Vector/pattern fill

[Jens D. R.]

Yes a vector fill would be wonderful. As in choosing a symbol like the bitmap-option in the fill menu.

+1 Vector fill option

[Argle Bargle]

I have alternated between Inkscape and AD. I'm a bit shocked that vector pattern fills aren't in AD since even basic SVG supports this. I didn't have time to read this entire thread, but I'm getting the impression that there aren't even plans to add this. I'd really love to hear that it is going to be added.

[only7yb]

+1 🙃

[QBerenguer]

+1 for REAL vector brushes too  

[François_B]

+1 It's so easy to do that in Illustrator since 20 years, I don't understant this is not possible in Affinity Designer... 

[Garikarp]

+100000000

[andren]

+1 for this feature. It would be very useful.

[D.E. Main]

Frustrated.  Not sure if or when Affinity will include this basic feature.  Just now trying Illustrator to see if it meets my immediate needs - for which I can't wait for Affinity any longer.  Product due in 2 months!!!   (Tried Inkscape and VectorStyler - not quite good enough.)

[D.E. Main]

Trialed Adobe Illustrator - what a wast of time.  Nowhere met the minimum of my needs.  (Just my needs - I'm sure others benefit from the basics.)

 

Staying with Affinity Designer.  Hoping they will advance in next release.

 

Message to Affinity - I would be willing to pay 2-3 times more for the features you have and advanced features like bitmap/vector fill, especially if I can distort the fill with the image.  Looking froward to the new Affinity Designer!!!! 

[Dazmondo77]

14 hours ago, D.E. Main said:

VectorStyler - not quite good enough.

I find VectorStyler to be better than anything else I've tried - even more options than Macromedia Freehand - you just need to dig in to learn it 

Copy pastes Pattern fills straight into Affinity as vectors you can be sorted in a few seconds ---- I use VS as an mega-toolkit to get stuff done that can't yet be done in Affinity 

[R C-R]

22 minutes ago, Dazmondo77 said:

you just need to dig in to learn it 

That's my problem. Every time I start trying to learn it, I get annoyed that so much of the UI uses icons that to me at least suggest little or nothing about their purpose, that I give up & put that off for another day.

[typeglyph]

R C-R,

Most OSs have icon hints. Hold your cursor over the icon and a little flag will pop up with the function. 

[R C-R]

19 minutes ago, typeglyph said:

R C-R,

Most OSs have icon hints. Hold your cursor over the icon and a little flag will pop up with the function. 

I know about the tooltips & how to shorten the delay before they pop up in VS, but it is still tedious to have to rely on doing that for every non-obvious icon in the UI. I keep having to move the pointer over each of them one at a time to find the one I want. I end up spending more time doing that than actually using any of the features they enable. 🙁

[Dazmondo77]

46 minutes ago, R C-R said:

That's my problem. Every time I start trying to learn it, I get annoyed that so much of the UI uses icons that to me at least suggest little or nothing about their purpose, that I give up & put that off for another day.

I totally get it R C-R.

I do quite a bit of t-shirt stuff designed for screen print, and seven months ago (approx) tried to use VectorStylers fairly recent addition 'repeater' function to create halftones and ended up giving up after F'ing and blinding at my screen after an hour or so of trying to get a grasp on it, and just ended up carrying on using my tried and tested combination of Clip Studio Paint, VectorRaster and Image Vectorizer for vector halftones. - but last Saturday had an urgent screen print T-shirt design to knock up and decided to use some of the VS true vector brushes I created, and create a few more, to compete the job. after successfully completing the job I decided to create more presets that would help me knock out these sort of jobs really quickly, so decided to have another play with Repeater and once I got my head around it, it turned out to be a really great tool for my halftone screen print workflow and have now created my own set of presets that will enable me to create total vector artwork fairly easily - I always start off and finish a job in Pubisher but I'm gradually finding VS to be more useful the more I commit to learning it. 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Dazmondo77 said:

I totally get it R C-R.

I just wonder if the developer of VS gets it. It is one thing to load up an app with a zillion useful features, but quite another to do that while keeping the UI intuitive & user friendly enough to make it worth investing a lot of time in learning how to use all that stuff.

The Affinity apps are far from perfect but way better than VS in that respect.

[dcr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

I just wonder if the developer of VS gets it. It is one thing to load up an app with a zillion useful features, but quite another to do that while keeping the UI intuitive & user friendly enough to make it worth investing a lot of time in learning how to use all that stuff.

The Affinity apps are far from perfect but way better than VS in that respect.

VectorStyler is like WOW!  It can do a lot of things, including a lot of things AD cannot (yet?), which is why a lot of people here recommend it as a companion to AD.  Plus, VS + AD is still far less expensive than Illustrator.

That said, VectorStyler's UI is not the greatest and, for a while, the documentation was minimal which meant that you knew VS could do things but how to do them was a big question.  The documentation has improved a lot, but still the UI is not the most intuitive.  I generally learn by playing around but it's difficult to play around in VS (as opposed to Designer, Illustrator, Amadine, Inkscape and others) because the intuitiveness needs work.

I know the developer was always quick on bug fixes.  I don't know if the developer is "attached" to the UI or not.  I don't use VS enough to suggest improvements because I would need to be more familiar with it to do so.  But, if the developer addresses UI issues as he's addressed bug fixes, maybe it would be worthwhile for those more familiar with VS to suggest UI improvements, maybe even present mockups like some people in the forums here suggest for Affinity products.

VectorStyler is amazing, and I've mentioned in other threads that I wouldn't mind if Serif bought Numeric Path and merged VS with Designer, but the UI needs improvement for VS to reach its full potential, IMHO.

[D.E. Main]

I echo the comments.  VS has some great and powerful features, but the learning curve - in absence of tutorials and good documentation - make it almost insurmountable to me.  Recent VS Forum advice was to learn by searching the Forum... but that should be the last resort - not first.  I love both but for different reasons. 

I like the idea of merging software/features.

[Boldlinedesign]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

I just wonder if the developer of VS gets it. It is one thing to load up an app with a zillion useful features, but quite another to do that while keeping the UI intuitive & user friendly enough to make it worth investing a lot of time in learning how to use all that stuff.

The Affinity apps are far from perfect but way better than VS in that respect.

I understand we all have our own unique difficulties learning software of different types, but I'm having a hard time understanding the obstacles you claim about difficulties with symbols and remembering what they are, that  keeps you from really understanding and using Vectorstyler. 

What specifically are you wanting the developer of Vectorstyler to "get"? How would you make it more intuitive? Remove the symbols? Not allow easy access to the tools? I am genuinely curious how you would improve it

You've mentioned the vertical toolbar and I assume you are also referring to the buttons at the top of the screen and the contextual menubar below that... 
I took a look in the official Vectorstyler documentation and found the section that goes in depth on every tool in the vertical toolbar. 
I also took a closer look at the Affinity vertical tool bar and main symbol bar at the top and then the contextual bar as well and found they are not really much different than the way it is in Vectorstyler. Boolean operations, alignment pull down panel, flipping objects around an axis, snapping tools, etc... its all the same on both. While there's similarity, there are also plenty of symbols in both Vectorstyler and Designer that could require hovering over to gain information. Vectorstyler is a more powerful and advanced program and so it's busier than what Affinity has - Affinity may get busier in the next update when they add a number of new features - we'll have to see. Affinity is never going to catch up with Vectorstyler in terms of features and abilities, but I also do not think that is their goal anyway - they instead seem to want to be a semi-professional program built to be sleek and work well as a unit with the other two components - nothing wrong with that. Those who want advanced vector features will turn to Vectorstyler as a primary use or as a powerful add-on to their affinity workflow. So comparing the two programs is apples and oranges in many ways.  
What you could try is taking a screenshot of the symbols and then hover over them and add their info to the screenshot so you know at quick reference what they are. I can see it being a little frustrating and cumbersome to learn so many symbols, but there are solutions like I suggested that should make this be an easy obstacle to overcome. 
If you seek the simplicity of Affinity - use that as your primary - but I don't think it's fair to knock Vectorstyler for having a busier UI when it offers many times more the features of Affinity. Any advanced program I tried to learn took time and patience and some frustration before it clicked. I remember using iMovie for so long before upgrading to Final Cut Pro - it was overwhelming for a while and then over time it got better.
Vectorstyler is not a perfect program any more than Affinity is imperfect. I agree there are some atheistical improvements Vectorstyler could make - improvements with the panels is coming for example...at some point there will be more video and tutorial options and that might help people as well 
 

[Boldlinedesign]

11 hours ago, R C-R said:

That's my problem. Every time I start trying to learn it, I get annoyed that so much of the UI uses icons that to me at least suggest little or nothing about their purpose, that I give up & put that off for another day.

I was reading your comment above and it made me think I'm misunderstanding you - are you thinking the only way to accomplish tasks in Vectorstyler is through the tiny icons on the main UI? If that's what you are believing to be true, I would totally understand your frustration with learning it. Nearly every symbol and icon on the UI is tied to a specific panel or option found and spelled out more clearly in the "panels" pulldown menu, much the same way Affinity has it's "Studio" menu. 
Most of the icons are just there for quick use once you know and understand the program. I hope that helps some!

Perhaps just focus on learning one topic that you could use to help you enhance what you are doing in Affinity? As @Dazmondo77 said, he uses it as a mega-pack side option and does most of his work in Affinity - that's a great way to go

[Boldlinedesign]

@dcrWhat do you feel like would help the UI of Vectorstyler be more intuitive? It reminds me a lot of Illustrator right now, for better or for worse. I would like to see the panels be more streamlined and less clunky looking. I would also like to see the main panels be able to be streamlined into icons if preferred, much like Illustrator has. That would help increase real estate space on the screen. Designer has a cleaner more spastic UI - which in some ways I like and in other ways, feels sparse... but I attribute that more to fewer features than anything else. As the program grows, I would predict more icons will be shown in the toolbar and UI overall.
What do you feel would make it more intuitive?
Tying in @D.E. Main's comment about "but the learning curve - in absence of tutorials and good documentation - make it almost insurmountable to me." Perhaps the fact that there's not enough existing tutorials, videos, better documentation overall, hurts the intuitiveness feeling and makes it feel insurmountable to some. I can understand that feeling for sure. My comment on that thread was to start with what you know that is very similar to affinity and illustrator already - there's a LOT of overlap. You plug away a little at a time and don't try to do too complex a thing at once - look up the topic in the documentation and try it out - then ask questions on the forum. That was what I did and now I use Vectorstyler full time and occasionally use Designer - I still use Photo quite a bit and want to do more with publisher.

[R C-R]

38 minutes ago, Boldlinedesign said:

what do you feel like would help the UI of Vectorstyler be more intuitive?

For one thing, an option to display both the name & icon of items on the main toolbar, just like the Affinity apps provide.

[Diller]

Features such as this STILL missing from this program (in 2022!) lead me to believe that the Affinity team have decided that their software is good enough. I'm very disappointed in this team and this software and like most of my colleagues I've had to go back to using Illustrator. It would be nice if we could move past the indie status of Affinity products but like the Serif suite, the Affinity suite is already old and unfinished, in an industry that is always moving forward. It is a shame because Affinity had a good start but it seems content to have its head stuck in the ground dwelling on the past. I guess I'll have to check back in another 3 years.

[Boldlinedesign]

@Diller I agree in large part with your comments. However affinity has said that 2.0 should be coming out sometime in 2022, so there's a five month window for that goal.

I've been using vectorstyler as my primary vector design program the last few years as I wait on affinity. Ultimately the combination of Vectorstyler and affinity covers most everything most designers need.

[Comet]

Yes, but no mention at all from Affinity about this most crucial of missing features. The impression that has previously been given is that this is not an important feature to the development team. It's such a shame that a product that is so good in so many ways is missing such a fundamental feature.

[NAR]

+1