VectorCat
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Posts posted by VectorCat
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thanks..good to know about the beta builds..
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Thank you to the Dev team for releasing AD 1.1.2; ought to be using it hot and heavy when I begin work today.
Curious; with respect to the bug reporting, do we continue to file them same as before, even if the same behavior is observed? I know that not all bugs can be addressed in one round...
Thanks for any info on this
VCat
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Is there a tutorial showing how?
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these are sweet! thank you!
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Might be more productive if you can describe what you want Affinity to do for you, or what you have been using other software to do. Also, I don't know whether Affinity Design has a trial version available, but there is very little learning curve and giving Designer a test drive would be the best way for you to get spun up on what it can do for you.
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Hi, Jon;
I know that there's a school of thought out there which uses Photoshop as a "web design" tool, and while I understand why, I'd encourage all devotees to rethink. Vector tools are vastly better-suited to this chore than raster, owing to greater speed, smaller file sizes, and better editability of the works-in-progress.
Affinity Designer combines both vector and raster tools in a primarily vector environment, so you can have some of the raster effects if you need them while retaining ease of editing type and shapes, the ability to change things easily. I am finding Affinity Designer to be *very* fast, even on years-old Macs. With Adobe, the mantra is if you want things to get faster, buy a new Computer. Down here on earth, that's not easy to do, and Affinity Designer effectively gives you that "new mac" feel with the incredible speed boost.
I think you'll be very happy with what Designer can do for you..
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The apps in question are...I hesitate to mention them bcs I don't want to generate negativity, or cause undue embarrassment to those developers..changing the landscape of computer apps is not easy.
Let's say they are...close competitors to Affinity Design without being the "legacy" vector app we all know.
I have a fair amount of work tied up in these apps, and I would like to move them into Affinity Designer without a lot of malarkey and re-constructing..things breaking, etc.
Any tips on the best way to ensure a happy ending? Export out as EPS? PDF?
thank you,
VC
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And by "printer" I mean the human/business kind, not the box full of toner...
Can the dev team speak to anything which will encourage printers and service bureaus to accept Affinity Publisher files, versus InDesign or Quark files, which have decades of history between them...
I suppose one way around any opposition would be to send PDFs to be ripped to film. Perhaps at the prices being offered now, Publisher won't hurt anyone expense-wise, but are there other reasons for printers to support Affinity Publisher?
thank you for any thoughts on this.
Vcat
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to my mind, there are only 3 heads which enjoy wide recognizability in the western world: Beethoven, Einstein and Waldo. Images of gutenberg show him rockin a fu manchu..which is pretty cool...his invention is undeniable.
what about the Chinese' contribution?
What is essential to putting ink on paper?
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not sure whether to use shapes for the wireframes, and then enable snap-to objects, or to snap guides and snap to the guides..
anyone care to share what they've done and what works?
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This is a challenge! I'll give it a go! :ph34r:
As mentioned by Vectorcat: Photoshop/Illustrator naming is a market winner: whereas ID=no idea. So can the Affinity team change its spots? If we come up with a stonker of a name for each app or the whole suite; then it's time to rename the 'litter'.
The holy trinity of brand names are thus:
- it must be a noun
- it must be a verb
- it must be an adjective
One out of three is good, two out of three is great...
Here's my ideas:
- Affinity Photo = Affinity Developer
- Affinity Designer = Affinity Poster or Graphiq
- Affinity Publisher = Affinity Press or Quill or Illuminator (I know...!)
What do you think?
a noun, verb or adjective? In other words, the name has to be a word, right? "Developer" sounds like what programmers do. Graphiq is not too shabby...it sounds sophisticated and European to my American ear. It speaks generally enough, and specifically enough at the same time..not an easy balance to achieve.
The current use of "Designer" for what seems to be an illustration program is confusing to me. What is the primary purpose of the software? I could design with Open Office.. but, what is the primary purpose of OO?
It might be time to explore words that don't have anything to do with preconceived notions, and therefore, don't come with any baggage.
Kodak is one such word...it doesn't actually mean anything in itself, though after 80 years of people snappin' pictures, "Kodak" came to mean "Photography."
This stuff doesn't happen over night, despite what "branding" proponents would have us believe.
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I'd put the logo on the "later list" and keep pumping out updates and tweaks.
Bump this!
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sometimes locked items have X's where the round control handles are, but sometimes not.
Is there a sure-fire method for "waking up" a locked item rather than rooting through the layers?
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this would be very handy!
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Good discussion, Znak...
and here are more things to throw into the mix... QuarkXPress...what on earth does that have to do with page layout, other than "Press", and when you say it, you don't think "Press" you think "Express"
Microsoft? Maybe at one time Micro (computer) Soft(ware) made a lot of sense, but now it seems sadly anachronistic.
Apple? Just because Steve Jobs worked on an apple farm and loved apples? What's the relationship to computers and personal electronics?
We could go on. Affinity is a positive-sounding word, so I feel there's nothing wrong with it at all, and many things right with it.
By the time a name becomes associated with a thing, all of this academic discussion evaporates in significance, yes?
Thank you for batting about these ideas!
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Affiniy Designer Suite ADS
Affinity Vector AV
Affinity Image AI
Affinity Magazine AM
It show easily what you can do with every app :D
Designer... designing it's more general, better for the complete suite.... I think. (IMHO)
I think this is very good reasoning....
What about the ppl who aren't doing a magazine, though? What is the commonality for what a layout app can be used for?
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I see where you're going, Znak and I largely agree. The problem with picking a great name or a great logo is that, in a sense, there's a narrow aperture in the human mind where you can really slam it home. You have to speak to what a user can do with a software tool rather than limiting their understanding of what they can do.
here is what I mean. to me, software named "Photographer" tells me that it's meant for photographers...maybe lets them lightbox their stuff, export it for their client, etc. With a name like "Photoshop," I get the sense that that's a place, so to speak, where I can do whatever I want..thanks to the "shop" part of the name. Like...workshop, only it's for images. Now, you can do things with Photoshop having nothing to do with photos, but by now, the public so thoroughly knows "Photoshop" that it's like the words "Kleenex" or "Xerox." These names belong to go-to technologies applicable across a spectrum of needs. And that is what puts steak on the table.
So, the trick here is an easy-to-remember, easy-to-understand word or logo that tells a broad spectrum of users: "this is your horse."
It's too bad the words, "Illustrator" and "Photoshop" are taken, as they are pretty darn good. "InDesign," IMHO is weak sauce. It feels contrived...forced ingratiation...
I feel there are other words which Serif could make their own and convey the idea nicely. As more visual designers work in web and interactive, as opposed to Print, the metaphors and boundaries blur and change. Just look at how Affinity Designer integrates raster tools in a vector atelier. We don't need no steenkin' boundaries!
I think that naming solutions are to be found in there..somewhere...
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Confirm...just tried on another mac, new document, re-tracing my essential steps and while I can change flat color, fill with gradient tools are not available when more than 1 shape is selected. However, if you GROUP those objects, then fill/line tools appear enabling you to fill with gradient...I don't know whether that's good or not..I might want them grouped, but I definitely wanted to fill all 3 shapes with a gradient..
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I had done basically that last night and was un-able to affect the fill/stroke. neither fill nor stroke tools appeared in the toolbar. I wanted to fill with gradients; I did not try using just the color wheel for either.
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Right now, it seems that only 1 selected object may be filled/have its stroke modified.
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The AD app icon/logo is pretty detailed. I don't find it ugly; more like...capable...broad...exact.
if you want to go with simpler, I'll always line up at that window, but seriously, I interact with that icon maybe for 2 seconds at a time, long enough for my little brain to say, "THERE it is!!" so I am not studying it..I am using it for the quick recognition a good logo or icon should provide.
Maybe an evolution is in order? Overall I think they're more on the right track than not with that A-shape...that bit stands out in a galaxy of icons and logos..
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I am John, going here by the nick, VectorCat. I am a designer, art director and illustrator, and hoping to expand my career to front-end web development.
I remember the first time I played with vector illustration software years ago. At first, I didn't get what it did until I hit print...then the light went off and I was down the road. I like to offset the super-precise nature of vector with the looser aspects of raster, so I'm jazzed about the mix of those tools in Affinity Designer.
Looking forward to where this will take us all. I am very impressed with AD right out of the gate..its future looks very bright to me.
Cheers,
John
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Adam nailed it. I've been using Wacoms for years. I regard them as necessary to my work, but the software/hardware is weak sauce. And I don't know which is the culprit for some weird behavior..such as double-clicks registering when I didn't double-click, or scrolling in finder windows and document windows which are NOT in front.
I've contacted Wacom about this and some their people acted like they couldn't be bothered. If Wacom weren't the only game in town, their stuff might be less squirrelly.
I am currently using the Bamboo Fun tablet; bought at Costco, so the price was decent, but all of these things are simply priced too high in my opinion. Works fine 95% of the time, until it does something I didn't want, but..it's not the end of the world. More an annoyance. the hardware seems to hold up but beware of weak connections where cables enter the tablet (if the wired version) and the pens seem to have this tactile coating which gets nasty with use and eventually rubs off. Eww.
Maybe Apple will make a larger version of their magic track pad and throw in a pen for all us mac-using artists? That would obviate the whole weird wacom driver problem.
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Apologies as this is not an Affinity bug; I'll leave it to the mods as to where this should be. I tried installing my bamboo fun driver on my MBP, now running Yosemite.
The driver balked, saying it would not install into OSX older than 10.6.
Even though we see Yosemite as "ten point ten," the driver sees it as "ten point one"
It's on Wacom to rectify this, but anyone for whom tablets are mission-critical, holding off on Yosemite might be a very good move.
how are brushes made?
in Resources
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..and maybe a little wing of bat, eye of newt?
:)