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Affinity Designer Artboard -- Everything is gone?


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Hi. I'll cut to the chase here because I'm just about in tears over what seems like a very dumb problem.

I was working on a vector design (a simple candy heart) and trying to get a feel for the tools. This is my first time with Designer (trying out the trial version), but I've been using similar programs for decades. I accidentally used the Artboard Tool. When everything disappeared, I undid the action.

Except nothing was undid. The Artboard is gone, but I cannot see any of my objects, despite them being visible on the layers menu. No matter how far I go back on the history menu, none of my objects reappear, and if I try to select anything it shows "0 objects". This is no "Artboard" on my layers. This was within the first ~10 mins of using this program, and I have spent the better part of the last hour searching the forums trying to undo this one simple click, to no avail. 

1567833044_ScreenShot6.png.d0625b840aef5aa6b592d98311a8b42c.png

When I try to view the full image at 100%, it's suddenly almost non-existent. I'll include my view mode panel as well.

701677560_ScreenShot9.png.ea7603993fb827d1d75bfba1fbe22177.png

1683644193_ScreenShot12.png.07cf941527ce264bca6f1e549c6ebbce.png

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Welcome to the forums.
I’ve tried to recreate the issue but have had no luck so far on Windows.
Since we don’t know the exact actions you performed it’s a bit difficult for us to try it for ourselves.
The closest I have got is to add an artboard off to the side of the other layers, and then delete it. This leaves me with a document with no background at all, see attached video. Undoing my actions gets me back to where I needed to be just fine but it’s a little strange.
I’ve also attached the file with history in case it’s of any use to anyone.
If I can reproduce your problem I’ll post something here.

background-goes-missing.afdesign

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17 hours ago, Sagan said:

When I try to view the full image at 100%, it's suddenly almost non-existent. I'll include my view mode panel as well.

My guess is all your layers are now far off the canvas. Try selecting one of them in the Layers panel & in the Transform panel check the x & y values. If they are very large numbers or negative ones, try resetting them to zero.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Hi @Sagan and welcome! It looks to me as though your candy heart group doesn't have a tick in the box next to it. That means it and its members have been set to invisible. Tick the box and see?

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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Hi Sagan - The easiest way I've found to locate an object is to double-click directly on the little icon (picture of the object) of the applicable layer. Be sure you have a check-mark in the "visibility box" on the right hand side of the layer.  Clicking on the layer icon changes the view to zoom right in on that particular object and then if you zoom out a little everything is right there.

Hope this helps, there's nothing worse then being frustrated with new software!!! 🙂 Jen

I have some YT tutorials and a Skillshare course on Affinity Designer.

This link allow you to watch the course for free:  https://skl.sh/32qtnRt

YouTube tutorials for Affinity Designer:  http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU_Y96iOVu_M-f1xWDEN2TA

Check out my Youtube tutorials and my Skillshare course on Affinity Designer:
This link allows you to watch the course for free: https://skl.sh/32qtnRt
YouTube tutorials for Affinity Designer: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU_Y96iOVu_M-f1xWDEN2TA

 

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On 2/29/2020 at 3:18 PM, h_d said:

Hi @Sagan and welcome! It looks to me as though your candy heart group doesn't have a tick in the box next to it. That means it and its members have been set to invisible. Tick the box and see?

Hi, yes that group was invisible because it was an earlier draft I wanted out of the way. You can see in the original post that I have an entire visible group I was working on that had disappeared, so the invisible group is not relevant to the question at hand. 

 

On 2/29/2020 at 2:33 AM, GarryP said:

Welcome to the forums.
I’ve tried to recreate the issue but have had no luck so far on Windows.
Since we don’t know the exact actions you performed it’s a bit difficult for us to try it for ourselves.
The closest I have got is to add an artboard off to the side of the other layers, and then delete it. This leaves me with a document with no background at all, see attached video. Undoing my actions gets me back to where I needed to be just fine but it’s a little strange.
I’ve also attached the file with history in case it’s of any use to anyone.
If I can reproduce your problem I’ll post something here.

background-goes-missing.afdesign 11.24 kB · 0 downloads

What you're showing here is the exact actions I took -- just made a little square with the Artboard Tool. Except when I undid the action, the "Artboard Layer" disappeared, but nothing else changed. So, it was stuck in that state with no Artboard Layer and no way to change anything, even if I went back 20+ steps. Nothing I did put the canvas back to normal. 

Apologies if this happens to anyone else who finds this question looking for an answer. I ended up just deleting the whole project. One single click is not worth 2 hours of pulling my hair out and crying and scouring the internet, and it's ridiculous that I would even have to do that much in the first place. Luckily this was just a quick little illustration, but what if this had been a much bigger time intensive project or I was on a deadline? I'm not a novice by any means, and I'm not at all happy with this software.

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It’s a shame that you’ve had this bad experience with the software. Unfortunately strange issues like this still come up from time to time. Designer is still quite young and not every possible problem can be foreseen and fixed before we users find them. That’s not an excuse, it’s just how things are.
The team can usually diagnose a problem and fix it for the next version but they generally need the original file to work from. If you have deleted the file then that limits the amount of diagnosis they can do.
Hopefully your future experiences with the software will be better.

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On Windows, if I have canvas content in the document, and then create an artboard somewhere off the canvas, the prior content ends up on the pasteboard.

If I then use Ctrl+Z, the artboard disappears, and the canvas reappears with all its prior content.

Has anyone tried that basic test on Mac?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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29 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Has anyone tried that basic test on Mac?

On a quick test on my Mac, even if I initially have View > Clip to Canvas enabled & drag the content off-canvas so it isn't visible, when I create an artboard off-canvas, the content becomes visible, although I may have to zoom or pan to see it. If I undo the artboard step, the off-canvas content once again is invisible until I disable View > Clip to Canvas.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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34 minutes ago, R C-R said:

If I undo the artboard step, the off-canvas content once again is invisible until I disable View > Clip to Canvas.

Thanks, R C-R.

I would expect that to happen if the canvas is not recreated by the Undo. On Windows, the Undo removes the artboard and recreates the canvas. So the Clip to Canvas status does not matter.

I think you've confirmed that on Mac the Undo fails to recreate the canvas, which I think is a bug that should be reported.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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1 hour ago, R C-R said:

On a quick test on my Mac, even if I initially have View > Clip to Canvas enabled & drag the content off-canvas so it isn't visible, when I create an artboard off-canvas, the content becomes visible, although I may have to zoom or pan to see it. If I undo the artboard step, the off-canvas content once again is invisible until I disable View > Clip to Canvas.

That is the intended behaviour. The content becomes visible when you add the artboard because by design all documents with artboards have Clip to Canvas disabled. As soon as you undo the artboard. the Clip to Canvas option is honored again and if it was set to clip the contents then any objects outside the canvas would become invisible again as they should.

Everything is working correctly on Mac and the canvas is indeed re-created as it should when you undo the artboard step. The OP never said the contents he was working on where dragged to outside the canvas but even if they were they would remain there when undoing the artboard step (although hidden as explained above).

In cases like this what one can do is zoom out quite a bit, select an object in the layers panel and its bounding box should be easily visible/traceable on canvas.

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44 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I think you've confirmed that on Mac the Undo fails to recreate the canvas, which I think is a bug that should be reported.

No, as @MEB said the canvas is recreated on the undo step. I just included dragging content off the canvas with Clip to Canvas enabled as a 'worst case' example of the only way I could get any content to be hidden.

Sorry for any confusion that caused. Things unrelated to computers are a bit chaotic here ATM so my recent replies have been hurried while I try to handle everything at once.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Sorry for any confusion that caused.

No; it's my fault for not reading more closely.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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