Affinity Designer 1.9 New Features

[Music] hi everyone welcome to this affinity designer 1.9 feature overview there are a load of new features and tools and just general workflow enhancements to the 1.9 update so let's get straight into it and go through some of those now a really powerful new feature in 1.9 is the select same feature as the name suggests this allows you to select particular elements of your design based on their characteristics so let's look at how that works and to start off with i'm going to select a little area of this illustration here and then i'm going to go to select and select same and choose fill color that has just grabbed all of the matching curves from my layers panel here and just then allows me to do various things with them so i could group these together i could in this case let's right click scroll down and let's give these a tag color so let's give them a gray type color there or i could change the color of them in the color panel for example so instantly that's one way you could use that if i then go to a different area and let's choose this white whisker sort of area and then go to select and select same and now let's choose stroke color so here we've just picked up all of the matching white areas of the design that have a white stroke color to them and you can see that in my color panel as well it's just areas which have this white fill so really quick and easy way to grab those and while we're there we could use the color panel just to adjust that and maybe just take away some of the white like luminosity to that and just drop it back a little bit there like so so now let's just grab something in the middle here this shape here which also has both fill and a stroke colour to it and let's go to select select same and choose fill and stroke colour and now that's grabbed all of those areas we can once again right click on the layers and give those a tag color as well uh so some just some great little ways to speed up your workflow and in this case add some organization to your layers as well in your layers panel in the next example i'm going to use this architectural sort of illustration i'm going to click one of these curves at the top and now if i go to select and choose select same and this time choose stroke weight that has just grabbed all of those matching strokes in my design saving me having to click and drag over the whole design and just saving a bit of time there really and now if i go over to my stroke panel i can adjust the width here and maybe just bring that down a little bit but actually what i'm going to do is give the strokes a different pressure profile by clicking on this box and just bringing the endpoints of my profile down just to give those a bit of a more of a dynamic look and you can see that's actually given quite a nice effect on the edges of the illustration especially so that's one nice way you could use that and now if we click on one of these rectangles i can show you another way you can use this by going to select select same and choosing shape there's only two rectangles in this design but i know that's one really quick and easy way to grab those especially in the future if i was using a design which had a lot of different types of shapes in there that would be a really quick way to do that but while they're selected let's go over to our stroke panel again and let's just give these a sharper join on the edges and maybe just decrease the stroke width again just to match our design a bit more uh like so maybe something like that yeah great i'm over there actually with say one of these pieces of text selected we can go to select select same and we can also utilize transparency or blend mode so this would be a good way to maybe select something which you maybe had a few different areas of your design which had different transparency modes added to them and you just wanted to make sure they all had a matching transparency and just keep your design really unified so it's a good way to maybe use that select same just for sort of due diligence as well in your design so another option you have there and in this last example i'm going to use this typography illustration and we're going to use some of our layer organizational options as well so as you can see i've got loads of layers here or curves within my layer should i say so let's just select one of these here and if i right click and scroll down i can this time use select same via my layers panel so if i select select same type color that's just grabs all of those matching tag color elements let's use command g and group those together and that is now starting to just tidy up my layers let's do that again scroll down select same type color on one of the blue elements and then group command g or ctrl g on a pc and for the last one i'm just going to show you the more traditional way to do it at the top of your screen with select select same and tag color i'm over there you can see we also have name as another option we could use as well just a great way to say grab anything that has the matching description shown in your layers panel for example so another option you have there just to really select kind of everything together uh with the same description but let's choose tag color for this command g and that has just instantly tidied up our layers in a really efficient way so really is a great way to use some of those select same features and just improve your workflow and really yeah save yourself some time as you're designing so some great features there so designer 1.9 now comes with a select object feature which is really handy as well so let's go to select scroll down to select object and take a look at that list so to get started let's just choose art text so that's just grabbed in this design the only area of art text that i have and one quick little keyboard shortcut little trick you can do is hold alt or option and use the left and right arrow keys just to tighten or loosen that text so in this case i actually maybe make it fill the page a bit more so let's just go somewhere like that and just space that out a bit a little bit more so that's a really quick way you can do that with this design there's tons of layers so that's actually a kind of an easier way to to just locate that text without having to scroll through all of my layers and try and find it and that way all have another shape sort of interfere with it when i'm trying to select it a more traditional way so that's just one example of how you could use that and if we go back to select and go to select object uh we've also got frame text and path text there as well just as a just to highlight those so if i go to some other options here we've got curves open curves and closed curves again for like a design example that's quite handy if you want to say you've got hundreds of curves and lines and you just want to locate the ones that actually aren't closed shapes so that's quite handy to to really try and um sort of troubleshooting with the design so i'm a big fan of that but let's just skip those and go straight to shapes in this case so you can see with the little outline preview we've got here that has just highlighted anything which is or which has been made with one of the shape tools so really handy there just to locate those and in this case let's utilize the color tag option again and just give those like a purple tag just for future reference that might be quite handy way for me to locate those without having to go to select object so yeah big fan of that just another way to organize your layers and let's go back to select and select object and again let's use artboards in this case so this has just got one artboard in this design but i just want to label this artboard and the way to do that is to do it on the layers panel so that's one way again to save me scrolling up on my layers panel one way just to quickly locate that so let's double click that and let's give it a more fitting name endless summer in this case click enter and that's just renames that as you can see here so just a quick way to do that without having to say scroll through layers and do it the more more traditional uh previous way um and then going back to select select object we now have in this section a huge range of object descriptions so yeah filled objects stroked on stroked dashed particularly handy again if you want to locate all your dashed curves and lines for say like an architectural design or something like that really handy with that one and transparent and opaque as well especially if you've maybe created a few shapes which originally had a transparent um or like an opacity to them and maybe you want to actually make everything 100 opacity a really quick way just to locate those but now let's look at images and pixel objects so images if i select that that's going to show you all in this case all of my stock images which haven't been rasterized they've just been dragged in and maybe duplicated and modified but that's just separating those from my pixel based images in there so let's do the old color tag trick again right click and give those a red color tag and now if we go back to select and select object and select pixel objects this is then going to grab all of those ones which i've rasterized or i've edited and then sort of baked in those appearances so just to organize my layers again let's give those like a yellow yellow tag there just add a bit more organization but i like that you've got the option of choosing between the two it's not just pixel and that's it it's it's yeah either or especially when you're using a lot of stock imagery and you like to duplicate and save those original images i do like you can you can select between the two so let's go back to that and underneath there we have some other options so we've got groups vector layers and embedded documents and symbols and to look at those i'm just going to show you this other example i have ready over here so this is kind of like an architectural design kind of thing and if i just show you again my laser kind of quite quite built up there's a lot of curves there so there's a lot of things to have to scroll through if i want to adjust anything there but just to show you how that works in this scenario let's go to select select object and let's grab groups in this case so i can see here i've got some additional elements applied to those so this these have a bitmap sort of pattern fill to those and the this group here has a color underneath it so you know one thing i might do is if i go to select select object and and go to groups i might either as i've shown before add a color tag there or i might add an additional layer effect to those those two groups which i could do by going to the layer effects button here for example and i could just give them a color overlay um just to change the characteristics there so the default there is just like a nice black overlay there but i might actually want to choose something like this blue in the background just to give it you know to get rid of my previous uh halftone pattern uh and i can also then give that if i wanted to see that coming through again change my blend mode from normal just to fill over that and give it like a linear burn or let's give it a multiply in this case just so we can see the the blue that we've chosen um to come through there so that's one way you could use that also if i go to select select object and choose vector layers that is then going to go to the top and in this case i've just got my one vector layer with all of my curves inside there so i'm actually just going to use this little shortcut just to rename that by double clicking and let's call that vector layer like so and we've also got just to show you again select object embedded documents and symbols there so just a few other options embedded documents as well really handy if you're working with something with loads of different embedded elements in there and you just want to quickly grab those and symbols of course again very handy to locate those instantly but yeah huge fun and there's a just a huge list of options there so no doubt loads of ways that can speed up your workflow and just save you a load of time as you're working through your design so yeah great great addition there the new studio presets feature allows you to save your favorite panels and layout of panels and recall those depending on the type of design you're working on at the time so it's a really handy feature so let's first of all go over to view and scroll down to studio and let's add some more panels to this particular layout so let's add character and let's also add a paragraph panel as well so there's two new panels and i'm actually going to just drag those to the right hand side in this example and i'm now going to call this my new default so if i go to view and scroll down to studio presets this time i can then add a preset and let's call that new default now i'm going to go back to view and this time i'm going to go to studio and i'm going to reset studio this will go back to the original designer default there we go and now if i go to view scroll down to presets and just click on that new default we've made that will then cover that back up so just gives me the option to bring my personal favorite default there before i started design and just saves a bit of time because that will always be there whenever i load up designer now let's look at a way to create a bit more of a creative layout so let's move this character panel over here and i'm just going to get the basics that i'm going to use for a sort of standard sort of design i might do so let's put some color on the left stroke panel brushes as well just as you can see as well as i move that around that just snaps underneath the panel so it's really handy like a sort of magnet feature there just to make it easier for us to move those around and i'm going to need layers of course so let's put that underneath and let's put transform on the left hand side as well so there's some traditional basic panels i would use in a design and now let's get rid of the others so you can move them around like so and you can just press this little cross button here just to close them so let's move the others that we're not going to use close that there this will drag that group across as well and i can just close that do the same with the remaining panels like so and just close all those off now let's move that to the right hand side and just tidy up the screen a bit more and now let's go back to view scroll down to studio presets and add preset let's call this design one for example great so now what we could do is go back to view and go down to studio presets and let's click manage studio presets and here you can see our two new studio presets there which we could either rename delete and just say you've got some quite a few there and some of them are very similar to each other it's just a great way to organize those and just make sure it's nice and nice and tidy in there so in fact while we're here let's change this design one to design custom layout there we go just a bit more of a specific um description there and we can close that and just to show you the process again if we go to view and go to studio let's reset the studio layout like so and then go back to view studio presets and there's our new name as well design custom layout and it remembers where they were placed as well so that's a really key thing as you can see i've moved them around to try and fill the spaces a bit more and that has called that up in exactly the way i wanted it to so it's a really great handy feature there and just makes your life a lot easier whenever you're working within affinity designer so one of my favorite new features in 1.9 in designer is the ability to create your own custom brush from a pixel selection directly within designer itself so with this example i'm actually going to show you how you can create this kind of confetti esque sort of brush i'm just using some simple shapes but then turning that into yeah your own custom confetti brush and then turning that into a really simple kind of fun birthday card design like this but let's go straight to it and start off with the shapes themselves so i created these shapes just using the simple shape tools we have on the left hand side in designer and you can get to some of these extra ones like the heart and the tier just by holding down on the triangle and then going down to those specific shapes there's quite a few there as well to choose from that's where you can also grab the star tool as well um so yeah i use those just to create these shapes and then add a gradient color to them as well just to add a bit more variation to them so the first thing i'm going to do is duplicate these shapes and one way to do that is just by going right click on the layer in the layer panel itself and then scrolling down to duplicate and you can also do that with the command j or ctrl j on a pc shortcut as well so let's turn the previous layer off and then i'm going to right click and then go down to rasterize so that's just going to turn those vector shapes into pixel shapes into a pixel layer and now what we can do is create a brush so let's go over to the top corner and go to the pixel persona just like so so now we can go to our brush panel and actually use the little corner option here and click that and once we have that selected already in our layers panel we can then go new brush from selection so once that's been clicked we can then double click the new brush we've made and start to edit it so here we've got various options available to us so let's start off by adjusting the size so let's bring this down a little bit here so let's go something a little bit more in the middle and everything else i'm fairly happy with but i'm just going to change the spacing as well that's a key thing here so we want it to be kind of like a stump really we want to just replicate these shapes rapidly over the image that we're designing so the spacing needs to be definitely a bit further apart if it's too close together it's just not really going to make any sense so definitely a bit of space there just to divide those up a little bit um we could add a bit of rotation but that would just add a unified rotation to each time it's it's repeated so we want to keep that actually on zero percent for this the next thing to do is go over to dynamics let's click on that so now we have loads of other options available to us we could change the size as it's as it's repeated flow and so on but for this actually i just want to change the rotation of the dynamics so if i turn that to 100 as you can see in the little preview window we've got here it will gradually rotate the group of shapes every time it is repeating them so that's an ideal thing here just to add we want it just to look kind of like a random collection of shapes again just to match that confetti that sort of design we're after originally along with that let's now go down to hue and let's turn that up to 100 as well so what that's doing is just changing those repeated groups of shapes just the colors there just to add even more variation so now we've got what looks like a load more shapes than we originally had so really really useful on top of that we've got saturation and luminosity and so on but let's just keep those two changed for now if we then go to texture we could add some texture here as you'd expect from the name um but for this we're just going to keep it sort of flat but another thing to mention is sub brushes now for this i just want the simple shapes but when you're creating your own brushes especially for sort of artistic purposes like creating a pencil or an ink brush these two are really really handy just to create your own really custom brush and you can add like a bitmap here so that's definitely worth experimenting with but for this one we just want to keep the simple settings we've changed so i'm just going to close that now we're happy with that go over to my brush tool make sure that's selected and then let's add a new pixel layer as well and let's turn the previous layer off and now if i adjust the size using the shortcut and just zoom out a little bit we can then start to fill our page so that's a bit too small let's bring that up a bit more yeah that's looking a bit better so now let's start to fill the page like so still quite small but that's fine i'm just going to really just chuck these on the page because they're going to be in the background really and it's going to be more of a a texture that we're after but as you can see it is starting to create this fun really colorful vibrant confetti pattern um on our pixel layer so and if i just slow it down and show you it just shows how those shapes are just sort of randomly being displayed in the square so it's a really clever uh sort of addition to being able to make your own brushes and but the key thing with it is that you can now do it within your document itself so i haven't had to load anything in i've just done it directly from the shapes i made previously so in you know in the same document um and that's a real big time saver especially if you're sort of doing something on the fly you just want to try actually i've got these shapes let's try and make them into a sort of fun larger pattern so yeah it really is a big time saver so there's our kind of ad hoc uh confetti sort of layer um now let's add let's quickly just add some text to this so i'm gonna go back to my designer persona in the top left just click on that there and let's click on the artistic text tool and let's just click and drag just to get the lettering in there at the appropriate size let's call that happy birthday i went to the full text actually to match the previous one and i'm gonna put my um snapping tool on sorry i almost forgot the name there uh and that's just going to help me to just get it right in the middle there so yeah nicely in the middle perfect and let's turn this into a white fill instead of having the outline to it so let's go like so so i've just switched that round and as you may have noticed there just just to highlight that the little double arrow indicates switching between your stroke fill and your main fill just to mention that so now let's and before i do that i'm just going to duplicate that layer just for future use which i'll show you in a second and turn that off so let's drag the pixel layer into that text now just on the layers panel like so if i drag it underneath where the actual text is um that you can read happy birthday text there you'll see that the positioning changes so if i just drag it underneath there that's just then snapped or clipped she'll say inside that text so it's hidden everything else and just um yeah put the text put the um pattern inside where the text was so now let's use the duplicated layer turn that on and give that just a black outline just like so and i'm just gonna use my keyboard shortcuts of command and backspace oh sorry command and open bracket to rearrange that so that's just move that around on my layers um and make sure it's got the fill that we need yep so now i'm going to duplicate this background layer again so that's now selected i'm going to click and drag using option and i'm actually going to give this a black fill just before i do that just so it's definitely got the appropriate fill that i need so i'm going to use option or alt and click and drag like so just to give this a 3d sort of effect and now i'm going to use power duplicate which is an awesome extra little tool there just to duplicate that in the direction that i want to go in and now just as a final thing with my top text layer where the pixel layer is i'm actually going while that's still clipped inside the birthday text i'm actually going to just resize that a little bit um just by holding command i can then do that from the center point as well and there we go so it's just a quick way just to create uh some this in this case this is just a sort of celebration you know birthday text but that could be anything just wanted to show you like a relevant example there but there i've gone from my original shapes uh i've then created my own custom brush and i've used them in this sort of fun text design all within the same document so i've not had to load anything else in it's all been self-contained so just a really great way to use that custom brush from selection new addition we've got here so yeah a really great feature in 1.9 for sure placing images inside a document actually now has some new options attached to it as well so let's go to the place image tool to get started with that just on the left hand side and then firstly i'm going to use this yellow background example and if i click and drag you'll see that i can actually choose the size i want this image to be placed inside the document so that's one great way to use that first of all but if we go over to the left hand side you can see in the context toolbar that i actually have additional settings here so if i click on this percentage here or this this row and then click on original size that will change the scale that i've dragged it into um to 100 so with this being a jpeg and a raster image basically set at a certain size you can always go back to the 100 dpi and make sure you're not dragging it into a larger scale than it should be so really handy if you're using jpegs or anything that's basically pixel information but for this i'm just going to drag it down a little bit just to fit which i can do obviously just using my move tool as normal and now i'm actually going to convert this color image into black and white using the k only button we've added as well so this as you can see just turns that straight into black and white very handy if you're needing to print documents that are full color images and if you need to save on ink or anything like obviously very useful just to turn something into black and white so actually in this instance i'm going to use it as part of the design and i'm going to go on to my blend mode and change this from normal to multiply and you can see then it actually blends in with the background um straight away and let's go back and change this to 100 scale or original size and just to make the most of the image and let's use the command and open bracket shortcut just to move it down our layer here so it's now behind our text and yeah that's one way you can do that i'm going to use an image with vector information for this second example though so i'm going to go to file and place as another way we can do that so now let's choose this af design file instead let's drag it into place again and this time because we're using vector information it doesn't matter in the same way that needs to be in the right scale because as you zoom into it it's going to be nice and crisp at any size so because it is vector information that is fully scalable but it's good to know anyway to see if you want it to be the same as the document it was originally made in so we could go back and go original size if we want to do that but for this example i actually want to change the i want to change how it's viewed so we can do that by adjusting the page box so we can do with this little box drop down box here we can change from a minimum content to maximum visible and so on so if i go to maximum visible content that's going to be the same as the trim box in this case but let's go to minimum and that's just going to jump straight to where all that vector data is so really handy way just to get straight to straight to the point really straight to the area of design you want to adjust and now i'm actually going to change the color of this text of this design sorry i'm going to do that by going to my effects layer effects options at the bottom here if i click on that then add a color overlay i'm going to add a white overlay in this case that has then just added the overlay to that vector data so it's a really quick and easy way without having to open that file separately copy the data in i'm just using it as an embedded embedded image essentially so really handy way a really quick way to adjust something like those vector lines and now let's just enlarge that a little bit more and just maybe turn that just to fit in that space a bit better with with where our text is and also now you can see that this little information here is actually in the way so what i'm going to do is use the vector crop tool just to click on that and let's just drag that in just to hide that really i'll do the same at the top as well and same at the bottom there and it's just tidied up the image um while still retaining i haven't had to rasterize anything it's still retaining its vector data and keeping it nice and crisp in our document so yeah just a few things that you can use with some of our new place image tools and features easily one of the biggest new additions to 1.9 is the brand new contour tool now this is a really powerful new tool with various different applications as well and i'm just going to talk you through some of the different scenarios i've put together just to hopefully inspire you to come up with your own use cases as well but for this first example i've got these three circles and i've just given them a multiply blend mode as well just to make them a bit more interesting when they're combined together and they are all grouped together and then by going over to the new contour tool on the left hand side i can increase the size or decrease the size of all three simultaneously so it's a really handy little tool to in this case just transform the shapes straight away and all i'm doing is increasing or decreasing them but it is happening straight away and saving me time doing that individually but if i just go to do one in one on its own and double clicking there i'll show you actually what's happening and if i just press o as a shortcut to get to that contour tool as well we can then see what's happening there so the the thin blue line that's there shows the original size and the fill color that you can see is obviously showing where it's going to end up now as i'm dragging that you might notice that at the top in the context toolbar the rhodius amount is also changing so if you go up there we can actually adjust this slider ourselves or we can put in a specific amount like so let's put 10 in there great but now while we're on that same context toolbar we can look at some other options so we have forced open and force closed but the default is also closed so for most scenarios i think that's going to be the most useful option to have but if i actually select all three of the circles and just put that back to its default then grab the contour tool again and just select force open you'll see that the type of image we get is actually very different so it's a really fun way to just experiment with creating in this case kind of quite retro or psychedelic little patterns and things or by just changing to a different fill type so really is worth experimenting to see what you can come up with um but let's just go back and undo that i'm just going to show you what you can also do in fact i'm just going to copy this and make a separate circle just to show you here if i go to increase this and then go to bake appearance that then converts that to the new radius amount that we've put in so that's now locked that in to a new size so really handy if you want to just lock in the appearance of some of the shapes that you've changed so there's some initial things you can do but now let's look at applying this to text as well so here's some lettering i have and firstly i'm going to just duplicate this by going to command j or ctrl j on a pc now on the layer beneath uh actually firstly i'm going to change the color of that so let's use this blue there we go on the layer beneath i'm going to select it and i'm going to go to the contour tool again and i'm going to drag and straight away that's just giving us a very traditional outline to that text so yeah it's just a really nice quick and easy way to add some more sort of dynamic lettering to your design but here what we need to do is just go to the contour type and adjust this to our preference so if we change the join to something more angular this is then going to match the lettering we have but you might prefer this to be more of a retro curved edge so there's just something to bear in mind changing the contour type can drastically change how the design is going to look as well so just a quick text example there the next thing i want to show you is applying it to curves and more of like a logo type design so in this case i just have these shapes and they are quite thin shapes at the moment but if i just select these by going to the groups i'm just holding command or control on a pc just to select all of them together if i go to my contour tool again and click and drag i'm actually going to be able to increase the width of these lines straight away and actually in a different way to how they would look by using the stroke panel so i think this is a really good way to consider doing in the future so instantly i've just made all of these lines much more sort of bolder and impactful in just one click of the contour tool so it's a really nice quick and easy way to do that and again if you want to lock in on that appearance you can just click bake appearance so that's another option you could choose the last thing i want to show you is utilizing the contour tool with compound shapes now this is quite a funky example and it's almost like a lava-like design but if you just click on one of these circles you can see they're actually merging with the different shapes in a really quite a unique way and it's almost like they are merging in a very non-traditional shape manner it's it's really cool and it's something that you could no doubt use this kind of technique in various other design formats but it was just worth showing you this this function which is kind of a bit of a hack really to use it but it's there's some really cool things i'm sure you could do with this and in this case obviously as i say it's kind of like a lava lava lamp kind of um kind of effect but i'll just show you how you can do that so i'm just going to move to a new space over here we'll be able to look at that properly so i'm going to grab the ellipse tool in this case click and drag with shift enabled and then i'm going to duplicate that shape and just overlap a few of them together just to create some sort of random shapes and then i'm going to select all of them i'm going to create a compound shape so we can do that by holding option or alt and going to the top of the designer window and clicking on add which is one of our boolean options and that's just created a compound shape so now what we can do is grab the contour tool again and click and drag now if we drag out outwards to increase the size that's increasing the radius as you'd expect but if we actually go in this is how we can create these quite interesting blob sort of effects and this is as i say a really basic example of that but it's worth just experimenting with this contour tall and compound shape um effect because i'm sure there are many other ways you could use this but you know creating like bike cogs or or various other things you know there's i'm sure there's many ways this can be used but it is just sort of goes to show some of the cool things you can do with this tool which is really really versatile so yeah really big fan and definitely lots you can do with that and worth checking out the ability to apply text to a curve in your design has also had some upgrades made to it as well so what we're going to do in this example is recreate this curved food design and utilize this some of these new additions so let's turn this layer off first and we're going to use this ellipse shape which i've made previously just using the ellipse tool so i'm going to duplicate that first just as a backup and then turn the original one off and now i'm going to go over to my artistic text tool and now as you approach the ellipse you'll see that the symbol is changing to signify that we can now click on this shape and the text will be applied there so i'm going to actually just click on the upper side of the ellipse as opposed to the inside of it and click and drag just to signify what sort of size i want my text to be so now let's put in some text like so and let's select all and change this to center align the text at the top in the context toolbar as well for our lettering now what we can do is adjust the start and end points and if you look at the bottom of the screen you'll actually see that we are prompted to it will tell us there that this is going to adjust the start point and this one is going to adjust the endpoint so let's do that now and because we have snapping on it's just gonna jump to the middle of that ellipse perfectly there as well just like so so now i'm going to go back to my the end point of the text i'm going to hit enter that has then given me a second line of text so let's put that in now there we go and we're then given two additional arrows so if we move this one down here that'll move the start point and this one here that'll do the same now if i just adjust this to cover the text you'll just spot a little i symbol pops up here this will just show us any text which is in the sort of no show zone basically so um this essentially allows us to show overflowing text or not so if i just click that again i'll just bring that back in so that's worth bearing in mind and just keep an eye out for that keep an eye out for that and you'll see that yeah it's just going to help you with your design basically so now i will do one other thing to adjust this text so the top line i quite like where it's placed it's kind of just on the outside of the circle and the bottom line of text i actually want to be more consistent with that so i'm going to select all this text and then i'm going to adjust the baseline of the text as well so if i click on the little arrow and i can then increase this slider so this is just going to put this text where sort of where the m the top of the m meets the circle just like with the a's and the n here i want that same thing to be applied on both lines of text so that's just one little quick tweak you can do there as well and and there we go so that's a really quick way you can use some of the new text on a path features and really create some interesting typography layouts as well the new resource manager in affinity designer is a really handy addition and it enables you to go from having embedded elements in your design to having the option to make those linked instead so particularly handy if you need to organize your files or if you need to send your final design to somebody else and just have all of those elements nicely organized together so let's have a look at that now by going to view and going down to resource manager so here you can see currently all of my images are set to embedded so what we could do first of all is click on one of these and click on locate in document and it will show me that in my layers panel and in my image so it's a really quick way to locate something especially if you've got loads of different layers in your design and you need to locate a really particular element if you need to change it or just yeah locate where that is in your design the next option we have is update now if this was a linked image which we'll go to in a minute this would then allow you to update that image which has say been changed externally so say we're using a linked image and it's been changed in affinity photo for example you could then click update and it would update that in your design straight away so a really efficient way to make the most of linked images there we can also replace as you can imagine that will replace that with your chosen image or we can click make linked now what i'm actually going to do is select all of these and i'm going to click collect so by doing this it's going to bring up the option to choose where to put my file so let me put that in my folder here and click new folder and let's go collected images and click create and collect and that is now put all those images in the folder i have here called collected images so just a nice really quick way to bring all those together so let me close that and just get back to our resource manager and the other thing we can do is also let's click one of these and click on show in finder and that will pop up with the finder window and in this case our collected images folder it's just going to show us that straight away so let's just close that for now and go back to our resource manager so that's how you can change those things there and go from having embedded images and turn them into linked ones instead so one other thing to show you with this in mind is how you can change the default designer setting so if i actually go to file or actually um designer and then scroll down to preferences sorry here we can go to general and at the bottom here it says automatically update linked resources when modified externally so if you click that option the example i mentioned earlier where we were using something which might have been changed in as i say affinity photo for example then that would automatically pop up on screen with the new design so say one of these elements have been tweaked maybe the color has been changed or something that would automatically update the linked resource and therefore update on screen so that's really handy if you just want to always have those there updating but sometimes it's quite good to do those yourself manually with the resource manager um so that's a personal preference something to bear in mind how you want to go about doing that yourself the last thing to show you is how to package this file together so similar to how we've done it before with the resource manager let's this time go to file scroll down and let's choose save as package so clicking on that it's then going to show us some other information here so it gives us a summary of the images we have in this case our images our total of seven images they're all linked none of them are missing and none have been modified so that's great to see that they're just as again a bit of a sort of due diligence just to make sure everything's as it should be our fonts are displayed here as well in this case it's purely just an image based design and our images are also listed and all have a nice big green tick next to them as well just so we know they're all present and nothing's missing so we can go ok and then we can choose a folder to put those in i'm just going to put them in this same folder for now just for the purpose of this let's just call this new folder oops and click package and then let's go back to that in our finder window and double click here and that is put everything together so what you would do is this new folder we've got here we would in our case right click um we could compress that and then that would make that nice and easy to actually send to somebody else to work on which in this case along with the images also includes the the folder itself so the design folder or design file should i say so just a really great way for you to be able to just yeah be able to send your file to somebody else and have all of those images separated from your design without having to have them embedded which you would have to do in the past so some really great things there with the resource manager and also something to bear in mind using the package option we have now as well so that wraps up the 1.9 overview hopefully you enjoyed those examples and if you want to see some more in-depth uh tutorials we've got a huge selection on our website in the link below but thanks for checking out the video and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Affinity

Views: 72,584

Keywords: Affinity Designer, Illustrator, Release, Contour, Demo

Id: ecpd4lvPJsc

Length: 57min 3sec (3423 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021