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Appearance Panel/Studio in Affinity Designer ???


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Hello, 
Want to know if at some stage or age we will have something similar to the Appearance Panel.
In fact, Affinity Designer makes it so simple and easy to work with Vector Shapes etc... and i really enjoy it but also i believe having a Studio or more functionality in the already present Stroke panel/studio or even in the FX studio will be of great help.

it will be so fine and so nice to add :
more than 1 stroke (+stroke color) 
- more than 1 fill 
- and even much more in the same vector shape/tool thus making it easy and simple to create and work on complex vector shape without having to cut/break etc... it will help creating symbols from just one element (can be used as tattoos sign for some other designers).

i mean the possibility go beyond the actual fill/stroke etc... that we already have.
Also please, correct if i'm wrong and if it's already possible to apply such thing with the actual version of software.

Cheers.

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Yes it would be nice to "group" all of the style attributes into a single Panel.

5 hours ago, Arnaud Mez said:

more than 1 stroke (+stroke color) 

You can't do this like Adobe does at the moment but you can create multiple shapes and have them layered in a group to get a similar effect.

5 hours ago, Arnaud Mez said:

- more than 1 fil

Again, you can layer and group the same shape and add different fills, then use blend modes to get effects.

5 hours ago, Arnaud Mez said:

-and even much more in the same vector shape/tool thus making it easy and simple to create and work on complex vector shape without having to cut/break etc...

Maybe show an example of what you mean here?

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5 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Yes it would be nice to "group" all of the style attributes into a single Panel.

You can't do this like Adobe does at the moment but you can create multiple shapes and have them layered in a group to get a similar effect.

Again, you can layer and group the same shape and add different fills, then use blend modes to get effects.

Maybe show an example of what you mean here?

Hi @firstdefence this is what i was talking about.

I discovered this technic from my dear friend Tom Cargill from Satori Graphics and it's really amazed me because i often create things like that with Affinity but it requires so much manipulation of the same object again and againwhich can be time consuming.
I never used this technic nor did it with Ai but just found it useful and life saving.

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@Arnaud Mez Yes I'm familiar with Illustrator and the Appearance Panel and it's flexibilities, Something else that Affinity Designer really needs is Offset Paths, you can pseudo do Offset Paths but its still a clumsy way to do it, having said that I've never understood why Illustrator doesn't have a simple way to access Offset Paths. Going back to the Appearance Panel, Affinity does make it hard work having to go back and forth between panels even if they are stacked one one on top of the other, it's still clunky.

 

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  • 10 months later...
15 hours ago, jamesholden said:

Can someone please show me some examples of the 'striking creative effects' that the manual speaks of?

The new Multiple strokes and fills video tutorial should give you a few ideas about that.

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  • 1 year later...
1 hour ago, clearlogo said:

 to apply this to live text

No. But the Contour tool does, so you can somewhat simulate a double stroke. But that will be without a fill then.

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Thanks loukash! I tried that, but I'm after having several (7-8) outlines.

I found out that you can use the appearance panel if you outline the text and bake it together, then add several layers of outlines there. The issue is that text is not editable anymore... 😓

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You can add multiple strokes (outlines) to text if you group the text and add an Outline FX to the group. Then group the group and add another Outline FX to that group etc etc etc.

The text remains editable at all times

 

strokes.png

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1 minute ago, clearlogo said:

The issue is that text is not editable anymore

Yep.

In theory there could be a workaround to use Photo's "Duplicate Linked" feature to sync the text content while applying different properties to each text frame while they are stacked on top of each other. But unfortunately you can't partially unlink individual text attributes via the Links panel.
(On the other hand, the linked layers settings are kept intact when switching back to Designer – which again is a brilliant feature with a lot of unexpected potential on its own!)

Similarly, it doesn't work – logically – when converting text to symbols: all changes are synced. Bummer.

43 minutes ago, carl123 said:

The text remains editable at all times

… and converts to pixels on export.
Just so you know. ;)

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Just now, Murfee said:

Have you tried compounds?

No yet, but that was one of the next stops on my list. :)

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  • 6 months later...

I would vouch for the option to have the appearance panel work on layers, just like illustrator. Meaning that, whatever objects are on a particular layer, their appearance is controlled through the appearance panel. If you for instance have a map of a city, all of the railroads need to be dashed in white, on top of a black stroke beneath. When tracing over the railroads, it quickly becomes tedious to change the appearance of the newly added lines, whereas this could easily be achieved if the appearance was affecting layers (or all the objects within a layer) as opposed to individual objects only.

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