affinity designer Affinity Designer: Additive Drag Select

[Pete Molinero]

Hi,

 

Loving Affinity Designer so far! It's sleek, fast, and does a great job at everything it does. I am curious about one aspect of selection, though.

 

Let's say I have 2 vector shapes. I do the following steps:
 

• Select on one shape
• Hold shift and drag a select box around the shapes

 

As expected, it inverts the selection of all objects I drag over. If the object wasn't selected, it is now selected. If the object was previously selected, the dragged box deselects it.

 

That works great, and is desirable sometimes. But there are also times when it's super important to be able to hold shift and only add objects. For example, if you have a bunch of overlapping shapes you need to select, but they're also arranged around another set of shapes you don't want to select, there's currently no good way to combine selections. For example:

 

What if I want to select all of the red and yellow objects, but not the blue objects? Is there currently any way to easily do that?

 

 

[R C-R]

What I would do for something like that is to group the blue objects together & temporarily lock the group. I tend to group things into logical groups anyway, so for me each of the three sets of colored objects would probably be in three separate groups to begin with, making it easier to do this.

[DWright]

As R C-R suggested use the layers tab to group the different coloured objects into their own groups

[Pete Molinero]

Thanks for the answers, folks! Grouping and locking works great if I created the file in the first place, and can plan ahead like that. But when I'm using a file that a more careless individual created, creating and locking that group can turn into a lot of work itself. Additive and Subtractive select hotkeys are just a quick and easy way of handling that.

 

But thanks for the info nonetheless! The old version of Illustrator that I used to use didn't have it either (though the new versions do), so I'm used to working around it.