Couple of suggestions for UX design

[Zoran Bosnjak]

Hi, so far I love this program (I'm using it exclusively for web and UX design), however I have couple of suggestions to make work more easy and simple.

 

1. Implement support for some sort of "Ruler" (or maybe automatic ruler that will display distance from nearby objects, while moving an object), so we can easily measure distance between 2 objects. Similar to Adobe XD.

2. Implement more simple way of resizing an document. For instance, my document is 1920x1080, but If I need to resize the canvas to 1920x2080 I need to go to document setup, than dimensions, manually set document size, set it to anchor instead of rescale, and finally set anchoring point. More elegant solution would be to have some sort of bar that can be moved up or down, outside the bounds of an document. Again, similar to Adobe XD.

3. Implement support for custom Icons. For instance it would be really good to have some built in window with glyph icons , in that way we don't need to manually download them from the internet.

4. I like the idea of an assets panel, however it is missing some of the features. It should allow us to add colors and styles (including font styles) to assets also, not only reference to an object. So when we select text or any of the object, we can apply specific style to that object from assets.

5. Give us support for custom plugins. Other users could then implement very specific plugins aimed at specific business needs. For instance there is plugin for Adobe XD that will automatically download profile face from the stock photo. You just need to select an object who will be parent for that face, open plugin and set search criteria, click OK and voila, you have profile face in your object. Incredibly useful and big time saver. 

 

Thanks, hope somebody from Affinity team is reading this. Would like to hear your thaughts on that. 

[fde101]

#1 - is already there - make sure snapping is turned on, select an object then hold down command (control on Windoze) and point to the other object you want to measure the distance to.

#3 - assets panel seems to cover this?

#4 - disagree, these don't belong there; there are already dedicated panels for Swatches, Text Styles and Styles that cover these needs more appropriately.

#5 - I believe Serif has indicated they do intend to provide a plugin API of some kind in the future, but it may be a while out.

[Aammppaa]

2. Use an Artboard.

Select the Artboard, and drag it bigger.

Or in the Transform panel type 2080 in the height box. Or type h+1000 and let Affinity do the maths for you.