Do Symbols support variants/inheritance?

[jochenstu]

Basic issue: I got a symbol consisting of a blue button shape and a button text. I want to now create a variant of that exact symbol with a red background. If anything was to change about the base symbol that I did not explicitly override in the variant, those properties would continue to be inherited.

 

People familiar with Sketch or CSS will recognize the concept. Does Affinity Designer support this?

 

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

[MEB]

Hi jstummbillig,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

Yes, Affinity Designer supports this. You have to un-sync the second instance of the symbol, change the colour of the element you want (in this case the fill colour) then enable sync again. All other attributes will update when you change the original base symbol except the attribute you have changed.

[jochenstu]

Hey MEB, thanks for the quick help! If I understand correctly that also means that currently there is no robust way to create sub symbols, correct? Like if i was to un-sync, change the symbol, sync again, then copy this new version of the symbol, i can not then later change the aspect that i changed after the unsync on all copy instances at once -- correct?

[MEB]

Correct. As soon as you un-sunc an attribute on one of the instances you can't re-enable sync for that attribute again in that or other copies of that instance. That attribute will remain independent on all of the copies of the changed instance.