Layers Panel

[Garish]

I'm either incredibly dense, or, there's no provision to open (or reopen) the Layers panel.

 

For example, under the 'Text' menu we see 'Show Character', 'Show Typography', 'Show Paragraph', etc.

 

Selecting any aforementioned menu item opens - with miraculous efficiency - the corresponding options panel, as one might expect.

 

It appears there's no such option available to open (or reopen) the Layers panel when looking under the 'Layers' menu.

 

Am I overlooking the 'Show Layers' option that should be in the Layers (or some other) menu?

[Garish]

For anyone else who might have the same problem (i.e., restoring the 'Layers' panel after closing it), you can re-open the Layers panel by going to:

 

View->Studio, then select 'layers' in the fly-out menu.

 

That should reopen the panel again.

 

I can only hope that UI/UX development on this software improves over time.

 

Burying so basic and simple a feature as restoring the Layers panel beneath such convoluted abstraction is - as best - unacceptable.

 

It's a well-understood norm of app development that - while wickedly-good software developers can indeed program wickedly-well - they often fail miserably in the delicate art of User Interaction and User Experience design.

[Wiredframe]

The more complex software gets, the more of these "issues" appear. And while I wouldn't say everything is to accept it's the user who has to LEARN to use the software the way it was designed. User perception is very different. So what you might think isn't well designed another user thinks is perfectly fine and common. 

[bripriuk]

I agree with Garish on this, access to the various panels should be easy as they are opened and closed regularly (at least I do). A separate top menu item for 'Studio' would be ideal, as would the equivalent of 'Save Workspace' in Photoshop. I'll add this to the 'Feature Request' section.

 

Brian

[MEB]

Hi Garish,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Thanks for your feedback. You can set shortcuts for each panel if you don't want to the menu constantly. Alternatively, you can also snap them to other panels side by side or on top/bottom to build columns of panels as you see fit if you detach them from the studio. If you double-click their label they will collapse to their title bar (a single click will reopen them again). Hope this helps.