CartoonMike

This is pretty wacky and I'll be watching its development. Thought I'd share it here for other fontholics to appreciate:
 
https://www.behance.net/gallery/29461079/Typography-Impossible-Font

The new style preview thumbnails make me smile. How cute you are. :D

This is pretty wacky and I'll be watching its development. Thought I'd share it here for other fontholics to appreciate:
 
https://www.behance.net/gallery/29461079/Typography-Impossible-Font

This is pretty wacky and I'll be watching its development. Thought I'd share it here for other fontholics to appreciate:
 
https://www.behance.net/gallery/29461079/Typography-Impossible-Font

This is pretty wacky and I'll be watching its development. Thought I'd share it here for other fontholics to appreciate:
 
https://www.behance.net/gallery/29461079/Typography-Impossible-Font

This is pretty wacky and I'll be watching its development. Thought I'd share it here for other fontholics to appreciate:
 
https://www.behance.net/gallery/29461079/Typography-Impossible-Font

This is pretty wacky and I'll be watching its development. Thought I'd share it here for other fontholics to appreciate:
 
https://www.behance.net/gallery/29461079/Typography-Impossible-Font

This is pretty wacky and I'll be watching its development. Thought I'd share it here for other fontholics to appreciate:
 
https://www.behance.net/gallery/29461079/Typography-Impossible-Font

From the Affinity website jobs section...
 
iOS DeveloperNottingham, England
We’re starting to work on full featured iPad versions of the Affinity Range with no compromise. An incredibly challenging project and one which only the very best iOS engineers will be capable of. Are you that person?

We badly need the eyedropper shortcut:  https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/9860-eyedropper/?hl=picker&p=42323

In fairness, we are talking of 1.something versions, so we still have a huge progression ahead.
I also know that some points are already on the to-do list.
 
But more than a global critic, and taking in account that I'm personally already very satisfied with the two apps, I see CartoonMike's post as an interesting analysis and a good start for improvements and new features to come.

Hi all!
 
After spending a week trying to come to grips with Affinity Photo and losing, I thought I'd share some of my insights/whinging with y'all:
 
1) Keyboard shortcuts for all Menu Commands. Please. A cherry on top would be to allow them to be user configurable. 
 
2) Loosen up the file stuff. While I understand that AP is mostly designed to be for Photos, it would be nice to give a bit of thought to other creatives who craft art with pixels instead of recording photons. There's such a thing as giving too many choices, I face that every time I create a new file in Affinity Designer/Photo. It would be excellent to have an option to choose a "Drawing/Painting" option and not worry about RAW this or Metadata that. It's all technobabble that Geordie from Star Trek would be envious of.
 
2a) Make the Margins, post-document creation, editable. Sometimes printers change and with that change comes new margins. 
 
3) Preserve Transparency as a layer attribute! While having a "preserve alpha" as an attribute for brushes is nice and all, for my work, it's just One More Thing to be mindful of and One More Thing that slows down my creative flow. 
 
4) Respect the Pixel layer! Sometimes I just need to clear a layer up*. I have to keep in mind that the "delete" key, if pressed without a selection, will delete the Pixel Layer. Without a warning dialog or anything. This is like hitting the Delete key in a word processor and having the current page get deleted instead of the previous character. I had a conversation during the beta about this, but the more I think about it, such a destructive action needs to have some kind of alert. A shift-delete could delete the layer and a mere press of the delete key would clear the current layer could be a good solution, as right now the process for clearing a layer is : Select all, delete, select none. It's simple, but reducing 3 steps (which require looking away from the screen and hitting key commands) to one key press would, in aggregate, save a hunk of time and effort. 
 
(* Point of reference, several painting apps I use have the delete = clearing the layer behavior, so expecting it of AP isn't that far of a stretch)
 
5) Some better way of organizing Brush Sets/libraries. Let's say I have 4 ABR files I want to compile into one:
 
A: import all four by right clicking and selecting "Import Brush Set"
B: Navigating to where the ABR files are
C: Selecting one and hit the import button
D: find the brush I want to move to another Set
E: Right click on that brush and choose the move brush to another set menu item
F: specific the set to move the brush to
G: Import the next set and repeat from A until finished.
 
Thankfully that only needs to be done once per new brush set. If there were some kind of visual way to "see" the brush sets and the individual brushes within and then to drag and drop the individual brushes from one set to another. Maybe even allow the Option key as a modifier to drag a copy of the brush to the new brush set. 
 
5) Make the tool icons bigger. I don't mean huge, but larger so that the selection brush's dotted white line looks like part of the icon instead of a brush with some dust on the monitor. Or put some kind of horizontal bar, clearly separating the tools into logical groups (which they are kinda now).
 
6) Have AP be dual-monitor aware. I usually like to have the viewfinder/navigator/ittty-bitty-thumbnail of the file on my second monitor. Every time I open up AP, I have to drag the Navigator from the restrictive UI onto the other monitor. Yet another One More Thing to be mindful of.
 
7) Have an option to either have One color for All tools or All tools have separate colors. 
7a) Have Fill remember which option (Custom Color, Primary Color, etc) was selected the last time it was used. 
 
8) If there's a selection, please have the Mesh Warp tool have an option to either affect the whole doc or just the selection or just have it be "context" aware; i.e. if there's no selection, it'll change the whole doc or if there is an selection then only the selection will be affected.
 
9) Let there be some way to change the default Document background (in other apps it's called "the canvas.") to a user defined color. Sure most times it'll be covered by the background of the painting, but when first starting out it's nice to have a specific color so the initial color selections can be made more accurately. 
 
10) A PDF version of the online help. I can tell when Affinity's dropping a new version, the online help files become cranky and so slow, if it shows up at all. Or at least make the online help files local to the user's machine. You know like it was back in the olden times, when the cloud was just something that brought rain or high humidity. 
 
11) This may be something to do with the Wacom drivers, but AP is the ONLY app that has this behavior: I sometimes have to click twice on an icon to switch over to it. This is especially true when it comes to specific brushes. Again it's One More Thing.
 
11 a) It would be nice if when one clicks on a brush in the Brushes palette the brush tool would become active. Because why else would one select a brush from the brushes palette? Or at least when the Brush tool is selected, switch to which ever brush set is the currently used brush. Usually, at first, I have to click on the brush tool, THEN I have to choose a brush, because I have NO idea which brush is being used as the start-up default. Fortunately, this only happens once but it's still One More Thing.
 
12) Make the Brush Editor a palette. It's not that I don't mind having a modal dialog box in the middle of my screen, it just that if it was compacted a bit more and made into a palette, changes/editing of brushes would be easier and not be One More Thing.
 
13) Speaking of the Brush Editor, it would be sweet if one could edit ALL the brush options there. As it stands the Brush Editor seems to be part of what a brush can do, to change "protect alpha" you have no choice but to check the box in the tool context bar (or what ever that UI element is called). And it's confusing to my wee brain-pan that checking the Protect Alpha and/or Wet Edges check boxes keeps the selected brush highlighted in the Brushes Palette, but change any other thing there and the selection is lost. Kinda hard to keep track of what's being used -- it makes giving brushes a name meaningless. A better UI behavior would be to just highlight the Outline of the Brush when Size, Opacity, etc is changed. This feedback can tell me that I'm currently using that brush, but I've changed some things (which could have a highlight box around them). 
 
14) Levels of locking: I shouldn't be able to delete locked layers. I shouldn't be able to draw on locked layers. But I can. So either this is the UI equivalent to using Password as an password or "Lock" doesn't mean what I think it does. I think having 3 kinds of Locked would be good: Lock Transpaency, Location and Throw Away the Key (really locked and have to unlock the layer to do anything!). Or at least make it clear what Locked means in the AP context of layers.
 
Basically, in the past week I've been more frustrated than productive in regards to Affinity Photo. Overall, the interface just isn't smooth. I feel like I'm always either going menu hopping or right-clicking menu choosing to figure out how to do something or waiting on the online help or just guessing on what this or that means/does. 
 
About the only nice thing I can really say about AP is that I do like how when no layer is active and I draw something a new layer is created. That is, when I'm aware of it. Which is all to often, because which layer is currently active is, you guessed it One More Thing. I can't assume that just because I started on Layer "A" means I'll stay on layer "A" as it seems that either new layers are created, I lose my active layer (and thus create a new pixel layer) or something I've done either created a new layer or throws me onto another layer. 
 
It's been a week of using (or trying to) Affinity Photo, and for me -- anything other than routine enhancement of scans, AP is a grand headache. I don't think I am understanding how it works, I've seen the work that others have done in it and I admire their ability to use this app more than their artistic skills. It's just that I'm spending more time wrestling with getting AP to do what I want to do than actually doing anything. I feel that AP isn't intended for digital painters, evidence to the contrary not withstanding. I'm used to a shovel, not a "soil mobility transference implement."
 
BTW, I still stand behind Affinity and wish nothing but the best for AD, AP and whatever goodies that are in the pipeline. But AP... specifically... not so much now.

Are margins  the kind of thing that once they are set, you cannot change them, even if you crop the page size down (like from tabloid to letter size or a custom size). Because right now I would love to change them from the 1 inch to a half-inch*, but there's nothing about changing them in the online help nor could I find a topic relating to this. 
 
Please correct me if I'm wrong. 
 
It would seem that inflexibility is the rule here and that my only course of action is to create a new document (prob. w/o those pesky and mostly useless margins**), copy each layer from the original and paste it into the new margin-less document. 
 
The reason why I'm grousing about this, is that the darn snapping kept on snapping to the margins, until I turned off snapping to margins. 
 
So out of a 30 minute pomodoro, I spent ⅓ of the time actually drawing, the rest seeing if Margins could be deleted or changed. At least I was able to get some drawing time in. 
 
 
 
*This is important, because printers can change and other variables can come into play after the document is created. But AP wants everything to be immutable. Or so it seems to me.
 
**Yes I know that margins set up what is to be printed and can be used for snapping, but it seems to me to be pretty harsh that the user has only 1 chance to set up margins.

Thank you, stokerg!  We've been begging for a PDF version of the Help for a while now.  I was beginning to think that no one was listening or if they were, could not see the benefits of being able to read it someplace besides within the program.  

TYVM for that. Sometimes when I spend way more time reading/figuring out a new software, I get impatient and don't read things through. The Help (wish it was a PDF so I could read it on my iPad!) did cover it, although it was in a lightbulb bulleted "tip" and I didn't read it. I'm also very spoiled, as in Manga Studio a new brush set can be created just by dragging and dropping and only have to use menus to dupe a brush. The good news is that I only have to create a new set and move the brushes to it in AP once, then I can just "live" with the new brush set. Will be exporting it just so I make sure that in updates I don't risk losing that work.

Thanks for the info, Mark! I was hoping that the distortion grid tool would be less of a hassle to do, but I guess it'll have to do as is. Have to remember not to make too drastic of a change, as the selected area will remain the same, but the contents of it will shift. It's like a "hole" has been made in the layer and the contents of that hole can be changed, but NOT the hole (area that's selected) itself. So it looks like the best way (for me) to use the distortion grid tool is to make a selection, copy it to a new Pixel Layer and then distort. 
 
I'm kinda viewing AP as a "rough draft" of a really outstanding image editor/creation app. I have to keep in mind that this isn't the shuttle craft I want, it's more like a Lunar Landing Module. It'll get there. In time. 

Thank you, Mark!  I did not know exactly how Mesh Warp worked and was muttering to myself that it wasn't as precise as the one in Photoshop.  Ha!  Was I ever wrong.  Guess I need to do more reading in the Help.  Wish the Help was a bit more "readable" (as in a PDF that one could just read at leisure.)

Hi CartoonMike
I'm new at this myself and I know what you mean about wrestling with the software at times!
Any way, back to the Distortion grid tool (I'm assuming you mean the one in the Photo Pasona)
Once activated, if you double click anywhere in the photo, even if you are zoomed right in, horizontal & vertical lines will be added. Keep doing this until you have a suitably dens mesh around the area you want to distort.
You can now push and pull the control nodes even while still zoomed in.
Also having the Navigator View window open can help judge the effect to the overall image as you work.
Hope this helps.

Thanks to A_B_C's suggestions, here's the latest version of the logo:
 
 

Thanks to A_B_C's suggestions, here's the latest version of the logo:
 
 

Thanks to A_B_C's suggestions, here's the latest version of the logo:
 
 

Here's the modified logo with better infinity symbol. thanks A_B_C!
 

I think I am with Callum here … :)
 
But I must confess, I didn’t get the meaning of the symbol before you explained it. To be honest, in my eyes an infinity symbol looks different … but perhaps I have been staring at those Computer Modern fonts for too long time in my life (see below) …  ;)
 
I would not think of an infinity symbol (lemniscate) as consisting of two rings or yummy doughnuts … oh dear, you are making my mouth water … but as consisting of a single loop or ribbon. Perhaps you can draw some inspiration of sans serif fonts (my second example is a rather bold one).
 
Hope you don’t mind my comments,
cheers, Alex  :)

IT been awhile sinceI  posted something here.  I have been crazy busy! I been using Affinity Designer on everything I can. I  got three digital billboard designs I created that will be displayed in two major NY locations. Right now I am working on a simple illustration.  This is my first round so feel free to comment critique or whatever.  Everything was done in Affinity Designer.
 

Howdy all! I'm Michael Rhodes, cartoonist, storyteller and illustrator. Got to this party a bit late, only got the beta yesterday and been playing around in it to get a feel for the app and now am working on character sheets (just for grins&giggles I tell myself, knowing full well this is a shake-down of what AD can do and what I can do in it). I am in the process of de-adobe-izing (and I make up words on a moment's notice) my graphic work flow. Lately I've only been  using Illustrator just to letter my comics as ol' illustrator is getting a bit bloated and can't walk up the stairs without take a few breaks to catch its breath. Now that I've been using ComicLife 3, I've not even been using bloat-strator for that. 
Photoslop has been replaced with Manga Studio 5 (aka Clip Studio Pro) and Sketchbook pro (love the fisheye perspective tool in Sketchbook).
 
So I've been looking for a good replacement for Illustrator. finally settled on iDraw and Artboard after getting disgruntled over the sketchiness of the makers of Sketch. While I don't begrudge anybody making a bit of coin, there's a way to do it and a way not to do it. Bohemian gave me an excellent lesson on how not to do it. Not to go all Aesop Grapes on y'all, Sketch really isn't for creating "art" (as in illustrative/comic/cartoon art) and has an interface only programmers who think they can also be designers can love. Anyway, I was on the MacUpdate page and it listed all the newly updated apps and I saw that Sketch has a new update, thinking it was for some other app I clicked on that link and saw it was for that app that is *dead to me*. Because I had some time to waste, I read the comments which was pretty much the balance between outrage and apologists as usual. Then one comment mentioned that a new app could come in and kick some proper behind. That app was Affinity Designer. The poster didn't include an URL, so I searched and promptly had my morning consumed. 
 
Affinity Designer has the potential to be a great for me replacement for Illustrator. I'm still gonna have to keep Illustrator CS6 as at this point, nothing can kill it (not even FIRE can) but I'm sure it's universality will be crumbling in time. Look how Flash is withering on the vine at this time. And Flash was the reason for Adobe buying Macromedia and promptly killing Freehand. At least Freehand is in good company: Pagemaker and GoLive needed some companions. :(
 
So I've freed up the resources to purchase AD tomorrow.
 
Glad to have found out about Affinity Designer and look forward to using it a lot in the future.