Does Affinity Designer have a method of maintaining a strict colour palette?

[rwessel]

Apologies if there is a solution to this - I've searched and experimented, but can't find a good answer.

I need to maintain thousands of UI icons for a wide range of different (but related) products. They are all required to use a strict colour set, but periodically the prescribed set changes, e.g. to accommodate dark mode better. When this happens, it necessitates a really boring process of working through every image one-by-one and replacing the colours as required.

It would be brilliant if there was a quick way to manage this in Designer, e.g.:

1. Capture a style that is just colour, and have everything drawn instantly update as the styles are edited
2. Have some kind of find-and-replace that worked on colour (or other attributes)

Does anyone have a suggestion for a good workflow to solve this? Or is there anything planned for the future that might help?

[kaffeeundsalz]

Use global colors for this. First, add the desired colors to your palette as global colors, then apply them to your icons once. If you then edit a global swatch in your palette, all objects with that color applied will adapt to the new appearance in realtime.

[rwessel]

Thanks - I think that will do the trick. It would be nice if there was an automated way to pair existing objects with the global palette where the colours match (which is true in every case for us - the build process will fail with an error if we get it wrong). But at least we'll only have to do it once.

It seems as if global palettes are document-specific. If you want it in other documents, you need to export/import. Is there a way to make an Application palette that is also global so we could update all the documents in one step if the colours change?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, rwessel said:

Is there a way to make an Application palette that is also global so we could update all the documents in one step if the colours change?

No.

And Affinity doesn't have any way it could track colors across different documents, especially since documents could be moved using native file-system methods, or duplicated, in ways that Affinity can't control or detect.

[rwessel]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

No.

And Affinity doesn't have any way it could track colors across different documents, especially since documents could be moved using native file-system methods, or duplicated, in ways that Affinity can't control or detect.

That's not exactly what I meant - I realise updating documents in-situ would be virtually impossible.

What I meant is an application palette where any document referencing that palette would be updated on the fly when it's opened (as if you had just updated the palette with the document open).

[kaffeeundsalz]

6 hours ago, rwessel said:

It seems as if global palettes are document-specific. If you want it in other documents, you need to export/import. Is there a way to make an Application palette that is also global so we could update all the documents in one step if the colours change?

Maybe you could just use one document and put each icon on an individual artboard. With the help of the export persona, these could all still be automatically exported to separate files.