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I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes: - Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher) - Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object. - I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't. - The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. - To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions. - Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode) - Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper. - Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it. - Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors. - Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation. - Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.) Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like: - Blend/Interpolate - Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers. - Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one) I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another. It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print. Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are. It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.

I have no problem with Publisher defaulting CMYK documents to "rich black” (a mix of CMYK colors) for text. Sure I like to see a default option to use 100 % K for all text, but in the meantime I'll just define all my Text Styles as 100 % K, and problem solved - right? Wrong! Changing a documents CMYK color profile (which I had to do at the end of a large job because my client changed printers) modified all the text blocks in my document back to "rich black". Even though every text style was defined as 100 % K, and nothing else. I had to manually click on each text block, apply the original Style with no overrides (option-click) – or in cases where I had to use overrides, manually chance the color of the text back to 100 % K. Now I pray that no CMYK text element slips through, as these sorts of "mishaps" cause unnecessary and costly delays at the printers, apart from making me look like a fool. (A CMYK separations view mode would also be nice to have). I understand that a new program – even a professional app – has some kinks to iron out (remember Indesign 1, anyone?) But I really hope this gets really, really high up on someones list of critical corrections/improvements. (I Hope this is not something that will ”never be fixed” because of some underlying RGB thing with the whole suite of apps.) ps. Why am I called a "Newbie" here? I've been doing computer aided layout since PageMaker 2, back in 1987.

I've had an enquiry for some A5 and try-fold leaflets set up in black and 1 spot colour so thought I'd run a few test in Publisher and just made a quick screen vid capturing Affinity's amazing flexibility - I remember having a go in Designer around two years ago and having to give up - just shows how things have improved - would still love to be able to use masks so as to get soft edges on some things (spots always seems to turn out CMYK with a mask in my tests) but I'm really chuffed that it all separates correctly Spot.mov

Hi, does Affinity allow for: 1. Overprint - I need to overprint certain colours for final print output. 2. Overprint Preview 3. Separations Preview - this is vital in seeing the final output of colours prior to going to print (other than printing physical seps). 4. Spot Colours - In the interim, does Affinity support spot colours - even if its not Pantone Book colours, I then can name it a pantone for the printers reference.

I was wondering for screen printing, if there any timeline for the halftone filters in Photo or Designer? How about printing host based separations from either program? Thank you.

Hi all. Maybe this is too much to ask at this time, and I know I've already mentioned this earlier, but I've been testing Affinity Designer periodically for proper spot colour gradient support (sometimes I miss a beta or two and I may skip the one that finally brings that feature to the table, hence my method). I cobbled up two similar files in Affinity and Illustrator, with gradients from spot colour to spot colour, spot colour to white, and spot colour to 0% opacity spot colour, and exported them to .PDF. For good measure, I also threw in a 50% opacity spot colour as a control swatch. After opening both files on Acrobat Pro and checking the Output [separation] Preview, I was a bit disheartened to see that Affinity still supports flat spot colour transparency only, whereas gradients are all converted/flattened into CMYK. For now, I can accept this omission, and the fact that it may be due to technical limitations in Affinity's engine or something, but I'm obviously expecting much more from it in the future (and that may include Affinity Photo duo/multitone support too, perhaps?), especially for colour-critical work like in logos, where tight budgets for print production more often than not call for the use of spot colours (and, yes, that also includes spot colour gradients). Though this would be fairly easy to correct (especially for simpler artwork) via a small trip through Illustrator before sending my work to the printing shop, I would really love to ditch it altogether from my workflow, and this would be yet another proverbial nail in its coffin. Can you comment on the feasibility of such a feature and maybe give us a rough ETA? Thanks guys. Once again, kudos for your great work! Pantone test.afdesign Pantone Test-AD.pdf Pantone Test-AI.pdf