Mark Oehlschlager

Working through Designer 1.7.0.3.
For the sake of collaborative workflows, it would be nice if the Affinity products could both import and export ASE color palette swatch files, respecting any named groups within those ASE files.

Will be nice to see OKLab/OKLch color space implemented in Affinity suite.
LittleCMS has just released it.
There are any plans?
 
 

I’ve shown one method to do this in my attached video (the text below isn’t a step-by-step guide, just notes on the video).
“Enable Snapping” should be ON, “Snap to object bounding boxes” should be ON, and “Include Bounding box mid points” should be ON.
Part A – The first circle
If you are not using Designer, and therefore can’t use the Point Transform Tool, or you just want to do it quickly, then, instead of the instructions in this part, you can simply snap the left ‘side’ of circle B to the right ‘side’ of of circle A and then rotate all the circles to how you want them later.
Draw a line from the centre of circle A to anywhere.
Use the Node Tool to move the end of the line to get the angle you want.
Use the Point Transform Tool to move and rotate circle B.
Use the Point Transform Tool to translate circle B so that it touches circle A.
Part B – The second circle
The width of the first construction circle should be: width of circle A plus width of circle C.
The width of the second construction circle should be: width of circle B plus width of circle C.
If you aren’t using Designer (and can’t use the Point Transform Tool) you can draw a line from the intersection of the two construction circles (to anywhere, the end point doesn’t matter) and then use snapping with the Move Tool to drag circle C into place.
Note: If you don't want circle B to be rotated after this then you can just double-click the rotation handle to reset it.
Important: There may be tiny gaps between the circles but that’s because they aren’t perfect circles, and that’s because of the way the Affinity applications draw circles using bezier curves. I don’t think there’s anything we can do about this.

2024-02-04 08-50-06.mp4

While that will work for use with the Transform Panel, here we are not actually using the Transform Panel. The Scale with object in the strokes panel must be ticked.

Why not?

This is a bug when switching the line style from one to another doesn't then allow you to alter the pressure curve.  I've given the report a nudge and left a link back to this thread so we can update when its resolved.
As stated in the Help file: 'Properties—Click to edit the brush used as your Texture Line Style via a Brush dialog.'
So making a change via the options shown when using Properties will change to a texture line style.
It's a bug.
A couple yes  

Apps: Designer and Publisher (+ some changes to the existing feature in Photo)
Platforms: Windows and macOS
We have now added the States panel to Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher which previously only existed in Affinity Photo. Layer states allows you to either:
Capture the current visibility states of your layers across your document Create queries based on various criteria to use to make a selection or toggle visibility of layers This feature is particularly useful to manage different variations of your work. As an example, one of the social ad campaigns for our recent Black Friday promotion was created in Affinity Designer across multiple artboards. Each artboard had 4 variants for English, Japanese, German and French language.

 
Previously if you wanted to toggle between the English and French version for example you would need to toggle the visibility of the appropriate layers on each artboard separately - not particularly workable when you have many artboards / spreads. The new states panel gives you a new way to work with designs like this. 

In this case I could set up a query with criteria which captures all my Japanese layers. From the states panel click "New Query" at the bottom, I called the query "JA" and set up my criteria to be "All Art Text and Frame Text layers that have a layer name which ends in JA" as below:


Because on each artboard we had used the consistent naming convention that all Japanese text has a layer name ending in JA, all English text has a layer name ending in EN, etc. it made it easy to then set up 4 queries for each of the languages. We could alternatively have used a convention like all French variants are tagged yellow, English tagged Red, etc. 
So now to switch from English to Japanese across all artboards I can just turn off everything that fulfils my EN query, and turn on everything which fulfils my JP query using the visibility on/off buttons next to the queries in the states panel - so in two clicks end up with the below:

 
While this example is only including text, of course I may have had different imagery for each locale and could have included those in the same queries to still have one button to toggle text and images of each language on and off. Also, as it's set up a query like this, should I add additional Japanese specific layers to any of the artboards and name them ending in "...JA" my JA query will automatically pick them up.
In Publisher the same principles apply giving the ability to globally toggle different layers on and off across all spreads in your document which match the criteria you have specified. While building complex expressions is easy, you may also find you wish to have a query for something simple like "Layer Type is Images" giving you an instant way to turn all images on and off across your whole document.
Additional Notes
As well as toggling visibility of queries there is an additional button to make a selection of all layers which fulfil the criteria specified in the query. This is also a new function not previously available in Affinity Photo. For those who used the States panel in Affinity Photo you will notice we have changed the name of what were previously called "Smart States" to "Queries". This reason for this is in the future we anticipate adding a new feature to this which would be better described as a Smart State (this will be something you can build from multiple queries). This will be something which we add in a future update. There is other new functionality we plan to bring to this in the future - namely ability to create presets and some level of integration with export options - but again that will be something for a future update.
 

Hi and welcome to the forum.
Designer 1.x was not intended to show the symbols for special characters so you should never see them unless you're opening a file created with Publisher that had them turned on. If you don't have Publisher, did you download a Publisher file and open it at one time?
But regardless, this is changed in the latest version, in version 2. Designer now has the Text > Show Special Characters command. If you're still using 1.10 you will need to upgrade to version 2 to get this.
Cheers

@chippwalters
No. Nothing new on this front.

For those who work with organizations and are often required to design attractive data graphs, it would be great to have a data graph design feature within Affinity Designer.
Building the feature into Designer would be ideal, but I've discovered an interesting solution from Datylon that integrates with Adobe Illustrator. Could Serif partner with Datylon to bring their plug-in functionality to Affinity Designer?
See this YouTube tutorial for reference: 
And here is the URL for Datylon: www.datylon.com
Thanks for your consideration. 

I would like to request that the Appearance panel in Affinity Designer offer the ability to add effects and opacity settings to the individual strokes & fills.
For example, assume a shape with two fills and two strokes. 
It should be possible to apply 50% opacity to the top fill; and inner shadow to the bottom stroke; and a drop shadow to the top dashed stroke. See the attached illustration below.

In Adobe InDesign, one can drag a Page icon from the Pages window into the Master Pages window to create a Master from a Page. 
One can also select a page or a spread, then, from the Pages panel options menu, select the command to "Save as Master".

@Friksel
As others have pointed out, U stands for uncoated, and C stands for coated. In point of fact, PMS 806 is a defined, unchanging ink formula. The appearance of the ink color will shift slightly depending upon whether it is applied to a coated sheet of paper or an uncoated sheet of paper. In the electronic swatch books included in applications like Designer and Illustrator, the only difference between 806 U and 806 C is in the way that the appearance of 806 is simulated on screen as it would appear on either a coated or uncoated sheet. It's for onscreen simulation. 
What's important for you to grasp is that any object to which you apply PMS 806 (U or C) will separate onto it's own plate (an 806 plate, separate from the traditional CMYK printing plates), and the print vendor will recognize the vector shape to which you've applied 806 as the intended die-cut shape, not part of the printed art.

I would like to request that the Appearance panel in Affinity Designer offer the ability to add effects and opacity settings to the individual strokes & fills.
For example, assume a shape with two fills and two strokes. 
It should be possible to apply 50% opacity to the top fill; and inner shadow to the bottom stroke; and a drop shadow to the top dashed stroke. See the attached illustration below.

This is a request for both a vertical and a horizontal cylinder preset for the Vector Warp feature.
The use case need is for wrapping vector art around a cylinder (bottle/can) object where the art correctly diminishes and foreshortens as it wraps around the cylindrical object. Presently, one can start with the Fisheye preset and make adjustments, but it would be a timesaver if there were vertical and horizontal cylinder presets as well.
Additionally, would it be possible for there to be rotation and perspective parameters to get the mesh to match the orientation of the photographed bottle/can/column?

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad
A few new features have been added to the stroke panel...
1. As has been commonly requested we have now added the ability to 'balance' dashed lines using a new toggle button on stroke panel. This means that the dash pattern is automatically rescaled between any cusps in a curve - making things such as corners of a rectangle or the start and end of a stroke look correct.

2. An additional dash and gap have now been added to build up more complex dashed line patterns (now giving you 3 dash and 3 gaps) making, among other things, two dot chain patterns possible. On desktop you can also click-drag the dash and gap indicator as shown to adjust the value. 

3. A new button has been added to clear any arrowheads on a stroke - just making it more convenient than having to open the drop downs to set both ends to "None".
 

 
 

@Lolalam Regarding your workflow, I would recommend a simple strategy:
Build / develop your images in the standard sRGB color space. From there, you can export to the same sRGB color space for web images, or to CMYK using the U.S. Web Coated SWOP v2 color profile. That should be your default.
If you want finer control, and you have a close working relationship with a printer, you might inquire whether or not that printer has specific recommendations for exported files.

@Lolalam The numbers there indicate bit depth per color channel (i.e., how finely subdivided the range of values is for each color channel). 
RGB/8 indicates that the dynamic range of color in your document it limited to 8 bits per color channel. In other words, for every pixel, the Red channel is capable of showing 256 levels of brightness. Same goes for the Green and Blue channels.
RGB/16 indicates that the dynamic range of color offers a more finely subdivided range of values, limited to 16 bits per color channel. Here, for every pixel, the Red channel is capable of showing 65,536 levels of brightness. Same goes for the Green and Blue channels.
Unless you are working on a high end display, and intend to display the final work on a high end display, it's not necessary to worry about these bit depths. Keep it simple: stick to RGB/8 and CMYK/8.

Hi @Mark Oehlschlager,
Thanks for your report and our sincerest apologies for the delayed response here. We are exceptionally busy following the release of V2 and we thank you for your continued patience and understanding here.
I can confirm I've been able to replicate this issue here and I have logged it with our developers as a bug - interestingly the same issue does not occur on Windows, so hopefully this should be an easy fix

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)

But for now you can specify a custom leader, just do it with the Paragraph panel. After you've done it for a single paragraph of the TOC then choose Update Style for that style. It's the same as editing the style directly.
Cheers

I added one more to the table - notes are demarcated by square blue brackets in v2.
 
 

Affinity V2 apps are installed completely separately from V1. V2 will not replace V1… i.e., V1 and V2 can both be run on the same computer. 

Why is it that for so many "New ..." commands (new category, new swatch, etc.) the Affinity apps don't automatically throw up a naming dialog box? Seems quite logical to give the user the opportunity to name the newly created item straight away, rather than forcing one to go back into the menu structure with 3-4 extra clicks.
EDIT: Allow me to apologize and to withdraw this post. I was watching one of the V2 tutorial videos (probably produced when V2 was still in Beta), and an Asset category first had to be created before it could then be selected and named. It reminded me of a complaint I had with the V1 apps.
I should have checked this behavior in the release version of the V2 apps. As I now actively create new items in my copy of V2 apps, a naming dialog box does indeed now appear by default, with the notable exception of the command to create a Spare Channel in Photo 2. 
Sorry for the inaccuracy of the post.
 

Why is it that for so many "New ..." commands (new category, new swatch, etc.) the Affinity apps don't automatically throw up a naming dialog box? Seems quite logical to give the user the opportunity to name the newly created item straight away, rather than forcing one to go back into the menu structure with 3-4 extra clicks.
EDIT: Allow me to apologize and to withdraw this post. I was watching one of the V2 tutorial videos (probably produced when V2 was still in Beta), and an Asset category first had to be created before it could then be selected and named. It reminded me of a complaint I had with the V1 apps.
I should have checked this behavior in the release version of the V2 apps. As I now actively create new items in my copy of V2 apps, a naming dialog box does indeed now appear by default, with the notable exception of the command to create a Spare Channel in Photo 2. 
Sorry for the inaccuracy of the post.