Artboards and Layers

[Herenow]

Hi all,

 

I apologize in advance if this comes off as a rant.

 

I have been trying to use Designer on and off for a couple of months and I admit that I am nowhere near familiar with the program. As a heavy Illustrator user I found working with artboards and layers very frustrating. How do I lock the artboard and prevent it from being selected? Why is it that when I move an object that's in a separate layer, it suddenly becomes a child of the artboard layer? Is there a way to change how selections work? Is my problem really that I am comparing it to Illustrator?

 

Again, I apologize since this is rant-y than I what I intended it to be.

[MEB]

Hi Herenow,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

In Illustrator Artboards are managed independently from layers. In Affinity Designer artboards and layers belong to the same stack/hierarchy - they are not independent - so you can think of them as several canvas on the same document all sharing the same layer stack/hierarchy. This means that layers should ideally be all inside an artboard layer (as if it was a single canvas document) and artboards are all siblings of each other on the root of the document/layer stack. So when you create or move an object over an artboard, it's layer is automatically created or moved to inside that artboard layer. This is by design.

[Herenow]

Wonderful! Thank you for the clarification.

[R C-R]

The Affinity Designer artboard implementation is so flexible that it is possible to do unusual things like creating parent/child artboard relationships & even rotate a child artboard in its parent, like in the attached nested artboard.afdesign file. Normally, there would be no reason to do this but it might be useful in a few special situations, possibly in combination with the continuous export feature.