Rectangle with vector pattern

[Vince42]

Hi,

 

I need to create a design with a vector background pattern consisting of small dots. How do I make that with Affinity Designer?

 

Cheers

Vince

[DWright]

Hi Vince42,

 

Welcome to the forum

 

You can use the power duplication feature in designer to quickly create your background of dots in the rectangle, this video tutorial shows how to use this feature.

[Vince42]

Unfortunately this feature would not solve my issue, as I need to create a set of designs where the dots need to follow strict sizes and positions and the customer is well known for resizing the rectangles on a regular basis. The power duplication feature would force me to rework all designs manually, while a vector pattern would allow me to just adapt the parameters of the objects.

 

Nevermind, I will use PhotoLine for this task instead. Maybe you could consider bringing this feature in a future release.

[DWright]

We have plans for a vector pattern fill to added in a future build at the moment the only way to achieve the effect you wish is to export one of the dots as a image then apply a bitmap fill to the rectangle using this image and turn on the maintain aspect ratio option.

[Vince42]

Pretty cool! Really looking forward to this feature - I like the look and feel of Affinity Designer.

[lepr]

.

[gdenby]

I haven't needed to use them, but might the constraints feature do the trick. The objects within the constraining container can be set to not change size, and maintain positions relative to the container boundarys.

 

Edit: Nope, Played with a few minutes, and doesn't seem to readily stop all scaling of children objects.

[PixelPest]

Not sure if I´m understanding the task:

Rosé color filled rectangle masking a dotted vector combined object:

Cheers

P.

 

 

[Vince42]

You guys are awesome.

 

I will shed a bit light on my design task: I have to design several types of notebooks with very small dots at the points, where usually lines would cross each other resembling squared paper without lines. 

 

While the idea would be suitable for many cases, it would not suffice in this specific case, as the offset from the top left corner of the writing area needs to stay constant. Yes, I could leave the background at desired size and move the rectangle and the background always at a time or even group them - but it's still a bit more error-prone than having a vector pattern. I might have misunderstood the capabilities of this approach, therefefor I will give it a ty - but the idea is anyway really cool and I might use it in other designing tasks.

 

Thanks again for all the input and the ideas!

[gdenby]

Given your description of needing a fixed offset for a grid of dots, constraints might work. The attached illustration shows an array of dots, a single object, constrained to not scale, but always be 1/4" away from the top left corner of a bounding rectangle. The rectangle can be moved, and scaled down, cropping away portions of the circle pattern. 

 

The dot pattern in this constraint will only have a constant distance from the top and left margins of the parent bounding rectangle. It appears to me that if the array must be a constant distance from the edges of the bounding object, they will have to scale down.

 

But as I posted earlier, I haven't worked with this feature much.

 

 

[Vince42]

I will definitely give it a try - but as I am new to Affinity Designer, I will first need to learn and understand the basics before I can successfully follow all the suggestions and instructions posted here.

[Vince42]

When you talk about "array of dots" - how would you create one? like DWright suggested?

[gdenby]

53 minutes ago, Vince42 said:

When you talk about "array of dots" - how would you create one? like DWright suggested?

 

Yes. 

 

Make a dot. Duplicate it and move it horizontally or vertically. Duplicate, duplicate duplicate....

Select the row/column, and duplicate all the elements. Repeat as above. 

Then select whole rectangles of hundreds of dots, and do the same.

 

If your fingers are quick enough, you should be able to make thousands of evenly spaced dots in less than a minute.

[Vince42]

okay, thx - my fingers operate at the speed of light - only the memory of computer is the limit - LOL.

[Vince42]

Just to let you know: it worked as expected! Now I am having problems with exporting - but that's a different story and worth a different thread. Thanks again!

PS: Still looking forward to the vector pattern feature in a future version.

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