flexible workflow. I hope it makes it onto Serif's development slate. I know they would do a stellar job of making it elegant.

For the most part, Affinity Designer's tool cursor shapes are very clear to understand and the cursors match well with their icons. All except the Move Tool. When I first started using Affinity Designer and I was switching between the Move Tool and the Node Tool with keyboard shortcuts, I would often confuse them (OK, maybe my eyes are getting bad too...). Even after using AD for many months I am puzzled by why they are not consistent. My suggestion is to change them so they are clearer for the user. I made a suggestion below, but this is not the only solution— you may have a better one, but really the goal is to reduce ambiguity and increase consistency.

haha! love it.