Auto Layout and Design System Library

[Sivadharshan]

Hello all!

Contrary to usual belief that only Adobe XD, Figma, Invision are great at UI design, I have a strong feeling that Affinity Designer has more scope to grow because it has a lot more to offer. Designer is intuitive, has WAY MORE control over curves than the popular UI design tools and is a complete design software while the others just barely are one. Affinity sure doesn't have prototyping, but otherwise it is a killer application for UI development, because I get to work with things as small as the pixel perfection of icons in the UI to something as broad as having symbols, constraints and even re-usable assets.

According to me, Adobe XD, Figma, etc., are "Tools" but Affinity Designer feels like a (end-to-end) "Solution" to all UI design needs.

But I believe there are two little things that Affinity Designer currently needs to do to make the life of a UI designer better:

1. Auto Layout: Affinity's Constraints feature is amazing. It is simple yet very effective when it comes to UI design in Affinity Designer. But it lacks when I add text, that will be changed at different instances, as an element inside constraint group. The text flows into the group and there is no option to set the basic padding beyond which the container resizes according to the height/width of the text that is set to auto layout. Same thing happens when I need any design element to resize according to the padding and not just as a relative size of the parent container.

2.Design System Library: This is a simple one. I'm not sure if this is very important but here I go. I know .afassets, .afpalatte & .afbrushes exist. But it will be awesome if we can combine those files and send it out as one file, a .aflibrary for example, that when loaded, loads up the .afassets, .afpalatte & more at once. This could also mean something to other designers as well. Say the designer develops a icon system, brush style, color palatte and a highlighting system (quotations and more) for a book, he/she, just has to send the ".aflibrary" file to a co-designer (or even if he/she sells that design system) that loads all the required assets into the respective panes at once.

Hope this is a usefull suggestion.

Have a great day everyone!

EDIT: Also, it will be great if the above mentioned ".aflibrary" file also gets saved along with the normal affinity file unlike the other asset files like afassets afpalatte and so on. This saving together could be an option like saving history.

 

Edited August 29, 2020 by tsivadharshan

[Seneca]

3 hours ago, tsivadharshan said:

But it will be awesome if we can combine those files and send it out as one file, a .aflibrary for example, that when loaded, loads up the .afassets, .afpalatte & more at once.

That's a great suggestion.

[MTimis]

+ 1 for AutoLayout. This is one of the top features for web and UI design. 

 

[kyzouik]

+ 1 for AutoLayout, I'm still using Figma because of that

[HiroKhan]

Still... Would love to see that! With the massive edit options, this would be insane and killer features!!

[lexislav]

Just editing logos on poster… and I miss autolayour for that 🤪

[Rudantu]

+ 1 for AutoLayout ✌️