Mark Oehlschlager

Ah! I see. That makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

Very nice 3D rendering! But now I must ask: since Designer has neither a perspective grid feature, nor a vector warping tool, how did you manage to draw your bucket in perspective and then to convincingly warp the product label around the cylindrical form of the bucket?

@dutchshader is correct. For some inexplicable reason, invisible characters can only be controlled from within Publisher, not from within Designer or Photo. The solution to your problem is to open the file in Publisher and turn off invisible characters before saving and returning to Designer. Showing/hiding Invisible characters, like text frame linking, is a common text setting feature that should be standard in all three Affinity apps.

@fde101 Yes, it does tile within a stroke, but what I'm asking for is that pattern tiles designed for straight lines, soft curves and sharp corners actually follow the contour of the path. Something more suitable for a decorative frame.

Seems to be yet another commonly used text setting function that should be present in Designer as well as Publisher. (The others being linked frames and baseline grids.)

@fde101 Thanks for reminding me of the bitmap tiling function of the Fill tool. But, yes, vector art pattern tiles would be desirable. Not just for use in fills, but also for strokes in decorative borders/frames.

I would like to request that Affinity Designer add the ability to create vector pattern tiles to be used in fills and along strokes. One should be able to define a rectilinear selection of vector art as a pattern tile, and be able to use that as a repeating fill, or as part of a decorative stroke/frame. The pattern tile might be a repeating graphic motif, suitable for a wallpaper pattern, or it might be a material texture used to render surfaces. Equally, straight and corner tile designs could be used with a special pattern brush to follow the stroke of an open or closed curve.

I would like to request that Affinity Photo add the features of pattern tile creation and fill. One should be able to define a rectilinear selection as a pattern tile, and be able to use that as a repeating fill. The pattern tile might be a repeating graphic motif, suitable for a wallpaper pattern, or it might be a material texture used to render surfaces. In the case of creating seamless texture pattern tiles, it would also be useful to build an offset filter that would allow one to offset a tile diagonally and wrap the edge pixels so that a clone stamp tool or an in-painting brush tool could eliminate visual seams for the repeating tile pattern.

I've experienced the same problem in Adobe Illustrator. One work-around is to draw in 1 : 72 scale. Set your ruler units to picas. Set up your document grid to show major divisions at 1 pica with 12 subdivision. If it's necessary to show your final work at 1/4" scale (1 : 48), select all of your final drawing and apply the appropriate scale factor – in this case, 1.5x (72 ÷ 48 = 1.5). It's not a perfect solution, but at least you can work with a snapping grid and your brain can easily translate picas to feet, and points to inches. A related work-around, if your working in metric units, would be to set up your document grid with major divisions at 1 centimeter with 10 subdivisions. The other work-around for imperial units (feet and inches) is to use the Grids and Axes Manager to set up a document grid where the major grid divisions are equal to your scale unit (1/4", 1/2", or whatever) with 12 subdivisions. This approach lets you snap lines and objects to an appropriately scaled grid, but the drawback is that you cannot enter values in the length, width, or height fields that correspond neatly to scaled inches.

Please add Duo-tone support in the Affinity Suite Apps. One should be able to specify that tonal imagery should print with two specified printing inks.

@MikeW Okay. Thanks. Clearly a missing feature then. Hopefully this is on the near-term roadmap.

How does one go about creating duo-tone images in the Affinity Suite apps such that the two spot colors used will separate correctly onto the spot color printing plates? I can't find a way to do this, and though i can simulate a duo-tone effect with adjustment layers and effects, the final result always separates out as CMYK.

Now that the full Affinity Suite v. 1.7.1 has been launched, I would like to request that the dev teams take a second hard look at the UI for the Color and Swatches panels. Presently, it's just too cumbersome to build and specify swatch collections for documents. Please do study and analyze the Adobe UI here. In Adobe's UI you'll experience the following: a color swatch clicked on from any built in swatch library will automatically be added to the active document palette swatches that are added to the active document palette will automatically carry a meaningfully descriptive label (e.g., Pantone 801 C for a coated spot color; C=60 M=0 Y=100 K=0 for a process ink color) within one swatches panel window, swatches can be organized into useful groups and displayed simultaneously moving a swatch from one user defined group to another is a simple drag and drop move. By contrast, in the Affinity Suite UI you'll experience the following: adding a color swatch from any built in swatch library (e.g., Pantone Coated) requires multiple clicks and selections as one must first create a user defined document palette, then switch to the Pantone palette, find and click on the desired spot color to load it into the color well, switch back to the user defined document palette, then click the "Add Current Color as Global Color" icon. spot color swatches that are added to the active document palette are not correctly labeled, but are given generic labels such as "Global Color 1" a user cannot display more than one user defined swatch groups or "Affinity Palettes" at once. Instead one must use the pop-up palette switcher to move from one group/palette to the next. and moving a color swatch from one user defined group/palette to another is also a cumbersome, multi-click experience. Thank you in advance for your consideration.

I can think of just one strategic opportunity for Serif to break the stranglehold that Adobe has over the industry: taking advantage of the potentially disruptive force of Apple's iPad Pro and iPad OS. If the iPad Pro and it's iPad OS were to become a dominant or significant new hardware platform within the creative industry, where Serif could claim a first mover advantage over Adobe, beating Adobe to the iPad platform with it's Affinity Suite, Adobe could be overthrown in a short period of time. This depends entirely on what Apple does with the iPad Pro as a new platform for professional work, on whether or not it becomes a significant new hardware platform for the creative industry, and on Adobe falling asleep at the switch, failing to deliver full-featured apps for the iPad Pro platform.

I would like to begin by praising Serif for striking a blow, on behalf of designers everywhere, against the hegemonic Adobe and their abusive subscription-only toolset licensing policy, an onerous policy made possible by Adobe's virtually worldwide monopoly and status as "industry standard" that entraps it's users, forcing them to pay monthly fees to rent their own digital tools, and threatening to render their own work product inaccessible should they ever cease paying monthly subscription fees to Adobe. The Affinity Suite of creative apps is an outstanding accomplishment. Truly a world-class set of tools that rivals or surpasses the comparable set from Adobe. The pricing and licensing agreement (a perpetual license for an affordable one-time payment) is most welcome. With those two significant chunks of the Affinity value proposition, Serif is in a position to set the creative industry free from Adobe's abusive rule. And yet, it's probably not enough. Adobe still enjoys the monopolistic benefits of incumbency and "the network effect" in the market place. Independent creatives and small studios who are involved in collaborative workflows are expected to receive and deliver work in proprietary, Adobe file formats. Many designers would love to abandon Adobe and their subscription fees, and the threatened loss of control over their own work product, but are held hostage by industry norms that dictate an Adobe workflow. Short of the miracle of Serif cracking the Adobe file format, making it possible for the Affinity Suite to read and write native .AI, .PSD, and .INDD files with perfect fidelity, I'm not sure how we get over this hurdle together. Are there business case studies that show how a challenger can overturn a dominant market incumbent who enjoys the reinforcing lock-in of the network effect? Without necessarily divulging business strategy and tactics, can someone from Serif at least declare that they are aware of the business problem, that they have studied the relevant case studies, and that there is a workable strategy for breaking down the hegemony of Adobe?