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Now that Affinity D is competing with Sketch...


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Congrats on launching v1.5. I love Affinity Designer's speed and vector tools. It's always open on the side when I'm designing UI with sketch to do quick vector work, then bring it back to Sketch.

 

Now that you guys brought art boards, constraints, styles, etc... to Affinity, I'm very happy to consider using Affinity Designer exclusively (it's just faster than sketch!)

 

But in order to get to that point and make it the perfect vector + interface tool, there needs to be a couple of things:

1. Artboard on phone live preview. Like Sketch Mirror, seeing my design as a final user—on the phone—is crucial.

 

2. Content generation: Be able to say, fill a bunch of shapes with images properly cropped and fitted (for avatars, for example). Generating text is also important for UI design. Currently I use Sketch plugins for this.

 

3. Grids: Be able to copy a shape a number of times within a user-defined grid of x columns and y rows

 

4. Scale: enlarging a symbol or group of shapes inside Affinity feels a big buggy and doesn't scale well. I'd like to see a scale feature where I define the dimensions for a group of shapes and it'll grow it proportionally (all styles and effects are scaled as well).

 

 

Now, I know everything I've posted is is not trivial at all to build. Having said that, if UI design is a space you guys want to compete in, then I'd really love to see you guys push it further. You're really a few features away from getting designers like me to recommend Affinity exclusively for design work (both designer and photo).

 

Cheers and congrats on the work guys! Love the new update!

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But in order to get to that point and make it the perfect vector + interface tool, there needs to be a couple of things:

1. Artboard on phone live preview. Like Sketch Mirror, seeing my design as a final user—on the phone—is crucial.

 

 

 

I'd say take it a giant leap further - straight up make AD available on iOS. It IS already tested and developed on iOS.

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It would also be great to get multiple fills + strokes, like sketch has.

It's so useful to be able to layer and blend fills on shapes with sketch. AD technically lets you do multiple fills, but only if you make the outer shape a mask. 

 

There's no way to do multiple strokes, shadows, etc.

This feature is listed on the roadmap, check it out: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/842-affinity-designer-feature-roadmap/
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1. Artboard on phone live preview. Like Sketch Mirror, seeing my design as a final user—on the phone—is crucial.

 

You can do a continuous export from Affinity and beam it up to your phone with Skala Preview.

 

Now, this isn't a perfect replacement for Sketch Mirror, but it does work satisfactorily. It's not as fast and you have to do a few more manual setup steps, but I tried it out and figured that it wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. I have issues with Sketch Mirror all the time as well, and it doesn't work on Android (where I use Skala even with Sketch).

 

That said, I'd really prefer a Mirror app. I need nothing but the connectivity, live mirroring (don't even need artboard selection or anything like that) and zooming. I know it's still not trivial to create these apps but you can get really far with just the basic feature set.

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