macOS document icons and type names

[gafvert]

I'm posting this again since the old post seems to have been migrated to a locked section and can't be replied to, while the issue has been raised by multiple users (see below) from 2014 and onwards. 

A simple request: An application as mature as Affinity designer should have proper document icons and have finder/macOS document types set up correctly.

Currently Affinity Designer (1.6.1) has three document types, with none of them having document icons:

- "Affinity Designer Documents" (.afdesign), these currently use the application icon, which looks very out of place and is a little confusing. Please add a proper document icon for these files.

- "Affinity Brushes" (.afbrushes), these have no icons so they get a generic blank system document icon (at least better than the application icon).

- "Affinity Openable", (all supported formats, like .svg .jpg .pdf etc), these also have no icons so they get a generic blank system document icon. Also these should get proper names that reflect the actual file type, like "Affinity SVG" etc, as "Openable" isn't really a file type and is a little confusing as it's shown in finder as the file type if you assign for example SVGs to be opened by Affinity.

This seems like such a simple thing to fix, and such a basic thing for a document based application I wonder why it hasn't been done already? Is it intentional?

 

[hawk]

I agree. Other apps do this... and so can Affinity.

[gafvert]

Just tried out the new beta 1.7.0.14, and when I saw that the app had a new app icon I was sure they'd fix this strange oversight with the lack of document icons, but now it seems that they've just done the same thing again and used a version of the app icon for the documents? Only slightly larger? Come on! How hard can it be to actually make recognizable document icons that aren't just the app icon?

 

[JGD]

On 5/31/2019 at 10:35 AM, gafvert said:

Just tried out the new beta 1.7.0.14, and when I saw that the app had a new app icon I was sure they'd fix this strange oversight with the lack of document icons, but now it seems that they've just done the same thing again and used a version of the app icon for the documents? Only slightly larger? Come on! How hard can it be to actually make recognizable document icons that aren't just the app icon?

 

Not that hard. As a matter of fact, one of the few things I find Affinity Designer great for is creating macOS icons.

The pixel grid snapping grid works great and, as long as you keep each artboard’s origin coordinates as an integer, you’ll be fine and have no need for Ai’s stupid “make pixel perfect” command. In AD, if you do your prep work properly, everything is always pixel perfect.

And as for creating the final .icns icon files themselves, it’s easy as pie: just plop your exported .png artboards/slices into a folder with an .iconset extension, name your files correctly and run a Terminal command. Boom, instant macOS icon, ready for Retina and old, regular screens and all.

However, I should add that there’s a pretty strong reason for Serif not to have bothered much with it; with QuickLook, which is enabled by default, the Finder already creates preview icons. Still, for those who may wish to disable that feature, those default icons should definitely be HIG-compliant, and they’re miles away from that. There are rules to follow and all of the examples given by @hawk mostly stick to them.

[fde101]

I agree that this should be fixed.