simonlayfield

I feel like this is ballooning out a bit. Features like tracking historical changes made to a brush throughout the timeline of a document is something interesting to consider for the future but quite honestly the problem that exists now is that there's no way of knowing even which brush you started with. If you're a user who uses brushes extensively and is making constant changes to brush configuration, sure, this basic information may not be as useful as knowing what modifications were made at various points etc, but for a lot of users this basic information is the only signpost they need for finding the last brush they used, which is currently just a guessing game. I'm not suggesting 'basic information' means it's an easy feature to implement; perhaps it isn't, but it surely has to be easier than the more advanced features I've seen suggested. I like the idea of a brush manager. Sounds like that would be a welcome inclusion to the application for those more advanced users. Anyway, my intention isn't to cause more of a stir, just to reiterate that I'm sure a lot of users would find the most basic implementation of this feature very useful.

I'd like to see support for variable fonts in AD as well. Today was the first time it was a necessity, but I expect this will become an increasing need. There are now a significant number of variable fonts supported at Google Fonts and although the use of webfonts is somewhat unrelated, I expect this the use of variable fonts in the design sphere will become more prevalent being that they are now more widely available. https://fonts.google.com/variablefonts

Select Same is a feature I've been hanging out for for quite some time, and thanks so much for adding it! However, aside from my general issue with it not being limited to selected artboards I did notice something unexpected with it today and thought I'd post the file here in case it is of any use. Basically I created a group of curves with strokes applied, each either yellow or white. This group is masked within a curve. If you select a YELLOW curve and then select Select Same > Stroke Colour and change the colour, for some reason it changes the colour of all strokes within the group. If you select a WHITE curve and then select Select Same > Stroke Colour and change the colour it only changes a select few of them. I think somewhere there's an issue with grouping and using Select Same across groups. Hopefully it's an easy one to fix! select-same-test.afdesign

For me, this is a use case that definitely needs to be addressed. I'm over the moon that Select Same has been released with 1.9, but as someone with multiple artboards each containing a variation of a composition it unfortunately means the current implementation has a big blind spot. Here's my use case: I get to a milestone with a composition, so I duplicate the artboard and get to work on the next iteration. I want to select all curves with a green stroke applied, but unfortunately this also selects all that apply across all artboards and so I either have to go through the previous process of manually selecting the paths on the current artboard and making the desired change, or using Select Same > Stroke Colour and then deselecting all of the selected curves on other artboards. Neither of these is ideal obviously. Locking artboards would solve the issue of course, but it sounds from Sean P's comment that in future it would be limited by the selection in the Layers panel - which would also solve it. I guess this was a very roundabout way of saying "+1"

I was disappointed to see global colours not working as expected with Gradient Map layers. On a separate note, updating the gradient colours in the gradient map slider doesn't actually update the colours on the Artboard - I have to force the update by zooming out and then zooming in again. Anyway, +1 for this feature. I would expect 'global' to mean it can be used anywhere.

I saw this in the email that got sent the other day. I haven't tried it yet, but performed a ceremonial powergrab upon reading all the same.

+1 for this. On a 15" laptop the Lock Children checkbox also tends to get bumped off of the main toolbar in to a collapsed menu so it takes some extra digging to get to it. A shortcut would be great, or at least for it to be selectable within the Shortcut options.

Hey! Sorry, realise this is an old post but wondering if there's a shortcut workaround for brush hardness? Currently not feasible to achieve the above with a trackpad, and can't set a custom shortcut manually as it doesn't appear in the list of available shortcuts in Preferences.

Hey all! Does anyone know whether there's a way to select a Layer directly from the canvas/artboard? I often find myself Grouping objects just to be able to quickly move them around together freely, and then ungroup them again. It's two steps that would be really nice to not need to perform for such a quick task. You can move multiple objects together in a Layer, but as far as I know Layers can only be selected from within the Layers panel. It would be really neat if there was a way to select the parent Layer of an object directly from the canvas. Maybe even command + click on an object? It doesn't look like there's a default binding for that... I couldn't find anyone else asking for this on the forums and so perhaps there's no demand for this feature, but thought I'd sound it out all the same. Grouping just to adjust the overal position of multiple objects seems like unnecessary legwork if it worked the way as described. Thoughts?

Ah, sorry I missed that the OP sepcifically mentioned Affinity photo - I was looking for this feature in Affinity Designer. Not that this would necessarily be way off base or anything. My understanding is that the underlying codebase is the same, although I'm not saying there aren't reasons for them to have different UI flavourings. @h_d This solution does work! Would be nice for size of the text on the Artboard to update when incrementing the value in the font size input in the Character panel (using the up/down arrow keys) too - but I can live with the provided solution just fine. Thanks!

Wondering if this was ever considered? I often have the need to visually nudge font sizes up and down and so would be a welcome enhancement.

Thanks @Gabe

@Gabe I saw this issue again today in the attached afdesign file, despite not having fractional values in any of the relevant layer positioning. I got around it by adding the adjustment layers to a containing group - but thought I'd add it here anyway in case highlighting the issue is of any help. mask-outline-issue.afdesign mask-outline-issue.afdesign

It seems when I set a shape to mask a pixel layer and some adjustment layers, there's a slight outline of the mask shape showing both on the Artboard and on the exported JPG file (despite no stroke/fill being set on the shape). Would seem to be something to do with the adjustment layers being used given that this doesn't happen with a mask usually. Is there a way around this? martell-ad.afdesign

Thought I'd revisit this today to echo the need for it. I doubt this is a planned feature, but thought I'd elaborate all the same in the hope someone else chimes in. I have this basic composition: Currently the image is nested within a circle vector, but I'd like to be able to save a version of it without the circle vector masking it. As it stands this would mean I have to drag the contents of this vector in the layers panel out of the shape, save it, in this form: ...and then drag the contents back again. What I actually want in the UI is a means of simply deactivating the effects of a vector mask (not toggling the layer off, which would in turn hide it's contents). Something like this: I guess it might just be me that thinks this would be worthwhile. For simple compositions like this it's not a big pain to move layers around, but if you were to have a large number of nested layers, it's a bit of a chore just for the sake of briefly bypassing the mask.

*Facepalm* Thanks Gabe.

@Gabe Just revisiting this because it's come up a handful of times when using Designer since. The problem I have is that all it takes is one very complex shape to be added to an Artboard and I end up with this issue whenever I want to use snapping to align two (other) paths. Basically, once you've added a complex shape to your artwork, you can forget having the ability to use snapping on any other objects. I thought there might be a way around this by locking the complex shape layer, but that does not seem to be the case. It would be convenient if there were at least a way to tell Designer to 'ignore this shape/layer when snapping'. There are other ways to align objects of course, but snapping is by far the most convenient from a workflow perspective for aligning/resizing objects to match and it's a shame that the snapping feature falls down so easily, especially given that it's highly unlikely for anyone to actually need to align to arbitrary nodes within a complex shape path. I'd hazard a guess it would in most cases be the bounding box you'd need to snap to. Like I said, not a show stopper, but a bit of a niggle.

From my point of view, if I select any path with a brush applied, it should contextually show me which brush was used. It doesn't have to select it, but if I use a variety of different brushes for some artwork, it's useful to keep track of what is being used where. I also agree that if you switch tools from the brush tool, the selected brush setting remain sticky; returning to the brush tool should have everything as was previously shown and selected. Those would be my preferences, at least.

It is, yeah - from Designer selected 'Edit in Photo'. I actually managed to overcome the problem by rasterizing both layers again, but all the same it seems like unexpected behavior.

If I have two pixel layers in Photo, select the top layer and select Merge Down, the top layer effectively just disappears and I don't see the result of the merge at all.

@GabrielM Apologies for the terrible delay in responding! You're right, I do - thanks for the tip! (Non) issue resolved for me.

I've also been having some serious issues with performance lately, the beach ball of death regularly appears when even just moving objects on an Artboard. I assume in the below instance it's because I'm using a halftone vector which is somewhat complex, but interestingly it's not when I move the halftone pattern itself - it's when I move a simple path (?) Any advice on how to remedy this would be much appreciated! affinity-designer-performance-issue.mp4

Just chiming in to say I've found 1.7.2 noticeably slower when dealing with even just a handful of Artboards, and there's just a general sluggish lag when moving objects or the view which just slows the process down enough for it to feel a tad uneasy. The occasional closing/reopening of the app improves things, I find (for a while, at least).

@dominik Oh, thanks - yeah this is practically what I meant. As you say, it's just not quite as useful given that you lose the context of it's scale/positioning with other layers. Thanks all the same! This is better than nothing, for sure.

Hey team, I can't find a way to do this but thought it might be something you'd consider as being useful. Currently if an object is nested inside a shape in the Layers panel, there's no way to actually toggle visibility of the contents masked by the shape (perhaps even opacity?). In my case, I would have found this useful a handful of times on each project just to get visibility of the contents being masked (particularly if this is an image/photo). The only way I'm aware of to do this is to physically drag all of the contents within a shape out of the shape and then back again. Happy to be overruled on whether it's worth this being a feature - I just thought it was something worth mentioning because, as I say, it would have been useful to have a slightly less 'action heavy' method of checking the contents of a shape on the Artboard. Thanks!