Layer names barely readable. UI Prefs don't help. Can barely use V2

[Les Wilson]

I hope this gets fixed. I can barely use V2. I tweaked the UI settings as much as possible but the color chosen for Layer names is a UI design disaster. Yet some layer names are nice a legible. I have no idea why. I'm hoping this is a BUG not a WAD.

[Alfred]

The legibility of light grey on a dark grey background is (as you would expect) not great, but it’s good enough that I can not only read the word ‘Rectangle’ but also see that the descender of the ‘g’ is clipped. Not ideal!

By the way, JPG isn’t ideal for screenshots where text is included (because of the compression artefacts that you get around hard edges). PNG is much clearer, and it will probably give you smaller file sizes for screenshots of dialogs.

[MikeTO]

The issue with automatic layer names (i.e., Rectangle, Curve) lacking contrast is a known issue. I assume we were supposed to be able to adjust the contrast with the Text Contrast preferences option.

I agree it's too difficult to read with the default font size.

[Les Wilson]

Thanks. I couldn't find another report of the problem ... there are so many ... and one gargantuan "I hate the UI" kind of thread .... I have the contrast at maximum and font size at large. It's horrible.

[Granddaddy]

The disheartening aspect of all this is that Affinity 2 has actually made the UI worse by reducing contrast in a UI that is already difficult to read because of tiny typeface, tiny icons, and inconsistent use of highlighting. How does that happen after years of reports from customers having difficulty with Affinity 1 and years of additional development to produce Affinity 2?

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/173835-what-ergonomic-design-principles-call-for-minimal-contrast-and-reduced-readability-in-user-interfaces/#comment-1000160

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/174379-visually-consistent-unselected-active-and-disabled-states/#comment-1001967

There are now so many threads from so many different people describing different aspects of what is basically one problem of usability/readability that it is difficult to keep up with them all.

[loukash]

4 hours ago, Les Wilson said:

I couldn't find another report of the problem

I vaguely remember seeing it reported a few times, and somewhere also acknowledged by staff as "logged".

Personally, I consider this a bug, so it's always a much better idea to report such issues in forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/71-bug-reporting to get them acknowledged and logged faster.

[Matthew Schultz]

Was there ever an answer to this? I can't believe how unreadable the layer text is and there is no way of tweaking it via prefs.

It's driving me crazy.

[PaoloT]

To read the new UI (in dark mode) I have to use the Zoom feature in the Accessibility preferences. This should say something.

Paolo

 

[Les Wilson]

It was only slightly improved. It's awful. I no longer recommend it to others. 

[fde101]

One factor is that the dimmed text of the layer type is not responding at all to the UI contrast/brightness settings.  The undimmed text of layers that are named does respond, and the background responds slightly to the "UI Brightness" control, but the range of that control is a bit too limiting to get the dimmed layer type text to a reasonable point.  I would argue that the fact that the text does not respond to those settings is probably best treated as a bug.

The general lack of contrast/readability for that text may not be a bug, but it is clearly a design flaw.

If you hover over the layer preview / icon you get a tooltip with the same text that is being displayed, except that it is actually quite reasonable to read - but you shouldn't really need to do that.

I agree that there should really be some improvements in this area.

[MEB]

Hi @Les Wilson,
Thanks for your feedback.
We have this logged as a bug (contrast issue in automatically named layers). I've updated/bumped the report to bring it up to devs attention again.