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2 hours ago, AmDivVal said:

I really feel like someone, or everyone, on the Affinity UI team should use Blender. Blender, to me, is really the best example of efficient UI design. If ignoring everything else, the way Blender handles UI scaling is absolutely beautiful.

Oh, indeed, this looks easy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py9CHZkHh4U

 

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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  • 2 months later...
On 12/2/2020 at 9:45 PM, thomaso said:

Oh, indeed, this looks easy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py9CHZkHh4U

 

I use a 27 inch iMac at the default top resolution. While text in Mail and and photographs are clear, the icon size around the Affinity suit of programs is too small with no way to easily increase them. As with Blender, there is a solution - and Blender is free.

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I have had Affinity for a while now, but just started to give it a go, unfortunately that's about as far as I have got, Ive changed the tool bar to the largest size, but quite honestly I see no difference, I'm trying to cut the cord from Adobe, but this isn't doing it for me, I need bigger icons, I've just compared it to Photoshop CC, and the icons are so much bigger. After all of these years why aren't Affinity listening to their customer base ! 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have been using GIMP and am now trialing Affinity Photo for the first time. I like the functionality but the first thing that struck me is that I can't see the icons on a 27" 1440P monitor. Whilst Googling how to change the icon size I arrived at this thread. I can't believe that there is still software around whare you don't get the option to scale the UI. Blender has a slick approach to scaling the UI but even GIMP gives you options for different icon sizes!!! I can see that this issue really is a show stopper for many people. If you are going to spend hours sitting in front of a screen processing photos the last thing that you need is to be struggling to see the icons properly!

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  • 2 weeks later...

People have been asking for this as an option for years. High resolution monitors are the norm these days. Redesign your icons if you have to. This has gone on way too long. When will the team address this? Its pretty frustrating since i can increase the size of images in layers but not the icons in my toolbar.

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  • Staff

Hi @umanoid, @ymugmike, @JayR, everyone,
Affinity apps already ship with regular and high resolution versions of all icons for normal and high def/retina displays which should be legible/clear on most common screen size/resolution combinations. I understand some configs, namely the 27inch 5K iMac or other screen size/res combinations may render them a bit smaller than usual (some users may even find them small at  27inch/4k display) and the OS is not always flexible enough to offer a proper solution without some compromises. I have raised these issues with the management/dev team. I can't say for sure if they will move forward with improvements here but they are being considered/discussed for an eventual implementation in a future version. Thanks for your feedback/understanding.

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54 minutes ago, MEB said:

Affinity apps already ship with regular and high resolution versions of all icons for normal and high def/retina displays which should be legible/clear on most common screen size/resolution combinations.

But it is obvious from all the complaints that for one reason or another many users do not think they are sufficiently legible/clear. It is not just the resolution that is problematic. It is also the similarity of some icons (like AP's Gradient tool & Color Replacement & Paint Mixer brushes) & the low contrast between selected & unselected tool icons.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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There is definitely a problem with the UI scaling.

There are also definitely applications which can handle that scaling well. It is not the configs, it is not the OS, it is these applications which solves that.

Whether it is worthy of the team's attention, I guess depends on the customer base with that problem, and this is the big unknown.

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And in response to MEB, I would suggest that by the end of the year with more advanced ARM based Macs being launched, resolution will only get better/higher, so the ability to tailor the IU for individual needs will become even more paramount.

It is not that we are asking for the impossible. Blender has been quoted previously - simple to operate and flexible.

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20 hours ago, MEB said:

 I can't say for sure if they will move forward with improvements here but they are being considered/discussed for an eventual implementation in a future version. Thanks for your feedback/understanding.

19 hours ago, R C-R said:

& the low contrast between selected & unselected

@MEB, at least concerning contrast it shouldn't require being "discussed" that some current UI contrasts simply wasn't a useful decision. Probably rational & emotional – but hardly reasonable.

1093826932_UIdarkbuttoncontrastcompare.jpg.17f3437e3f1a9e770f2465d290f869f3.jpg

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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My issues are mainly related to contrast, not icon size. On my 27" Dell it's noticeably better than on the cheap 32" Benq.

(maybe the GUI would be better for us amateurs if you took the designer's $$$$ monitor away, and gave him/her a lousy bottom shelf monitor).

I find the light style generally easier to see things at a glance. Maybe tune it to pretty/dark and contrasty/light variants. Then you could always switch to light mode if you have trouble seeing the details.

Worst offenders (to me) are

  • selected tool highlight
  • the 'selection' on the selection brush icon
  • too many tools have a "45° tilted pen" as the dominant feature
  • drop target on the layer panel (worst case: drag a blue square between two blue squares, where the drop target is a blue line). Would make the drop target red in a heartbeat if the option existed.
  • the Assistant Manager icon. Always thought that was a microphone, but in light mode you can see that it is a tube sticking out of a trashbin (right? ;) )
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3 hours ago, thomaso said:

@MEB, at least concerning contrast it shouldn't require being "discussed" that some current UI contrasts simply wasn't a useful decision.

I really do not understand why from day one it was not obvious to the developers that higher contrasts between selected/enabled & unselected/disabled tools & other UI elements would be a good thing. ☹️

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1 hour ago, R C-R said:

I really do not understand why from day one it was not obvious to the developers that higher contrasts between selected/enabled & unselected/disabled tools & other UI elements would be a good thing. ☹️

I assume the development workflow is the/one reason. As if from a certain stage in the design process the team's focus turns to coding & debugging. Then none wants to go back to question the design again, bug-fixing becomes more and more important, a growing number of bug reports makes it worse. Design is felt as a matter of "taste" or even "fashion", subjectively, different to an objective malfunction.

Besides UI contrast & scale to me the "New …" dialog window appears to be developed like that, initially designed without a fully functional concept, rather as a vague sketch by "tasty feeling" and today still stuck in this status. Same to the typography in the details section of the Resource Manager: there the right aligned text block of the labels appears irrational, possibly nice in a mockup state but not working for certain entries, e.g. longer profile names and dimensions. This issue of roughly cut user information is obvious since the first version, just doesn't play a role for developers. Not to mention some odd UX issues in the Resource Manger design. A pity especially for an app which is made for designers, "Form follows Function" becomes reduced to a phrase only.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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Working in AD on a 27" 5K iMac and the tools are just too small, which slows workflow down. I've been putting up with it, but recent changes in work set up are making it impractical.

Scaling via System Preferences scales everything, so isn't a solution when working across multiple programs.

I don't understand the response from Serif that the icons would have to be redesigned, surely they just have to be scaled? Yes, I don't know how to build an app, but the question of scalable UI has been asked, and none of the responses from Serif make sense yet. 

I really value Affinity apps and encourage others to use them, but how can it be OK for a design app not to be fully operational on a high-res screen?

Any chance of something being done about this? 

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27 minutes ago, pxin said:

I don't understand the response from Serif that the icons would have to be redesigned, surely they just have to be scaled? Yes, I don't know how to build an app, but the question of scalable UI has been asked, and none of the responses from Serif make sense yet. 

At least on Macs, the icons are all implemented as raster image files (tiffs, pngs, etc.) so they would not scale up smoothly to any arbitrary size like vector objects would. Also, it is not just the icons that would have to be upsized but also everywhere in the UI where larger ones would appear. So the size of most of the panels would have to be increased to prevent the larger icons they display from being truncated.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1 hour ago, ymugmike said:

Funny how Blender (which is free) manage to accommodate their seemingly simple interface through <Preferences><Interface><Resolution Scale>.

Just click the arrows on site side and the icons/headings get larger or smaller.

Brilliant.

At least on my iMac that works OK but once I scale up the UI much above the default it requires a lot of manual tweaking to keep the text in most interface elements from being truncated to just a few characters.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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2 hours ago, R C-R said:

At least on Macs, the icons are all implemented as raster image files (tiffs, pngs, etc.) so they would not scale up smoothly to any arbitrary size like vector objects would.

Yes, it appears Affinity.apps on mac contain their icons at a specific size. Whereas icons of macOS are a kind of container, if I open a copied folder icon (cmd-i > top left icon) from the clipboard in Preview it opens 1 file in 10 sizes:

533647299_macOSicons1-10.thumb.jpg.f9341907d127d987e43b42dcca63beed.jpg

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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2 hours ago, thomaso said:

Yes, it appears Affinity.apps on mac contain their icons at a specific size. Whereas icons of macOS are a kind of container, if I open a copied folder icon (cmd-i > top left icon) from the clipboard in Preview it opens 1 file in 10 sizes:

macOS icons (*icns files) are stored as a collection of specific rasterized image sizes. The difference compared to Affinity is there usually are many more sizes, ranging from tiny "ic04' types at 16x16 px to jumbo "ic10" types at 1024 x 1024 px. Many of these files are surprisingly large, including 20 in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources that each are 2.8 MB or larger on my iMac running Catalina.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I stopped using this program and uninstalled it in 2019, and it was *only* because of this UI scaling issue. When 1.9 was released I reinstalled it and I was hopeful that this may have been addressed, but nope. It's still the same, minute text and icons. All the new stuff in 1.9 is appreciated, but what use is it if I can't use them?

I cannot understand for the life of me why Serif is refusing to give the user what they need to, well, stay being users. This is a functionality asked for by many - in fact I'd challenge you to show me one other feature that has more requests than the proper UI scaling.... You can't..

Please fix this.

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Come on Affinity.

This is not an unsurmountable issue. Everybody who uses Blender already has a very useable option to suit their needs.

We are not asking for cutting edge unseen before tricks for the Affinity trio.

We just want to use and see what we are using.

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