UI too small

[mr.burns]

Hello,

I am brandnew to Affinity tools and downloaded Affinity Photo Trial yesterday. Up to now I am very impressed!
But I have a problem. I use it on an iMac (from 2011) with 27 inch screen and El Capitan. 

The UI symbols, icons, bars, buttons, etc. appear very small on my high resolution screen. The only thing I found is to set the 'Font UI size' to large.

This makes it a littlebit better but all toolbar buttons, slider buttons, nodes of curves etc. appear very small so it is not very comfortable to see and to use.

One has to be very precise to reach a certain button / icon etc. if it is only 2 mm on screen!
Also the guides (the blue lines you drag out of the ruler) have a width of only 1 pixel and it is very difficult to see.

 

Also the subwindows like e.g. curve, levels, etc. appear realtively small (around 8 cm in width on my screen). 

This is very small in width if I should judge the curve, histogram values or whatever, I prefer to have bigger analyzing windows because then I can see more details.

 

Is there any way to increase the size of all UI elements?

Thanks a lot!

  

[MEB]

Hi mr.burns,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Currently there's no way to change the size of the icons/buttons in Affinity Photo. You can change the size of the tool handles on canvas (path nodes, bounding box controls, gradient stops etc) in Affinity Photo ▸ Preferences, Tools section, Tool Handle Size.

[misc33]

I have a similar problem, and would like to see the ability to change the sizing of UI elements. In the meantime, rather than change the resolution of my screen to get things bigger, I simply press Ctrl and scroll to enlarge portions of the entire screen as needed. Not an ideal solution, but still very quick and does the job.

[MEB]

Changing the screen resolution to a lower one with make all UI elements bigger.

To use the solution proposed by @misc33 you have to enable it in OS X System Preferences, Accessibility section, checking Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.

[mr.burns]

Hi,

 

Don't get me wrong but I don't have a high resolution screen to reduce the resolution just for the lack of Affinity.
I really wonder that the developers did not catch this point on an earlier step of the development process.

Especially on Macs we have very high resolutions since several years now. 

A big player on the imaging software market should know this and provide an professional way to give the users a comfortable way to scale up the UI elements as they need.

This topic appears already several times in different threads on this Affinity forum and hopefully there will be a solution soon!

Again, I really recommend to take a look at Blender. I did not find any other software right now which makes it so easy to scale any UI element just by one simple value!

[chaoskcw]

+1

 

Very critical for use on 4K monitors and beyond with OSX.

[R C-R]

At least for me, while using my non-retina 27" iMac the problem is not so much the size of the UI elements as not enough contrast for all of them to stand out from the background.

[gvreugde]

Sign me up as another interested party who is really struggling to see the icons, particularly the vertical column.  This is a major usability issue with only "detune your expensive system" as the current solutions.

[mac_heibu]

"GUI size" and "GUI Contrast" seems to become the ultimate running gag with Affinity Designer/Photo.

I really like the products, but – as I wrote months ago – I am not willing to use these applications, until they reach an acceptable level of usability.

Look at the attached screenshot of the tool bar in original size. Can you tell at one glance, which tool is active? Is this hide and seek game really meant seriously by the developers?

In my eyes it is nothing but an embarrassing concession to something, what seems to be "cool".

[Oval]

[…]

Can you tell at one glance, which tool is active? Is this hide and seek game really meant seriously by the developers?

In my eyes it is nothing but an embarrassing concession to something, what seems to be "cool".

 

Selections like selected tools are not highlighted consistently in blue. Perhaps they change the icons/contrasts. Soon in some years.

 

Still same level here: 

[R C-R]

Look at the attached screenshot of the tool bar in original size. Can you tell at one glance, which tool is active?

No, and that is even true when viewing the screenshot here, which on my Mac displays it at about twice the actual size of the tool palette in the app.

 

I have learned to live with it, mostly by looking at the cursor shape & the text at the bottom of the window for clues about which tool is active, but it is an annoyance that substantially reduces the fun of using such an otherwise well thought out app.

[Jayares]

Thank goodness, I thought it was only me. I agree, re the tool icons being too small. Making Affinity software almost unusable. I find the programs to be great in most ways, but to be honest, I only purchased them to give Adobe and Quark a jolt.We are not all rolling in cash and at the moment, the affordability of the Affinity programs is a refreshing change in the graphical software business.

[thomaso]

58 minutes ago, Jayares said:

I agree, re the tool icons being too small. Making Affinity software almost unusable.

As a workaround you only can reduce your screen/monitor resolution. That way every item appears larger, page or artboard size included.

On 6/9/2016 at 11:08 AM, mac_heibu said:

Can you tell at one glance, which tool is active? Is this hide and seek game really meant seriously by the developers?

In my eyes it is nothing but an embarrassing concession to something, what seems to be "cool".

Agree. Especially with a dark user interface, the selected items of the user interface (buttons) are hard to detect: their black background is too close to the dark gray around it. If you lighten the gray a little, it the black would be easier to see.

Unfortunately, changing the UI gamma does not improve the image, but only shifts the brightness of the entire UI, the UI black of the selected included. Instead, it would make sense to influence the contrast.

 

[mac_heibu]

… and a three year old statement emerges to the surface again! At this time the UI was much worse to use than after the actual revisions. But obviously there is still some work to be done!

[R C-R]

57 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Agree. Especially with a dark user interface, the selected items of the user interface (buttons) are hard to detect: their black background is too close to the dark gray around it.

I have complained about this almost since day one at the end of 2014 when I bought my first Affinity app, explaining that the problem, simply put, is there is not enough contrast between the background & the selected item. But instead of fixing that, we eventually got the light UI (which I know some users wanted). But for some reason I cannot understand, the contrast issue has never been addressed or even acknowledged.

Very frustrating!

[RalfL]

I've been looking for alternatives to Adobe for a while, and it has become more urgent now due to the Venezuela issue - I want to get away from the subscription shackles. Affinity seems like the best option. It is just this long standing UI problem that keeps me away from it. Bad contrast and tiny size of the icons makes it impossible for me to use. I don't get it. How hard can it be to to fix that? No such issue with any other software. (Used to be a problem with many programs in the past, but everyone I care about seems to meanwhile have fixed it ...)

[ctrlaltdesign]

Found this via google while looking for solutions, was hoping the solution was at the end of the thread.
It was not.

Why would you make an art product hard to use at 4k? It's like building a race car with the tiniest steering wheel.

[MEB]

Hi ctrlaltdesign,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
What OS are you using - macOS or Windows? and what's the size of your screen (inches)?

[RalfL]

Hi MEB,

Welcome back to the thread!

Win10, 34", 3440x1440px

(I tried on other screens, 15" laptop, 17" secondary screen, it's no good anywhere. But of course, I really want to use my main screen to work on.)

[misc33]

For the most part I get along just fine, but from time to time I find myself using Ctrl + mouse-scroll (Mac) to zoom into parts of the UI that are hard to see.

 

[Ecnavda]

Hi all,

I have the same problem too. Both the Affinity designer's UI icons and Tool's texts are too small for me. It affects my progress to get familar in Affinity siute.

In fact, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop having the same problem too. It is funny that this problem carry to their update in late 2019. See the user's feedback in their forum, they still cannot completely solve the problem. The application cannot taking care with the changes in high resolution and bigger screens. Their support staff always mentioned that they will reflect these problems to their product team.

Remember, this is the fundamental need of any softwares or apps (no matter which OS or displays). Especially the softwares for "designing visual".

I expect that Affinity team can solve this problem nicely and react quickly. Suggested the team to review and benchmarking with Freehand and early versions of Illustrator. Give up "the complex & scary professional look" and Bring back the excellent user experience to the users.

Thanks!

[GRH]

I can't help thinking that the ' dark look ' (yes, I have heard the arguments; easier on the eye and so forth)  is a fashion statement of the 'Emperors New Clothes' category.

Recently, the bank sent me a new shiny pin pad.

Guess which one is the new one.

Dark mode, it seems, is not limited to user interfaces.

[RalfL]

I personally prefer the dark look, but that is not the issue here. As long as there is good contrast and the icons are large enough, it's all fine for me - at least usable.

Ideally, of course, there will be a choice. Of colour and scaling. For Affinity, currently, there is no choice and no matter the colour, everything is just to small to be usable for me.

@Ecnavda Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop totally had the same issue. But they solved it (for me, at least) years ago ...

"I expect that Affinity team can solve this problem nicely and react quickly." - We may at least keep dreaming. So far they have neither confirmed the issue nor shown any interest in it. Why? I wonder.

[cjchambers]

Just posting to ask if anyone has yet found any sort of workaround for this issue?

I recently bought a 4K monitor specifically for photo editing and I find I'm having to use 200% scaling in windows control panel for it to be anywhere near usable. In other words, I haven't actually gained any resolution over my old monitor! I have tried changing font sizes in windows control panel too, but that doesn't help with the icons and it kinda puts everything out of alignment. I love Affinity Photo but I'm pretty disappointed about this, to be honest, and the fact that it's been an issue since 2016 is particularly disappointing. Maybe I'm being naive but surely it's an incredibly easy fix to implement?!

[MEB]

Hi RalfL, cjchambers,
Unfortunately Windows doesn't offer much controls to work around this other than scaling the whole interface or changing the resolution so i'm afraid there isn't any sort of workaround for now. I'm passing these concerns to the dev team/logging the issue for comments but it's not something easy/quick to fix as it eventually requires to redesign all icons (for three apps) for larger sizes along with other app modifications to accommodate these options/change.