V Silly

I am building guitars and need to draw outlines of shapes from which to create templates. The problem I am having is that the drawing tools are not at all intuitive for me. They don't do what I expect when I go to add points move points edit points etc. Affinity products do not seem at all intuitive to me coming from Adobe products. I just tried a program called Amadine after some hunting around following my first post. On the first try I was able to easily draw and edit shapes, so this may be the solution for me. I realize I have extremely low patience for the learning curve. Since I use the program only occasionally, anything I learn is long forgotten by the next time I need to draw a template. Thanks to everyone for your answers, I do appreciate your attempts to help :-)

Thank you for the encouraging words. I was hoping to find something where tool behaviors are very similar to illustrator so I could just jump right in. I do not have time or patience for taking a class considering the limited amount of use I put the program too. If I can't find anything that's an easy transition I will just forgo the computer and draw on paper but it would be nice to have a digital record of the designs.

I use vector drawing very occasionally to draw simple shapes as black and white line art. I used illustrator for 20 years. Every time I pull up Affinity Designer I am unable to execute even the most simple shapes. I watch and re-watch the tutorials and they don't help. I have so far been unable to find a simple application with commands and functions similar to the Adobe pen tool and path editing commands. Wondering if anyone here knows of a simple Mac program that would be an easier transition for an illustrator user?

Right color swap in the character panel seems to affect directly behind type only and does not change the color of the text box. The only way I have found to do this so far is to set the rectangle color prior to turning it into a text box.

I was actually trying to remove an unwanted background color, so I don't think an additional rectangle underneath would help in that case..

Well I found a workaround, I made a new rectangle and made sure the background color was transparent before turning it into a text box. So I guess I'm under control here although I still don't know how to change the color of an existing text box background. Thank you

I am in affinity designer. I went to studio menu but I do not see a selection for text frame. Thanks!

I created a text box and for some reason it came in by default with a gray background color. Using the color picker only seems to change text color. I found an old post that said go to the Character panel (menu Text ▹ Show Character, Background box) to change the color but I have been unable to find the character panel. I am unable to find a menu of the available tool panels. I expected them to be under the window menu but there is nothing under there. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thank you

Thank you, took another look and found them!

Hello folks, trying to export to another file format and the only option I am getting is PNG. Not sure why, when looking up file formats there is a long list a file types that affinity designer can export. The file I am trying to export is a very simple block type logo that I have converted to curves. Is it possible something about my file is making it incompatible with the export function? Thank you

I've almost got it but I'm a bit confused. I got the measurement to display, but then the next time it would not work. Do I need to have a particular tool selected in order for this to work? Do I need to select entire object or just part of the object? I was trying to measure the distance between two endpoints. One time I did it I got square boxes that lined up and showed me the measurement I was looking till four. Just tried it again with the same file and now I am not getting any measurements to show using the command key same as before ... thanks very much for the tips it's really helpful

So if what I really wanted was to change the size of the page I need to do it in document setup? Is the art board feature for a multi page document? Also is there a ruler tool to make measurements within the program? I have only found the eyedropper tool… Thank you

Here's one more thing that's baffling me. I redrew the art board and I can't seem to get out of art board mode. It says the word art board in the upper left corner and even when I select other tools it still seems to be in art board mode. ???

Yay so easy! Maybe I'll get the hang of this yet :-)

That was helpful, my confusion came from choosing close curves instead of join curves. So now I have joined the shapes, and I would like to remove the extra nodes which are selected in the screenshot below. In illustrator you would use the pen tool with the minus symbol to delete nodes from the path. How does this work in affinity designer? Thank you