[ Can't be done on * ipad* ] Swatches - Change them in the document palette

[AllAppsUser]

In the colour studio, I've added colours to a document swatch.

How do I change them please?

So say I wanted to change the dark blue in the illustration to something more turquoise.. how do I do this?

The three bar menu only sports "Add current fill to palette". If I tap-hold on the colour it only brings up "Delete" and "Rename".

I tried dragging the circles, but they don't budge, and I can't think where else I can tap on.

[AllAppsUser]

I'm hoping some one will happen along soon and tell me this can be done, or perhaps what the 'Affinity' way is.

[DM1]

3 hours ago, ProDesigner said:

I'm hoping some one will happen along soon and tell me this can be done, or perhaps what the 'Affinity' way is.

Swatches contain predefined colours and these are not editable. You can however create your own colour pallette and add to the existing swatch or save as a document or application swatch. You can choose an existing swatch colour, adjust it in colour studio to your liking and save it.

[AllAppsUser]

Hi @DM1.

I've obviously not been clear, because that's exactly what I've done to get to the illustration I posted in my opening post.

It's once the colours are in there... how do you adjust them?

The dark blue is applied to 12+ objects throughout the illustration and to gradients. I want to tweak the colour. to be a bit more turquoise... updating all the objects and gradients in the process.

[DM1]

29 minutes ago, ProDesigner said:

It's once the colours are in there... how do you adjust them?

The colours 'In there' (in the pallette Itself)  are not editable. 
 

29 minutes ago, ProDesigner said:

The dark blue is applied to 12+ objects throughout the illustration and to gradients. I want to tweak the colour. to be a bit more turquoise... updating all the objects and gradients in the process.

You can select multiple objects/layers and reapply or adjust a colour for both line and fill.
Gradients pose a greater problem as the new (multi layer) selection box becomes the gradient span, not the individual layer.

Maybe you could set the 12 objects as 'symbols' and adjust them that way?

[AllAppsUser]

Hum, this is a big hole in Serif's comprehension of creative work (Dunno if you're part of the team @DM1). There's a sense of "they (Serif) just don't get-it".

It's such a shame to limit the usefulness of a document palette.

Possible app update solution:

A find/select by colour - I'll post this in the features request forum.

A find by gradient too, to address the particular problem gradients pose.

> > >  The moment you save (custom colour) data somewhere, it can be over-written - so why not from the document palette?

I'd be intrigued to know the answer - I'm genuinely curious. What's the problem?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 There's a request for global colours below (that I've happened across so far). It speaks of other evidence elsewhere of dissatifaction in the customer base relating to this.

Is a colour handling review on Affinity's roadmap I wonder, because I'd counsel that it should be.

[Alfred]

8 minutes ago, ProDesigner said:

Dunno if you're part of the team @DM1

No, he’s just a user like you and me. Serif employees are in the Moderators group and have a  badge under their avatars.

[AllAppsUser]

I thought @DM1 wasn't on the team, but couldn't be sure. Another really helpful soul, like you @Alfred. Thanks for the insight there.

[LCamachoDesign]

@ProDesigner global colours do existing in Affinity Designer / Photo / Publisher, and they work as you expect (except for a few bugs). But they are only editable on the desktop version of the apps. My requested you linked above it's just to bring the editor into the iPad.

What this means is, if you bring your file into the desktop Affinity Designer and add global colours there, they will work just fine and as expected both on desktop and the iPad. You just can't change them on the iPad itself. This is probably more clear with an example:

1. Create a new Designer file on the iPad, not because it's necessary, but it makes the point I'm trying to make more clear.
2. Create a new Document Palette. It's important to be this type of palette, so that any swatches added are carried within the file itself.
3. Draw a few vector shapes, save the file and bring it into the desktop Affinity Designer via iCloud / OneDrive / Dropbox...
4. On the desktop add a few global colour to the document palette you created in step 2. Don't bother applying them to the shapes, just save the file and take it back to the iPad.
5. On the iPad, apply the newly created swatches to the your shapes. Shapes will change colour, you still can't change the swatches themselves... but save the file again and bring it to the desktop again.
6. On the desktop, edit the global colour swatches. The shapes will change colour accordingly as expected.
7. If you keep doing this iPad <-> Desktop dance you'll realise the 'globalness' of the swatches is never lost.

In summary the iPad apps do support global colours, they understand and apply these properties, they're just no editor for them in the iPad. And that's my request on that post, a swatches editor for the iPad. That's it.

[DM1]

43 minutes ago, LCamachoDesign said:

In summary the iPad apps do support global colours, they understand and apply these properties, they're just no editor for them in the iPad. And that's my request on that post, a swatches editor for the iPad. That's it.

It’s unfortunate that some really 'basic' drawing features are yet to be 'ported' to the iPad. Importing palletes, for example) is another basic feature that is missing, but many requests made and no response from serifs developers. The app has so much potential..... maybe they're saving it for version 2 .

[DM1]

1 hour ago, ProDesigner said:

Hum, this is a big hole in Serif's comprehension of creative work (Dunno if you're part of the team @DM1). There's a sense of "they (Serif) just don't get-it".

I think they do 'get it'  because many of those features already exist in the desktop version (and I suspect could be made available in the iPad version). Maybe it’s a marketing thing?

No, not part of the 'team', just someone with an interest in theses apps and too much spare time on his hands. 😁

[AllAppsUser]

@DM1

8 hours ago, DM1 said:

...maybe they're saving it for version 2 .

7 hours ago, DM1 said:

Maybe it’s a marketing thing?

If they are it's not a clever strategy (customers will write-off, invest elsewhere and not return), and silence is not marketing.

I suspect the truth is it's a programmatic challenge somewhere.. perhaps even a previous decision proving difficult to own because hindsight has shone a light. Or something in the iOS architecture is a bit tough here.

Clients love mucking about with colours (it's the only thing they focus on sometimes). Quickly changing colours on the fly infront of the client is high on a wish list -  and it's the iPad you have with you in the clients office... if Serif have missed/ignored that, it possibly says a lot.

I know the software has a way to go, of course it does and they've done a cracking job this far, IMHO. I'm quite the evangelist truth be told. I just hope they see their way through all the bells & whistles requests.

7 hours ago, DM1 said:

many of those features already exist in the desktop version

I've been hammering the iPad versions, tbh (don't want to embarrass myself in the client's office)... all but ignoring the Desktop versions (for now) - actually been wondering if I need the desktop at all....

[AllAppsUser]

1 hour ago, LCamachoDesign said:

In summary the iPad apps do support global colours,

As I've said above, though I own the desktop apps, I've really not used them much, hammering the ipad versions instead... so yup, there's holes in my view of things right now. Thanks for filling a few of them in.

Have amended title for clarity (though I've tagged this with ipad and my opening post is all about the ipad... I know I struggle sometimes to understand whether desktop or ipad versions are being referred to in here).

[LCamachoDesign]

3 hours ago, ProDesigner said:

If they are it's not a clever strategy (customers will write-off, invest elsewhere and not return), and silence is not marketing.

Yeah, that's particularly true now that Illustrator for the iPad is two months away from release, and from what I can scrape from the videos out there, it's at least quite acceptable for a first version. And that's the gamble of not listening to the need of basic features like global colours... people need to remember that there's no such thing as one unified "Adobe". These corporations are collections of "independent companies" which happen to operate under the same name. As such what one of these "companies" achieves, says nothing about what the others will. Just like what one coffee shop does says nothing about the coffee shop down the street.

That's why you end up with massively asymmetric softwares called "Adobe something". An excellent example is the XD/InDesign pair. Adobe XD is developed by a team that's very active, releases updates several times per month, is always putting out great new features, keeps up and sometimes sets the pace on UI/UX software. Then you have Adobe InDesign, which let's call it what it is, it's abandonware. It's left to rot in the open fields. They don't even bother fixing glaring issues, "new versions" are nothing more than number bumps with a literal couple of unneeded, not useful, "features" released every... two years? It's that bad.

The gamble is, who are the people behind Illustrator for the iPad? The same kind living dead that "work" on InDesign? In that case you don't have to develop global colours... or a pen tool, or anything. Just do a blank app and you'll be ahead for years to come. Or is it a team of relentless folks like those behind XD? Well, if that is the case then Affinity product managers should start sweating profusely...

They got lucky with Photoshop for iPad, which for the most part turned out to be dud, and it doesn't look like it will ever catch up. But it's like I said, you don't know who's doing what. Just because the Photoshop team is terrible, doesn't mean the Illustrator team will be.

[AllAppsUser]

Can't argue at all with that view @LCamachoDesign.

There's an eternal business truth here....

Innovation driven by external forces (developments in UI/UX - Adobe XD's) is actually just 'fast responder'.. and sure, they get lucky and set the pace sometimes. If you're set-up to respond quickly, it's (relatively) easy. It's the getting set-up that's hard.

By contrast, where you have a product/activity (market) perceived to be mature - print design - that's an altogether different thing. It's a more challenging area requring true innovation driven from within. Much harder. Though it's where real winning growth lies... because everyone else in that market thinks it's mature too. (I happen to wear another hat at times, that's about achieving this very thing).

Adobe simply don't know what to do with InDesign. It's mature.. in their minds. To be fair, it's a challenge because it got to a point where it did 99% of what print designers needed and did it well enough 99% of the time, a decade ago. Truth is, Adobe have innovated very little with the core of the 'suite'. They bought PageMaker, gave it a makeover and Quark-ified it a bit... hey presto: InDesign as you pretty much know it today. Illustrator was beaten into a cocked hat by FreeHand, so they bought that and binned it - job done there. I expect Adobe to attempt a repeat of that last manoeuvre in the not too distant future. It may be the way Serif lets us all down in the end.

[LCamachoDesign]

13 hours ago, ProDesigner said:

Adobe simply don't know what to do with InDesign. It's mature.. in their minds. To be fair, it's a challenge because it got to a point where it did 99% of what print designers needed and did it well enough 99% of the time, a decade ago.

Fair enough, but then at the very least clean it up to a usable state. I only install InDesign once a year, to work on a product catalogue that's about 150 to 200 pages long. Nothing too fancy, it's a B2B company, so it's mostly grids of photos and product pricing beneath. My work computer is a Ryzen 3700x, 32Gb DDR4 3200Mhz, GeForce GTX 1060 6Gb, and a M.2 970 Samsung SSD. It's an overkill beast for graphic design.

And let me tell you, InDesign runs like sh*t. It's dog slow simply scrolling through pages. Editing the contents takes forever. I could go on, every single action is slow. I mean, it's not a 2 page résumé, but it's also not a highly detailed National Geographic book either... come on. And it's been on this state since... ever really. I don't think I've ever seen InDesign perform acceptably over the years.

In this case I'm very glad for Affinity Publisher. I use it for all my internal documents, and any client work that does not required very advanced features. Sometimes it's just that, get the basics working, and get them working well and fast. Extra bells and whistles are only useful if the basics are solid.

And that gets us back to Affinity Designer. Sure, it has plenty of nice features, but they need to get the basics done well first. For example, what good serves the appearance panel, where I can add dozens of strokes to an object, if I can't get the colours working reliably? I'm supposed to add different colours to each stroke, and then manually go through each of them if I later change my mind on colour combinations? What if I have dozens of such objects?

So yeah, your (and mine) request is very much valid. And looking at how others fail in the basics, namely InDesign in... well even scrolling through pages, is a good example of why getting the basic right matters a lot. Is InDesign better than Affinity Publisher? I guess so. Will I ever use it I'm unless forced by a large project? Not in a million years.

EDIT:

Quote

Innovation driven by external forces (developments in UI/UX - Adobe XD's) is actually just 'fast responder'.. and sure, they get lucky and set the pace sometimes. If you're set-up to respond quickly, it's (relatively) easy. It's the getting set-up that's hard.

Literally today, the XD team added one new feature that's a massive help on your UX/UI work. You always had the ability to design the UI for (a common example) and iPad and an iPhone in the same file. But then when it came to share that with a client, you had to create an extra screen as a starting place where they could tap to see the iPad or iPhone UIs. I used to do this "hack" all the time. Not anymore, now you can select a number of interactions from your file and create a link that shows only that. From now on I'll create two share links out of the same file, one for the iPhone and another for the iPad.

This is the kind of understanding how the designers work, how they interact with clients, that sets the XD team apart from all other teams at Adobe and many other companies. Listen to how your customers work, listen to their pain points, and address that quickly. Today's release literally only has that one feature and nothing else (and keyboard shortcuts to switch between personas), but that's fine, I'm not stressed out by that. I know that next month they'll be back, they'll add yet another nugget of improvement that makes my life easier. They do it in small, but consistent and timely, chunks.