Designer Recommendations

[doughead]

First of all, great product!  Several of the things I'm wishing for are already on the roadmap, so I won't bother wasting your time repeating them here.  

 

So first of all, my gripes.  After first buying this illustration software, I was literally dumbfounded at the lack of a dedicated LINE tool.  I finally figured out how to use the pen tool to accomplish the task (awkward).  I was then blown away by the complete lack of arrows for the ends of line segments (I mean, even the most basic drawing program nowadays has these things).  Those are probably two of my biggest gripes.  And as for the Arrow shape tool, control of the arrowheads at each end using the toolbar was really cumbersome until I figured out to use the control points (toolbar controls not very intuitive).  Additionally, I don't particularly care for the Command-J shortcut for the Duplicate function, but I can live with it.  Also, I would prefer to have the VIEW commands available from a pop-up menu somewhere within the workspace window.  It's also rather awkward in my opinion not having access to a document window's title bar, as I routinely do things like duplicate the current file or revealing the file in the Finder, all from the title bar; I know I can accomplish the same tasks another way, but it's not normal.  With your Callout tools (rounded rectangle and ellipse), I found it disappointing that it's so cumbersome to attach text to the callout (I mean that's the whole point of a callout isn't it?); whenever I would try to attach text to a callout using the Frame Text tool, the callout itself would disappear!  And when I created dashed lines, the controls available for dashed lines didn't do what I expected (as far as dash spacing), and turned out to be very unintuitive.  When creating text on a path, it's unclear to me how the software decides whether to place the text on the outside or inside of the path (it seemed rather random to me).  Also, twice in a row, when attempting to use the Intersect tool with two simple overlapping shapes (an oval and an arrow shape), it would lock up the program (progress bar running indefinitely).  And another thing… I discovered that once you fill a shape with a gradient, there's no obvious way to get rid of the gradient and go back to a simple color fill without going through the extra steps of filling both ends of the gradient with the same color.  Those are my main complaints; now on to feature requests.

 

While we're talking about gradients, I would like to see the ability to do compound gradients (more than two color points).  I would also very much like to see text morphing capabilities in Designer (the lack of such capability is especially curious since it's available in Affinity Photo).  

 

Anyway, that's all for now.  I'm sure I'll come up with more as I use the program more.  Thanks for listening.  

[Dave Harris]

Thanks for your feedback. To address a few of those: whether text is on the inside or outside of a path is supposed to depend on whether you clicked on the inside or outside. (I think this is more useful for lines than for closed shapes.) Using Layer > Convert to Text Path will always put the text on the outside.

 

You can get rid of a gradient from the Gradient tool by changing the Type to Solid in the context toolbar at the top. If you are not in the Gradient tool you can simply apply another colour and it will replace the gradient.

 

You can add more colours to a gradient by clicking on the gradient line with the Gradient tool. That will add a new handle, which you can select and recolour. Alternatively, with the Move tool there is a Fill box in the context toolbar, and you can click on that, select the Gradient tab, and then double-click on the gradient line to add a new handle.

 

Affinity Photo's morphing is a raster effect. Designer is more of a vector program so we really want its morphing to be a vector effect.