Difficult to Identify Groups in Layers in Affinity 2

[Martigny]

Recently updated to Affinity Designer 2 and I love it except for one thing. It's very difficult to identify groups now and groups within groups now (which I have a lot of). This was so clear in Affinity Design 1. Could groups not be made bolder making them easier to identify? Have pasted 2 images to show the difference between the two.

 

[GRH]

I have to agree, some things are best left alone (not broke, don't fix), and this is one case when less is definitely more. I think there are probably things that users have been pleading for that would have been better addressed than twiddling with the UI; after all, 'go faster stripes' don't improve performance or productivity one iota.

[R C-R]

7 hours ago, Martigny said:

Could groups not be made bolder making them easier to identify?

If you mean the disclosure icons that were triangles in circles in V1 & are now just v-shapes, that is just one example of the many places in the UI where low contrast makes it harder to tell how something is set, a problems that never got fixed very well in V1 & is now even worse in V2.

There are now options to not show group thumbnails so you just see a folder icon, but that does not help much.

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, R C-R said:

If you mean the disclosure icons that were triangles in circles in V1 & are now just v-shapes, that is just one example of the many places in the UI...

But even with more visible icons, how would you distinguish between a Group and something else with child layers? 

I think that's what the question is about.

[Martigny]

19 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But even with more visible icons, how would you distinguish between a Group and something else with child layers? 

I think that's what the question is about.

That's exactly what I mean Walt. Thank you.  I had a big file I was working on today. In the end I had to copy the groups etc and paste them into AD 1 again. Now I can work on them easily.

Affinity? What were you thinking of?

 

 

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But even with more visible icons, how would you distinguish between a Group and something else with child layers? 

I think that's what the question is about.

How do you do that in V1? Consider that in either V1 or V2, a parent layer can have a long enough name that you cannot not see all of it, much less the parenthetical layer type suffix V1 offers.

Instead of V1's suffix, V2 now has an option to show the object type as a small icon along with the v-shaped disclosure button, but again, the contrast is low & these small icons are not very easy to tell apart. So it is an improvement in one respect (because its always visible no matter how long the layer type might be) but it needs work to make those icons more visible & easier to tell what object type it is.

For now, my lame workaround (such as it is) is to set the tooltip delay to close to zero & hover the pointer over the type icon whenever I can't otherwise tell what kind of layer it is.

[Martigny]

2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

How do you do that in V1? Consider that in either V1 or V2, a parent layer can have a long enough name that you cannot not see all of it, much less the parenthetical layer type suffix V1 offers.

Instead of V1's suffix, V2 now has an option to show the object type as a small icon along with the v-shaped disclosure button, but again, the contrast is low & these small icons are not very easy to tell apart. So it is an improvement in one respect (because its always visible no matter how long the layer type might be) but it needs work to make those icons more visible & easier to tell what object type it is.

For now, my lame workaround (such as it is) is to set the tooltip delay to close to zero & hover the pointer over the type icon whenever I can't otherwise tell what kind of layer it is.

Thank you RCR ... This is more than my question was about. Thank you for your response though

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, Martigny said:

Thank you RCR ... This is more than my question was about. Thank you for your response though

I know it is far from ideal, but instead of copying everything & opening it in V1 (which will break a few V2-only features if you use them), maybe try my workaround of setting the tooltip delay to close to zero & when there is any doubt about what object type a layer is, briefly hover the pointer over the V2 object type icon. It should take less time overall than copying stuff to V1 & won't break any new V2 features.

As for what they were thinking, I am fairly sure they were trying to come up with something that would work with layers with custom names too long to show V1's object type suffixes, which some V1 users complained about, particularly for those using a relatively narrow Layers panel & several nested layers so there was progressively less space for  custom names or even the complete parenthetical object type suffixes.

I think it was a legitimate complaint if for no other reason that it discouraged users from using long custom names in complex projects unless they were willing to use a very wide layers panel, which in turn left less room for the project & window.