jamesholden

Waiting on this one feature to kick Illustrator to the curb. Used Macromedia Fireworks 15 years ago in part due to its simple distortion tool. But a mesh warp like AI is critical.

Nothing specific as they are dealing with three betas at the moment. Sorry but the answer is whenever it is done correctly.

Bear with me if this has been asked, but what is the timeline for the next phase of features on AD, ie the specific dates for example on mesh tool?
 
 
 

I use Image Vectorizer, but only rarely for scans of hand drawn work. It has a decent ability to improve contrast, sharpness, do de-speckling and set edge threshold. It also seems quick to me. For $5, it performs very well, and only adds maybe 15 seconds to getting a trace into AD.
If I need something w. multiple grey scales, I use (free) Inkscape's trace  tool. Inkscape runs poorly on Macs, so I don't use it often enough to be familiar w. the more complex settings. But after thrashing about some, I can usually get very good results.
FWIW, I've been using auto tracing to start works based on old decorative motifs for years, mostly w. Corel. To this day, I haven't come across a tool that gives me results that don't require lots and lots of adjustment. Often enough,  I spend more time fixing trace problems, than just re-doing w. a pen tool. W. the advent of resonabley priced tablets, for my own works, I no longer start w. scans from paper. 

Hi everyone, this post hasn't been bumped in a while but a member redirected me to this discussion. From my understanding, the reason why this hasn't been implemented was due to the ability of affinity designer in relation to making plugins work. 
However, how feasible would a compatible plugin wherein one is able to grab resources (like icons, photos, vectors, etc.) from an online database inside affinity designer instead? I feel like it might be, since it won't be dependent on an actual application feature (for example, photoshop plugins using photoshop actions as referenced from the posts above).

Would it not make more sense to offer plugin support earlier rather than later? That way, the community itself will help you proactively build and popularize your products - hopefully leading to a snowball effect. I see it as a potentially very powerful growth mechanism.
 
I'm sure you guys have thought about it but I'm curious what your thoughts are.

I'd really like to see this be made a higher priority with Affinity Designer.  So much of my workflow in Sketch and Illustrator relies on the use of plugins to automate, organize and simplify tasks. Take a look at what Invision Craft and Astute Graphics are doing to add amazing functionality to these apps.

I don't know if this should be here or in Feature Requests, so by all means move it to whichever is correct.  In any case, I was wondering if there were any plans to add support for plugins in Affinity Designer (as has been done in Photo).  If so, will you focus on existing Adobe Illustrator plugins or on plugins designed for Designer?
 
I also have a question concerning the nature of plugin support (both as it is now and in the future), which is why I elected to post this under "Questions" rather than requests.  Are there (or will there someday be) plugins designed for Affinity, or is the feature meant specifically for supporting Adobe's plugins?  Is it possible to create plugins specifically for use in Affinity Photo?

Create a new document at the paper size you intend to use, and then use the Place command (found on the File menu) to add each of the photographs. You can resize a photo precisely by selecting it on the APh canvas and using the W and H controls in the Transform panel.

There is a way... on Mac at least,
If you can collect the palettes as .clr palettes (Apple Color Palette) you could drop all the palettes you want into the Colors folder: Users > Yourname > Library > Colors 
From there these palettes will show in the swatches panel as apple palettes which has the bonus of being available systemwide in any app that can use .clr palettes.

Thanks Alfred, that's a pity TBH.

Hi jamesholden
Users on our forums have previously shared some in our Resources section, check out the links below!
 

Absolutely need this!

I will chime in here, as new to Designer, and, I am hopeful, a recovering Illustrator user.
Until I had to search for - and fail to find - the "Select same <attribute>" function, I was fully committed to making Designer my only vector drawing tool - purchased the full edition, bought the book, thought I was in heaven. But now, seeing that this often-requested and >necessary< function has been on the wish list for going on five years, the bloom is off the rose. That it's not even on the time line is a deal-breaker.
Devs: please consider that there is a wide variety of use cases for Designer, and each user has unique needs, but the basics >must< be included for this to be a viable product.
/rant

Some great points there, @furtonb, I agree with much of what you said, particulary your last sentence.
For me, Affinity Designer is a Lamborghini without wheels: It's incredibly capable and sexy but due to lacking something so integral it stays parked in the garage gathering dust.

I think that supporting Photoshop plugins, the old .8bf style ones as non-destructive Live FX would be great. Internally it would convert the object to bitmap and apply the plugin then keep a cache of the result to show for the object. Then changing the settings of the applied filters is allowed. Same way that Fireworks handles .8bf plugins non-destructively on vector objects. I use lots of the KPT and Alienware plugins on vector shapes in Fireworks mixed with dropshadows and glows and transparent texture fills etc is really cool.

All the UX apps are fairly basic when it comes to vector work but it depends what you need to do. Assuming you're talking about more than drawing some boxes and stuff then Sketch isn't too bad for icon work for example (Figma next best, XD really bad but they expect you to use and pay for AI for real drawing), even proper icons not the child like ones that seem to be everywhere. It would be fine for logos. I don't see why you couldn't use it for posters and stuff but I've not tried so not seen if there are any shortcomings. But I count Sketch as more specialised, even if you ignore prototyping, it's more to do with screens and pixel perfect drawing that can do some general purpose stuff too.
But you do really have to rely on plugins to plug gaps even for some basic functionality. For example select same you only get via a plugin. The trouble with relying on plugins is that most are by individuals and they can and do give up on them for various reasons,  fed up of the api's changing and breaking stuff, moved to another app, not enough time. Sometimes that might be the only one so then you're a bit stuck.
Here's a few things that I've noticed Sketch does that AD doesn't regarding drawing:
Round to Pixel, like AI's Align selected art to pixel grid button (Figma has the same option). This is a must have for me when working on pixel perfect stuff like icons or UI anything.  It's no good just snapping to pixel when you draw you also need to be able to re-snap when you scale etc. I'm not doing that manually. Fills & Strokes. Like pretty much every other app you can have multiple fills and strokes (and normally effects too). Not a big deal for me but nice to have.  Plus it has a few more fill options like picture and more control over noise. Effects. Like blur and drop shadow are converted to SVG filters when exporting SVG. AD exports them as raster, which sort of defeats the point in using SVG. Offset Path, that's a basic tool that everyone uses except when you don't have it. Locking layers, actually locks them like you'd expect. I know you can sort of do it in AD but it's clunky, it should just do what it says.  That's also sort of my list of reasons I can't even consider using AD for icon/UI design. That plus lack of scripting and things like the much discussed select same and the expand stroke problems.

Good point.
What's Sketch like for vector work, logos and illustrations?
To reiterate, though I value Affinity's entrance into the market, I think they're missing a trick here by not having it earlier. Noted though it is slated for inclusion.

I'm curious... Why PDF doesn't work for you? And I mean, I am interested, genuinely curious about it. Mostly as I am doing projects, exporting as PDF, and it all seems correct here, both from all the 3 Affinity products... but I might be missing a lot of stuff... So, I'd like to know... I'm versed in this kind of things, but had used less Affinity line in my workflows... till now.
Why is that? If one hits the "more" button in PDF's Affinity export, one can set not to rasterize anything.... Maybe they rasterize them not knowing how to deal with some things in their side ? (another genuine question)

I very much would appreciate some kind of plugin support for third parties to help push forward this software.
Something similar to Inkscape
Currently the pace means that designer is often lagging behind in multiple features.
It would be a massive plus for me and others I feel.
 
Thanks
 

Hi all,
I totally agree. Support for 3rd party plugins, as they are available for sketch would definitely add a lot of value to your fine product. Almost every platform, supporting design systems as (atomize, zeplin, marvel, invision,... you name it) and therefore facilitating a designers workflow and supporting collaboration with the kind of plugins mentioned here.
I understand, that e.g. sketch files kinda automatically transform into code (css) and affinity designer does not (yet???) has this feature  but I hope it will - sometime in the future. And maybe then it will be possible to deliver an API for progammers to make such things possible.
In the meantime, it would be grate to find a way so we can directly open sketch files in affinity designer and the other way around :-) without taking a detour through svg or the like.
Best regards and thanks for keeping that good work up!

I love how Affinity Designer is as user friendly as Freehand used to be, however the inability to export to AI format is a huge oversight. I want to use AD to create scalable logos that can be handed off to clients and vendors but unfortunately they require AI format. I'm hoping this issue will be solved very soon.

Here is a fairly recent interview with Ashley Hewson. The last part reads as follows:
For now, the main effort is on getting Publisher out of the door early next year. After that, Hewson says there will probably be an asset manager to organise Affinity files, perhaps in 2020. In the meantime, Serif plans to work on extensibility, to open up Affinity so third parties can write plugins and links, historically part of the appeal of Adobe’s and Quark’s success. “If everything goes well we may have that capability towards the end of next year, 12 months away,” says Hewson. “We will then be wanting to talk to people who might want to take advantage of that. There are very specific high end use cases for print.”  Best regards!

One thing that keeps popping into my mind is this: There are tons of title plugins for FCPX/Premiere, but they are only usable within said application(s). For things like Youtube cover pic graphics, social media graphics etc it would be "strange" to create those within FCPX or Premiere with its "timeline" layout. For that one should use Designer, which is document-centric.
Long story short: it would be absolutely "KILLER" if Designer was able to utilise those plugins in a static document environment.
Over to you, guys, and for all those sympathizing with me, please leave a comment or a "bump". Thank you!
Helmar

Since the most requested (based on the reply count) are technical illustration related, it would be awesome to have an official response on all of them, whether we can expect Designer to strengthen this side as well in the future.
To be honest, although I've bought Designer for both macOS and iOS, they are mainly collecting the dust on my virtual shelf, because it is just that pain in the [ ° ] when it comes to dealing with technical drawings – which is basically 90% of my time during any chosen workday. The time required to organise my document to a workable manner (sorting through tens of thousands of different lines, fills, etc.) is not really worth to me. 
I hope though, that this will change in the foreseeable future, if not, please be clear about it.