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Mark Oehlschlager

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Posts posted by Mark Oehlschlager

  3. Posted

    I don't believe there is a Table tool or panel that is exposed in Designer. However, Designer, Photo, and Publisher all work from the same file format, and so there are two solutions to your problem:

    1. Begin authoring your document in Publisher, where you will find a Table tool and panel. Then use the Studio Link feature to invoke the Designer tools for any illustration work you need to do.
    2. Begin your illustration in Designer, then select the command "File > Edit in Publisher ..." to take the document into Publisher to add your table(s).

  5. Posted

    I've been experimenting with "vector brushes" in Affinity Designer. Having applied various vector brushes in a test illustration, I've gone back to select a particular stroke and discovered that there is no way to inspect the name of the applied vector brush.

    Or maybe there is a way to identify the applied brush, but I can't find it. If you know of a way to inspect the name of an applied vector brush, please let me know.

    Thanks.

     

  6. Posted

    With regard to efficiency, a small complaint that I have with the Affinity suite in general is that it always requires an extra step to name newly created items like swatches, collections, spare channels, etc. 

    It would be nice, when creating a new item like a swatch or a spare channel, if a dialog box would appear upon the creation of the new item, allowing one to name the new item in one fluid sequence, rather than forcing the user to first create the new item and then go back to reselect the new item, right click, and then select the "Rename" menu item.

    Thanks for your consideration.

  10. Posted

    @JET_Affinity

    Plotting points is tedious and more in line with an engineering mindset. Some tasks are suited to careful, surgical point plotting, but for digital illustration which assumes an artists mindset, there should be direct intuitive drawing and painting tools. Natural, direct, efficient, intuitive.

    As for your complaint about excessive points, that's a software engineer's problem, not an argument against a painting tool that creates freeform vector shapes. Consider the problem Serif had with excessive points for expanded strokes.

    mackleys and anon2 reacted to this

  12. Posted

    Just got done watching the "Lockdown 2020" video: "Speed and motion: illustrating a car in Affinity Designer with Chris Rathbone".  One thought occurred to me: when it came time to block in the color, shadows and highlights, having the equivalent of Adobe Illustrator's Blob Brush would be more intuitive to work with and more efficient. The Pen Tool makes sense for line work, but a Blob Brush that "paints" freehand shapes would be better for painting areas of flat color.

     

    (https://youtu.be/iMlJrYE8Xo0)

    anon2 and mackleys reacted to this

  13. Posted

    @Jowday

    One of my pet peeves as someone who started designing for print is the conflation of dpi and ppi. Dots per Inch has always meant the ratio of literal dots of ink per inch applied to a paper substrate, where a high-end image setter could image a printing plate with a resolution of 2400 dpi – not to be confused with the 300 ppi resolution of the raster art being processed. It seems that the definition of dpi was appropriated as an analogy for explaining pixel density of electronic displays.

    The other pet peeve is the insistence of web and app developers who've never worked in print to refer to the pixel dimensions of an image or screen as the "resolution" of that image or screen. Without a ratio of pixels to inches, nothing is resolved. There is no resolution described or implied by the simple pixel dimensions 800 x 600 px. We simply have dimensions expressed in abstract and relative units.

    But language evolves. Persistently misused terms become accepted standards. 

  17. Posted

    @Bwood

    Affinity seem to have their hands full just quashing bugs in their current suite of three apps. I don't think they have the bandwidth to add a new application to their workload. Unfortunately.

    Dominik mentioned Pinegrow and CoffeeCup. I have found that Sparkle is a terrific app for designers who want to build responsive websites without having to touch a line of code. If all that you need is to produce attractive websites or landing pages for yourself and clients, and are not required to colloborate with a web development shop, I think you would be thrilled with Sparkle. Here's a link to descriptive documentation.

  23. Posted

    UPDATE:

    I now see in the online Help files that one removes a ruler guide, not by dragging the guide to the rulers as in other apps from Apple and Adobe, but by dragging the ruler guide beyond the edge of one's artboard or canvass.

    Okay. So, first zoom out to see the edges of one's artboard, then drag the guide beyond to the pasteboard.

    Still, when one is zoomed in on a document, it would be nice to be able to remove a guide either dragging to the ruler, or by being able to select the guide and hit the delete key, or select a Delete Guide contextual command with a right-click.

  24. Posted

    I'm currently running Designer 1.8.3 on Mac OS High Sierra.

    I've discovered some inconveniences in creating and managing layers.

    1. Inserting New Layers at Specific Locations in the Layer Stack: Often, I'd like to insert a new layer just above the layer or object I have selected in the Layers panel. Presently, however, a new layer always ends up at the very top of my layer stack, which can be far removed from where I want it, requiring me to scroll up and drag the new layer back down. : Please add the ability to insert a new layer above or below a currently selected item in the Layers Panel.
    2. Collecting Selected Layer Items in a New Layer: Often, I would like to quickly collect items in my Layers panel into a single sub-Layer. Presently, the only way to accomplish this is with a hack: Group the items, then go to Layer > Promote Group to Layer. 
    3. Converting Groups to Layers and Layers to Groups: Presently, it's possible to select a Group and go to Layer > Promote Group to Layer, but there is not a useful and complementary Layer > Convert Layer to Group. Having the two complementary commands available would be useful. Moreover, in the interest of efficiencies, it would be nice if both of those commands were available as part of a right-click contextual menu.

    Thanks for your consideration.

    Krustysimplex and baoyu reacted to this
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