Glitch or am I just uninformed how to remove auto-gradient?

[KJV1611]

In a document I'm in when I create a shape it auto fills it in as a gradient, and it won't allow me to remove gradient when I go to FILL, nor if I go to GRADIENT to try to remove the gradient. I have a big document file this is happening in, but for the attached file I just duplicated the document and deleted all the pages. And the issue is reproducible. If I actually create a new document from scratch it doesn't do this but I definitely don't want to redesign all the work I did, so I really just need to figure out what I'm missing, whether it's a setting or something else that's causing this, or if it's a glitch. I'm running Mac OS 10.13.6, i7 2.7 ghz with 16gb ram.

Glitchy Forced Gradient.afpub

[garrettm30]

57 minutes ago, KJV1611 said:

In a document I'm in when I create a shape it auto fills it in as a gradient, and it won't allow me to remove gradient when I go to FILL

First, thank you for sharing the sample document, as it helped me quickly identify the problem.

In this case, the fill is set properly. What you are seeing is not a fill gradient, but a transparency gradient. On top of a white background, it looks like a regular gradient from black to gray, but create another object behind that object and you will see the difference.

To fix, click the transparency tool (the wine glass), then select your object. Next, in the context toolbar, set Type to None.

For creating additional shapes, you will probably want to use either the “Revert Defaults” or the “Synchronize Defaults from Selection” button.

[KJV1611]

Thank you! That fixed it! How were you able to tell that it was a transparency issue when the "layers" section does not show anything unique applied to it? I knew it was transparent as I did see things behind it, but I didn't know it was because I accidently set a synchronization with creating shapes to be transparent.

[thomaso]

15 hours ago, KJV1611 said:

How were you able to tell that it was a transparency issue

You had fortunately uploaded your .afpub. That enabled @garrettm30 probably to check this detail.

15 hours ago, KJV1611 said:

because I accidently set a synchronization with creating shapes to be transparent

It's not necessarily the case that you actively set or saved this fill as custom default.
Usually (by default) Affinity keeps some currently set object properties in memory and uses them for further, newly created objects. For instance color, fill, stroke width, font style etc. This allows a faster workflow with continuous properties if wanted.

[garrettm30]

On 4/30/2021 at 6:02 PM, KJV1611 said:

How were you able to tell that it was a transparency issue when the "layers" section does not show anything unique applied to it?

The layers panel does not show things such as fill and gradient, and transparency gradient is apparently treated as such. It is not the same thing as object transparency (which is part of the layer panel), as they are different values.

I was able to find it because it was really my first guess once I saw that you had selected the object and the fill showed no gradient. I was able to confirm since you uploaded the file, which makes it easier to identify and test the problem.

I think thomaso has answered the rest of your questions, but let us know if you desire further clarification.