How to visualize a looping design?

[michalmph]

How can I visualize a looping design that's to be printed on a tape?

Two cases where I encounter this most often:

1. product label design, where the label is glued around a cyllindrical shape (bottle, paper tube, can) with an intersection - so that one end of the label is glued on top of the other after it's wrapped around the packaging

2. continuous tape designs for print or custom adhesive tapes

Actually, I think my question is a subset of "how to generate looping patterns", but all the materials I found on this did not show any visualization tools.
I end up copy-pasting the design and modifying it by eye, which is imprecise and time consuming.

[sfriedberg]

The usual trick, which is not specific to Affinity products, is to manually wrap your design so that the seams run down the middle of your view.  Then you can edit the design across the seam to make it look the way you want.

For a 1D wrap like a can label or tape repeat (a seamless tile would be a 2D wrap), get the basics of your design the way you want them.  Then make a couple of copies and offset them left and right so their right and left edges align.  Edit these copies.  When you get the seam looking good, apply the changes from the copies to the original.  Then repeat the copy-and-offset to doublecheck that things look good in the finished design.

Once you get adept at this, you can actually start out building the design at the seam.  Once you have the ends of the wrapping pattern worked out across two blanks, move them to the appropriate places in a new single blank, then fill in the middle of the design.

[telemax]

Symbols in Affinity Designer

 

 

 

 

 

[michalmph]

@sfriedberg I used to render from Illustrator to smart layers in Photoshop, but I don't want workarounds anymore. I want to see the design and the intersections as I work on them. Workarounds affect the final design and waste a lot of time. That's why I wondered if there is a solution or best practice to do this in Affinity.

@telemax Perfect. Thank you!