Artboards Pannel?

[Petar Petrenko]

I think it is a good idea to have an "Artboards" pannel in Designer same as we have "Pages" in Publisher. Because, in a way, they represent a kind of pages in Designer.
This way we can have very nice visual presentation of the artboards and they will not share a room with layers in the same pannel and make a confusion because they are not layers.

[Petar Petrenko]

No answer from A-Team, yet.

[walt.farrell]

As you've probably noticed, Petar, the Serif team usually does not comment on suggestions. Mainly they just read them and take notes for their future planning.

[fde101]

On 6/8/2019 at 5:25 PM, Petar Petrenko said:

because they are not layers.

Actually, they are layers in the Affinity products.

[Petar Petrenko]

2 hours ago, fde101 said:

Actually, they are layers in the Affinity products.

Actually, they a kind of "pages" for Designer. IMO they are placed in layers pannel because the A-Team didn't think of them as pages at the very start.

[Petar Petrenko]

Anything new?

This feature will establish better communication between Publisher and Designer.

[walt.farrell]

You'll know there's something new if Serif ever ships a beta with the feature you've asked for. Until then, as with most feature requests, the answer is "no"

[dominik]

On 7/1/2019 at 6:26 PM, Petar Petrenko said:

Actually, they a kind of "pages" for Designer.

I personally tend to have artboards all over the place. Not in a sequential order like pages. Many times I end up with very differently sized artboards when e.g. working on a web project.

I find the Navigator Panel helpful to keep track of the artboards. Or I simply hit CTRL+0 to get a complete overview and then z to zoom to the area/artboard I want to work on.

I do not miss an additional art board panel.

d.

[JET_Affinity]

4 hours ago, dominik said:

I personally tend to have artboards all over the place....I do not miss an additional art board panel. 

Amen.

Illustrator's historic nemesis, FreeHand, originally had a single page residing in a limited size pasteboard, much like Illustrator. Macromedia gave FreeHand multiple pages long before Illustrator ever acquired multiple "artboards". In the arguments that ensued throughout the years between, during which Illustrator devotees insisted that giving Illustrator the ability to have a "page 2" would constitute the end of all that is holy, I explained the advantage with the following:

A conventional-wisdom page-layout program has a page-flipping metaphor. All same-size pages stacked like a book. FreeHand, though, had a sheet-spreading metaphor, entirely different from conventional wisdom. It was more like gathering up all the various documents pertaining to a project, spreading them out on the office floor or conference room table, and freely arranging them.

That's exactly how I use "artboards" in a drawing program. In a sign project, for example, I may have the customer's tabloid-size concept draft in the lower left, a row of three or four full-scale working drawings for the construction above it, and six full-scale sheets of various lengths on each of which all the vinyl cuts for a specific vinyl color are nested to save materials. Those are the sheets that are exported to the cutter.

For an identity package project, I can have all the different press-sheets for the letterhead, business cards, note pads, etc., etc., each ganged appropriately for the specific press-runs.

FreeHand didn't need any kind of special screen for handling its pages. You just zoomed out, used the Page tool to select pages and drag them about. They abided by the very same alignment, distribution, spacing, and guide or grid snapping  as any other objects. And as of CS6, Illustrator's treatment is still hugely more tedious, cumbersome, and frustrating by comparison.

Of course, those were also the days before someone got the bright-eyed idea to make a LAYERS palette into what should be called an OBJECT STACK palette, by insisting on listing every freaking object in it. I still despise that. It makes me scream "STOP HELPING ME" at all of today's inelegant drawing programs.

[dominik]

5 hours ago, dominik said:

I find the Navigator Panel helpful to keep track of the artboards. 

There is actually one thing I am missing in the Navigator Panel: some way to click drag a rectangle to zoom to a certain area. Click dragging only moves the set view area around.

d.

[Petar Petrenko]

11 hours ago, dominik said:

I do not miss an additional art board panel.

Of course, we can survive without them, but IMO their place is not in the layers panel.

[dominik]

4 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:

but IMO their place is not in the layers panel.

I can follow you with this. Unless the layers panel is improved to filter out just artboards (and other things). This would be an different approach.

d.

[Ecifircas]

It might be more useful to hide the dartboards from the layer panel. So you would just zoom out and visually select the artboard. The layer panel would only show those on the selected artboard and hide all other artboard layers.

I currently find it needlessly clogged to see all artboards layers even though I am not working in them.

[dutchshader]

180 

[scatterbrain73]

The closest thing I've found to this is going into the Export Persona (top left), and that will get you the Slices panel. In the Slices panel, the top item represents your whole document, and the ones below with the pink box icons are your artboards.

[Petar Petrenko]

1 hour ago, scatterbrain73 said:

The closest thing I've found to this is going into the Export Persona (top left), and that will get you the Slices panel. In the Slices panel, the top item represents your whole document, and the ones below with the pink box icons are your artboards.

Would you be so kind and read again the first post?

[JET_Affinity]

Quote

…IMO their place is not in the layers panel.

No argument there. Merely dragging something from one artboard to another, or from an artboard to the pasteboard has no business altering the object stacking order. A page (artboard) in a freeform "page spreading" metaphor should not be a mere clipping path. It should simply be a region of the pasteboard.

But many users go nuts when a drawing program won't visually "clip" bleeding objects to the page or bleed area. That has never been a problem to me. I commonly store things entirely off the artboard(s), and when designing for bleeds, I manually trim bleeding objects midway between the trim and bleed area.

This and several similar discussions remind me of the firestorm Corel started when they implemented page-specific Layers.

JET