Working with multiple artboards in Affinity Designer

[AshTeriyaki]

So I've been using Designer to make a banner ads recently (Oh god, I haven't done that in years, kill me) and on a doc with ~90 artboards needing export, I have some feedback and ideas to make it a little smoother. It's a bit long... 

 

...sorry.

 

 

 

1.Artboard selection tool I know this isn't necessary technically, but selecting a ton of boards to move at once for export or to move together is too fiddly using the standard select tool. A tool that ignored other objects would be stellar. If this tool were also available in the export persona, that'd be a bonus.

 

2. The export persona I personally don't really like the export persona, I'm all for specialised views, but it should be that, a view. I'd love to be able to use all of the same tools and panels outside of the persona if desired, and I'll tell yer for why.

 

• I'm unable to rename layers inside the export persona, which is a pain in the arse, having an additional three button clicks to correct a minor mistake is pants.
• V doesn't select the select tool. I know I can map it manually, but it should be shipped that way, it's reasonable for a user to expect the same tool to have the same shortcut in a different view.
• I can't delete layers in the export persona. Similar to the first one, this is a bit of a edge case but any basic operations that require a round-trip are bad.

 

I'm not saying the export persona shouldn't exist, it's still useful for slices and whatnot, but I'd rather a little more flexibility in the main viewport. Having the slices and export panels there would speed things up somewhat.

 

3. Put an add slice button in the toolbar Both panels are visually quite similar and I find myself frequently going to the wrong one to create a slice, the muscle memory just isn't happening for me.

 

4. Export options and export presets in the slice panel This is pretty confusing, we have two different places to set export presets, with differently populated preset lists, and which overrides the other? I'd suggest ripping export presets and batch builder options from the slices panel and putting them in export presets.

 

4. Export options defaults This is also pretty obtuse. The default set up used when creating new slices, right? I'd suggest removing this button entirely and when no slices are selected, have the inputs usable and whatever is populated is the default. I fumbled with this quite a lot before realising it only applied to newly created slices. It really does feel unnecessary. I'd also advocated showing some kind of small marker next to slices in their panel, just showing something like the format they are exporting to, making your set up less fiddly and more glanceable.

 

5. Change the label on artboards to "artboard" in the layer panel I know an artboard can be other shapes than a rectangle, but having that word in little parenthesis behind one, would make working with the layers panel a whole load easier.

 

6. Sack off the colour selector in the export persona toolbar. I have no idea why it's there.

 

7. Expose all document presets in artboard tool. It's strange to have only the devices ones show, unless this is a bug or something?

 

8. Artboard grid This isn't important, it'd just be nice to have a grid for things outside of an artboard, just for anal people like me to align them nicely.

 

9. Artboard align A Tool or option to align all artboards by name (respecting slashes in name/path setting) so common paths would group together. So if I had a load of boards for iPad let's say, I'd name them all ipad/screen 1,2,3 and click to align them by this grouping. That would be wizard.

 

10. Quicker way to apply multiple output presets Currently the workflow is - go into a slice, change the settings, hope you don't change your mind before adding anything that can't be copied, click the copy to clipboard button, then click the apply button. I'd suggest changing the export preset list from a dropdown to a true, always viewable (but probably collapsable) lists so you can firstly see the selected preset(s) applied to the current slice and also drag and drop them over to the slice panel. You could also add an apply button to the right so you can apply to all selected slices. This combined with labels in the slice panels I mentioned earlier would make the experience wondrous. (Happy to do you a doodle if I've gotten confusing)

 

11. User variables in export path Right now you can add custom use variables to file names, which is grand. But a second (Or even shared) pool of variables for paths would be great.

 

12. Animated gif export I know, I know, but hear me out. I'm not suggesting going down the path of Photoshop's animation panel stuff. But a nice, simple "Few frames and duration" setup like the slices panel would be awesome. Shift click a few slices, say add them to a gif. Set a universal (Or per slide) duration and it gets added to the export pile. I know you could say, where do you draw the line, but unfortunately people still want banner gifs (I hate them too) and this would make life a lot easier. Trying to find a simple standalone gif creator (That doesn't want to do giphy videos) is actually quite hard to come by, I searched for an hour or two and found something called "Smart gif maker" on the Mac App Store. It works, it's 2 quid, but a bit shit. This would be a great addition to AD.

 

And I'm done!  ...I think.    ....There might be more I'm forgetting.