Zoyt Posted October 31, 2014 Share Posted October 31, 2014 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 Raskolnikov 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grzessnik Posted October 31, 2014 Share Posted October 31, 2014 Hi Zoyt, you can try use layer fx with background layer (it can be raster or vector). It should work but maybe you need something different. Best, Greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zoyt Posted November 1, 2014 Author Share Posted November 1, 2014 @grzessnik - I understand, but it requires copying the items, adding a mass, and blurring it every time. I guess I could use a template file, but that seem like a hacky approach to me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KipV Posted November 1, 2014 Share Posted November 1, 2014 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. Quote New Internet Book Project | Another New Website Project Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Raskolnikov Posted November 2, 2014 Share Posted November 2, 2014 Infinite canvas (as default starting canvas) it's a lovely thing to have , for those times you want to open AD draw quick an idea! :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cam Posted November 6, 2014 Share Posted November 6, 2014 @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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jakubfoglar Posted January 3, 2015 Share Posted January 3, 2015 Background blur (and improved slices export) would make the app probably the only one I would use for years to come in UI design! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lojza Posted January 6, 2015 Share Posted January 6, 2015 +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. Quote 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). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Ben Posted January 7, 2015 Staff Share Posted January 7, 2015 @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. Quote SerifLabs team - Affinity Developer Software engineer - Photographer - Guitarist - Philosopher iMac 27" Retina 5K (Late 2015), 4.0GHz i7, AMD Radeon R9 M395 MacBook (Early 2015), 1.3GHz Core M, Intel HD 5300 iPad Pro 10.5", 256GB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fredrik Posted October 13, 2016 Share Posted October 13, 2016 Hi! I personally use a LOT of bitmaps, therefore i was wery suprized that this was not included in the export options.I use them for textures an a lot of other stuff. Would really be glad if this would be included in future updates. Cheers! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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