Textured Line Style for Pen Tool

[Daniel Amberson]

(Apologies if this has been suggested before, I'm legally blind and couldn't read back that far in this forum section before getting eyestrain. I also apologies for any typos for the same reason-)

One of the only things that bugged me about Affinity Designer in general was the weird behavior with the pen tool and trying to give it a textured line style. The button isn't greyed out, you can still click on it, but it just acts like you didn't and snaps back to what you had previously.

My suggestion here is to allow the textured line style to be selected and usable with the pen tool. I see many, many designers draw a normal line with the pen tool and set a brush manually afterwards. Repeatedly. Over and over and over-- seems like this'd be an invaluable time-saver tool. Many of the examples I can pull up were in past Affinity Spotlights as well (one such example, this one featuring the Artifex Forge; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAN2QlYUfRI).

Instead of drawing many blank lines with the pen tool and selecting all of them to assign a brush and tweak the settings afterwards, you could just have the brush pre-loaded into the pen tool. This could also save a lot with brush management, as you can have an area somewhere in the document that has all the brushes you're using for that project, and then just synchronize defaults from selection when needed.

To people who's gonna suggest the vector brush tool; The vector brush tool and the pen tool fill two very different niches, one's for freehanding strokes, and the other's for plotting down individual points. If you want a perfectly straight line with a texture, using the brush tool for that wouldn't work out as well as using the pen tool.

 

An alternate suggestion, although one that I'm less keen on, is to just grey out the textured line style button when using the pen (or pencil) tool.

Would very much like input on this, and if there's anything I can do to help push this through, I'd be willing to do it. Cheers. o/

Edited March 19, 2021 by Daniel Amberson