10 Best Features in Affinity Designer for the iPad

affinity designer on the iPad is pretty awesome but it also comes with a completely different interface than the desktop version and that can be a little intimidating at first so here are my 10 tips to get you off to a fast start I spend a lot of time over the last couple weeks using affinity designer Pro they have had to create my new you to me course there's a link down below so I've got 10 tips that I think are gonna be really helpful if you're just jumping into it for the first time tip 1 use your fingers you want to move a shape in a straight line put a finger down you want to resize a shape and keep its proportions put a finger down you want to keep a napkin from blowing away in a windstorm put a finger down that one's an extra tip you can thank me later most of the tools in affinity designer take advantage of hand gestures and so you should try them everywhere and it's not just one finger if one finger resizes your shape at its proportions what do two fingers do it resizes your shape from the center point of that shape and if you put three fingers down on the canvas it's gonna resize that shape from the center point and keep your proportions number two the palette menus have hidden gestures you want an arrow where stroke put your finger on the stroke palate and pull down on the screen you want a bigger put your finger on the palette icon and slide it upward and it's not just the strokes almost all of these palettes have similar functions you want to change color slide up and down changing your text size yep does the same exact thing number three you can install fonts on an iPad I know right affinity designer makes it so much easier to install fonts than any other program I've used on the iPad in fact it's the only program I know of that lets you install fonts on the iPad there's probably something else out there but I'm just not familiar with it doing it is pretty easy but you can't do it from inside the application you have to go back to the gallery and then click on the little gear icon in the upper right hand corner that will take you to your preferences and you will see on the very right there is a tab called fonts and if you tap on that guess what you can install your fonts now downloading a font from a service like say google fonts is still a little clunky on the iPad right now I think it's easiest to find your fonts on the desktop download them unzip them and stick them in a cloud folder of some kind before you do this but you can do it I pad if you're resourceful enough I'm using a little app called izip if I go to Google Fonts and I get all the fonts that I want it's gonna give me a large zip file with all the weights and different things that I have chosen I can use izip to unzip that it'll pop them on my iPad and then I can open it up in affinity designer also I zip is free which is why I recommend it number four rotate your canvas by default the canvas and affinity designer doesn't rotate now if you're using some of the hand drawing tools because there are some nice pixel tools in there if you're like me I like to rotate a little bit just to get that perfect angle on that stroke you can do that an affinity designer it's back in the same preferences menu where we're just looking at the fonts it is in the tool section and there is a little icon that you can toggle on that says allow canvas rotation in all tools so long list we need an intermission that that's not that's not what I meant number 5 zoom is your friend this may seem obvious but if you're using affinity for the first time you're you might get a little bit frustrated I know I did that's because I'm often accidentally grabbing the wrong points or the wrong nodes as they call them because the interface is designed to be used with your finger if you have multiple nodes in one area it could be hard to grab the right one or to have it do the right thing even if you're using an Apple pencil but this is where zoom becomes your friend if you ever find yourself having a hard time moving something it resizes it or you grabbed the wrong node just zoom in and it will fix everything and since affinity designer zooms in and out so smoothly it just becomes a natural part of your workflow after a while number 6 you don't need an Apple pencil in fact you don't need any stylus it's amazing how well this app works without one in fact I spent a lot of my time just using my fingers to navigate around and do everything you might be thinking but I want the pressure sensitivity and yeah it's good for that in fact if you're using like pen strokes or if you're inking something up that can be really handy but if you don't have a stylus handy you can still do that in the strokes menu there's an ability to add your own levels of pressure to every single stroke and even after I use the Apple pencil to apply pressure I found it really handy to go in there adjust it after the fact if I was using something like say procreate what I might do is I might draw a line and then I might say oh it tapers out too much here so I go in and very carefully add a little extra the back of the line this time I could just grab that stroke and say I want it to be a little wider at the end number seven if you are ever stuck check the contextual menus along the bottom of the screen this little square menu pops up whenever you select any tool and every single tool has a different contextual menu associated with it and if you ever ask yourself how do I do this to a shape will grab the shape tool and see what's in the contextual menu if you're wondering how to do something with text grab the text tool and see what's in that contextual menu there's just a lot of good stuff buried in that contextual menu that you don't see it first until you dive into it number eight organizing your layers and groups if you've never used affinity designer before it might be a little disorienting when you first draw a shape and realize every single shape and every single line you draw becomes its own layer technically it's not a lair it's just a shape in your layer palette and once you get used to it it's actually really helpful here's what I would recommend every time you go to add a different chunk to your illustration create a different layer and then I lock down all of the layers that contain elements that I'm not currently working on that means you're not gonna accidentally grab anything in the background you're not gonna accidentally add a bunch of shapes to a layer that you don't want to just makes life easier number nine goes along with this it is take advantage of the masking features I like to block in my basic shapes and then use those as masks to put in all of my textures and put in all my other shapes and infinity makes it really easy just by dragging to the middle of any given shape that shape will become masked inside of it incidence you could do this with pixel layers you can add different textures you could add different things and you don't have to worry about going back and erasing the parts that ever overlap and since masks are so much easier to use I find that I use them much more than I did when I was using Adobe Illustrator and number ten is take advantage of the shape tools there's so many cool things you could do with the shapes every time you draw one it puts these little red dots on them these allows you to adjust certain parameters of that shape now this is kind of obvious but the reason I'm including it is because you might be wondering if you've used another vector program after you lay down a shape you can use the white node tool to say modify that shape designer works a little bit differently since all the shapes have their own parameters that you can adjust independently if you want to modify it by hand you have to first convert it to curves once that shape is converted to curves then you could go in with the node tool and you can manually adjust every point to your heart's content so those are my ten tips what is your favorite tip for affinity designer on the iPad I'd love to know let me know in the comment section down below if you're new like this video and also subscribe for more content like this and don't forget about the discount code to my affinity designer course over on udemy I'd also like to shout out to everybody who's been taking part in the finished art challenge little challenge thing we do around here where we take a featured artist every month and everybody has an opportunity to finish one of their sketches see how everybody else does it learn practice and grow thank you guys for watching and I'll talk to you in couple of days [Music]

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 69,925

Keywords: affinity designer, affinity designer iPad, ios, ipad pro, ipad 2018, affinity, designer, designer ipad, 10 tips

Id: pH0Y4mPHQJE

Length: 7min 33sec (453 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 10 2018