Affinity Publisher's swatches make it difficult to work with professionally

[vendara]

i had a pretty intensive course in indesign for the last few months. but since i wasn't a big fan of adobe even before the course, i wanted to transfer the knowledge i gained to affinity publisher. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that many important functions are not available, or are extremely cumbersome to use.

1. spot colors
If you want to make a spot color, you MUST create a new global color. There is no option to convert an existing color to a spot color.

2. overprinting
In InDesign you can select an object and mark it as "overprint". In Publisher, you have to set up a swatch and mark the color itself as overprint.

3. delete a global color
When you delete a global color, you should be able to replace it with an existing global color.

4. add global colors automatically
When adding a vector graphic, the colors it contains should be added directly to the document palette.

5. create palette from document
since point 4 does not apply, this function is useful. however, even colors from images are added, so you have to disable it first, otherwise this function is useless again.

6. quality of life
A big help would be that when you double click a color in the swatches, the "Global Colors" window (which opens when you create a new global color) opens. This small change would fix point 1.

 

I would love to work 100% with affinity. But these points make my decision difficult.

[DGee]

I agree, after using these apps for years and attempting a transition from Adobe at all costs, I have to say that I feel as if Serif lacks a clear vision to give professionals the basic tools they need to put out professional work in a timely manner. There are enough tools to create a colourful butterfly and share it with your pals on insta no doubt about that. But using these apps professionals has many caveats that could disappoint many clients. I think they need to rethink the very foundation of these apps in terms of workflow and get advice from people who are putting out work for big clients if they want to evolve into something that can become a real substitute for adobe apps without serious compromises that can have an impact on businesses.

[Petar Petrenko]

I wonder why Affinity insists on standard colors instead of global ones only? InDesign and Quark support only global colors.

[fde101]

1 hour ago, NNN said:

I wonder why Affinity insists on standard colors instead of global ones only?

This has been discussed multiple times on the forums already:

The Affinity file format can travel among all three apps: Photo, Designer and Publisher.

While DTP apps have traditionally used what Serif calls "global colors," photo and illustration apps generally have not.

Requiring people using Photo or Designer to use only global colors would be even more out of place than supporting non-global colors is in the DTP app, and document compatibility would be broken without supporting them in Publisher as well.

 

Practically all of the points in the first post have also come up.  Serif is not trying to clone Adobe, they are doing their own thing.  It will obviously not work the same way.

Some of these suggestions can still be done without breaking the established document model that Serif has already put together (and almost certainly should be done), such as #1 and #3.

Some of them would be good as *options* - such as #4-6.

Others, such as #2, seem to me to be highly unlikely to change and will generally require you to adjust your way of working.