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Infinite canvases, background blurs, and better exporting (oh my!)


Feature Requests  

29 members have voted

  1. 1. Which of these features do you want added?

    • Infinite canvases
    • Background blurs
    • SVG slice exports
    • Better export scaling


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Hello,

 

From the title, you an probably tell I'm a Sketch person. I truly love Sketch, but it's pretty buggy and limited, so I was very happy when I ran across Affinity Designer.

 

However, as an app designer, I commonly use 3 features of Sketch that are not in Affinity Designer:

 

First of all, I love infinite canvases. I feel like limited sizes always end up having redundant or too little space, causing me to constantly resize it to satisfy my OCD. I also almost always only use slices (similar to slices and art boards in Sketch) for my graphics, since I like to develop a lot of elements of my app in one document. However, this only works well in an infinite canvas or, as I said, one has to keep readjusting the canvas size.

 

Another thing that I commonly use in Sketch is the background blurs feature. It is very common in iOS design to see a background blur and it's very useful to be able to easily re-create that with the click of a button in a vector designing software.

 

Finally, to be blunt, the slices exporting in Affinity Designer are dreary. First of all, they only allow bitmap export formats. In iOS, I typically use PDFs or SVGs for web development. Therefore, being limited to bitmaps is completely useless to me. I don't want to create a new document for every item and export them individually that way. Another thing I dislike about the Affinity exporting is the lack of flexibility in export sizes. You simply limit us to 1x or 2x. This makes slices completely useless for app development. Developers commonly re-use images at different sizes within an app. So, for instance, in Sketch, you can type in the obvious "2x, 3x, 5.5x, 42x" whatever to multiply the size by that number. However, you can also type in something like "32w" to scale the image down to have a width of 32 pixels. The same works with height by using an "h" behind the number. I strongly suggest Affinity Designer improves exporting, since having to create graphics in Affinity and exporting them to Sketch is quite the dreary process.

 

Thanks,

Nathan

 

 

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The web features you mentioned are probably what I care the least about bringing over to AD. Sketch already does a good job at that and I don't think that web layout design should be AD's main focus. The infinite canvas is just as valuable to any kind of illustration work so I could see that being brought across.

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@Zoyt +1 I would also love to see more settings/options for blurs as well, adding Background Blur would be a great addition.

 

@grzessnik In some situations the Gaussian Blur layer effect doesn't provide the desired results. I created a feature request post about such a situation here.

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  • 1 month later...

+1 on the exporting features.

 

I would also like to see some kind of "smart" export options, that would...

1) export only currently selected layer / group with proper transparency, i.e. without background

2) make smart crop on exported elements so that the "slice" borders will be determined dynamically by exported content.

 

That would be huge time savers.

UX/UI designer, IT analyst & consultant, Business Architect at Cool Ticket (www.coolticket.co).

MacBook Pro 13'' Early 2015, 3,1 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1867 MHz DDR3, Apple Thunderbolt Display 27'' (2560 x 1440).

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@Lojza - we already do this with slices.  You can create a Slice for a given layer - it will size automatically to that layer object and when exporting it renders only the layer and not the background.

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