Affinity Designer Basics - Part 1 - The File Menu

I'm done quite a few videos on YouTube about specifics of affinity designer however as the questions pop up it becomes more relevant to probably get to do a total fundamental series of videos that's gonna help people who are coming brand new into affinity designer or people coming into just designing with Victor autumn and for them to and get an understanding so the methodology is going to be very different than the normal videos we explain a particular part of the program and go into detail with that this will be very high-level but I think we could consider it something like affinity designer essentials so in some cases you might be thinking okay I need to know a little bit more about that aspect and he's not explaining every better detail but there are a lot of videos out there that's going to do the intermediate three and also their advanced sections of it so the method that I've chosen is to literally go through each of these menus so when the menu pops down I'll walk through the different aspects of a year and cover them now a lot of these menus are covered in these icons that you see on the top panel and these toolbars on the sides and and all of these things so you will find a little bit of overlap but it's good to go that route because you then can see that in some cases or most cases you'll be using the toolbars or even shortcut keys to get your job quicker I want you the end user to get a sense of I think I know how a vanity designer works and if I want to do any logo design or any product design or or use vector art I kind of know that affinity design is going to help in that direction so it's for the total total newbie and for the person who's been just thrown in at the deep end with a brand new piece of software and not familiar with it so hopefully I could you know meet everybody's needs in that area and then once you've gone through this entire series of videos you you literally can then Zone into maybe one of the specific videos that is on YouTube or one that I have done about specific features and in estime on this is version 1.7 when they bring out later versions will probably do a little bit of a you know new features thing unit okay so let's start off by going down the file menu and I'll be discussing that for now so for those who are new to affinity designer they've got a unique feature that they've brought in which is referenced as personas so you have the designer persona which is what we are in now then you have the pixel persona and export persona so a persona is just a grouping of our workflow the program can you know do a bit of pixel modification on its own but they've put it into a section because it deserves focus on that area when you're working in it and it's not like you've got to export it using a bridge piece of software it's part of the software but it's just see it as as when you click on that area it brings a whole new focused set of features so let me just show you this Jana I'm going to just create a blank document and I'll be covering this now but if I go here now and we look at the we on the designer persona if you look here also the years the three icons that cover these three personas so that's pixel export and that's pixel and that's export if I now flip through to pixel persona look what happens on this idea you'll see that some of these actual toolbars change and they change for a reason that they are focusing now on to pixel persona so you could understand that if you had designed a persona and pixel persona this old boss could be full of of tools over and this is what most programs that we've been using over the years they've developed into having this millennion one tools running all of and thousands of menus so what serif has done which is the company that developed affinity designer is that kept it nice and clean so that will be a different persona then when you go to the export persona and you have these tools coming up here which seem to be very kind of basic but when you start to work with it there are few things that start to pop out as you start to engage you're able to do slicing you're able to export one slice or one object in multiple formats you can choose one object to be exported at the same time as a PNG a JPEG PDF etc so it's quite advanced in its features however when you in the design a persona you have the ability to go to export also but the export persona is a kind of a a semi specialized sort of environment to working and this is just a click of a button in between ok so let me just close that up so hopefully I understand what the logic is in the personas interesting thing is when I work in other packages now even like DaVinci Resolve which is a video editing package they broken it down also into this workflow areas and I just naturally refer to them as personas ok so when we start creating a new document now if you look on the side you'll see all the quick keys here which you could go modify if you choose to do that but we are going to go down this listing and see what happens so when you're creating a new document in affinity designer it has literally two options you can create a document or you can have an odd board and a document is pretty much as it says it's one document that you are working on whereas you could have a document converted to an odd board then you can create multiple artboards and work on multiple artboards in in the one interface you don't have to you know jump between tabs or anything like that so let me show you if you go to new we'll start off just looking at the section of a yin and try and understand what's going on yet so it's a new document these are merely presets so this is the printer preset this is for photos so that you don't have to go and you know every time you're going to do a edit that you want to do on a photo size image that you've got to now go and do the dimensions it's literally presets and you can go to do your custom presets and create the motor but let's assume we're going to be working on a web page that gives you a few options and then you can still go and modified beyond that so what we see this section yeah if we look down to the men's dimensions this is actually reflecting over here so that's just a label that's given to it the fact that they've got 1280 by 816 teen is just a descriptor so you kind of know what the features is of that particular area and then your document units which you could set up like you want to so if you had to set up your own you could then say I want to check this out in inches and then you could go and modify the dimensions based on that inches and then save it as a preset okay when you come to this one here below this is asking you and it's to that point that I mentioned it's asking you do you want to create an artboard or do you want to leave it as a document in some cases you're just working with a single document which is either a photo or a design you're gonna do and that's what you're going to work with other cases you maybe want to do a mock-up of the same setup or a different setup and have it on two artboards next to each other then you'd say create an artboard but I'm not going to create an artboard now I'll show you how once you created a document you can still convert it to an artboard so you know you could flip in between this is one area that I think is important to note when you're choosing the colors this is a color profile now if you are using anything that's got to do with color the computer needs to understand what color base you working from or if you bring in an image it needs to understand the format of that color and when you export it it needs to respect that color profile that it's been used so color profile is literally when I pop it down here it's how the different digital things talk to each other and if you for example Avedon ROM like I added at one stage with one document I kept exporting it and in the in the document I had a photo put in there but this photo kept on coming out very dull and it was because of the wrong choice of a color profile so the default one is RGB is a good one to be on and these settings if you are working 99 percent of the time with images that you want to work with if you are efficient and proficient at color corrections and all that and you know exactly what you're doing then you can fiddle yeah but these are the settings that you should leave the other thing is with their color when you start off when you're creating a document you can say that the background must be transparent or if you uncheck this the background will default to usually a white color but if you say it's transparent and you open up the document you will see the background showing is transparent and when you export it you think and use the feature of exporting it as a PNG file in me and maintain that transparency okay so this is important to put in here if you want to start and work on a transparent background okay so we will just check that box there as mentioned this references the area on top here they only got a portrait button which makes sense if you're going portrait its portrait if you uncheck it it would be landscape so you don't have to have an extra landscape button okay and we won't worry about the actual zoom feature on here now let's go to include margins that is just to add margins onto the document this one at the bottom is one that you probably might come across more soon than you know other features that I'm sort of just skimping over which is the bleed feature if you for example creating a business card and you've got a business card that's got a color on it say a bold color and that color goes right from the edge to the other edge when you send it to the printer to be printed if you just put the color on the edge the printer usually would print it a bit more than the actual size and then they cut it down the guillotine or to size so if your color that's right to the edge is is not bleeding over the edge then when they cut it they might have your your card with a little white stripe at the edge because they may be cut a little bit away maybe a quarter of a millimeter away from the actual edge so what we do is we create a little bit of bleed and this is where you add that bleed into the document so I won't put the bleeding now and I'll show you but it will what it will look like when we do add a bleed so let's open up this document without any bleed on it and this is what we have okay so this is the document that we have just opened up now via this new window okay I'm going to close it quickly and then do a new one open up the document and I'm going to just put excessive amount of bleed on so we can see the effect of it and it just maybe make it 20 pixels and you just need to type it in one so please tab it will formulate the day because there's a link yeah if I unclick this and I'll have to enter it independently so if I click OK you see now around the border yeah there is a another marker they that's 20 pixels away that's what the bleed is all about so if you're going to be designing anything let's say we take this usually I'm gonna make it some more of a bolder color if that was part of your design and you wanted to send it to the printer what you would be advisable is that you extend it beyond this area into this bleed area and it's usually about 5 millimeters only that you push it across but I'm using pixels here now because I've literally opened the document in that format so when you send it to the printers they will get it as for example a PDF and they were printed to the bleed area and then cut it to shape cut it to size and then you'll have this perfect each part that comes across here because if you do this and you just don't have a bleed and you send it to the printers the printers might print it and when they do the cut it might pull up with a little bit of a white edge like that when they utilize it so the bleed is a common practice when you've seen stuff to be printed okay let's just do that I'm going to ctrl W just to close this window and I'm going to go create a new object you now a new document okay so there we have a document now let's go into the next view see Cinzia or sections should I say here you see new from clipboard what that means is that if you have an object be it an image now I'm going to just use these tools here and I'll explain them later so I'm going to say place this image I'll place that D if I wanted to create a document with this image but the document must be the exact size of this image so say I was busy doing something like this that I had two images and I wanted to create two separate documents I'd literally go Y and press ctrl C for copy or I could go edit and copy and then come here file new from clipboard there's a shortcut key there but you could come up here if you can't remember that so when I do this now you can see that entire image is falling up this new document now if I grab the edges of the image you'll see that we have the actual size of the original document a and this is now resized if I take these two and say for example I pull them together and I go ctrl C and then new from clipboard what it will do is we'll take the bigger size one and use that as a selection area okay so this is I'm gonna go ctrl W to close it this is a nice feature if you if you're busy working in some area and say you are yeah and you're like happy with this but you want to do modification with it on its own then it's probably just ctrl C and go there and say new from clipboard I'm gonna go ctrl alt shift in ctrl alt shift in and there we have our new document in E ok let me control W to close that so let's go into the next part here which is open and here you can open any document if you open a document that is formatted well enough to be opened in affinity design it could be a pixel-based image or a vector image now if you're bringing in an image from another program like a victor program like a illustrator or a choral draw or so forth you'd go and bring that in as a format that is compatible to this program so if we go to open yeah you'll see if we click over here it's giving you all the formats that it is compatible with from pixel-based images you even get two points here if you come yeah EXR files you get JPEG files pngs you also have the ability to get in PDFs illustrator files Photoshop PSD SVG's all of these file formats can be opened up in yeah and this is just when you open it up it opens up in its in its own window as a single document okay if you if you choose to take for example two objects and you say open it will open it up as two windows you'll see that's the one window that's the other window and this is the one that we had open all the time so you can open up multiple objects and they will just open up in independent tabs okay I'm closing those off let's just zoom out here again when we go to open recent there is files that have been open before like any other program and then of course we can clear that from this buffer close just means to close off the actual object that's open so if I go now I'm gonna go control C control shift alt in so we have two tabs yeah so if I go now and I say close which is shortcut key I've been using all along ctrl W it's going to close this tab so you I don't want to save it and we'll go to the next step so this is not closing the program it's closing a specific tab that you're working with okay if I go ctrl W I'm not going to save it again and then I'm back to square one so let me just create a new document now I'm going to not create the odd board now because I'll get to the point of showing you how the odd word gets created let's get back in there now let's look at the next point here this is very significant in affinity design it's the ability to save the history with a document which means that if I go let me just do some stuff here and do and what else can I put in my bell put in an image so I'll put a couple of stuff in here and then I decide I can want to shift this year I want to move that there and to do this yeah so all of these things are recorded now if you notice here I've got my layers all year any fix in history that's because I've moved it here for my convenience on the left it usually appears on the right hand side yeah but now if I go to the history tab you can notice here if I click it actually walks through the history like any other program it walks through the history it's got some other advanced features of doing history undo the net but that's for a more intermediate and advanced course so yeah we have the stuff with the history in so usually what happens is if I go and I save this file when I open it up again all that history is not there it's just the file as it exists with it's a pixel-based or victor mixture on the document that you're working but if I go and I say save history with a document when I go and save it it's I'm gonna just say no for now but it will save all of these history areas so when I opened the document you'll be able to go back in history which is very unique and very awesome so that features quite unique to affinity designer then these two areas here these appear here when you have these applications so this designer has two partners one is affinity filter and the other one is affinity publisher for those of you come from the derby suite environment it would be your equivalent to a Photoshop and InDesign photo and publish have very unique features the interesting thing is the file format that it saves for India for designer for Fulton publisher is exactly the same file format so it's the same file it's just given a different extension for identification purposes then of course things that are designed in publisher have certain other placeholders like pages whether you have master pages etc so that's out in the file which when you open it up in photo or designer doesn't necessarily mean that you want to access that information but it is all embedded in the same so if I have to say edit in photo I must make sure that I own the photo application or the publisher application and when I click here it will automatically open whatever I'm working in the document over there so I'll just click on edit in photo so we can show you how that all works there we have it we are now in affinity filter okay so yeah you can see the menus are different there's all these different personas okay let me not go into that now that's not for this time but we have all the additional personas we have a lot of other features because this is the photo editing app okay so now if I'm done if I make a move yell it's just for example take this and I move it up here if I go look at the history you can see all the history features have come across see also so I can go here now and I can say let's get to edit it back in designer and in designer when I open it up it's right back here now you see this the DAO has been moved up and positioned so the jumping in between is almost instantaneous and that's what these buttons about and then of course if you are busy working with a file and it's in a specific folder you can go and say open folder in Explorer it will go through the end it will show you where the file is currently we haven't saved this file anywhere so it's basically taking us to a desktop okay so let's go now to this next one which is place feature works differently to opening a document so if I to go and say file open a document with it and image let's say I'm going to open this image again it's gonna open the image as an independent document cuz I'm just opening it I'll close that off with place I'm able to place the image or whatever else on this document so it stays in the document and I'll a belay sit now there's two things I can place on here it is a pixel-based structure and I can also do a vector-based structure so let me show you that I'm gonna just clear this off and I'm gonna go file place and let me find an image so I'm gonna just go there let's go forward document and that's the image and yes the nice thing about placing images in this application yeah you have a placeholder so you left mouse button click and draw the size that you want on and yeah we don't have things like smart you know smart objects and all that the pixels inside if it's a pixel-based image maintains it whether you're sizing it big or small it maintains the quality so we had a problem way back when we were working in Photoshop when you brought an image in and you made it very small it would throw away all the other pixels and just keep the small image for optimization then when you try to resize it it was you had a poor pixel base so what they did was they started creating this kind of smart objects that when you made a smart object although you're making it small it still retains the original width affinity it from the word get-go when you drop it in yet no matter what sizing you do it keeps the original resolution of that image here without a problem then you can also go in and place now this is where you're able to bring in a additional format file and it could be a PDF but in this case I'm gonna bring in another affinity design a file so let me just see where I can find one you go in yeah we'll stick to these Eagles so this is an EPS file okay so this is not even a Finity file it's got an EPS extension so you could try it out with a PDF Adobe Illustrator files tend to because it's not a very modern format there's always a bit of glitter so I always recommend rather just converting that into a PDF or EPS and you even have lists into program format issues so if I say open this same thing but if I pull it yeah now you can see that I've got this image and this is it's a vector file okay if I double click on this side yeah nothing happens because I'm just making the selection of this image however because this image is a either a affinity designer or a filter or publish a file that you can do this with or an EPS or a PDF you could put it in when you bring it in it will show it as embedded and what embedded means it's any document on its own and you can access it by taking it into its own window so how do I do that I just double click on the embedded image and it will open it up in its own window okay so I could decide that I want to size it yeah look at this if I go back yeah you'll notice what it looks like there if I go in and make it small if we go back yeah look it's made it actually small now the beauty of the system here is most other systems if you're doing something like this you're going to have to create a live preview so you must click on a button that if you size it it shows you dialog showing your live preview yeah look at this I this is an embedded document as soon as I do it yet it's real-time links into this document that I'm editing same thing yeah is if I go and let me just click on this wing and I'll change the color look there it's changing in the real time in this image because it's an embedded document this for me is where tool is really incredible it's not like you got a editor do get a feature and then save it here or clothes that you have for it to show effect on the side you literally can see it happening in real time if I move this can you see that so that's quite awesome okay so let me just close this to a couple of undos just remember that if you go and you double click on your new editing the undos of the history remains in this window okay so I'm undoing to get it right back to its original yeah I can't come into this window and do undo than expected with this embedded thing to go back because it keeps its history within the specific document itself so any changes that I want to reverse on this document like let me just show you quickly for example if I to go in the end let me just go here and change this to that purple when I come back here if I'm on this and I go control seed it's just going to take it away because the object was in the previously so the last undo was to place the object so if I come back in I just say redo put it there for me to edit this and to undo this I've got a double click it it opens it up in this window and if I go look at the history now the history is with reference to this embedded document okay and let me pull it there so I Phi in this embedded document I go ctrl Z I write the way back everything is updated there okay just so that you understand how the place works so the place tool is a great tool when you posit doing projects where you are going to create mock-ups so you could place this object in an area and say you have a day you can double click on it open it see how you're modifying it so if I take this and I do it maybe a sheer you see I can check what's happening in there so you have you know all of those things that you can do with it but we'll get to that later game ok let's go to the next one which is export now I did explain to you what they sport persona is but that is a specialized area but in your general working you most likely won't go to the persona every time for every little export so you come to export here we have all of these formats in export remember if you're sending out anything as a PNG it retains any transparencies that you're using if you want to change the size you've just got to be a way as explained before a vector can size to any size and keep its quality but a pixel-based image which this one has a pixel based filter yeah if you are gonna push the size to you know ten thousand pixels it will export this thing but this image if it's not that high quality and big will be pixelated on the big image that you've seen down if everything is victor then it doesn't matter whether your size a big or small yeah it will maintain it and why do we need to do an export for the reason is that the receiving program needs to get it in the format that it uses whether it's a JPEG a PNG and SVG it needs to get it in that format and that's why we do an export if you are just saving the document for your own use in future in the same program of course you just go file and save as okay so we're not going into all the depth of this that's for intermediate and an advanced feature sets but I think there's one significant thing that I'm going to cover at this stage which is PDF you know when we set up this document and we set it up with the bleed marks now maybe I should just go in and control W and I'm going to create a document now and I'm gonna create it with say I make it five millimeters okay can you see even if you are working in pixels if you selected pixels you can just type them mm and it will do the relevant conversion or you could just come here and make the document to work in millimeters and you'll see it will all adjust accordingly so I've got this bleed and the reason I'm showing you is when you now go and you use the export feature on the file menu there you can see the bleed I'm going to just put in a sample area and I'm gonna feed it right from the bleed area let's do that so if we go to file and export with a PDF you'll notice that there's different settings over here if we go export for print it will give us presets that we could possibly use comfortably now yes the important thing include bleed however when we do the include bleed bleed and say export some people complain that it's just printing it with a bleed but there's no crop marks so the printer doesn't know how to align the images that area specifically in this more area so specifically with PDF if you go down to more and I'm not gonna go through any of these settings at this stage you can just use the defaults but if you scroll down you'll see it says include bleed and then it goes include print marks now the print marks will show all the crop marks and I'm not gonna check that now I'm gonna just export that and show you what it looks like and then include print marks and you'll understand why that is important so this is an important feature that I think you need to know with exporting and next to that is the fact of a PNG where you maintain the transparency if you want to for example seen the logo with zero background so if I say export I am just going to leave it in this area and just call this say call this card and say save and then I'm gonna do the exact same thing and say export but now we're gonna go in here and we are going to scroll down and say include printer marks which is the crop marks the registration marks etc as I close and export okay we'll come here and I'm gonna say let's call it card PM for print box okay then to make it simple now to go find that folder I'm just gonna say export the we'll just use any export so it will just open up this window I won't say save anything but if you look at this now I'm gonna click open we're gonna see this is the one that we chose show the bleed marks but don't show the actual print crop marks okay so that is what is embedded in that PDF let's see if we can make this smaller so you see how difficult it is now it's showing the entire thing we don't know how far the bleed mark is even though the bleed is about 5 ml right at the edge but it also includes this white area but if we go now and we go and look at the one with the crop box which I showed you a way to attach look at this it will zoom out it will show you a document like this way you see the bleed happening over the end it will show you that that's where you've got to cut it and that's where you would have cut it across and there is registration marks so this is for printers they would understand all of this and yes all the the color palettes that is used in the design work so that's the big difference there that's why I'm gonna just select this and delete it select and delete I don't to save anything that's why when we go and we do the export it's important to note that if you are exporting for the printer don't forget about going to look in this this more area and enabling this include print marks okay else by default it should just have the bleed switched on or not okay so yeah I want to modify now this document I don't want it to have the bleed and everything how do I go about doing it I don't have to go create a brand new document without the bleed and that's you know copy things across I have a modification thing which is just below the export which is document setup so yes now an interesting part of the owl setup here the document setup can have me modifying quite a bit of the features that I set up when I created a new document so let me go to document setup yet again gives us an indication that we chose this particular document which was for print the dimensions and everything and we're not going through these specific things at this stage with anchor2 page and rescale and all that sort of stuff that is for an intermediate stage or you can just look that up the thing we go through is the color and remember when I said setting up the document if at that stage we had a wrong color we could correct it over here so these settings are pretty much what we have when we create the document the first name but this is to apply to an existing document now if we want to modify and remember what we showed you you're about transparent background yeah we could still enable and disable it if we didn't have a day and then the next thing is the margins okay so yeah I could go and say include margins and it can include margins now the margins our margins on the actual document not off the document of the document is bleed on the document our margins and we can get those margins even from the print I could do a download from the printer settings okay but I just switched that off this is the bleed so yeah now I'm gonna go and I want to remove that bleed so I can place zero paste tab to move it around and you see nothing happens here now because I didn't accept it and if I go okay you can see what has happened is that bleed areas disappeared even though this is still extending beyond the bleed area has now been cut away so we are not using this for bleed anymore okay and you'll notice that if I move like this and get to the edge it's all snapping it's because of settings here that we'll get to okay so there we have it we were able to do the document setup here for example if I wanted to now change the bleed again let me show you I could put in five millimeters tab to accept at all and if I go okay you can see there it goes again you see controls it I'm just doing control Z to undo that feature and then we get to the next stage which is the print of a document which not going to covet the stage at all but it's conventionally when you go out and print what you have here to a physical printer or to a PDF file okay so hopefully that gives you an idea of the features that we have in this area and as we go into the next area I think what is just significant I'm going to just show you what would happen if we creating from the word get car we create a artboard and not a document to show you the difference there as we lead into the next video session if I delete this area now okay let me just start right from the scratch I'm going to ctrl W if I come in and I said new and I don't want an artboard so I'm gonna just say okay if I at this stage now I want to drop in a full color yeah if I move this nothing happens I practically will have to grab a shape and place it here and then if I change colors its able to change but there's a physical shape that I've placed here okay that's on a document if I have to open let me close this ctrl W if I have to open this as a new document but I say let's create an artboard it takes on quite a few different features to it let me show you what happens if I say okay now we have a total different set of these an artboard over here and we have a different response without me even moving a object on your knife I change the color yet automatically will change so the artboard has quite a few different properties then you have for a specific document okay but we'll get into that much later as we go through the different things but just to remember a document and an odd board because a document you can work on one document I can show you that I can take this odd board and I can duplicate it and even change the size of this odd boat that I'm working on and I can have two areas that I'm working on so that's the advantage of it plus lots lots more which we'll discuss in later videos

Channel: Rory Townsend

Views: 8,330

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Affinity Designer Basics, File Menu, Beginner, Part1

Id: teahu8mu5xI

Length: 39min 58sec (2398 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020