Arranging Artboards

[arifg]

here's the mess

please add arrangement features (not distribution)

Reordering pages

change stacking (2x2,2x3,3x3 artboards etc...)

easier Artboard selection if you don't want to edit across layers

[retrograde]

Yes I think in general, artboards could use a revisit or some love or polish. Including a panel or ways to arrange and or reorder, better automatic naming when drag copying or duplicating an artboard (currently it keeps the same name as the original copied artboard), the ability to toggle the use of guides or grids across all artboards, copying and pasting objects or text to all artboards in a single paste (great for labelling artboards), viewing the active artboard to fit to window when you have a file with more than 1 artboard... etc...

Also somewhat related, I prefer the way Amadine and Illustrator separate artboards and layers into 2 separate panels and workflows, etc...

[loukash]

12 hours ago, retrograde said:

I prefer the way Amadine and Illustrator separate artboards and layers into 2 separate panels and workflows

-1
Illustrator's artboard concept – or rather the lack thereof, after Adobe killed Freehand which had artboards/pages since the late 1990s – was always driving me nuts. 

I, for one, very much appreciate the Affinity concept of artboards essentially being just another type of vector container object on a large canvas. Which is then logically displayed as a layer in a layer stack.

Also note that in Affinity you can freely nest artboards, thus enhancing the feature with many interesting and unexpected options, especially for export scenarios. Also, any vector object of any shape can be converted to an artboard:

^ An older screenshot from my forum attachment archives; I don't remember the original context though. 

Don't know about current Illustrator, but as of CS5 this definitely wasn't possible; artboards were just plain rectangles acting as pages, nothing more.

[retrograde]

9 hours ago, loukash said:

Don't know about current Illustrator, but as of CS5 this definitely wasn't possible; artboards were just plain rectangles acting as pages, nothing more.

Yeah that's kinda what I liked about them, just simple pages or in Amadine they're called sheets. 🙂 

I have yet to warm up to the container workflow of Designers artboards and can't ever recall wanting to nest an artboard inside another artboard. Maybe it's the sort of work I do and I've never needed it... I can certainly see how making an artboard out of an object might be useful, but again, I've never really needed to do that.

I like the workflow of how in Illustrator, Amadine and I think even VectorStyler you can have the same layer across many artboards or sheets. So for example across all of my artboards all of my linework is on one layer, all of my colour work on another layer, all shadows and highlights are on their own layers. 

I also usually work with a bunch of objects off of my artboards and in Designer these objects are kicked out of the artboard container and start to pile up in my layers panel as separate layers. So I usually make a scraps artboard to drag stuff to just to keep the layers panel under control. 

I do like the ability to have separate guides and grids per artboard, but I miss the ability to add or adjust one big horizontal guide across all art boards for lining up stuff across all artboards because of the container workflow.

I do get it that many people love the way artboards currently work in Designer but after ten years of using it daily I'm not a fan of the artboards as containers workflow.

[loukash]

19 hours ago, retrograde said:

can't ever recall wanting to nest an artboard inside another artboard.

My favorite nesting workflo… er, workaround of this kind is multipage spreads which the Publisher is still lacking.
Hier another couple of random nested artboard example screenshots from my forum archives:

   

Again, I don't remember the exact context of the respective threads, but there are many applicable scenarios that weren't possible otherwise using just the plain "kinda-page-but-not-really" Illustrator-et-al model.

[retrograde]

Thanks @loukash for those examples. This is an approach that I have never considered using with artboards. Looks like nesting artboards would be great for packaging work or for jobs with multiple sized components. I remember Illustrator used to be able to do page tiling on larger oversized artboards (pages) for outputting larger documents in sections with bleeds. It seems also to be a nice organizational type of workflow to keep artboards inside of other artboards like folders in the layers panel. Maybe someday I'll find a use for this in my own work. Thanks.

[loukash]

7 hours ago, loukash said:

multipage spreads which the Publisher is still lacking

Here an old example screenshot from an old thread on that topic:

The spreads were set up in Designer using artboards, but from then on they can be of course edited in Publisher using all of its typography features.
The benefit of nesting here is that you can easily export either as spreads, or as individual pages.
This is what I require when designing such brochures for print and online distribution as PDF.

It would be a no-brainer in InDesign, but a major pain in the butt to set up using APu alone. The nested artboard workaround fixes that.

[loukash]

Back on topic:

On 2/14/2024 at 12:28 PM, arifg said:

Reordering pages
change stacking

It would be nice to have more refined arranging tools.
Not just for artboards, but for any selected objects.

On 2/14/2024 at 12:28 PM, arifg said:

easier Artboard selection if you don't want to edit across layers

?
You can select artboards on the canvas just like you can select any object using click'n'drag with the Move tool.
Or click the artboard name labels on canvas with Shift-click.
Or Select → Select Object → Artboards.