Gravit Designer 3.3 major update released with support for Illustrator EPS files, bugfixes and more

Gravit Designer

Gravit Designer is a cross-platform, free design tool for the 21st century empowering everyone to design. It’s available on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS and comes with web and desktop apps.

Gravit offers unique design and interaction possibilities to design everything from logos to illustration and interactive prototypes for web, mobile and more.

Powerful yet easy-to-handle, Gravit has been custom designed from the ground up with an emphasis on versatility, fluidity and elegance – complex design tasks are made simple through its robust suite of tools and highly responsive smart work environment. Express yourself in a new way with Gravit – the new must-have tool for today’s pioneering design professionals!

Gravit’s advanced style-sharing features make it possible to share design assets between multiple documents, unifying your designs and saving you time. And creating those assets has never been easier - from common tasks like color palette selection to more advanced techniques like applying multiple-layered visual effects, our custom-designed styling system allows you to create complex and elegant designs with ease. A potent combination of simplicity and power – at every step.

Gravit is a tailor-made blend of powerful functionality and ease of use, custom-built to help you maximise your creative potential. Features like robust typography tools, paste-inside support, and a versatile context-sensitive user interface have all been laid out with efficiency in mind. A streamlined work space means a fluid workflow and a greater focus on what really matters – your creativity.

Here is what’s new in Gravit Designer 3.3:

EPS import - Just use File → Open file… to get started

Improvements to the welcome screen

Option “Don’t show anymore at startup.” To bring the welcome screen back, use Help → Show welcome screen.
Press Esc or Enter to close the welcome screen and create a new document with an infinite Canvas. Clicking outside also does the trick.
New “Open Recent” tab to quickly access your recently edited files.
Windows: Gravit Designer can now be closed/minimized right from the welcome screen in the top-right corner.
macOS: Accessing the menu bar also closes the welcome screen.
Templates now have a “Large preview” switch so that it’s easier to see what you get.

Enhanced Windows installer and Portable version

Lets you choose the installation directory,
Correctly adds Gravit Designer to the start menu,
The same for Windows 7 and 10,
Gives you the correct naming of the application in the taskbar.
Improved not only the installer but also the portable version, which consists of just a single GravitDesigner.exe file now, ready to start from anywhere.

Long-requested features from the community

Panning on the Canvas with the middle-mouse-button.
Horizontal scrolling with Shift and the mouse-wheel.
Delete layers with both the the Del and Backspace key.

Multi-language support - Portuguese translation

Portuguese translation - Probably, because the largest Gravit Designer user group is speaking Portuguese. But that’s just the beginning: Gravit Designer developers have plans to offer translated versions for Spanish, German, Indic, French, Indonesian, Russian and Italian in the future. To switch to the Portuguese version, select Help → Language → Português in the menu bar.

Ability to change your user data

The user data in the cloud was quite limited. In the new iteration, you can change your password, update your profile picture or delete the entire user account all from the same page. To access your profile right from Gravit Designer, click on your profile picture in the top-right and select “Settings.”

Other changes:

New “Edit” option (and Enter to go into Edit mode)
Improved precision
Better vector-point-snapping
Temporary switch from the Pen to the Subselect tool (and other tools)
Unified resizing behavior of borders, corners, and clipped shapes
Improvements to line endings
Performance optimizations

Other notable improvements

The show state of the Layers panel and Inspector is remembered and with it, everything from “Show”, “Snap to” and the Settings is synced across all versions.
Guidelines are enabled the moment the rulers are shown to prevent confusion. Furthermore, they can now be moved independently of the element’s position or groups.
When importing files, the real file name is shown instead of “Untitled.” This also goes for the file tab. Also, the loading indicator represents the loading progress more accurately.
Both the Swatches colors and “Make Exportable” are scrollable.
Changed the default theme to “Dark.”
Extended the “Help” menu so that it‘s even easier to contact us and get support. Also, added a new “Show welcome screen” option as a quick way to see the version number.
Multiple elements can be flipped at once.
The threshold to resize the Layers panel has been increased.
Holding Alt while clicking on a Swatch color selects all elements with a similar color and makes them blink for a while.
Optimized the selection box in the Transform tool when altering elements and enabled the rotation point to be included into “smart duplicate,” allowing things like that for example.
Updated the included Web Fonts so that they are in sync with Google Fonts again. Some fonts may still miss due to incompatibilities with character sets.

Remarkable bugfixes

Knife tool cuts shapes in perfect half again and lets you cut paths properly.
Reduced rendering artifacts.
Master pages: Margins (and other values) are synced correctly, and they don’t get lost when reordering pages.
Copying and saving don’t reset the height of text layers anymore.
Fixed various display problems in Firefox.
Anchoring now works appropriately for clipped shapes.
Entering Play mode on macOS doesn’t freeze Gravit Designer anymore.
Multiple bugfixes for symbols. Also, the length of their name isn’t limited anymore and it can contain special characters.
Closing paths with the Pen tool acts more predictable, no matter if closing from the start or end point.
The center point of radial gradients can be adapted appropriately.
The dpi resolution is also set correctly for PNGs.
Massive fixes to effects on Windows 7.
Fixed a few issues for compound shapes (“Merge”).
Text layers attached to a path are correctly exported to SVG and PDF. Furthermore, they aren’t cut off anymore.
Resizing or moving compound paths doesn’t screw up the axis of applied gradients anymore.
Confirmation emails are correctly sent when signing up or resetting the password.
Pan tool works when the Inspector panel is hidden.
The overlay effect also shows the gradient axis when applied to a group.
Fixed that lines can be anchored vertically, too.
“Make exportable” works correctly even with same-named elements.
Fixed creating a new page and undoing it.
“Paste Inside Selection” works correctly when copying elements outside of Gravit Designer. This only goes for the desktop apps, in the web app we just have restricted access to the system clipboard.
The text color is correctly updated when an effect is applied.
Fixed the color picker in HSB mode, which was basically unusable.
File → Export → PNG exports correctly independent of screen density or specific system settings.
Correct preview image (instead of broken image) when exporting at higher dpi sizes.
Fixed multiple issues with Modify → Path → Expand/Shrink.
Proper display of font list in Chinese version.
Fixed some issues in PDF and Sketch import.
“Open recent” also works for folders in the Gravit Cloud.
Fixed that Vectorize Border only works for elements with borders and leaves other elements untouched.
Stars can be created properly in a perfectly horizontal position.
Bezigon tool also snaps vertically.
“Retina Display” isn’t checked by default anymore when using a high-res display.
Setting the “Corner” for polygons works correctly. [Blog Release Announcement]