[Designer] Flip/Rotate Canvas

[Tankitha]

I am a new user of the Affinity suite. Trying to see if I can transition from Adobe.  I generally work in Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop, and Illustrator. From what I understand, Designer, in function, is a mish-mash of a drawing program with a Illustrator.

First thing testing out Designer I noticed is ease of changing document setup. I made a document 8.5x11, just to test out the program, it was vertical, I would have to retype the document dimensions in order to change the orientation, so lazy maker-person I am, I thought, "I'll just rotate the canvas afterward." BUT NO. It is NOT POSSIBLE. I thought, "Okay, I'm learning the new program. I'll look it up." What I found was the capability is in photo but NOT in Designer. 

So TLDR my suggestion/ask is either make it easier to flip flop the document orientation in the creation window, like either photoshop or Clip Studio Paint does (see images below), or LET ME ROTATE AND FLIP my canvas.

[MikeTO]

Hi @Tankitha and welcome to the forums.

There is actually a portrait/landscape toggle when creating a new document but you probably overlooked it. It's above the list of preset sizes and it's in the same place in all three programs.

There is not a toggle when you resize a document in Photo like there is in Designer and Publisher.

Cheers

[Catshill]

If you turn a single page into an artboard you can rotate the artboard by 90 degrees and the content rotates with it.

[Hangman]

Hi @Tankitha and another warm welcome to the forums,

In Designer, you can go to the Document Setup window and uncheck the 'Portrait' option so you don't need to retype the values...

While not quite the same there is a Rotate Left and Rotate Right option but in Designer this rotates the canvas in 15° increments... It would be nice if Rotate Left and Rotate Right did the same as Publisher and rotated in 90° increments with 15° increments available via a modifier key...

Again, I appreciate not quite what you're looking for but there is also a freeform rotation option using either the Cmd (Ctrl) Key with Mouse Scroll or the Trackpad on a laptop...

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, Hangman said:

In Designer, you can go to the Document Setup window and uncheck the 'Portrait' option so you don't need to retype the values...

But note that this may not work well unless the document is empty. For example:

 

 

[softsound]

19 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Hi @Tankitha and welcome to the forums.

There is actually a portrait/landscape toggle when creating a new document but you probably overlooked it. It's above the list of preset sizes and it's in the same place in all three programs.

There is not a toggle when you resize a document in Photo like there is in Designer and Publisher.

Cheers

To me, this is a poor oversight when thinking of presets you *might* think about toggling it there but I think that just also having this button or something similar associated with the actual width and height makes way more sense from a UX perspective. That's why other software does it. So this is bad in multiple ways UX wise, it fails Jakob’s Law about working with similar models (aka not reinventing the wheel). Sure it kinda works with law-of-similarity in that it's grouped by search and presets and functions as a global switch-a-roo but honestly most people when working on a doc and typing in their dimensions aren't thinking globally and if they need to flip their local document aren't thinking ah yes, just need to flip all my global presets and everything on the page...!

This comes up so often in the forums. Just make a copy of the button and stick it next to the page dimensions or add a local button that only affects that document properly and not the presets. Problem solved. Now if only Affinity would implement this... I suppose it's functional sure, but only in a roundabout way. Since I work in games I tend to work in the power of 2 (64, 128, 256, etc)so it's not something I use *that* often but when I'm looking for the function I seem to have to look it up often since it's a poor association.... On that note, I'd probably redo quite a lot of this screen if I could... 

[MikeTO]

I agree that the toggle is in an odd place, I provided the same feedback when the change was made in v2.

[Tankitha]

On 6/15/2024 at 5:08 PM, MikeTO said:

Hi @Tankitha and welcome to the forums.

There is actually a portrait/landscape toggle when creating a new document but you probably overlooked it. It's above the list of preset sizes and it's in the same place in all three programs.

There is not a toggle when you resize a document in Photo like there is in Designer and Publisher.

Cheers

I see that now, but that seems a really dumb place for that to be. As an illustrator, I am often making very random image sizes that match almost no presets so I usually ignore the presets section altogether and just go straight to the dimensions section.

[Tankitha]

On 6/16/2024 at 12:40 AM, Hangman said:

Hi @Tankitha and another warm welcome to the forums,

In Designer, you can go to the Document Setup window and uncheck the 'Portrait' option so you don't need to retype the values...

While not quite the same there is a Rotate Left and Rotate Right option but in Designer this rotates the canvas in 15° increments... It would be nice if Rotate Left and Rotate Right did the same as Publisher and rotated in 90° increments with 15° increments available via a modifier key...

Again, I appreciate not quite what you're looking for but there is also a freeform rotation option using either the Cmd (Ctrl) Key with Mouse Scroll or the Trackpad on a laptop...

TOTALLY AGREE. It is not the same. Sometimes I start sketching and realize....this just needs to turn.

And the rotate function is great but I don't want to 'rotate my paper' per se because it's easier to draw or see something that way. I want to rotate the setup of the entire composition. This is also a hard thing to explain because both ways of doing it are 'rotating the image/canvas' but what is a working rotation and one is a ...permanent? rotation.

[Tankitha]

@MikeTO@Catshill@walt.farrell@softsound@Hangman

Thank you so much for your replies! I really appreciate you being here and taking the time. My usual approach to and experience with forums is that I go say something into the ether and maybe someone might reply and maybe it might be helpful.