Rocketdrive

It's true that Macs are of high quality, durability and stability - mostly. But it is also true, that despite all the junk that is sold in the name of Windows there are also superb machines build for it. I am referring to workstation and laptops built for professional use, favouring stability and quality over hyped claims on paper for apparently little money. In short, if You want a smooth and stable, mostly worry-free system, it's probably gonna cost You a bit more, regardless which OS or ecosystem You prefer. I've learned to get along with whatever tool does the job.

Pretty thorough testing, ballardstudio. Did You run into any problems or interesting things? Would be great if You shared Your findings. Oh BTW: does Publisher support document linking for images? I managed to do my clients' print design in Designer until now, but the files tend to bloat towards epic sizes, megabyte-wise.

This is the other side of the spectrum, good ol' isometric vectors It became part of a larger infographic that a colleague of mine finished (and which I can't share at the moment). The beauty of isometric design is that once You have correctly scewed and rotated Your building blocks even larger scenes become pretty straight forward – Affinity Spotlight recently shared a great tutorial on that. The trickier parts are of course geometries at odd angles, as well as round structures. Full disclosure: we bought a similarly looking original from iStock, but due to the messy way that vector and raster layers were intertwined we decided to use it just as a reference and rebuild the whole thing properly.

That one turned out a bit cheesy, but nonetheless was a valuable proof of concept. I started with a hand drawn fish which I then hooked into a particle system in Fusion 9. There I could easily add some variation to individual fish, like size and rotation. Back in Photo I added the background, light rays and a slight vignette and depth of field blur towards the edges.

I guess I started that one on the iPad as a sketch and finished it in Photo on the desktop. I turned the outlines of the sketch into filled vector shapes first, only to rasterise them for shading with loose, light and mostly pretty big brushstrokes. For the finish I added a subtle vignette and also loosened the silhouette edges that are further away from the center.

I've been fooling around with this idea of a legged oven for some time. It started as an unremarkable sketch for Inktober, but I liked the idea and am bringing it further. I am doing some moods and concept sketches in AD/AP, which might end up as guides for a 3D scene.

Together with Designer for iPad this was one of the milestones I was waiting for. Thanks for the continued efforts on making high quality creative software, I really appreciate it.

That one was all about, well, science. I might have been watching "The Expanse" around that time

Editorial Illustration I made for the newspaper I am working at. The topic was "Disruption". In a business context, disruptive forces remain long time unseen, but gain power out of sight and suddenly break loose, tearing apart the established structures. I used Photo for this one.

These are illustrations I made for the newspaper I am working at. Topic was "Security in Austria and across the World" I used Designer on the iPad as well as Photo on Windows for the creation of those. The universal file format helped me a lot switching between platforms effortlessly.

This has some super useful tricks. Thanks to Charlotte Thomson-Morley for the detailed and easy to follow tutorial. https://affinityspotlight.com/article/frankentoon-creating-a-funny-video-game-boss-in-affinity-designer/?utm_source=SpotlightEmail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter

You (OP) can get Your feet wet and try Your luck with BMD Fusion (post production/compositing software). You can get a glimpse here: Maybe You could yield better results if You render the CG parts with DoF in the first place. Probably slower but also nicer, depending on the renderer of course. Anyway I'd be interested to hear when You find a good solution that works inside of Affinity Photo

This! Looking forward to the final release I think this also happens when polyline selection is active, can You look into that?

“Open from Cloud” can open from any storage provider supported in iOS, including Dropbox. After altering the file, You can from the main screen then tap on “Save” to, well, write the changes back to Drobox - or other storage providers. After that You can safely close the file from the same menu.

+1. A radial/marking/gesture menu (different names for the same thing, basically) could be used for the mosed used tools, of course definable by the user.

Affinity Designer for iPad has exactly those gestures: two finger and three finger tap for undo/redo. I’d guess that those gestures are coming to Photo, too.

Actually swiping (left or right) selects other layers. Which I find useful. However we could keep swipe to right for selection and swipe to left for delete.

Funny, I am desperately trying to get rid of the brush outline on Windows (some outlines heavily distract while drawing), while obviously a lot of folks want the exact opposite here. Affinity would best serve all if this became part of user preferences.

Affinity Designer for iPad has two finger tap for undo, among other improvements over Photo - like better menus and a better brush engine. I hope all this swag will eventually make it to Photo, too.

I’ve been using Photo for some time as my primary illustration and drawing tool. I always felt that the brush engine was not top notch, but I kept going because of the completeness and power of the app. I bought Designer for iPad right after it was published and was positively surprised that the brush engine for the pixel persona felt snappier than the one in Photo. I would like to assume that this upgraded experience is coming to Photo, too I would also love to see a much improved brush speed on the desktop. It is strange, but brush strokes feel most sluggish on my Windows workstation, though in theory it should be up to four times faster - according to geekbench comparisons between the A10x and a Xeon E5-2680 v2. Affinity tells me that the brush engine is CPU bound, so I hope it can tap into all cores for best speed.

I am blown away. It took some time, but the result is great. Kudos to the team

For an animation project I did two years ago I successfully used assets created in AD, exported as PNG and animated in Apple Motion. If You plan the scaling in advance You can easily work with pixel based files. I mean that In many cases it is enough to export double resolution files, in more extreme cases just bump up the res of the assets. Seeing how long Publisher is taking, I am not counting on a production ready animation app within the next five years, if ever. There are great apps out there, including AE, Moho, Motion, Fusion and the new Resolve which comes with it’s own Fusion page. Fusion and Resolve have extremely capable, free versions. Motion is a bargain for what it offers.

I was in a similar state of mind when Designer was released. A couple of years have passed since then, and I have an ongoing transition from Adobe. I can tell You that creating new documents in Designer is a joy typographic tools are fine, but not as polished as Indesigns' there is no text frame linking. Documents that do not exceed a couple of pages work fine, but forget books I have ported many designs which I originally created in Indesign by opening the exported PDFs in Designer. Some things are just fine, some objects need to be fixed. I am commited and that isn't a problem for me. However there is no one click solution for porting Indesign files to Designer. Designer does not yet utilise external file linking, instead all artwork is embedded. This always results in very large files. PDF export times are slower, while PDFs are larger. I had quite an extreme case: Indesign exported a file in under 30 seconds, and the resulting PDF was around 3MB. That was on a 2GHz MacBook Pro. The flie, rebuilt in Designer as close as possible, took about 8 Minutes to export, and the PDF is around 50 MB. On a 20 core / 40 threads Xeon workstation. Even with those limitations I love working with Designer because it is a fast and versatile tool that fits my needs. I do hope however that linking, export size and PDF creation speed will greatly improve over time, especially when Publisher comes out. Photo is a great addition, and a cool feature is that they share the same file format. Hell, I can even open and edit Designer files created on the desktop on my iPad in Photo for iOS. I see artboards, special grids and everythig else. If You are into that kind of platform independent work, You'll like Affinity. As always: try if the app is useable for Your specific kind of work. Spend some time watching tutorials, even before You start Your trial.

You are right, it is not absolutely necessary. It's just a habit, and never was a source of any problems.

Designer has no native 3D feature. However You can design and draw just about anything, including a perspectively correct book shape. If You need to map an existing cover image to the right perspective You will need Photo, too. I just threw in a couple of shapes and a book cover for an isometric, pseudo 3D style. It needs more tweaking and details, but Yout get the idea. I just skewed the cover, no Photo needed here because no perspective distortion.