POLL: Improve Workflow for Web Designers - Official Statement Appreciated

[Wiredframe]

I just wanted to recap the current state of how Affinity Designer is performing in web design workflows.

 

I'm using Affinity Designer since one year for all of my work and I love the application itself. But as of now there is no complete workflow to handout designs made in AD to developers in any way:

 

1. Neither Zeplin nor Avocode support AD and it doesn't seem that anthying will change here.

2. Affinity Designer supports PSD Export but has two major drawbacks: Border radius properties are not preserved and text layers are completely flattened which make them completely useless.

3. Affinity Designer doesn't support the new open file format of SketchApp to be able to export designs as Sketch files to then inspect them in Zeplin, Avocode, or any other Sketch Viewer.

4. Exporting to SVG or PDF is not an option either because important properties like border radius, line-height and others are missing.

5. Right now it doesn't seem that Affinity is adding an inspect persona or any viewer service or app.

 

So I'd like to ask the Affinity Designer team: What are your goals to improve the workflow for webdesigners and developers? How are you planning to improve this workflow in the future or don't you plan to do anything in this regard? Do you have any suggestion how web designers can work with developers? 

 

I've added a poll so that users can vote which suggestion they like the most.

 

[Mark Ingram]

Hi Wiredframe, I'm going to move this to the Suggestions and Feedback forum, as this is the Windows Designer Beta forum, which is for bug reports.

[Wiredframe]

Ah thanks, I thought I've been there. ^^

[smallreflection]

I don't have a ton of knowledge of underlying architecture differences, but it seems highly unlikely that Affinity will support Sketch format or will achieve perfect PSD compatibility.

Overall I feel like Affinity's UI workflow is pretty strong, and the biggest leg up there will be opening up some kind of extension framework similar to Sketch and allowing shared libraries/symbol syncing, which is the big request a ton of designers currently have for Sketch as well. What's made Sketch incredibly popular is not just its core featureset but the huge amount of community plugins that add a ton of speed to the design process. That would likely make it a bit easier for third parties to support things like inspector tools for dev handoff, etc. With sufficient growth in the Affinity user base, Zeplin has indicated they'd be interested in adding Affinity support.

[MattP]

I'll add Sketch import soon. I actually already had a .sketch importer that imported their old file format (back when it was using Mac-native file serialisation) but I didn't tell anyone outside the company about it as I figured until our support for multi-lines and fills was working then we couldn't render documents perfectly. Now that they've updated to a very easily parseable solution I'll just have to rewrite it a bit. Our back-end already supports multiple lines and fills, but our UI does not, so we just need to add that ability...

 

Our PSD, PDF and SVG import/export will always receive updates to improve functionality and compatibility - and our SVG import/export is currently being looked at...

 

I can't comment on future products and services, but I will suggest to you that you may not need a 'Sketch viewer' or export to Sketch format... and you may be very motivated to stay 'in-house' with Affinity...

[smallreflection]

Ooo— @MattP that sounds exciting. :) A Sketch importer would be terrific. Can't wait to see what's cooking!

[Wiredframe]

Sounds interesting, thank you very much :) Looking forward!

[Zunaid]

On 7/31/2017 at 6:38 PM, MattP said:

I can't comment on future products and services, but I will suggest to you that you may not need a 'Sketch viewer' or export to Sketch format... and you may be very motivated to stay 'in-house' with Affinity...

 

Staying in Affinity Designer and sharing files using plugins/web service like zeplin would be excellent and reduce or stop the need to export files for other apps. It would give Affinity a huge boost in the eyes of UI designers. 

I voted 4.

[Wiredframe]

You're absolutely right @Zunaid, why should we (and our clients) pay for something like Zeplin if inspecting, measuring and exporting assets would just like that but inside AD? 

[Wiredframe]

Is there any possibility to speed up the fixing of the PSD export bugs? My customers are loosing patience with not getting PSDs with proper text layers.

[Teo_]

I too look forward to this new features 

[Capocha]

To send the design to the code people always askme for the PSD to take the font size, opacities of layers. But all of this can be done with zeplin integration. I really think this feature i would be a great thing. Thanks