Document background color/transparency issue

[Tero]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to transition to Affinity Designer from Sketch/Illustrator permanently but seems like I'm spoiled by few QoL features in those apps. 😄

I'm designing large number of white icons and need export them all at once but I'm finding troubles with few issues:

1) Changing document background color.

I tried to search this issue but the threads I found were few years old and at the time there wasn't any solution. White background in document for obvious reasons won't work when designing white icons and with transparent background it's also hard to see the designs. Creating a fill rectangle is not really an option. It's a workaround, sure, but not a solution.

2) Changing opacity of Global color

This would work for changing fill rectangles in every artboard to transparent for export, but alas it seems you still can't change the opacity of already set Global Color (based on threads I found this has been on wishlist for quite a while).

 

Can you guys offer any other solution how to deal with multiple artboards needing to see what I'm doing (since white on white won't work) but having the ability to export all of them as transparent images? I did try to create one fill rectangle behind all artboards so I wouldn't have to deal with multiple layers for export, but now I can't see artboard boundaries unless I lower the transparency a little, which again is a workaround but not really a solution.

Thanks for your help in advance!

[Paul Masri-Stone]

+1 for changing document background colour to anything I choose.

I am designing white vectors (videogame graphics) and it's just wrong having to workaround with a black rectangle. Every time I change the document size I have to resize the rectangle. Every time I export to PNG I have to hide the black rectangle.

[loukash]

3 hours ago, Paul Masri-Stone said:

changing document background colour to anything I choose

If you use artboards:

• Place an ultralarge rectangle at the bottom, lock it, then you can resize the artboard as you see fit.
   

Or:

• Place a large rectangle outside the artboards in the Layers panel, make it partially transparent to see the artboards:
  
   
• Disable the rectangle on export in the Export persona:
  

 

If you don't want to use artboards or background rectangles, on Mac you can "hack" Designer by replacing the checkerboard background:

 

[Paul Masri-Stone]

Thank you @loukash. Great tips. I hadn't thought about locking the background layer — that'll save me the problem of it always getting selected.