Affinity Designer 1.8 New features list?

[MikeW]

5 minutes ago, ErrkaPetti said:

But if you’re a Pro, use Pro software that cost hundreds or thousands of bucks, and, don’t buy application for peanut money and think you can charge your customers more that you are worth...

You don't know me and I don't know you. You don't know what software I use daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. You don't know what I charge or why.

Pretty poor assessment of me...and the value of Serif software, which is/can be greater than the cost of it.

[nezumi]

8 hours ago, Jowday said:

You never made an estimate? Time never was a factor? 20 or 30 hours did not matter? 

Of course it does. Mainly to estimate a deadline. But it would be absurd to charge on per-hour basis. Say logo - how long does it takes to do? I dont know. It might take a day or a week of back and forth, different versions, revisions etc. It also might be 30 minutes and I got brilliant idea (or happy accident ) that client instantly likes too. And what - I should charge for half an hour? Client is paying me to came up with idea, something that will sell his product, position him well on the market. Not for the bloody time I was pushing nodes to get clean shape. That 30 minutes can be worth few grands.
I thought you were saying you're professional? Why I am talking about that basics of a business here...
 

2 hours ago, MikeW said:

I get what Jowday is saying. No matter how a job is estimated/quoted, it is based on hours.

If you are a mechanic then maybe. You can even charge extra for making stuff faster. But this is CREATIVE business we are talking about here. Can you guarantee that idea will come to you faster if you agree on making work faster? I cant. Will you include hours that you are THINKING about the design? Then, MAYBE. "Sir, it took me 2 hours to do, and I added estimate of 15 hours I was thinking about it, mostly in the metro... Sir.. Hello?!". Good luck selling that.

Here is another example. My wife is a dentist. Would you like dentist to be paid for hours? Trust me she can get rid of that tooth in 2 minutes. Or take her sweet time. You tell me what you like. Hourly rate? No problem, let me just strap you to a chair and put some loud music so screams will not bother neighbors for the next... What is your budget? 4 hours sounds fine?..

You are free to charge on per hour. People are making this funny calculators - "how much is your hour worth? Add rent, electricity bill, mouse and keyboard cost, software license, sandwich, hot chocolate, soup, divide by 7 days a week, divide by hours worked daily, multiply by 2 (so you dont get completely screwed), minus the time you were procrastinating, add income tax, consider difference between incomes in your country and clients country... TA-DAAAA! Your hour is worth $23.9992. Now go get them tiger!"

Meantime me, 23 years in business amateur/hobbyist : "sir, it will be $500 and I can have it done by Friday. Maybe faster but want to be on safe side."
To each his own I guess...

BTW, I cant wait to see what are devs working on now You know them amateurs - they like to know whats coming to their cheap software... Am I right guys? High five!
 

[MikeW]

5 minutes ago, ErrkaPetti said:

It was not meant to be rude against you personally ...

But you were. I don't expect, or even want, an apology. I'm a big boy. But you should think about what you write.

5 minutes ago, ErrkaPetti said:

... people here in general think that they can buy an application for 40-50 bucks, and, have an app that does everything the big Pro app does...

Pretty poor assessment of the 111,000+ members here. See the point above. I expect any software billed as being billed as for professionals to live up to given standards. Don't you?

6 minutes ago, ErrkaPetti said:

... I know that you are one of the friendly Affinity supporters, compair to mr Jowday that complains here on and on and on........

People who complain are often people who have paid for the software. To me, that makes them "eligible" to make complaints. How that is handled does matter, but the complaints can be viewed as a passion to see the software get better.

I'll leave this thread alone now.

[rubs]

1 minute ago, MikeW said:

I'll leave this thread alone now.

Too bad, but understandable. As in many aspects of life these days, unfortunately important / interesting discussions are lost because some people insist to take matters personally.

[Jowday]

2 hours ago, nezumi said:

Of course it does. Mainly to estimate a deadline. But it would be absurd to charge on per-hour basis.

I never said that. So why the absurd black and white derailed discussion / examples. It is like being back in high school. One thing is for sure - I do not recognize your silly examples from my own work life. ~30 years and in a handful of big or even huge international companies. Currently I have thousands of colleagues in a very professional setup and we make estimates all the time. We are charged based on estimates all the time from left and right. We are picking offers based on estimates all the time. Funding is an issue that comes and goes. Time is always against us, as well as against companies or individuals we pick or have to reject. And we are certainly not "mechanics" - but creatives. But it doesn't matter. Developers or creatives - both have to come up with a great idea, structured approach and effective execution all completed in as few ours as possible. And we do. That is how we got the job. That is what makes us professionals. Experience, skills and method. But this Game of Estimates is not exactly sellers market. So if the software itself made the time factor slightly less problematic... some customers out there would win time and money. Serif would benefit too. But you apologists are more concerned about the discourse in a forum and about "complainers" and what not.

So I totally agree with Mike about time, workarounds and passion. And I too will leave this thread alone now. In fact it is ready to be locked.

[nezumi]

Yeah maybe difference here is that I don't work for a man, I work for myself. Being part of massive corpo works differently - you are doing as you are told for a salary. Of course you have bloody hourly rate there - its a factory.
McDonalds has thousands of employees too - very professional setup may I add.

[JGD]

On 12/5/2019 at 12:19 PM, MattP said:

@JGD - is this the unicorn layer functionality you are looking for?

Well, by any other name, I guess it is. And it makes a world of difference… 

Wait, is it finally coming?!  Considering how nicely Publisher is also coming along, especially the IDML importer, I could really start digging into Designer for the odd job.

If I do indeed get used to it, all those other advanced features from Ai would then be just “nice-to-have”; and as long as Publisher correctly renders PDFs generated in .Ai with unsupported features (such as, say, the variable and SVG fonts we're discussing on another thread), I could certainly do the bulk of my work in Designer and save Ai for those odd use cases.

It's not as practical or elegant a solution as having embedded, editable .afdesign artwork, but I've been working that way with ID and Ai for years, it's not like it's a downgrade to my workflow or anything.

[Move Along People]

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[JGD]

On 12/5/2019 at 8:05 PM, MattP said:

With regards to artboards being ‘glorified clipping paths’ I’d argue that they are less like ‘glorified clipping paths’ than Illustrators artboards are like ‘glorified rectangles’ - our artboards are containers* [emphasis mine], as are XD’s artboards, even as are Photoshop’s artboards. We have pages in Publisher for when you’re trying to achieve things which would be more appropriately constructed that way..

*And therein lie the issues which, IMHO, plague Serif apps (also, for the sake of accuracy and intellectual honesty, no, Ai's artboards are most definitely not “glorified rectangles”; they are smart enough to also drag objects along with them, have a database and panel of their own, and allow for quick export with printers' marks, so, if anything, they are “glorified slices/groups” which do their intended job just perfectly and with almost zero complaints from end-users – or none that I heard of).

No other design application does this, and for good reason. Conceptually speaking, artboards are pieces of paper/media (or their final, cropped state), and artists, designers, etc. can and will on occasion work well outside their boundaries and readjust said cropping factor, or reposition their artwork, while still keeping an unobstructed, bird's-eye view of all their stuff. The etymology of the word, and the way the physical object used to work – and still does, in fact – offers some insight as to how it should be approached in a mostly digital-first but not digital-only world, and a container/box/folder it is not. You may conceptualise it as such, being a developer and all, but artists do not “see” it that way, nor does it work that way in real life with physical media.

That is why I've been saying for years that Serif apps are inherently non-WYSIWYG/non-skeumorphic/non-whatchamacallit. They do not behave like real-world, physical tools at their basic level (of course, digital tools will always offer a degree of abstraction impossible in the physical world, but to do so at the very conceptual/structural core may break some people's minds). And most other competitors, conversely, do. For all its snappiness and even intuitiveness when it comes to certain tools, Affinity apps – especially Designer – add a layer of user-unfriendliness that is hard to survey or put into words, but believe me, it's there. Just because enough users and Apple itself heaped you with praise, that doesn't mean I'm wrong about it; it's just that they didn't notice it or it didn't make much of a difference to them considering their demands and/or how affordable Affinity apps are.

Honestly, have you personally seen non-digital illustrators work, in the field, with their pens, pencils, brushes, masking tape, scissors, x-acto knives, rulers, glue sticks and whatnot? I've dated one for three years and I saw her and her colleagues work almost daily for more than two years straight. They do that kind of tinkering and repositioning a lot, and the “artboard” only becomes an irreversible, done deal much later in the process (more often than not only in digital form, after the original artwork is scanned).

As for my design work, even I do that a lot (albeit digitally), and I'd love to be able to do so in Designer, too. Maybe it comes down to the fact that I was trained at a fine-arts school, as are many top-level designers all over the world, and started out working in physical media myself (and the same goes for our MA, which includes an entire semester at a letterpress workshop as the main subject).

You might ask: in a digital-first/mostly-digital world, why should a developer like Serif even worry about physical metaphors and accommodate for users who started out on physical media? Ask me, and I'll say that 99.9% of art and design teachers at the under- and postgraduate level will tell you that learning first how to draw by hand is essential. Ask them directly, and you'll be lucky if they don't outright laugh at you. I know, because I tried having that very debate with some of them, and it wasn't pretty. Also, the more I read on the subject and teach students of my own, the more convinced I am they are absolutely right, and I'm very far from being conservative as a person, as a creative or as a teacher.

And I'm not even getting back into the whole “universal layer” conundrum (and I'm ecstatic to see that you may be fixing it soon, thus allowing you to have your cake and us to eat it too)… As I've said before, those two concepts, while related, aren't mutually exclusive, so we should also have the ability to turn off “Clip to Canvas” even in a multi-artboard document whose objects are indeed contained in specific artboards (if you must insist in keeping that interaction model around, and I understand why you would, for backward compatibility with that always-cropped, iPad-first paradigm that I'm sure a sizeable portion of users enjoy).

If I may give you a constructive suggestion, an easy solution for the inevitable issue of having objects contained in an artboard overlap with objects contained in another, maybe that mode might affect only the active/selected artboard, thus acting a bit like an “isolation mode” of sorts. That would probably also force you to add further functionality to the Layers panel, such as entering modal states via, say, double-clicking/tapping (i.e. “entering” an artboard/group/clipping group/inpainted group/layer/universal layer), instead of just selecting stuff; all that modal functionality offers a level of abstraction for power users which, IMHO, is perfectly acceptable, desirable and sometimes vital, unlike the arguably and demonstrably weird/crippled “container model”. That, too, would also allow us all to have our cake – i.e. artboards as containers – and eat it too – i.e. seeing stuff outside of them even in complex documents. My €0,02.

[Seneca]

I may have misunderstood the thrust of the main post here but even Adobe are reconsidering the way they treat layers.

They find their global layers a mess and want to switch to per artboard layers copying Affinity. They "discovered" that the per artboard layers are more logical and less messy.

Again, I might have misunderstood what Adobe want to do but it seems to me that not all people find the per artboard layers a problem.

[Move Along People]

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[Vaaish]

1 hour ago, JGD said:

*And therein lie the issues which, IMHO, plague Serif apps (also, for the sake of accuracy and intellectual honesty, no, Ai's artboards are most definitely not “glorified rectangles”; they are smart enough to also drag objects along with them, have a database and panel of their own, and allow for quick export with printers' marks, so, if anything, they are “glorified slices/groups” which do their intended job just perfectly and with almost zero complaints from end-users – or none that I heard of)

I think I'm missing something here or at least this there has to be some confusion of terms going on. For context, I've used Illustrator for over 15 years and in the last year I've been poking at using Designer since I'm tired of the subscription model pricing for CC. 

Just double checking today, I find very little difference between Designer and Illustrator when it comes to the function of art boards though there is a good bit of difference in how I access things. Designer's artboards drag contained objects with them when rearranged just like Illustrator. Both programs can print or export artboards with printers marks, both can create ad hoc artboards. Sure Illustrator uses a panel to manage them while designer places them in the layers panel, but neither option seems significantly better. I can't speak to the database functions as I've never needed them, but I really can't say I notice much of a difference between the apps when dealing with artboards outside of Illustrator having a properties panel and Designer treating them more like a shape once placed. 

[Mithferion]

2 hours ago, JGD said:

Affinity apps – especially Designer – add a layer of user-unfriendliness that is hard to survey or put into words, but believe me, it's there

Adobe Illustrator is whatever you might describe, except for user-friendly. It's a piece of Software with many great Tools but to this day it's something I don't enjoy using. On the other hand, even when you consider its shortcomings, Affinity Designer is way more user-frienly.

Now, there are some parts in Affinity Designer that can be improved, and what Matt has shown (something asked rightly by you) looks good to me and it's a welcome feature, but taking that example and speaking like that's the case for the overall experience on both Applications, I find it just not to be true.

Best regards!

[nezumi]

26 minutes ago, ErrkaPetti said:

Adobe can do that, Adobe can do more, Adobe is smarter... Bla bla bla..

I tell you what I bet Adobe illustrator still CANT do. Simple bloody inner shadow.
I haven't used AI for 3 years now but I would bet my money on it, that this "industry standard", full PRO, Adobe Illustrator still have to fake simple inner shadow with black glow and no direction. No problem in Designer though, out of the box.
Sometimes Adobe users have to look for workarounds to make something absolutely basic. And as we were said here by the long time professional - workarounds are for amateurs and hobbyists, right?

[Mithferion]

To be as fair as possible:

On the Applications mentiones here:

• Illustrator has many more and more advanced Vector features than Designer
• Designer has a better overall experience using it for the first time
• Designer has features that are not present in Illustrator, or that Illustrator just recently introduced (think of the Crop Tool)

On the Customers and Serif:

• Affinity's messaging can be misleading beceause it is using words that encompass a lot
• A customer should be responsible enough to see if current features are what they need. Assuming is a word that I've read a few times here
• Users can be so self-centric that they put their use case as that basis for their main argument: Designer is good/bad

Best regards!

[Move Along People]

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[Mithferion]

Professional is just the work you do at a certain level of knowledge and complexity. Efficiency and best practices are desirable but they are not always present in the Professional world (and many people treat them as equal).

Anyway, as I said once:

• Use the Tool that you need to use to do the work with the best result possible
• But if you have more than one Tool available, use what you want

Designer can't cover all of the scenarios and some workflows are not as fast a others, but it can be used in Professional environments. It's just that it won't fit everywhere (and because of that, it's labeled derogatorily as "for hobbysts").

Best regards!

P. S.: I had such a mentality regarding some Consultants that work with a certain company's solutions, considering them square-minded individuals with no creativity. Now I see that's not the case, but that some scenarios required more than going by the standard (us), but others require rigorous methodology (them).

[Patrick Connor]

On 12/7/2019 at 4:27 PM, ErrkaPetti said:

JGD, together with Jowday, is complaining endless...

Adobe can do that, Adobe can do more, Adobe is smarter... Bla bla bla...

I can’t understand why you two guys coming here on steady basis just to vomit on Affinity Suite... Stay with Adobe, and leave us amateurs and hobbyists alone! We don’t need your endless negative opinions here, because you two have said enough BS concering Affinity...

This kind of comment achieves nothing. Stop it. If you hover over a users avatar there is an ignore option. I suggest that you use it. We decide who posts here and what's acceptable and robust criticism of our software is not taken personally, nor does its presence here mean we agree with its contents.

I think that there are forum regulars here for whom Affinity is 95% what they need, which is frustratingly close. Telling us "it's not good enough for them" tends to lead to other regulars saying "you're wrong it's ok" (for me), well that's not constructive. If any more features are added we are more than likely to leave existing workflows available. So if Affinity works for you now, it most likely will work for you in the future too. So adding other features does not detract, so it's all good. If we add no more features then those 95%ers should then use it or leave but we are still adding stuff, so.... IMHO they are welcome. This seems like a good thread to express opinions. There's many support threads where this level of critique is unhealthy but in a thread that's actually about what's currently missing, surely this is okay.

Now to everyone who has posted in this thread today (myself included), you are all being disrespectful to the Lead Developer Mark who asked nicely for this to be kept on topic. As that seems impossible I'm moving it (from the Designer beta on Windows forum) to the Designer Suggestion forum as none of this is about the current #514 beta anymore.

[nezumi]

24 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Now to everyone who has posted in this thread today, you are all being disrespectful to the Lead Developer Mark who asked nicely for this to be kept on topic.

I honestly missed the message. Sorry.

[JGD]

On 12/7/2019 at 4:27 PM, ErrkaPetti said:

JGD, together with Jowday, is complaining endless...

Adobe can do that, Adobe can do more, Adobe is smarter... Bla bla bla...

I can’t understand why you two guys coming here on steady basis just to vomit on Affinity Suite... Stay with Adobe, and leave us amateurs and hobbyists alone! We don’t need your endless negative opinions here, because you two have said enough BS concering Affinity...

You completely missed the mark here. Where, pray tell, did I single out Adobe on my last comment?

Quite the contrary… I mentioned ALL of Serif's competition. That includes: CorelDRAW; Inkscape; Scribus; the defunct Macromedia; yes, Adobe, but certainly not just them; Glyphs.app; FontLab; and I'm willing to bet that the list goes on, and on, and on…

Sure, I'm willing to admit that per-artboard, per-master and per-spread layers can be incredibly useful, as @Seneca pointed out. In fact, just because I think the implementation is flawed/incomplete, and outright weird from a conceptual standpoint, never have I said that they were an inherently useless, bad idea. But universal layers are also demonstrably useful, and I gave plenty of examples elsewhere on this forum where that may be the case… To claim otherwise is, to put it mildly, fanboyism and intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.

[JGD]

On 12/7/2019 at 5:24 PM, haakoo said:

People often call things workarounds but sometimes they bring you the result much faster and those hobbyists are doing things faster then you pro's can because you'll are waiting for a tool to change the way you think it should work,uhm that's really professional.

Nope, we're doing it even faster with the tools we already know how to work with (and which work in a way compatible with a) our workflows and b) the complexity of our projects), with our 10+ years of accumulated experience.

[JGD]

On 12/7/2019 at 5:15 PM, Mithferion said:

Adobe Illustrator is whatever you might describe, except for user-friendly. It's a piece of Software with many great Tools but to this day it's something I don't enjoy using. On the other hand, even when you consider its shortcomings, Affinity Designer is way more user-frienly.

Now, there are some parts in Affinity Designer that can be improved, and what Matt has shown (something asked rightly by you) looks good to me and it's a welcome feature, but taking that example and speaking like that's the case for the overall experience on both Applications, I find it just not to be true.

Best regards!

Also, not what I said. Overall, AD is indeed more user-friendly. I did mention its intuitive tools, didn't I? As for Ai, I believe I mentioned it before but it does bear repeating: it has a steep learning curve and features some positively horrible vector editing tools.

So, it stands to reason that for a digital illustrator that wants to quickly plop down some artwork into a simple virtual canvas, AD is WAY friendlier.

But for someone who's more of a perfectionist (re-read my comments regarding artwork repositioning in more complex documents), the current document model may start to irk them a bit…

And, finally, for an information designer who may have to produce, say, an entire signage system…? Ehhhh, things start to get ugly and slow, real fast. As I've also demonstrated before here in the forums.

As you should know, when it comes to software usability and workflows, things are anything but obvious and linear. Once you get past that learning curve, economies of scale kick in, and I can assure you that whatever workarounds I'd have to come up with in AD would be way worse and time-wasting than having to deal with Ai's horrid tools every now and then. I know, because I tried them.

[JGD]

On 12/6/2019 at 10:52 PM, haakoo said:

Didn't we all?

 

Again, don't we all?

The passion the so called amateurs have is as much as the so called pro's.
The goal is the same just the constant complaining is the problem.
What would new users think if they come here for answers?
They only see negative posts which make them reconsider if this is the right product,it could mean they will leave,don't buy the products,no future funds,no development.
So maybe put this thread to sleep and let you half empty glass members take a look at yourselves in what it is that you are really doing here.
Not only alienating current users whom paid as much as you ,the complainers.
But also the future users that will pay for your precious to die for features.

Good night, sleep tight,

BOOO wake up people!

I'm not sure I fully agree with your assessment. They will actually see a lively back-and-forth between devs and users. Sure, it may not always be perfect, but it's leagues ahead of what happens at the competition's user forums (and here, I'll single out Adobe by name: I will never, *ever* forget that infamous Photoshop gradient thread).

We are discussing very precise factors here, and users who don't feel affected by them will either ignore the discussion altogether, or realise those issues aren't that big of a deal anyway. Also, Affinity apps are so affordable that taking the plunge isn't that big of a risk, IMHO. Even if you never pick them up again, they cost as much as a few months of a CC subscription, and you can absolutely recoup the initial investment in no time.

The main reasons I (and others?) am so “passionate” about the Affinity suite are, as stated earlier, because I do wish to switch to a more affordable alternative, but also because I'm trying to recoup the time investment and regain some of the credibility lost for having peddled it to no end at the very beginning of the public beta phase. And the main reason I'm not doing so anymore, nor investing in crazy workarounds without any guarantee that they will become obsolete ASAP, is the fact that I know of the sunken cost fallacy. Nuh-uh, I'm not getting caught in that rabbit hole.

Once I realised AD did not work for me and my students in its current state I pulled out of my self-appointed duties as a full-blown tester and evangeliser, and focused on its irreconcilable structural shortcomings instead. For all the people here thinking that I'm too emotional, or passionate or whatever, I would kindly ask you to take a moment to appreciate how very rational, logical and laser-focused those decisions actually were.

As for Serif, a company constantly propped up by none other than Apple itself, I think you worry too much about its short-term future. Our comments about the long term are aimed mostly at Serif management itself, not other users – current and potential –, and I fully believe the latter realise that and are more than able to decide for themselves if Affinity is good enough for them in its current form. There is, IMHO, plenty of time to correct course here and there, and these latest posts are absolutely a step in the right direction.

[JGD]

Patrick, I know we had our differences, but these two snippets right here warrant some kudos:

On 12/7/2019 at 6:31 PM, Patrick Connor said:

I think that there are forum regulars here for whom Affinity is 95% what they need, which is frustratingly close. [emphasis mine]

I now see that you totally get our sentiment. That about sums it up nicely.

On 12/7/2019 at 6:31 PM, Patrick Connor said:

If any more features are added we are more than likely to leave existing workflows available. So if Affinity works for you now, it most likely will work for you in the future too.

Also this. I've been mentioning it before as something I just assume it's going to happen, hard and ambitious as it may be to achieve (in fact, I think it's something akin to squaring the circle), but to see you actually commit to that is refreshing. Never in a million years did I wish for any of my suggestions to make Affinity apps harder to work with for those who already enjoy and are used to them, and I expected they would get that by default. I'm hoping that your statement clears that up a bit.

Anyhoo, I'm now heading back to my little SVG/variable font corner.

[Move Along People]

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