Gradient Palette in right Palette bar?

[taharvey]

I've been messing with the UI, and I'm a little baffled. On the inspector/palette bar there are the typical stroke & fill palettes. But no gradient. For gradient you have to click in the top-side context aware toolbar when selecting a object... which also has copies of the stroke and fill palette (inconsistency?). 

 

I've trying dragging the top-bar gradient palette into the permanent right-side palette bar? Nope. I've tried to find a AI windows/tabs list. No. Right clicking on palettes to add? No.

 

How do I get a gradient tab in the palette bar?

[v_kyr]

AFAIK you can't drag or assign over the one from the context aware toolbar to the side palette. But there is a used gradient swatch selection panel on the right side palette, accessable via a popup menu on the swatches panel, where you can see and access the last used gradients as swatches etc. - Beside that you can edit a gradient also directly on an object.

See:

• Gradient editing

• Swatches panel

[taharvey]

Oddly inconsistant implementation. Why is gradient fill color treated different from gradient fill color, or any other pallet? Quirky.

 

I find the context menu too small to edit complex gradients. There are some neat bits about Affinity. But in a short use time I'm finding too many quirks and missing features to be a real replacement for AI. Maybe they should up the price and do more development work. 

[R C-R]

Regarding what you see as an inconsistent implementation, the major elements of the UI are the main & context toolbars, a Tools panel, & various "Studio" panels. Everything except the Context toolbar can be customized to suit a user's workflow.

 

For example, on the View menu you will find a "Studio" item with a fly-out listing the various Studio panels & options to show or hide the Studio(s). Each Studio panel & the show/hide options can be assigned a keyboard shortcut so you do not have to go to the menu to access them. The Studio panels can also be 'docked' to the left and/or right side of the workspace, in individual tabs or in tab groups, or free floating, also as individual panels or as tabbed panel groups. Among other things, this means you can place Studio panels wherever you want (including on a secondary monitor if you have one), & hide or show them as needed on the fly, either individually or collectively, to maximize screen space for documents.

 

The Tools Panel can also be customized, both for the number of columns it uses & the tools it displays, & can be docked or free floating. The main toolbar can also be customized, including which items it shows, their order, & spacing. There is even a keyboard shortcut to quickly show/hide all the UI elements at once, so nothing obscures the document(s) you are working on.

 

You can also interact with tools & some of the Studio panels directly in the document workspace, so for example by using the Gradient tool you can create very complex gradients, including ones with as many stops as you want, using the full extent of the document (& at whatever zoom level you need for fine or coarse work) -- you are not limited to the popup context toolbar item for that.

 

So the tl;dr version is the UI is not inconsistent; it is just the logical consequence of the enormous flexibility & different ways you can configure & interact with it.

[Polygonius]

You can save any gradient as a "color" to a "color-palette" of your choice. It saves all gradient relevant stuff inside.

Its much faster and more intutive than the special-gradient-popup. And yes you can combine solide colors and gradients in one palette.

 

[taharvey]

11 hours ago, R C-R said:

So the tl;dr version is the UI is not inconsistent; it is just the logical consequence of the enormous flexibility & different ways you can configure & interact with it.

 

Its fine to have fixed context menus. But why is a major feature like gradients missing from studio panels? Stroke is there. Fill is There. Gradient is just another fill. As you noted its not like they didn't implement tear-off and re-arrangable panels. Just strangely things are missing from the panels like gradients, which is already implemented as a tabbed panel in a fixed (and different) location.

 

Everybody mentions that you can save a gradient in this thread and others asking the same thing. Yet in the last 20 years, how often do I pre-create a fixed gradient, and then just re-use it? Very rarely. AI and even Apples non-drawing tools (keynote, pages, numbers) all have a very interactive gradient palette that saves the last version for reuse & tweaking. This seems very clumsy and inconsistent with the rest of the interface.

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, taharvey said:

Its fine to have fixed context menus. But why is a major feature like gradients missing from studio panels?

Probably because you can do almost everything you might want to do with a gradient using the Fill Tool (Affinity Designer) or Gradient tool (Affinity Photo) directly on the canvas. The only things you have to do in the Context Toolbar are to set the Type of gradient (to linear, radial, etc.), lock the aspect ratio (if desired), rotate the gradient by fixed 90° increments (if desired), reverse the gradient (if desired), or (for vectors) set the context (to fill or stroke). All these functions are available either directly as buttons or in short, single-function popup sub-menus on  the Context toolbar.

 

You never need to pop up the larger, multi-function Context Toolbar sub-menu to do anything unless you just want to use it for some reason, or to set values by percent. Directly on the canvas you can move, add, or delete stops; move midpoints; rotate the entire gradient to arbitrary angles; & even (in conjunction with the Color Studio panel) change stop colors interactively. The canvas is also the only place you can alter the shape of an elliptical gradient or change the radius of a radial gradient.

 

Perhaps more to the point, consider creating a complicated gradient with 10 or 15 stops & several midpoint adjustments. That is very easy to do with the tool on the canvas -- you can zoom in & out as needed to set or move things that are very close together -- but imagine trying to do all that in a reasonably sized Studio panel that would not obscure much of the workspace. To see what I mean, refer to this screen capture of an arbitrary (& admittedly quite ugly) elliptical gradient:

It is not impossible to set or edit all the stop & midpoint adjustments in the Context Toolbar popup or a Studio panel version of the same thing, but would you really want to do that when it is so much easier to do right there on the canvas?