ilmiont

I see, thank you for the explanation. I hadn't thought of scaling the symbol; I'll give that a try and see how it works out. The exact behaviour I'm trying to achieve -> the inserted objects should retain their own aspect ratio across all instances of the symbol. So at present that's fine on the landscape instances, but as you see, the portrait instances the symbol loses its correct aspect ratio. I guess I'm working outside the intended use case of symbols, so perhaps I'll be better off trying another approach.

Hello, This is frustrating and a bit hard to describe. It is probably clearest if you watch the video I've made: The setup is that I have multiple artboards of different aspect ratios and sizes. Then I've made a symbol (the blue background rectangle) and added an instance of it to every artboard, sized to fill the artboard. I then proceed to select an instance of the symbol, with sync enabled, and insert an object into the symbol --- first an image, and then a rectangle. As expected, the object is populated into all the symbol instances (yay!), but the aspect ratios/orientations of each instance seem to be ignored - so it looks skewed on the portrait artboards. I'm struggling to properly articulate the behaviour here, but hopefully the video makes it clearer. I do understand why this is happening I think - it seems only the orientation of the symbol instance I originally insert into is considered. But I'm sure you can agree the results are NOT the expect behaviour here! As you can probably see from my artboard setup I'm trying to make a set of artboards for producing social media images – the idea being, I have a symbol with an instance for every social media image size. Then I can just drag my content in and, voilá, Sync works its wonders and I have an image ready for each platform. As the video shows, this is kind of a big stumbling point for that use case... Latest Affinity public on Windows. ilmiont

I also received the auto-update prompt on stable on both my devices, and am now running 1.6.3.103 over 1.6.1. This release is in the beta subforum, but as above I can't see any round-up of all the changes introduced, or any announcement that it's a stable release. Was this pushed by mistake? Can't say I'm complaining... finally, this seems to be usable with my Surface Pen. Core m3 Surface (2017), I've been trying to use raster brushes for scribbling wireframes for weeks, but the "lag for a second after starting drawing" bug proved unbearable. Since installing 1.6.3.103, this lag seems to have disappeared, and AD writes as smoothly with the pen as Windows Ink Workspace does! Let's just hope it lasts; seems to be a great update so far, even if maybe wasn't meant to go to stable...

Hi all, I'm trying to use AD on my Surface Pro to design UI wireframes. I almost have a good workflow in place, but it's falling apart because I can't see any way to add arbitrary menu items to the top toolbar. Specifically, I need to be able to add options like "Toggle UI" and "Hide Studio" to the toolbar, so they are just a button press away. Consider AD in the following scenario: I'm working on my Surface with the pen, in "studio mode" (kickstand flat) and no keyboard connected I'm wireframing, so I'm in the brainstorming stage, and I really, really don't want any disruption caused by UI friction On Surface at 200% scaling, the AD interface feels a little cramped, so I work mostly with the UI off However, without keyboard shortcuts, there is no easy way to quickly toggle the UI or hide/show studio panels... so I have to keep digging through the menus using touch/the pen and break my creative flow It's annoying, because I'm so close to having an end-to-end AD workflow that works for me. I want to wireframe in AD with the Surface, because then I can just pick up those designs and layer actual objects on top once I'm with my desktop. A few other annoyances while trying to use AD without a keyboard: Why can't you pan around using a single finger on the background (behind artboards)? You cannot deselect objects just by tapping somewhere else; you have to explicitly deselect or choose a new tool I really, really wish AD could behave like Windows Ink Workspace, and automatically select the paint brush tool whenever I put my Pen to the screen (and eraser when the pen is inverted), then automatically switch back to select/last used tool etc. when I'm interacting with touch So really I just have a series of issues which individually are minor but together mean working with AD is unexpectedly frustrating when just using pen and touch, which is when I want to have the minimal UI friction possible. On my 3440x1440 desktop, I never have any issues with the AD interface... but then I have keyboard shortcuts and I'm not trying to use my pen. Proposal: - Allow adding arbitrary menu items to the toolbar (e.g. View > Studio > Hide Studio, Select > Deselect etc.) so they are one tap away - Add a "Toggle UI" button to the application titlebar (maybe with a fullscreen diagonal arrow icon); this would allow single-tap toggling including when the toolbar is hidden Just solving these two problems would go a long way to making AD more usable as a tablet app to dump brainstorming ideas to follow up on and properly design later! ilmiont

I'm a web developer preparing to go freelance and start my own business. I'm using Affinity Designer for all my UX/UI design work and am now looking for a new device to use at client meetings. Surface Pro fits my needs, and as a Microsoft fan I've always aspired to one. Ideally I'd have the i5/8GB version, but I'd rather not spend >£1000 and then have to still go buy the Type Cover + Pen. Right now, Amazon UK has the core m3 with the Type Cover in a bundle for £620 (was £600 on Black Friday). Trouble is, I can't find a demo unit anywhere, and actual reviews of the m3 unit are rather lacking. The device really won't need to do much, besides "give the right impression" (i.e., look good) to clients. I see it mostly sitting on the desk while we discuss the brief and I share prototypes of designs. The most intensive app it will ever need to run is Affinity Designer, but even then it's unlikely I'll be doing much actual editing while I'm sitting with the client. So... anyone here use Affinity Designer on a Surface Pro 2017 core M3 (or anything comparable to an m3/4GB combination), and how well/badly does it run? Should I see sense and admit that whatever I buy won't see much "active" use, or is m3/4GB as big a potential issue as I'm making it seem? For comparison's sake, I'm currently using Affinity Designer on an i7-7700K/32GB setup, with 3440x1440 AOC 34-inch ultrawide.

Ye, as I wrote above, I've ended up using transparency on a duplicate layer to do what I want. Imagine you have a 2D bird in flight in two unions, body/wings and neck/head. I need a black radial gradient starting at the body and ending in grey at the wing tips, but white at the head. To appear realistic, both the grey/white areas have to appear to be on the same path from the black area of the body. So really, I need a hypothetical V-shaped gradient path, with black, white and grey stops, where black is shared. I've achieved the effect I want by applying the black-grey gradient to the body and the black-white gradient to the head (black slightly adjusted on the head to be closer match to the colour of the gradient body pixels near the join between the shapes.) Then I duplicated the layer, joined both shapes and applied the black-grey gradient across the entire thing. Then a careful transparency curve allows the white on the lower layer to show through, while preserving the smooth gradient on the neck. On mobile now, but tomorrow I'll add examples to illustrate. Struggling to describe the effect! Important point is, there are two objects, which need to have a gradient that makes them look like one object, but their end stops have different colours.

Never mind, I think I figured it out after walking away from it for a bit. Seems Layer -> Duplicate and the Transparency Tool are all I need

Hey all, New around here, owned AD for around three weeks, new to professional vector design. So far, it's been great, but now I've hit an issue and can't think how to solve it. I'm drawing a flat vector design of a bird, where the body goes from black to grey and the head goes from black to white. The body is one union of shapes and the head is another. I need the two gradients to merge, so that there's no obvious divide on the bird's "neck" where the shapes have their shared edge. I.e., the two gradients should seamlessly merge, and appear to form from the same black area, but then be able to diverge, so the body is grey and the head is white. Any advice appreciated. ilmiont (edit - added a very simplistic example of the problem, I need to get the two objects to merge convincingly)