Working with Pantone Colors...

[Kuttyjoe]

This needs some work in Affinity Design to be useful. For example, if I select a piece of art in Illustrator, it hi lights the swatch in the palette. This doesn't happen in Design. Also, In Illustrator, I can open a piece of clipart, then create a color palette from it with just a quick key command. From there, I can convert each of the colors in that palette to Pantones with ease. I can't find any way to replicate a similar workflow in Affinity Design. It's hard to assign every color as Pantones in the art. And it's hard to know if I got everything or not. In order for this to work well, a set of features have to be available. Select same. Hide Selection. And the palette needs to highlight the swatch when you select a color that uses it. Also the Pantone Palette swatches should have a little indicator showing that you are indeed looking at a Pantone color palette.

[Kuttyjoe]

I realized that one of the things I mentioned above is actually possible in Design...but it's buggy.  Select all the art and choose add to swatches.  Its buggy because it only added some of the colors in the art.  I had a piece of art that I imported from Illustrator.  A giant Number with a bunch of text masked inside it.  Just two colors.  Red and Gray.  The red was successfully added to the palette, but the gray was not.  Ironically they are both Pantone colors.  Which brings me to another flaw or oversight.  When you hover over the swatch in the palette, the little pop up says something like "Document 2, 3, 4" or "Global Color 2, 3, 4" etc.  Rather, it should say Pantone 423 C or Pantone 485 C etc.  If I switch to the "Colour" palette, it reads the proper name of the Pantone color as it should. 

 

On a brighter note, it opens the art accurately.  Which is a big deal considering that most other programs really don't do a good job of opening Illustrator files, or even pdf documents.  Still, exporting a usable file out of Design is hit and miss.

[wonderings]

This needs some work in Affinity Design to be useful. For example, if I select a piece of art in Illustrator, it hi lights the swatch in the palette. This doesn't happen in Design. Also, In Illustrator, I can open a piece of clipart, then create a color palette from it with just a quick key command. From there, I can convert each of the colors in that palette to Pantones with ease. I can't find any way to replicate a similar workflow in Affinity Design. It's hard to assign every color as Pantones in the art. And it's hard to know if I got everything or not. In order for this to work well, a set of features have to be available. Select same. Hide Selection. And the palette needs to highlight the swatch when you select a color that uses it. Also the Pantone Palette swatches should have a little indicator showing that you are indeed looking at a Pantone color palette.

 

So basically same sentiments as the posters above. It is close to being usable, but right now still a headache trying to manage simple colours. 

 

Was thinking maybe I was not looking at this right, but I am not. 

 

Something that should be changed as well is the global colours. Not sure what the intended purpose is for them, but they do not function well. I have a box, I have selected a Pantone Red 182 for the solid fill, for the outline I have Pantone 2312 (just an example). When I go under swatches and click on "document" to see the colours used in the job, rather then get Pantone Red 182 and 2312 in the list, I get "Global Colour 1" and "Global Colour 2" and so on and so forth depending on how many pantones I have in the document. Why not just list the name? What is the purpose of titling them with Global Colour? Now I could manually go and rename the colours, but thats really counter productive. 

[randomjames]

I'm experiencing the above described frustration right now too... Grrrr!

 

Feature request: please show the Pantone name on hover in the documents swatches palette.