Affinity Designer Quick Start

Affinity Designer is an incredible, new effective design program from the guys at Serif. This program has been going from strength to strength. It's won Apple Design Awards and we're seeing a lot of designers drop their old software in favor of moving completely over to the new software that Infinity is bringing to the table. In this course, we're gonna go through and give you a quick start if you are new to Infinity Designer. So you know how when you are learning to use a graphics program and you get a little way into it. And then you find that there was some shortcut or some tool that could of saved you hours, and hours of time. Well, this course is designed to give you all of those shortcuts right at the beginning. So that you will be working as efficiently as you possibly can with a really smooth workflow from the outset. Now everything that we go through in this course can be done in the free trial version of Affinity Designer. So there's nothing to stop you jumping in and following along with every single one of these videos. I'll see you in the first lesson. Welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna go through how you can create curves in Affinity Designer. So a curve is anything that has nodes that you can edit. So here we have nodes, this is a node, this is a node, and these nodes link up to create either shapes or lines. We can select any one of these nodes and move it around to edit our shape. Now there are two main ways that you can create curves in Affinity Designer. So we'll just get rid of that shape to start with. You can either start with a stock shape from one of the tools here on the left. Or you can draw curve yourself from scratch using either the Pen, Pencil or Brush Tool. So with the Pencil, you can just jot out your shape however you like. And then link it up at the end. With the Pencil Tool, you can draw your shape out fluidly. With the Brush Tool, You can brush with different types of textures. But you'll still be creating a curve in the process, so we've still got nodes that we can work with. Or if you don't want to do any of those things, if you wanna start with something a bit more predefined. You can draw our a preset shape, and then you can hit Convert to Curves. So right now, if you wanted to try to edit any of the nodes, you wouldn't be able to access them, because this is just a stock shape. But if you hit Convert to Curves, now you can edit any of these nodes that you want. You also have circles, rounded corners, and you've got quite a large selection here of all different types of shapes that you can use to start building out your designs. And then once you've drawn these shapes out, if you want to edit this from its stock beginning point, just hit that Convert to Curves button. And then you are free to turn it into anything you want. In the next lesson, we're gonna look more closely at nodes in existing shapes. We're gonna look at how you can add more nodes to a shape, how you can delete nodes from a shape. And how you can connect nodes that are disconnected. I'll see you there. Welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna go over how you can add and delete nodes from an existing curve. So let's say we've started out with a square and we've converted that to curves like we did in the previous lesson. Now if I want to add nodes into this existing curve shape, all I need to do is make sure I have the little white arrow here selected, that's the node tool. You can also select that with A as a shortcut and then you wanna hover over the line until you see that little squiggly bit show up underneath that cursor. And then you can just tap right on the line and that will add a node in for you. So, you can tap as many places as you want and add in all of the nodes that you want. And if you want to delete a node you just simply click it to select it with the node editing tool or you can draw a box around it so it'll just drag. You can select multiple nodes it's that way. And then just hit the delete button. And now we get rid of those nodes. So that's with a closed curve. It will also work the same with an open curve so with the line, so let's just knock out a line really quickly. So we got our line there and if we wanna add nodes along the way, along the lines that we already have, with the node tool, we can still look for that little squiggly line under the cursor and just tap in more nodes. However, this node tool is for existing curves or existing nodes. You can't add new nodes out here with it. Sorry, if you want to add on to this line, out on the end here, you'll need to go to the pen tool. You'll need to select the end and then you can continue adding nodes onto the end of that open shape. You'll notice that right now one of these nodes is red and that's the root node for this line. You can't actually add any extra nodes to connect to that root node. So if I did want to have another node coming from here and going here I would need to reverse these curves. So I can look for this button up here, Reverse Curves. And there you can see that the red node has jumped to the other end, and this node has now been highlighted. That means that I can now select the pen tool, and I can start adding nodes onto the other end. Now if I wanna close this shape, I just need to hover over that root node until I see the little circle come up on the end of my cursor icon and then just tap, and that closes that shape. So then that can now be filled. There's also another way to close off and open the big shape. Lets get rid of this. So let's say you're working with the pencil and you've drawn out a rough shape and now your ends don't meet. So what you can do is grab the node tool, highlight both of these ends and then up here you'll find the Close Curve button, so you hit that and now your curve is fully closed. Now in the same way in reverse, if you want to split open a curve, you can select a node at the point that you wanna break open the curve and you can hit Break Curve. And now you've got a new separate root node, and you can start adding extra nodes onto your curve. You can also use a similar technique to join completely separate curves. So, just get rid of this one. And so, let's say we've got curve number one and we've got curve number two and right now they're completely separate. We can grab the node tool and then hold Shift and then click the second shape to select it. Now if we select both of these ends here, and go to the Join Curves button. And that has connected our two shapes into one single shape that can be manipulated all at once. You might have noticed that some of the nodes in these shapes that we've been working on look a little bit different to one another and they behave a little bit differently. And that's because there are different types of nodes. And we're gonna check out what those different types of nodes are in the next lesson. We're also gonna learn about the different types of drawing modes that you can use when you create these shapes with the pen tool. I'll see you there. Hi, welcome back to Infinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna go through the three different types of nodes that you can use to make up your curves. There are smooth nodes, sharp nodes, and smart nodes. Each one of those has a different look on your canvas so you'll be able to identify what type of node you're working with and they behave slightly differently. All right, let's have a demonstration of each type. We'll just grab the pencil and just draw out any old shape to work with. Now by default you can see here we've got these little circular shape nodes. And when you see those little circles that means that you're working with smooth nodes. Now, I'm gonna highlight all these nodes and then up here, you can see that we have this Convert menu. And you'll see this Convert menu come up any time you highlight nodes using the node tool. We have the three different types available here that we can work with. So we can convert all of these nodes to sharp nodes. And now you'll see that each of this nodes no longer has any curvature on it. We just have sharp corners on every single node and you'll also notice that each one of these nodes uses a square shape node now. So you can identify the circle shape nodes are smooth mode and the square shaped nodes are sharp mode. The third type of node is the smart node and what that does is it automatically calculates a smooth curve of best fit for you, depending on where you've put your nodes down. So normally if you have just regular smooth nodes. When you want to control the curvature on this node, you have to do it manually. So, you have to select the node that you want to work with and then it's up to you to figure out how these nodes should be placed, how the handles should be moved around in order to give you the type of curvature that you want. If you use a smart mode, all of that will just be handled for you and you'll get smooth flowing shapes as you move through your curve. So if I switch this now to smart mode, it's just smoothed that off automatically for me. So if I select all of these curves and convert to smart mode. You'll see that the icon has changed, it's still circular but you have a dot inside. That's to let you know that that is a smart node. That's auto calculating the curvature. If you edit any one of these nodes at this point and change it's curvature, you'll see it switch from being in smart mode to smooth mode. So watch this node here carefully. There you see it switches because it's no longer being automatically calculated, so the dot in the middle of this node has now disappeared to let you know that it's no longer in smart mode. You can actually draw from scratch using smart mode. When you select the pen tool by default, it would typically be just in regular pen mode. This means that you can, if you want, you can draw your lines all out as sharp mode or if when you click down to add a node you drag it at the same time, you'll also be able to create smooth nodes. So that's the default Pen mode but if you come up here and switch it away from Pen mode and switch into smart mode, then as you put down nodes a flowing curvature will be automatically calculated for you, as you're going along. Now in the same way if you definitely know you don't want to have any curves you want only sharp nodes on your shape, then you can switch to sharp mode up here with the pen tool. And now you know you're not gonna accidentally drag and add curves where you don't want them. And the last type of mode of drawing that's available with the pen tool is line mode. With line mode you're going to be adding down two nodes and no more to make a single line. So you put down one node and then you put down another node and that's it. It's just designed to make it very easy for you to put down a single line rather than a whole shape. In the next lesson we're gonna learn how to use the corner tool. Which is a really fantastic tool for quickly and easily rounding off corners and creating different shapes in your corners. I'll see you there. Hey welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, you can learn how to round off corners really easily using the corner tool. Alright, so, let's find a sharp corner in this design. So I'm just going to zoom right in. And so here's a sharp corner. If we wanna round that off, we don't have to mess around with Visio Curve, Handles, trying to make sure everything's symmetrical and uniformly rounded. What you can do instead is select this tool here, the Corner Tool which you can also select using c as a keyboard shortcut. Then select the shape that you want to modify and then hover over the point that you want to round out. You're gonna see a little curve come up. It'll be easier if I show you on this side. You see that little curve comes up at the bottom of the cursor. Now, from here, if you hold down and drag, you'll see a circle come up. Inside that corner and that circle will determine how rounded off your corners are. Now, once you've done that you can come back to it anytime. And just grab this little red circle here. To change the roundness of the corner to anything that you need it to be. But the actual node itself still stays out in the corner here, you're not moving the location of the node of this corner. So, if you subsequently need to change around the way you have nodes set up in this area. You might need to convert this corner that you've created from your corner tool into an editable Bezier curve. And the way that you can do that, is with this Bake Corners button. So if we click that, now, our node has been converted from a single node, into three nodes. And each one of those nodes is now individually editable, as you would with any other node. So, we'll just undo that, to bring back our corner. Now, you'll notice by default this corner just has a rounded shape but that's just one of a few options that you have. If you have a look up in the context menu area you'll see that there are a number of different corner shapes that you can use with this tool. So, we've got it set to round it by default but we can also have a straight corner. We can have a concave corner and we can have a cutout corner. And in the case of each one of these, it just works in exactly the same way, you're just moving the little circle, that gives you the radius of your corner. And then with each one of those different types of corners, you still have the option to bake that corner. So that you then have nodes that you can work with individually. In the next lesson, we're gonna learn about using Power Duplicate, which is a really amazing feature of Affinity Designer. It's great whenever you need to replicate the same transformation in a duplicated shape over and over. I'll see you there. Hey, welcome back to Affinity Designer Quickstart. In this lesson, we're gonna go through using duplication, and more importantly using power duplicate, which is a really awesome function of Affinity Designer. So first up, there's two ways to duplicate in Affinity Designer. You might be used to using Ctrl or Cmd+D in other applications, but in Affinity Designer you use Cmd+J to duplicate. Or alternatively you can hold down the Alt or Option key, and then you can drag the object that you want to duplicate. So we are going to duplicate this little guy here. So I can hold down Alt and drag. Or as well as using keyboard shortcuts, there's of course the ability to, just head into the Edit menu and choose Duplicate. Now, one of the really, really cool things that you can do is power duplicate, so this is probably easier shown rather than explain to start with. So let's say I wanna make kind of like a little flower petal shape out of this little shape here. So I will hold down Alt to duplicate, and I'll move it over to the side. And now I am gonna rotate it a little bit. Now, if I continue hitting the shortcut key for duplicate I'll start power duplicating. And that means that the transformation that I just supplied, that movement and rotation, that same transformation is going to be applied to each of my new duplicates. So then we get this. And that all just happens automatically and this is just so, so helpful. I discovered this when I was creating a staircase, completely found it by accident. I created one stair on the flight of stairs, duplicated it, moved it down to the next step, and then duplicated it expecting to have to manually transform about 20 times. And then I'll just able to go duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate and the whole flight of stairs was created in about three seconds flat. So to recap, that's just, you hold then Alt while you are dragging one of the shapes in your design. Then you ahead and create whatever transformations you wanna create, so you can move, you can rotate, anything you want. And then if you immediately hit Cmd+J, you can keep on power duplicating with all of those transformations in there every time you duplicate your shape. In the next video we're gonna learn how to take one Affinity Designer document and embed it in another, and then edit that embedded document in real time. I'll see you there. Welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna learn how to do real time editing of embedded objects. And you can actually embed any type of image that you want into any Affinity Designer files. So you can drop in JPEGs, or PNGs, or anything you want. But, if you drop in an Affinity Designer file as an embedded object, you can then do real time editing to that embedded object. And you'll see those edits update in your design in every place that you have embedded it. Let's have a look at an example. We have two Affinity Designer files here. The first one, you're already looking at and it's a simple isometric cube and the second one is a flat image that we're going to imbed into our first document and turn it into the sides of our cube. All right, so head back to our first image. And then we're gonna use this tool here, the Place Image tool, to embed our flat crate side. And then we can just place the image in. And now we can manipulate it to line it up with our box shape. Now, I'm just gonna speed this up so you don't have to watch through as I manipulate each one of these sides. All right, so now we have our three instances of our embedded object. One on each side of our isometric cube. But what happens if we decide that we want to change the way that the sides of these cubes look? Or what we can do is double click anyone of these embedded objects. Now we can edit right here and any changes that we make are going to show up in all the embedded instances. Now I'm gonna switch into separated window mode so you can see this a little bit more clearly. All right so that is our original crate side. And here is the embedded version. I'll just move this over. All right so now, let's say we want to change the color of the inner most box. Make a different shade. So that you can see, as we're changing the shade here, you're seeing the effect in real time in our main document. Now the thing to be aware of is, the real time editing that you're doing is not going to affect your original document. When you embedded that original document into your design, you created a duplicate. And it's the duplicate that you're editing here. So if you were to go back to the design that you originally created, you can see that nothing has changed there. The only thing that's changed is the embedded version and every instance of that embedded object in your design. So just a recap you embed any of your other Affinity Designer files into your design using this little tool here the place image tool. And then to start doing real time editing, just double click on any of the instances of that embedded object. In the next video, you're gonna learn about one of the coolest features of Affinity Designer, and that is the ability to paint in brushstrokes that look like raster based brushstrokes, but are actually vectors. I'll see you there. Hi, welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson we're gonna go through probably one of the coolest features of Affinity Designer, and that is the ability to paint using vectors. Now if you've ever used the brush tool in Photoshop or any other similar application you'll have had the experience of what happens when you paint a brush stroke that's not exactly how you want it. There's nothing you can do about it. You simply have to undo and go back and do that stroke again. But with Affinity Designer, things are a little bit different, because you can actually paint using vectors. In the toolbar here, this is your Vector Brush Tool, and you can pick any one of these brushes, just as you would in a raster based painting program. And you can see there's various degrees of textures and different types of style. So we'll just pick one, we'll choose a pastel brush, and now we can paint just like we would with a pixel brush. But the huge huge difference is that if we choose our Node tool, now we can adjust this brush stroke just like we would with a shape or a line. I'll just quickly show you a couple of other brushes. So there's a whole different variety of different types of styles that you can create. And because of the ability to edit those vectors, you've got the kind of fine-grain control that is very, very hard to achieve with pixel-based brushes. For example, if you want to create a 100% straight brush line, let's get rid of these. Then you can draw your straight line, and then you can delete all of your nodes, except for the first and last. And now you've got the ability to make this a completely straight line, perfect brush stroke. You have the ability to curve it exactly how you want. And this just opens up new possibilities for design that aren't available without this type of Vector painting tool. And you can also paint with pressure control. If you have a pen, and we're gonna go through how you can use pressure control in a little bit more detail in a later video. So in your Brushes panel, you have a few different groups of brushes. So if you go to Assorted, you'll get the full range of brushes. You can also choose Textured brushes. So these are great for simulating realistic styles of medium. So that's a watercolor brush, you have pastel brushes, all different types of textured brushes. You have Basic brushes, which are just as though you have a great big marker. And then one of the most interesting ones is, Image brushes. So let me just clear a space to show you these. With image brushes you can paint out a continuous stream of a particular image. So you can imagine the possibilities that a tool like this gives you. And you can actually create your own custom image brushes as well. In the next section of the course, we're gonna move into learning about working with Affinity Designer's interface. And we're gonna start out by learning how you can transform objects. I'll see you there. Hi, welcome back to to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson we're gonna go through how you can transform shapes. Now there are two ways that you can transform shapes in Affinity Designer. One is on the canvas, using tools that will come up when you hover your mouse around the shape. And the other is using the transform panel. So if you've worked with other graphics applications, then a lot of this is gonna be pretty familiar. But it's worth going over because there are a couple of things that you might miss if you're not sure exactly where to go to use them. All right, we'll just start by drawing out a square onto our canvas. And over here in our transform panel, you can see that we have immediately got some information coming up about our shape. So we're able to use these fields to start transforming our shape. So for example, let's say we wanna make sure that this is perfectly square. We can jump in here and change these values and we could set the position that our shape will be at. You can also work with rotation. You can see that we're rotating the shape around. We can change the point of origin for that rotation. And this can be very handy for making precise rotations when you know exactly how much of a turn you wanna have in your shape. Now in this square here you can set the skew of the shape. So we could skew to the left or to the right. Now, something that might not be obvious at first is what do if you want to skew your shape in two directions. You might come down here and skew your shape a little bit. Let's say we just skew it by 14 degrees. But what happens if you also wanna skew it vertically? The transform power will only give you a horizontal skew. So if you want to skew vertically then you'll need to come in here and look for these little arrows here. It can be a little finicky to make the skew tool come up. So you just need to very finely come into the sides of the shape until you see these two arrows appear. And then you can skew vertically as well as horizontally. So on top of the ability to skew, you also have the ability to rotate if you hover your mouse around any of the corners. So that's free rotation, but if you hold down shift you can also lock the rotation into set increments. If you position your mouse at directly over any of these transformation nodes here you'll have the ability to scale. So there you've got free movement in your scaling. And once again if hold down shift, you'll lock in the movement of that scaling. You also have vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. So that is the essentials that you need to know for transforming objects in Affinity Designer. In the next video you gonna learn how to set up your Affinity Designer display so you actually have a split screen where you can see your design in two different modes at once. And you have a slider down the middle that allows you to scroll in between these two different types of views. I'll see you there. Hey welcome back to our Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, I'm gonna show you how to set up your workspace so that you can have two different types of views in the same workspace with a slider that you can scrub left and right between these two different types of views. So what you wanna do is head up to View, and then go to View Mode and then choose Split View. Now on the left side, you can have whatever type of view that you want. In this left side here, we've got a Vector View, something I find particularly helpful on the right side is to go with an Outline View. So we can go to View > View Mode > Outline. This is super, super helpful, because you've got your full color view here. And then, particularly when you really need to get some fine grain control over your design here, you can zoom right in. And you can make sure all of your outlines are set up exactly how you need them to be. You can have this all the way over to the right, so it's as though you are just working with it full screen. And then you've got that ability to easily just scrub from left to right. So on top of having Vector and Outline view, it's also particularly useful for previewing different resolutions of graphics. So on the left side here, I can say, have a regular Pixel Preview to show me how this design is gonna come out when it's exported to pixels. And then on the right side, just by clicking on the side that you wanna change up, I can go to View and then I can choose Retina. So there I can get an idea of how the different types of resolution are gonna have an effect on my exported graphics. And this is probably more noticeable if we zoom in quite a bit. So as you scrub over, you can see that you've got a much sharper image in the Retina View and less so in the normal Pixel View. So that's super, super handy. In the next video, we're gonna go through using the Layers Panel in Affinity Designer, which can be a little bit different at first to what you might be used to other applications. And there's actually some really cool stuff that you can do with the Layers Panel. I'll see you in the next lesson. Welcome back to Affinity Designer quick start. In this video we're gonna go through how to work with the layers panel. If you're coming from a program like Photoshop, you might not instantly see how the layers panel in Affinity Designer works. So we're gonna step through how objects are placed into the layers panel when you create them. How you can move them around, how nesting works, and how you can create different types of layers. All right, so we'll start out by drawing some rectangles out onto the canvas. Now in another application you might expect to have a different layer for each one of these rectangles and then you might expect to select all of those layers and group them up. But then you head over to this layers panel and you see that you don't have separate layers, you have just one layer. Now that's because every individual shape that you've just drawn has been given it's own child underneath the default layer that is created with every new Affinity Designer document. So rather than layers being automatically created like in some other programs, in Affinity Designer you need to create layer manually yourself. Even though Affinity Designer does have groups, you can create groups of objects, layers behave in a lot of ways very much like groups. So I can create a new layer with the Add Layer button down the bottom here. And then if I want, I can move these shapes up into the second layer as though I was shifting them from one group into another. So shapes can be nested underneath layers, however they can also be grouped. You can that by either pressing Cmd+G to create a group or you can select the shapes that you wanna group and you can go to the layer menu and press Group. Now functionally, a group is almost the same as a layer. But by having both layers and groups as options for the way that you can organize all of your shapes and curves, it gives you multiple ways that you can categorize all of the elements of your design. And keep everything organized in a way that makes sense for you. Now if you need to you can also convert a group into a layer. So we have this group here selected right now, we can head up to the Layer menu and we can choose Promote Group To Layer. Now the next thing that you wanna be aware of is how to move things around inside the layers panel. When you click and drag an item in your layers panel, you'll see different drop zone rectangles coming up. And the width of these drop zone rectangles will let you know what level of nesting your item will be at when you drop it. Now if I move this item a little to the left you see the width of that drop zone expand. And if I move it to the left again it expands even further. So this full width drop zone here tells me that when I drop this item it will be at the top level. It will have no parent, it will not be nested under anything. If I move it to here that tells me that it's gonna be grouped under layer two. And if I move it to here, that tells me that if I drop it now, it'll be nested under this group. So here, now the item has no parent, it's at the top level. If we move it again, so here, it will be nested under layer two. And now we finally have this shortest width drop zone and that will nest this object under the group. So there's our drop layer. So as you're moving things around pay attention to the width of the drop zone and that will let you know where the item is going to be placed in your nesting structure. Now so far we've just been creating object layers. So object layers contain things like curves, and shapes, and texts. But there are three other types of layers that you can create too. There are pixel layers, which you can draw based graphics into. There are masked layers, that you can use to mask contents in layers below. And there are adjustment lighters that you can use for things like putting a gradient map over your design and correcting its color and things like that. So to create any one of these three types of layers, you can just head down to the bottom of your layers panel. And you'll find a shortcut button to create a Mask Layer here. You'll find an Adjustments layer button here. And then, over here is your Pixel layer button. Now, I won't go into exactly how you work with each of those three different types of layers because we'll be covering those in later videos. Now the last thing that I did wanna cover about working with layers is these three buttons in the top right corner of your interface. Each one of these helps you control where in your layer hierarchy an object is placed when you're drawing it. So the first icon we have here is to insert an object behind the currently selected item. This one inserts at the top of the layer and this one inserts something inside the selection. So let's have a look at how that works. All right, so let's pick out this rectangle. Now if we press this button to insert behind the selection, if we start vector painting, rather than seeing the vectors go over the top, we should see the brush strokes come up behind this rectangle here. So let's have a look. So there we go. Sure enough, just how we want that to come out. Now the second option here, will insert your brushstrokes at the top of the layer. So, even though we have selection down here, if we press this button, we should see our new curves added in at the top of the current layer. So let's try, that again. And sure enough, this has come up right at the very top of this layer. Now just clear that out. And then the last option is to draw inside the current selection. Now if we press this button, we should see our brush strokes only appear inside of this rectangle. They shouldn't cross the outlines of the rectangle. So grab our brush again. And there we go. Everything is neatly contained inside that rectangle. And when you expand, you'll see that the curves that you've just drawn in are nested inside this rectangle shape. So these shortcuts can help you with quickly inserting objects exactly where you want them to be in your layer hierarchy. In the next lesson, we're gonna step through how you can use Affinity Design as excellent guides manager tool. It allows you to get really fine grain precision with how you layout your guides in your document. I'll see you there. Hi and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson we're gonna talk about the guides manager. Now you can drop guides into your Affinity Designer document to help you with layout. And the way that you do it is the same as you've probably done in other applications. You just place your cursor out on one of the rulers, and then you drag. You got it out to the position that you want it. But you'll notice that as I'm dragging this guide out I'm actually able to drag it down at a decimal point rather than a whole rounded point. Now, if you were working with web design or something that needs to be pixel perfect, then you want to be able to make sure that your guides are down exactly where you need them to. This document for example is 1,400 points wide or 1,400 pixels wide. Now if I want to make a 1,200 pixel wide layout, then I need to drop this guide down at 100 points. But with these decimals coming into where I can drop these guides, it can be a little tricky for me to put this guide exactly where I need it. So this is where the guide manager is very, very helpful. So if we head up to View, we can then choose the Guides Manager. And this shows that the guide that we have down right now is at this point here. And we can just edit that figure and change it to the 100 point value that we need. And now we can put in our second guide by hitting this little button here to add a new guide. And we can set that to the 1300 value that we need in order to create a 1200 pixel wide or a point wide layout. You can do the same thing with horizontal guides. So we can set a gather at the top of our layout, say of 50 points. And then in the same sense, we can also delete any of these guys that we need to by hitting the little delete buttons down at the bottom. Now as well as using explicit values, we can also use percentage-based values. So now rather than having 100 points and 1300 points, we've got percentage-based values. And then we can change those to anything we like as well. So we might have a layout that is 80% the width of the entire page by entering values of 10% and 90% for our two guides. So that is how you can easily put guides in exactly where you need them to be for whatever type of layout you are creating. In the next lesson, we're just gonna cover a really quick tip on how you can rearrange studio panels in Affinity Designer. I'll see you there. Hi, and welcome back to Affinity Designer quick start. This video is just a quick tip about working with studio panels. Now you have a bunch of panels over here on the right side of your screen, and they do things that you would already be familiar with if you've worked with other graphics applications. So they give you your history, they give you color selectors and so on and so forth and you can rearrange these panels. You can drop them in with other sets of panels, you can drag them out. You can nest them in different locations, and you can also close them down completely. Like this. Now one thing that can be a little bit confusing at first if you're used to other programs is, where you go to bring a panel back once you've closed it down. You might be used to going up to the Window menu and then looking for the panels so that you can bring them back. But the menus in Affinity Designer are set up a little differently. Now where you want to go to control these panels here, is actually to the studio submenu which is located under the view menu. So you hit up here to the View menu and then come down to Studio and this is where you're gonna find the controls for your panels. So then we can bring the History tab back, we can bring the Color tab back, and then we can nest them back whereever we want to in our layout. We can also use that same Studio menu to completely reset the Studio. So if we've kind of made a mess of things, we don't like our layout, we can put it back to the default. And you also have the option to hide the Studio all together. So that is how you work with the Studio panels in Affinity Designer, perhaps a little bit different to what you might be used to, but all very accessible once you do know how to use it. In the next video, we're gonna learn how you can use grids in Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer has a really great grid management system that's very versatile and let's you do a lot of different things. I'll see you in the next lesson. Hi and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. Affinity Designer has a really good grid system which we're going to go through in this lesson. It's quite versatile and it's also got some really good tools for things like doing icon design. And it's also has things like isometric grids for doing graphics for games for example. All right, so we gonna start by showing the grid so head up to the View menu, and then check the Show Grid sub menu, that brings up the default grid. Now, to change the way that this grid is laid out you wanna go back up to the View menu and then go down to the Grid and Access Manager. Now, by default, Use automatic grid will be checked. So if you wanna change things around, you just need to uncheck that check box. All right, so first let's have a look at how you can set up a grid to create icons. Now, 64 pixels by 64 pixels is a pretty common size for icons. So we can head down here and we can set the horizontal spacing to 64 pixels. And then here we can set the vertical spacing to 64 pixels. So now each one of our squares is the right size for an icon to fit inside it. But what we can also do is increase the amount of space in between each one of these grid cells. So we'll just up that to 24 points. And now we can fit exactly one icon into each one of these little grid squares. Now we can take that even further to help us work with our layout a bit more. By increasing the number of divisions. So, we can make a smaller grid inside our grid. Let's say that we set the divisions to 32. Now, if we zoom in, we can see that we've got several lines here that are breaking down each one of our grid cells even further. So when we are trying to align all of the different nodes and points in our icons, we can snap to each one of these lines. We can do the same things horizontally. So that we've got a really nice little self-contained grid for each one of the icons that we produce. So that icon grid layout is just using the standard mode of grid, but you also have several other predetermined types of grids that you can work with. For example, you might be working on graphics for an isometric video game. So you can hit up here and you can choose Isometric, and now your grid will be converted into an isometric layer. So just drop that gutter back down to zero, and we've kept our grid divisions there. So we've got a really nice framework that we can use to start plotting isometric graphics. Without having to worry that the angles and the perspective that we're trying to lay out are incorrect in any way. Now, where these grids that we've just gone through really come into their own is when they're used in conjunction with snapping. And that's what we're gonna learn how to set up in the next lesson. I'll see you there. Hey welcome back to Affinity Designer quick start. In this lesson, we're gonna have a look at snapping, how you can turn it on and what the different types of settings that you can use with it. Now in order to activate snapping, all you need to do is set up here and hit this big magnet button up here. Alternatively, you can hit this little drop down arrow here and just ensure that this box here is checked. Now if you are designing graphics for the web or for pixel perfect game or for anything that requires pixel precision, there are a couple of buttons that you're gonna wanna know about right away. The first is this one here, Force Pixel Alignment. Now if you don't have this turned on your vectors can actually snap to positions that are in between pixels. And then when you export your graphics you can end up with blurry looking edges. But by turning this setting on you make sure that you always force pixel alignments. And that's going to help you keep your edges nice and crisp. And the second one that you want is, Move By Whole Pixels, and that one is helpful for the exact same reasons. So when you're moving things around, you're not gonna have anything fall in between two pixels. And you're gonna make sure that your graphics are always coming out nice and crisp. So now that we have snapping turned on, if we grab the pen tool, zoom in a little. And now we can very easily start tapping out some isometric shapes. And likewise if we now wanna move our shape around we get really great visual feedback and snapping to help us move our shapes around. And keep them on the grid and keep them perfectly aligned and in order. Now there are also plenty of other snapping settings that are in this drop down box here. Now we won't go through every single one, because there's quite a lot that you can do with this. But definitely have a look inside this panel. Check out some of the presets and some of the different settings that you can use. And experiment with them to see what works best for the kind of work you're doing. In the next section of the course, we're gonna move on to looking at how you can work with color and fill and stroke Affinity Designer. And we're gonna start out by stepping through how you can use Affinity Designer's fill tools. I'll see you in the next lesson. Hi, welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna learn how to work with fills in Affinity Designer. So we'll start by grabbing the pen tool and just jotting out a shape. Any shape at all will be fine. So when you first put out a shape on the canvas with the pen tool, you will have no fill and it will just have a black stroke around the outside. And there are two ways that you can edit the fill, add in flat color, or some other type of fill, and that is either with this little fill sub context menu up here or using the Fill Tool. Now this context menu here will only show this fill window here if you're using the select tool. The node editor, curve editor, pen, Or any one of these shape tools here. First, we'll add a fill in using the context menu. So you have a few choices here, you have a preset selection of swatches that you can choose from. And just tapping any one of these will add in a fill for you. You also have a series of color selectors that you can work with. And we'll talk more about how color sectors in Affinity Designer work in a later video. And you also have an option to set a gradient. We're also gonna talk about gradients a little bit later as well. So basically this context menu is the easiest place to set a fill if you want to do something fairly standard, fairly quick and easy. But if you're wanting to get a little bit more complicated with your fill, that's when you're gonna wanna use the Fill tool. The fill tools gives you access to a couple of extra things. So up here you can choose what type of fill you're going to be working with. So solid is just a flat color. If you're just setting a flat color you probably don't really need to use the fill tool you can just use that context menu that we just went over. You also have a variety of gradients so we've got linear elliptical radial and conical gradients. And we're gonna go through how you actually create and edit gradients in a later video. But once you do have a gradient setup with the colors and the stops that you want, the fill tool allows you to really easily manipulate the direction and the positioning of your gradients. So just draw out our gradient to go in any direction that we want, which makes it really easy to tweak and work with this gradient and get it running in the exact way that we want it to be. Now the other extra that you'll find under the fill tool that you won't find in that context sub menu is bit map fill. So if we select bit map fill, we can then choose a file, a pixel-based file that we can use as sort of a texture to fill in our shape. So pick out this wood texture. And now, We have a bitmap acting as the fill for our shape, and we can manipulate this bitmap in the same way that you just saw with the gradients. So you can redraw the bitmaps out and you can work with these handles to change the way that the bitmap is laid out or tiled in your shape. You also have some extra settings up here, that you can work with. So you can change the way tiling works, or you can have the bitmap not tile at all. And these bit maps are really great for adding some more complex texture into a sain. Some times you want a flat clean look with Vector Art. But sometimes you wanna add in a bit more complexity into your texturing in a way that you really do need to use bit maps to achieve. Now that said, Affinity Designer does also give you another non-bitmap way to add texture into your fields. So just head back, and put in a flat color. So make this, say, sandy, sort of an orangey-yellow. Now you see down here we have a noise slider. So we're able to add noise in and still maintain a completely vector based design where you can zoom in and still maintain the same degree of quality. And this noise can be used in all sorts of different ways, it's great for creating rocky textures, woody textures, even fabrics. If you use it in the right way, you can add a lot of life into your art work. So that covers the fill tool, the context menu for working with fill and adding texture into your designs with bit maps and with noise. In the next lesson we're gonna go through working with stroke in Affinity designer. I'll see you there. Hi and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In the last video we went through how to work with fills and in this video we're gonna talk about how to work with stroke in Affinity Designer. The most of what applies to working with fills works also with strokes. So we'll just start with a regular old rectangle and now just as before we looked at the context menu to work with fill, in the same context menu you have all of your settings for stroke. And just like with fill, you can choose from Swatches, Color and Gradient. And just like with fill, this stroke context menu will come up when you're using the move tool, the node tool, the curve tool, the pen tool, and any of the shape tools. And also like when you're working with fill you can actually use the fill tool. It might not seem obvious at first because we're working with stroke but if you select the fill tool and then up here look for this context sub menu, and choose stroke. And from there, you can work with the stroke using the same tool. So that covers how you can set the color of your stroke but there is also a range of stroke specific settings that you can use. So If we just head back to the move tool. You can access your stroke settings by clicking this button here. Or by looking at the stroke panel. So, this gives you a range of different types of stroke that you can use. So we have the solid stroke, a dashed stroke, and we can also use a textured stroke, and that allows us to pick out a brush, any brush, and texture the stroke. We also get control over the width of the stroke. And you can then just also control the way that the corners of the stroke appear, the alignment of the stroke, and just exactly how the stroke is drawn in relation to the shape that it's surrounding. And the last thing that's really good to know about working with stroke in Affinity Designer is that you can completely separate the stroke out from it's original shape that it's bordering so that you can work with it as a self-contained curve. And to do that make sure the shape is selected, then go up to Layer, and choose Expand Stroke. Now, if you have a look in the layer menu here. You can see that our stroke is now a separate shape to our original rectangle. So this means that you can get in and you can edit the nodes and you can do everything with this stroke that you would with any other curve in your design. In the next lesson, we're gonna look at all of the different types of color selection that Affinity Designer provides. And we're also gonna look at what you need to do if you want to copy and paste hex codes into your document or around within your document. I'll see you in the next lesson. Hi, welcome back to Affinity Designer Quickstart. In the last couple of videos, we went over the tools that you can use to edit fills and strokes. In this video, we're going to take a closer look at how you can select the colors that you want to use when you're working with those tools. For color selection, we have the context menu areas that we worked with before for fill and stroke and we also have the color studio panel. By default, you're going to get this HSL color wheel in color solution for any of these, but you do have the option to choose from several other types of color pickers. But they categorize slightly differently, whether you're looking at one of the context menus or whether you're looking at the color panel. One of the reasons that this difference in setup is good to know about is if you're wanting to copy a color code, for example, say you have a hex code that you have chosen from a color palette that you already have defined and you wanna paste it into your design. If you want to paste in a hex code through the context menu, you'll need to go up here and choose IGB Hex Sliders. You can see all the different color selectors that we have up here as well and then here, you'll get your hex code that you can work with. Now if you're using the color studio panel, first you'll need to choose the Sliders category and then from this drop down list, you can choose IGB Hex. Once again, all of the different color pickers that you can work with can be picked from this drop down list if you're working with the context menu. But if you're working over here, first you'll need to decide whether you want a whee, a slider, or boxes for your color selection. I'll just put that back to the default. Now when you're working with this color selection panel, you can either choose the stroke by tapping on this little circle that is hollow in the middle and then you'll be able to change the color of the stroke. Or to work on the fill, tap the Fill, whichever you're working on is going to be in front. If you're working with the fill, it will be in front. If you're working with the stroke, it will be in front. And then you can choose your color. Now if you want to use the color picker, you can look here and then drag and then you'll be able to choose a color from anywhere on your screen. However, you notice that just by choosing that color, it's not being applied right away. If I want to actually apply that color, I need to click that color picker one more time and it will then apply the color that I've chosen to whichever of these two is active. The same thing applies if you're working up here. If you use the color picker, click and drag, choose a color, and it's not gonna apply right away. You need to click it again and it would then apply the color that you have selected. Those are just a couple of little hints for working with the color selection tools in Affinity Designer. In the next lesson, we're gonna learn how to extract an entire color palette from any file. It can be an Affinity Designer file, it can be an image, anything you like. I'll see you there Hi, and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna learn how to extract color palettes from any document. So here we have this beautiful vector design. And it's got a very clear color scheme. And rather than going through and manually selecting these colors if you wanted to continue working with this piece, we can have them automatically extracted out of the piece. And the way we do this is in the Swatches panel. If we head up to the little drop down menu here, you'll find that we have this item, Create Palette From Document. And this is gonna pull all of the colors that are needed out of the document. And there are three ways that you can create this palette. You can create it as an Application Palette, so it will be then available for you every time you use Affinity Designer from then on. You can create it as a Document Palette, so it's available just within this document only. Or you can create it as a System Palette, so you'll be able to use it anywhere in your machine, including in other art applications. So for now, we'll just choose As Document Palette. And there you go, all of the colors that are used in this design have been extracted, so they're all there for easy use. And you can also see that the palette has been named according to the name of the file. So the file is called Concerto, and so is our new color palette. So this is a vector piece, but the process works equally well with photographs. So, over here, we could do the same thing again. Create Palette From Document. Give it a second. And then there's all of our coffee colors and background aqua colors. So that's incredibly useful also if you're doing a design where you need to work with a client's logo, so you can easily pull the colors out of their logo. It's great for sharing color palettes from one application to another, if your work goes through a pipeline that involves multiple design tools. And it's overall just a great time saver. In the next video, we're gonna learn how to create color palettes in a different way. And that is by creating color chords, and these color chords are based on rules from color theory. I'll see you there. Hi, and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna have a look at the tools that are included in Affinity Designer to generate color schemes based on color theory. You can do this inside the Swatches panel. Right, now the first thing we're gonna do is just grab a shape. And then we'll pick a base color, which we're gonna create one of our color schemes. So the first one that we're gonna create is an analogous color scheme. So head up into your Swatches panel and hit this little drop-down list. And here are three different types of palette that you can create. An application palette, which will be available to any document that you create in Affinity Designer. A document palette that will be restricted just to the document that you're working with. And a system palette that you can use anywhere on your machine with any other art application. So for now we'll just choose Add document palette. And it comes up as unnamed. To rename this palette head back up here, and choose Rename palette. And we're going to call this Analogous. All right now the first thing we need to do is get this red colour that we have in our little Recent swatches here into our color pallette. So to do that, just hit this little palette icon here, and that will add the currently active color into your pallette. Now, to create an analogous color based on this red, right click the swatch, go to Create color chord, And then choose Analogous. And now we have extra colors that are being added in based on our red color to give us an analogous color scheme. So, we'll draw another circle and chose the orange that's been generated And the pink that's been generated. So, there we have an automatically generated analogous color scheme. All right, so, let's try another one. This time we'll generate a shades color chord. So, we'll get back to our red color. Delete these circles, and once again w'll create a new document palette. This time we will call it Shades. Add the active color to our palette. Now right-click that new color, choose Create Color Chord and choose Shades. So there's a whole bunch of different shades of our original red. So we can start using these colors, there's our base red And we can see all the various shades that we've just had generated for us. So there are several different types of color chords that you can create. And if you're not familiar with any of these different types of color rules, then just jump into Google and have a look. You'll find a ton of information on each one of these different types of color schemes. So that's a great way to start with a preliminary basic color and easily generate some color schemes that you know are going to fit with color theory. In the next lesson we're gonna learn how to define and edit gradients. There are a couple of different ways you can go about this and each one of those ways is suitable for our different types of scenarios. I'll see you there. Hi, and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In the previous lesson, you learned how you can apply gradients to fills and strokes. And in this lesson, you'll learn how you can actually define and edit those gradients. So, we begin with the shape that we can apply a gradient to. And you'll recall that you can add a gradient either up here in the context menu by choosing Gradient. And you'll notice that you don't immediately have the gradient come up here. If you want to apply a gradient this way, just change the type of gradient and then you'll see your gradient appearing. And the other way you can apply a gradient is with a fill tool. So choose the type of gradient that you wanna use and then draw out the gradient in the direction that you wanna have it appear. Now one of the easiest ways to start editing your gradient is through the fill tool. Editing a gradient through this fill tool is kind of similar to editing curves. If you place your cursor anywhere along this line, you'll be able to add an extra stop in your gradient. So just hit there and now we have an extra stop in our gradient. And you can change the color of that stop up here in the color wheel. So I can do the same thing down here, add a different color. And I can also change the color right down at the end. And you'll also notice we have these little horizontal lines. These will affect the distribution of the color. By default these little horizontal line will be exactly half way between the color stops and that means that the color will be evenly distributed in between these two stops. But if you want to have more of a certain color at one end, then you can drag these stops, To change the way that the color falls and this is great for creating different types of lighting effects. So just like you add color stops in the same way you add nodes to a curve by finding a spot on the line and clicking it, you also delete color stops in the same way that you'd delete nodes on a curve. So you just select the stop that you wanna get rid of, and hit the Delete button. So that covers how you edit your gradients using the gradient fill tool, but you can also use the context menu just like when we were working with flat fill colors earlier. So the same principle's apply here. You have your stops and you have these little lines in between that control a distribution of color. The difference is, when you wanna add a stop in here, select the stops at the left of where you wanna add in a stop, and hit the Insert button. Now generally speaking, the reason that you would work with this panel instead of the fill tool is if you want to be able to manually insert your midpoint values and the positions of your gradient stops or if you're working with a fill that's too small and too fiddly to really effectively use the gradient tool directly on the canvas. So another thing to just talk about quickly is when we're using a different type of gradient to the linear gradient, so we're using an elliptical gradient, you have this extra handle that shows up here. And you can use this extra handle to rotate and change this shape of your gradient. And that can be great for things like creating lighting effects on curved surfaces. You can use this handle to make your gradient line up with the curvature of a shape that you have created. And just like with flat fill colors, at any point in this gradient, you can add noise into your gradient. So over here in the color panel, you have a slider down at the bottom. By default, that slider controls opacity. But if you tap this button here, it'll switch to noise. And then you'll be able to add noise into your gradient. You can do the same thing with the Context menu. So choose a stop, and here opacity settings are controlled in this slider. But if you wanna add noise, tap the color and then your noise slider is down the bottom. So that's all the essentials of creating and editing gradients in Affinity Designer. In the next lesson, we're gonna learn how to work with Affinity Designer's transparency tool which is actually a great deal like the gradient tool. I'll see you there. Welcome back to Affinity Designer, A Quick Start. In this lesson, we're going to learn how to use the transparency tool. Now the transparency tool is a lot like the fill tool, only instead of filling in color, you're taking color away. Right under the Fill tool is the Transparency tool, this little thing that looks like a wineglass. >> The way that you can use it is select a shape, and then we're gonna add some transparency in a linear gradient to this shape so that it shows through some of this background shape here. Just like with the Fill tool, you just draw out the transparency that you want, and then you can see that we've got a nice transparent edge here. The way that this works is it's just like laying out a gradient. Now if you have a look up here, you'll see that you actually do have a gradient that you're working with but rather than adding in different colors, all you're setting in this gradient is your alpha channels. I can grab the very end point here and I can change the amount of opacity that I'm adding in with the Transparency tool. You can see that changing in the right end of the transparency gradient there, and also just like with the gradient, I can change the shape of the transparency that I am applying. By default, you get this linear transparency, but you can also use elliptical, radial, or conical transparency. For example, with elliptical transparency, we can have a really nice rounded edge. You can see, you have that soft rounded edge around the outside there. You can use this to create a perfectly rounded off fuzzy edge. You can also, with the linear gradient, you don't have to just have transparency fading out on one edge. Just like you do with a regular gradient, you can add in extra stops. I can select this first stop, add in an extra stop. I can set this middle stop to the 100% opacity and then I can drag the first stop down to zero and now we have faded our edges on both the left side and the right side. Also, just like with the gradient tool, you can adjust the exact line of your transparency, and you can change the distribution of the opacity levels and you'll notice the transparency effects both the stroke and the fill. This is really, really powerful way to fade shapes into one another without relying solely on things like transparent gradient stops or masking. In the next session of the course, we're gonna start looking at Affinity Designers different personas. The first of those being the pixel persona and we're gonna start out by having a look at pixel-based brushes. I'll see you there. Hi, welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. One of the things that makes Affinity Designer so powerful and kind of sets it apart from some other art applications is the fact that you can work with both vectors and with pixels in the same document. And what you're looking at here is a beautiful example of how vectors and raster based drawing have been combined in one piece. So we have, for example this shape here is a vector based shape. But then all of the fine details, the creases, and lines and some of the shading and lighting are all produced with pixel based drawing tools. And this is done through something called Personas. And when you first open up Affinity Designer and start a new document, you'll be in the Vector Persona by default. And that is signified by this little icon up here. But you also have a Pixel Persona. So if you switch into Pixel Persona, you'll see the all the tools you have down in the left side have changed. And what you've done by switching Personas is you've basically turned your editing program from a vector based design program into a pixel based design program. And you can switch back and forth between these two at any time during your design. And switch between using vector based drawing and editing and pixel based drawing and editing. Now a lot of the tools that you see in the Pixel Person area will be familiar to you, if you've worked with other raster based applications. So you've got things that you'll recognize like the Eraser, Field tool, you have Burn, Dodge and Blurring tools. So over the next few videos, we're gonna focus on the tools that are a little different in Affinity Designer. And we'll also have a look at things that change when you switch from Vector Persona into Pixel Persona. And we're gonna start with Pixel Brushes. So in an earlier video, when we were in Vector Persona, we looked at the Brush Tool. And we talked about the brushes that are available to you that you can use to paint out brush strokes that are editable as vectors. Now if you watch here, these are the groups of brushes that you have when you are in Vector Mode. But if we switch to Pixel Mode, now we'll grab our paintbrush and have a look at the Brushes Panel. And you can see that there is a completely different range of brushes that you have to choose from. And that the categories you have to choose from is also different. And this is because when you're using pixel based brushes, there's a whole range of different effects that you can achieve that aren't really going to work quite as well with the vector Brush Tool. For example in the Painting submenu, we have all kinds of simulations of different types of traditional media. So we'll just give one of those a test run. And you can see that the type of painting stroke that you get is quite different. And when you're using the Pixel Brush Tool, you also have different settings that are available to you. In particular, settings that allow you to work with pen pressure. And we'll go through those more closely in a later video that we're using to talk about pen pressure and working with velocity settings. So the brushes that you have in the Pixel Persona are more suitable to you if you want to do quite a lot of brushstrokes. If you're wanting to do, say, digital painting, or using digital painting techniques. Because while the Vector Brush Tool is excellent. If you're building up a great huge number of vector brushstrokes, it can get a little bit unwieldy in your document. Whereas pixel brushstrokes, on the other hand, once they join in, you don't need to have any vectors maintaining the program. So, it's more efficient for Affinity Designer to process. In the next video, we're gonna have a look at another one of the Affinity Designer pixel editing tools and that is the Pixel Tool. And this is a great tool for anything where you need to make sure that every single piece of color in your document snaps exactly to the pixel. You'll see how that works in the next video. Hi, and welcome back to Affinity Designer QuickStart. In this video, we're going to be checking out the pixel too, which is this little one here. Now because Affinity Designer is primarily a vector-based drawing app, you might not think that it would be the go to place for a pixel drawing and yet, a couple days ago somebody asked me for a recommendation on a simple program that they could use to start producing pixel art for games and I recommended Infinity Designer. Because when you combine all of the other features that Affinity Designer has, its color management tools, its grid system, its exporting process which we'll cover a little bit later and all of the rest of the things that you have in the bundle, when you turn on this pixel editing tool you really do have a simple and accessible pixel drawing application that stacks up very well against any of the other options that you have available to you. Using is very intuitive as you might expect, you just select your tool, you choose a color that you want to draw with, and then you just start drawing away. However, what makes this tool special is that when you zoom in, I have a grid turned on that's showing exactly one pixel by one pixel. And now you can see that when you use the pixel tool, it's snapping to this grid perfectly. So you can draw out exactly perfect pixel by pixel lines, For any type of art where you need this precision. Now I have this set to one pixel in width, the pixel tool but, I can set that size to anything that I need. So if I wanna start putting down much larger shades of color, then I can do that too and it's still, Going to have snapped exactly to the pixel when we zoom in. So this is perfect for things like game design, as I mentioned, where you might need to do pixel art. But it's also perfect if you need to make sure that you have very, very crisp lines because as long as you're using this pixel-based tool, you're not going to get any lines that are halfway in between one pixel and the next, they're always gonna be perfect. There's also some really great shortcuts that you can use with this pixel tool. So let me just clear out this space. If I draw out one line, and then I'll hold down shift, I can instantly connect one line to the next, and you can also hold down the command key, and then the tool will act as an eraser, making it very easy to draw out shapes and then erase what you need to get rid of. So if you do need to do any pixel-based drawing, definitely take a moment to try out the pixel tool and have a play around with all these extra settings that you get to work with, and you might just find that you end up doing all of your rest or best drawing instead primarily vector-based drawing app. In the next section of the course we're gonna learn about the interactions between shapes that you can use with Affinity Designer and we're gonna start by how to use Boolean functions. I'll see you there. Hi. Welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, you're gonna learn about Affinity Designer's boolean functions. Boolean operation are a type of interaction between any two almost shapes. There are five different kinds of them and you can see all five up in the top-right corner of your interface here. All right, so let's grab the rectangle tool and we'll draw out a couple of squares on the page so that we can check out each one of these functions. In order to use Boolean functions, you'll need to make sure you have at least two shapes selected. Once you do, you'll see that all of your Boolean tools become highlighted so that they're available for use. All right, now the first one we'll check out is the Add tool and right now you can see in our Layers panel we have two separate shapes. If we use this Add tool, that will combine those shapes into one. So you saw the outline disappear there and now this is a single curve that we can edit accordingly. Now one purpose that this is particularly useful for is duplicating a shape so you can have a symmetrical layout. So for example, if we were to commit that to curves. If we were to create a shape like this and we needed to reflect this shape, so that we had the exact same layout on the other side. So we could duplicate and flip that shape, move it over to here and now we can combine these shapes So now we have perfect symmetry. So the next boolean function that we will look at is subtract. So once again, we'll select these shapes and then hit subtract. You'll see that the icons here give you a pretty good idea of what this function is going to do. So hit subtract and you can see that this shape subtracted itself from this one. Now if you have a look at the layers palette again, this is the shape that's gonna be creating the cutout and it's the top shape. So let's say you wanted to create a sort of a scoop out in the middle here. You could draw out a circle, position it where you needed it to be for your scoop out, and then hit the subtract button. Next let's have a look at intersecting. I'll draw out two squares. So intersecting is going to find the area. In which these two shapes intersect. So select both of our shapes and then hit intersect. Next up let's have a look at the divide Boolean operation. So we'll just use some simple squares again. Now the divide operation is kind of similar to the one that we just used. It does find the intersecting shape here but rather than only giving you this shape and then deleting these extra areas it will divide these areas so that you end up with one, two, three spots. So now we have one, two, three separate shapes and then finally we have the combine operation which is basically the opposite of the intercept operation. So just draw out two more squares. Now once more this is gonna find the area where these two shapes crossover but it's going to delete it. So we'll have this shape and this shape remaining with this overlapping area gone. So that's all five Boolean functions in Affinity Designer so they're very, very useful. You can use them in multiple different ways. So just keep those in mind as you're going through and mapping out your designs. They can give you a lot of shortcuts and make things a lot quicker. In the next lesson, we're gonna look at another set of behaviors as far as shapes interacting with each other in Affinity Designer and this time, we're gonna be looking at masking equipping, where you take one shape and you use it to obscure part of another shape. I'll see you there. Hi and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, you're gonna learn about using masking and clipping in Affinity Designer. Now with both masking and clipping, what you're doing is taking one shape and using it to hide a portion of another shape. In Affinity Designer, there are two types of masking and two types of clipping. In each case you can create either a vector or a pixel based mask and you can create either vector or pixel based clipping. If that seems confusing at first don't worry because it's going to make sense once we go through some examples. Let's start with an example vector-based clipping and then we'll do an example vector-based masking. And we'll put those side by side so you can see the different between the two. So grab ourselves a rectangle and draw it out. And now what I wanna do is use this shape to perform some clipping, and there are a couple of ways that you can go about this. The easiest one, you saw in an earlier video, and that is to use this button up here, insert inside the selection. So if I press this button, and then I pick another shape, and then I draw inside, you can see that part of this shape is not visible, the area that's outside our original rectangle shape. And that's because the rectangle is clipping the circle. And in our Layers palate, you'll see that the circle has been nested underneath the square. And this is what happens in Affinity Designer anytime you nest one shape inside another. The shape that's above will clip the shape that's nested below. And because you can control this in the layers palette, you don't have to use this button if you want to do clipping. So if I just delete the shape that we created. And this time, I will just draw the shape out normally without having that button activated. But now what I can do, is just drag this down and nest it underneath the rectangle, and I get the same effect, so it's still being clipped by the rectangle. So that is how you do vector-based clipping. Vector-based masking, on the other hand, is a little bit different. So we'll draw out another rectangle and we'll also draw out another circle. So here is our two shapes that we've just drawn out. And this time, we're gonna right click the top shape and we're gonna choose Mask to Below. And now you can see that it's the circle that is controlling how much of the rectangle is visible. And unlike with clipping where both shapes remain visible with one just being clicked, with masking, only one shape is visible. And the portion of it that is visible is determined by the shape that you have used to create your vector mask. Now as with clipping, there is more than one way to set up vector masking. So we'll just move this one out of the way. So we'll create another square and another circle. And this time instead of using the right click, we're gonna grab this layer and instead of nesting it underneath the rectangle, we're going to nest it right inside the layer with the drop zone, this little rectangle here, just to the right of the thumbnail of the layer that you are trying to mask. So that gives us the same effect. That's just two different ways of going about creating that effect. So that is our two vector based methods. We have clipping, in this example, and masking, in these two examples. So the third method that we're going to look at is pixel based masking. Pixel based masking works just like these two masks that we have here. But instead of using a vector-based shape to create your mask, you use a pixel-based shape. So we'll draw out one more rectangle. And this time what we're going to do is head up here and switch to the pixel persona. Now creating a mask over the top of our new rectangle is as easy as just grabbing the eraser, and then just erasing over the top. And you're not actually affecting the rectangle shape here. What has happened is Affinity Designer has automatically created a layer mask for you. And this layer mask is comprised of pixel-based brush strokes. So once you have a mask layer here, if you want to continue editing it, you just need to click on the thumbnail for the mask and you can then keep on hammering away at adding in definition to your mask. And you can also use the paintbrush tool to work up your mask. And the way that the paintbrush tool effects your mask will depend on what color you have selected for the brush. Right now, I have black selected. So that means that when I use this brush, it's going to continue to add transparency onto my shape, like so. However, if I change this color to white, I can start painting the shape back in. And I can also use anywhere in between. So that if I just want to make something opaque, I can do that too. And because this is a paintbrush, you can use any one of the brushes that are available in your brush's panel to build up your layer mask. So rather than just flat opacity, I can add a little texture into how my masks come out. So as you can imagine, that gives you a whole lot of different possibilities with the type of effects that you can achieve using pixel-based masking. Now the process that you saw before for creating clipping with vectors is basically the same with pixels. So I'll just grab a different brush, something a bit more basic. And I'll just increase the size of the brush. Now, if I paint out a pixel layer here, and then choose another color, make a new pixel layer, and paint out another pixel layer. Now, if I nest one layer under the other, now we have clipping working in exactly the same way that you saw before with our vector-based clipping. So that is how you work with masking and clipping using either vector or pixel-based layers in Affinity Designer. In the next section of the course, we're gonna look at styles and effects in Affinity Designer as well as pen pressure and velocity. And we're gonna start first, by learning how you can use effects and styles inside your documents. I'll see you there. Hi welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson we're gonna how to use effects and styles in Affinity Designer. If you take a look over in your panels, you'll see that you have an Effects panel and you also have a Styles panel. So the Effects panel allows you to add all kinds of effects to your layers, your groups, your shapes, any item that shows up in your Layers panel. So you have things like shadows, glows, beveling, all the types of things that you might be familiar with from a program like Photoshop. Now we also have a Styles panel, Styles can include effect, so they can include drop shadows and things like that, but they also include fills and they include stroke styles. So we'll just reset our studio panels, and then we'll have a look at some examples of how Styles and Effects work. So we'll just grab a rectangle and draw it out. We'll give it a fill color, and let's give it a little bit of noise. We'll give it a stroke, And we'll change the color of that stroke around a little bit. Give that some noise also. So now we've just given fill and stroke styles to this shape. Now let's apply some effects. Now you can apply effects via the Effects panel. So just drag this out. And the way to apply affects via this panel is to choose the effect that you want and check it's box. So apply an outer shadow and then you can work with the settings you have available here to tweak how the effect looks. Now these this settings are actually a limited subset of all the settings that you have available for each effect. So if you want to have access to all the settings, hit this little gear icon, and now you'll have access to extra tools that you didn't have access to via the Effects panel. So we'll increase the opacity of this shadow, give it a larger radius and we'll just move it around a little bit until we can see it. Okay, so now we have, Fill, stroke, and a layer effect applied to our shape here. Now all of those things comprise this shape's style. And if we want, we can take that style and we can apply it to other shapes that we use in our design. So, if we draw out another shape. So that already has the fill that we applied but just to illustrate things a little bit more clearly, we'll just change that back. All right, now if I wanna apply the style that I have from this shape onto this shape, I can do it very easily by selecting the shape, pressing Cmd + c to copy, selecting the new shape, and then pressing Cmd + Shift + v, and I can paste the entire style on to that shape. So it's a very easy way to duplicate styles from one shape on to another as you're going through and preparing your design. Now if there is a style you think you're gonna be using a lot, then you might want to save that style out so it will show up as an option in your Styles panel. And to do that, select an object that has the style you want, and then over in the Styles panel, hit the little drop down and choose Add Style from Selection. And there's the style that we just created. And you can rename that style by right-clicking on it and rename it to anything you need. And from that point on, you'll be able to add that style to any other shape just by clicking on the style that you've created in your styles panel. So just to recap, Styles include your fill, your stroke, and any layer effects. You can copy styles from one shape to another with Cmd + c and then Shift Cmd + v. You can save styles out into the Styles panel, and you can add effects to any item that shows up in your Layer panel via the Effects panel. In the next lesson, your gonna learn how to set up Affinity Designer to work with your graphics tablet, if you use a graphics tablet. And if you don't, we're gonna learn how you can still achieve similar types of effects using velocity controllers and also manually simulating pen pressure. I'll see you there. Hi, welcome back to Affinity Designer quick start. In this lesson, we're gonna learn how you can work with a pressure-based controller if you have a drawing tablet. Or if you don't, and you're working with a mouse, how you can work with velocity instead of pressure. Or how you can use settings to manually simulate pen pressure. So first we'll look at working with pen pressure from a drawing tablet. Now when you're in vector if you choose either pencil tool or the brush tool you'll have the ability to work with a pressure based controller. And what you want to look for up in this context menu is the controller drop down and then choose pressure. So with that pressure controller active, if I press down hard I'll get a thicker stroke, and if I press down soft I'll get a thinner stroke. And then because we are using the vector persona that will be smoothed out as we go along. So heavy, light. By comparison if we don't have any controller on if I press down heavy or I press down light I'm gonna get the exact same width in my stroke. If you don't have a graphics tablet you can still create varying width strokes. So instead of choosing the pressure controller, choose the velocity controller. And the way that this works is slow strokes will be thin and fast strokes will be thicker. So a slow stroke will come out thin and a fast stroke will come up thickly. So even if you're working with a mouse you can still create those flowing style varying thickness strokes. If you're using the vector brush tool you can also control opacity as well as stroke thickness and this works best with pressure controller. It does work with velocity but it works best with pressure. So choose the pressure controller and then we'll hit this little more button here. And we'll slide the Opacity Variance slider up to 100%. So now, soft strokes will come out quite opaque and hard strokes will come out darkly. And you have the same types of pressure and velocity based controllers over in the pixel personal when you're working with the brush tool. So we'll just clear the canvas, make some space, now the easiest way to activate pen pressure control with this brush is to hit this little target looking icon up here. And that forces pressure control no matter what the settings are that are preset in the brush. So we'll just activate them and now If, we have a soft stroke, it's light and thin. And, a hard stroke, is heavy and thick. When, you use that setting though, just bear in mind, that some brushes already have pen pressure settings in their defaults. So, we just turn this off, and we'll select this brush here. Now with this brush, even with that target button pressed, soft stroke looks like this, while a hard stroke looks like this. So we haven't had to activate this force pressure tool, in order to get variance In our brush strokes. So just experiment with the different brushes when you first choose them, to decide whether or not you want to have this forced pen pressure button active. All right, so the last thing that we want to look at is manual simulating pen pressure. And this is great for if you really need fine grain control over the exact thickness at each point of a line or if you don't have a tablet and you're not getting the effect that you want using the velocity controller. So head back to the vector persona. Clear the canvas. All right this time I'm not gonna use either of the free hand drawing tools. I'm going to use the pen, and I'm going to set it to draw out a line. So we'll just create a line, and now what we're gonna do is head up to the stroke settings. And down here, you'll see there's a little box marked pressure. So open that up. This is a curve you can use to manually simulate pen pressure. For example, we can make this line start thick and finish thin by holding down the option, or ALT button. And dragging down this end of our curve. So now let's have a look at that. So now that looks like a brush stroke that has started heavy and finished light. And we can also curve that to make it look more natural. And just like with curves that you create on the Canvas, you can add multiple nodes. So, you can add a node in the middle, just by tapping on the line, and then we can reposition, Each of these nodes to create different types of a effects. So now we have it thicker on either end and thinner in the middle. So it's a really great way to manually simulate pen pressure and to give you really, really tight control over the exact thickness of your line at each point. Next up, we're gonna move into the final section and final lesson of this course. And we're gonna cover exporting. You're gonna learn how to export your entire document, or how to export it in pieces. And also how you can set up continuous exports. So that when you make a change to your design, all of your exported images are updated on an as needed basis. I'll see you there. Hey, welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we'll going to learn about exporting new designs from Affinity Designer. And there are two ways you can export a design that you had created, the first is you can export the entire design in to a single export file. And the second is you can slice up your design and export smaller individual parts. To export the whole design, you wanna had up to File, and then choose Export. And here you'll see that you've got a whole range of different file formats that you can export your whole document out to. And notably one of those file formats is PSD. Affinity Designer actually has a really strong PSD export function, so, let's check that out. So, we've just chose the PSD option, and we're gonna hit Export and we'll just Save that out. Now, here is our new PSD, so we'll open that up. And you can see that everything has really exported quite well. So we have our one layer, that's copying over the format from Affinity Designer of having everything nested under one layer. And you'll notice that on this little square here, we have a drop shadow. And that was added in via the effects panel in Affinity Designer. And that has been carried over to the effects in Photoshop. So we have a drop shadow here, just like we did in Affinity Designer. So that's really really useful if you need to take your work into Photoshop for any processing you need to do. Or if you need to share your work with other designers who are using different software. Now, if you want to export your design in parts then you need to slice it up and you do that through the third persona in Affinity Designer, the export persona. To create a slice, grab this tool here, the Slice tool and just draw out your slice around the area that you want to export. And you can then quite easily adjust it, to fit snugly around the area that you want to export. And for each slice that you create a new slice will appear down here in the slices panel. And from here you can rename the slice, this rectangle and using this button, you can individually export just that slice alone. So you're not stuck with only being able to export all of your slices at once. If you just need one at a time, it's very easy to just hit this little button here. And then you'll get an export option and you'll notice above this panel we have the Export Options setting panel. So, here is where you choose the file format that you want to export. And you can also set your quality settings or the things that you'd expect to find in an exporting tool. And on top of that you also have the ability to export at multiple resolutions. So, down here we have by default exporting at just one times resolution. However, if you are supporting high DPI displays, then you can also choose to export at two times resolution and even three times resolution if you need that as well. And then as well as exporting using the slices panel. You can also use this shortcut buttons up here. And once again you have the option to export at one times resolution, two times resolution, and three times resolution. And one great feature that you will find in the export persona is the ability to do continuous export. So right now, this is our rectangle PNG, it looks like this. And if we activate continuous export, that PNG will be updated anytime we change the design within that slice's area. So, to make this work, you have to first choose Export Selected as your means of exporting all of your slices. So, we'll do that now. And now that we've done that export. You can see that this check mark labeled Continuous is now active. So, we'll check that box and then we'll just move this over so we can see what's happening with our PNG. Go back in to vector persona. Now, if we change our rectangle There we go, our slice has automatically re-exported itself. And you can now see the updated version in Finder. So once you have an essentially, finished design that you have to go back to and perform tweaks on. That's a perfect way to streamline the export and update of all of the graphics that have to come out of your design. So that wrap's up the final lesson of Affinity Designer Quick Start. I'll see you in the last video of the course for a few final words. Thanks very much for taking Affinity Designer Quickstart. I hope that you learned heaps about working with Affinity Designer and that you're really excited about jumping in and creating all your own new designs in the software. We're gonna be bringing you a lot more material on both Affinity Designer and also Affinity Photo, they're raster based editing application. So make sure you keep an eye on Tuts+ for that. But we're seeing some really amazing artwork coming out of the Affinity Designer community and I really look forward to seeing your work on my end. So thanks again for taking this course and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, I'm Kezz Bracey for Tuts+. Since we originally released this quick start course on Affinity Designer. And there's been some really great new additions to the software made by the team at Serif in version 1.5. So, we are bringing you five bonus lessons as part of the quick start course, that are gonna cover some of these new features. So I'm gonna teach you how to use art boards, constraints, symbols, and the asset panel. And these are all new additions in version 1.5. But before we get to those topics, we're gonna start out with the topic that I didn't get to squeeze into the original course. And that is how you can work with typography in Affinity Designer. All right, let's jump in. The first thing you need to know about working with typography in Affinity Designer is that there are three different ways that you can create text. And each one of these are a little bit different. There is artistic text, frame text and path text. So first up you have artistic text, which is meant to be used for decorative designs. So, single words, headlines, logos, things like that. Then you have frame text which is things like paragraphs. So for copying a brochure or buddy text in a blood design, for example. And then thirdly, path text is when you make text run along a vector path that you've created to give that text a certain shape. So to make it go around in a circle or a wave, for example. All right, so let's have a look at each one of those types of text. How you create them, how you work with them, and what the key differences are between those types. Now the tool you're gonna work with is here. If you hold this down, you can choose between the artistic text tool and the frame text tool. So we're just gonna grab the artistic text tool to start with. And just click anywhere and then will add in some text. Now, let's select all of that and we're just gonna style a little bit, let's give it the, Roboto font family and will increase it font size, make it fairly large and we'll change it to, let's go with bold. Move this into center here, you can see a bit more easily. Now, let's create some text using frame text tool. So hold this down, that'll bring up the option to select the frame text tool. Now, this time instead of clicking, we're gonna draw out a frame. The size that we want to have takes fill. So in here you can paste in some copy that you might already have, or if you're just working with a prototype, what you can do is go up to the Text menu and then select Insert Filler Text. So that's really useful when you don't have that copy on hand yet. And we're just gonna do the same thing, we will double click to select text and we're going to increase the font size, let's take it up to 16 points. So, the first key difference between artistic text and framed text is how they behave when you resize them. Artistic text is designed to act much like any other shape that you might draw out like a square, circle or a vector shape. So when you resize artistic text, the whole word goes along with the size of the bounding box. And with framed text on the other hand, when you resize, the text itself doesn't change, what does change is the way that the frame is filled up with the text. So it affects the re-flowing of the text. Another significant different between artistic text and framed text is, in the same way that you can convert a square or a circle. For example, into curves, you can do the same thing with text. So up here, we'll just expand this to show the extra tools that don't fit on the context toolbag. You're gonna have the interface shrunk quite small at the moment. So we have Convert Curves here, and now. We can get into each one of these letters. Each one of these is now a vector shape that we can edit individually. So that gives you a lot of options for getting right in and really closely controlling the exact shape of your letters. Now we're actually just going to undo that change for now, so that we can keep working on this as a text object rather than a vector object. So basically to sum up the difference between those two, your Artistic text acts a lot like one of your shapes that you would use from these tools here. Whereas frame text, behaves more like actual text that you would work with in, say, a web design, for example. So that gives you a quick intro to Artistic and frame text. Now let's also have a quick intro to text on a path. So just move these off to the side for now, make a little space. Text on a path is pretty much what it sounds like. It's text that you can make follow any type of path that you lay out. So that can be a path on a shape that you've created using one of the shape tools here. Or it can be a shape that you've laid out with the pen tool. Any vector path, you can make your text follow along that path. So we're gonna start out here by grabbing the donut tool. And we're gonna draw out a donut. Now, we're going to select the artistic tool again. And then we're going to hover over the parts that are inside this donut. Now if you look closely, you can see that there is a little T with a squiggle underneath it. And when you see that squiggle that means that Affinity has identified that there is a path underneath your cursor. And if you add text at that time it's going to follow that path, so in the middle here, there is no squiggle. Right over the path, there is this little squiggle. So we're gonna click there and now we're gonna add in some text. So we'll just say Text on a Path. Now the first thing you might notice here is we've got some strange behavior where our text is not completely fitting around our path. And that's because you see these little red triangles here. They determine where the text on the path should begin and where it should finish. So if we want to make some more space for our text, we can grab these little things and we can drag them, To make more space for our text. It can be a little bit fiddly, but pretty much, if you just keep clicking and dragging these little markers, then you're gonna end up with the result that you're looking for. I'm just gonna roughly center them and then I'm also going to select all that text and I'm gonna click this button up here to center align it. And that fairly evenly distributes that text around our path. There are a few different settings that you have here to control how the text on the path behaves. One of those is this baseline control up here. You can see right now the baseline of our text is directly on our path, but if we change the setting here, we can get a completely different behavior. We just undo that, put that back to 0% for now. Another really useful tool is this button here, which will reverse the text path. That's easier demonstrated than explained, so I'm just going to hit that button to show you how it works. And there you can see that the text decided to run the other way along the path. And that's most useful if, for example, instead of having this text run along the top of this path here, I wanna have it run along the bottom. So then if I grab our little start and finish blippers. And move that around. Now that text is running left to right, as it goes around the bottom of the path, which of course is more natural for left to right reading. So we'll just undo that one as well. The next thing I'm gonna look at is how the character panel can be used to control your text. So we have shortcut for it up here. As long as the text tool is selected, you'll get this shortcut in the context toolbar up here. At the moment, you can see that there's a little bit too much space in between our letters. It looks a little bit funny. So what we're gonna do is use the tracking control, which is this one here, to bring that spacing down a little bit. So by hovering over any one of these values, you can preview what effect that's gonna have on your text. So we'll take ours down to negative 50%. That looks a lot better but it's still a little bit too spaced out. And we don't have any more options here in the drop down list, so what we can do is just type our preferred value directly into the field. So we're gonna change that to negative 100%. So that looks a lot better. Just gonna adjust that a little bit. But some of the spacing in between our letters is still a little off and this is where we can use current values. So in Affinity Design the way to do that is to place your caret in between the letters or spaces that you wanna adjust. This space here between the T and the e is a little off. And then from this kerning setting here, you can select a different value. So just as before, you can either select from one of the drop down values or you can type in a value directly. Or if you want to go with a shortcut, you can hold down Alt. And then you can either hold down the right arrow to increase the space, or hold down the left arrow to decrease the space. And this is pretty convenient, because then you can also adjust arrow across to the next space that you want to adjust, And you can just sort of eyeball this on the fly and get your spacing to a level where you're pretty happy with it. Obviously that's still a bit messy but that should give you pretty good idea of how some of these tools work. We've just step through kerning and tracing as well as these positioning and transform settings. You also have control over your underline and strike through settings and your general font settings that you would expect to find in any graphics app. So we'll just Select All. And let's try putting an underline on it. We'll change the font color a little bit. And then down here in the typography section, you can do things like converting your text to all caps, to small caps, and various other modifiers here. Once again most of these are relatively self explanatory so I won't go into too much detail on every individual setting. So that shows you how to work with some of the character settings and you can use those character settings on any type of text, whether it's Artistic text, frame text or text on a path. So now let's have another look at our text on a path and a little bit more information of working with the paths that are affecting your text. So I'm just gonna close this character panel for now. Now once you have put text on a path, the path still remains editable and the text will conform to whatever changes you make to the path. So you can transform the path, so if we grab this little corner here, you can see how that change effects the text. And you'll notice that I grabbed this corner here for that transformation, and it didn't preserve aspect ratio as I transformed that path. If you do wanna preserve aspect ratio, then just grab this little dragger out here instead. And now that's gonna be locked in. You can also edit individual path nodes when you're working with text on a path. So let's just grab that pen tool and I am just gonna draw out a very quick path. And we are going do the same thing that we did before, look for that little squiggly line and then we will add in a little text and say more text on a path. And that text is a little bit too big for that space, so I'm just going to shrink that down. And I gotta go back into Character because that tracking, make it look a little bit weird. So I'm gonna take that up to 0. Now, that's a little too big again. So I'm just gonna go with let's say 36 pt. And that's still looking a little strange because we have these sharp points here on our path. So what we're gonna do is grab the node tool, and we're gonna select these two nodes in the center here. And then up top in the context tool bar, I'm gonna convert those to smooth points. And now we can get down here and we can work with this path until we get the text looking nice. So that path is going to continue to behave like any other vector path in Affinity Designer. And you can make your text follow along with it, however you like. Okay, so we've gone through a couple of the settings in the character panel. Now let's also have a look at the effect of the paragraph panel, so we're going to go back to our frame text. And you'll notice that this paragraph option appears in the context toolbar here. So I'm gonna hit that to open it up. Now let's have a look at some of the settings that we've to work with here. For example one of the things you'll probably find yourself working with very often is this vertical spacing value here. So you can select from any of the values in the drop down list or again you can directly type in a value. Or if you want to work with multiple of the text size, what you can do instead is type in a percentage and it will automatically calculate the correct value here for you. So for example in my web designs, I like to have a line height of 1.618 M, which effectively works out as about 162% of the font size. So, I'm going to select % Height from here. Now, I'm going to type in my value of 162%. Hit Enter, and now that's calculated the correct point value for me. You also have other paragraph controls here like the amount space before paragraphs, after paragraphs. Your indentation in the first line, If you need that in indentation on the left side indentation on the right side and once again those things are very self-explanatory. So, let's just have a quick look at the effect if we start increasing the indentation on the first line for example. And if you start to miss around with these types of settings and you find that you're Word spacing is looking a little bit off here. Then you have more controls down here, so for example you have justification controls. If I change this to left justified, I can then use C settings down here to control exactly how the justification is controlling the flow of my text. So basically, when you're working with frame text and you need to control how it's spaced and laid out, then you'll wanna use this paragraph panel here. So we'll just close out of that for now. We're done with that. So now the last thing I want to cover is how to work with text styles. All of those different settings that you saw in the character panel and the paragraph panel can be changed into preset styles. That you can then use throughout the document. So you find the textiles panel over here, by default. I'm just gonna pull that out to make it a little easier to see. You can see that we have a bunch of styles in here already. Now what we wanna do is save this paragraph style that we've just been working on here with our little indentation and our font settings. So we just select our frame text and then all that we need to do save this styling is paragraph style is to just hit this little button here, in the bottom left. And we can give our style a name, we'll just call it indented. And then if you look in the bottom right corner, you can see that we've got a full list of all the setting that are being saved as a part of this style. So we're just going to hit OK. You can see that our new paragraph style has been added in here, under the name indented. So now we can switch back and forth between any of these pre-saved styles. And all of the settings that are saved inside them will automatically be applied. And we can do the same thing with character style as well. So, now this time let's select our artistic text. We're gonna open up the character panel. And let's just change a few things around. So let's give the text a new color. Give it a blue. We're gonna select, black as it's wise and let's just increase the size a little bit. Now, to create a character style, we're gonna hit this little button here, the second one on the bottom left panel. We could give it a name, let's just call it BlueHeading. Now in my experience, sometimes not all of the character settings are automatically saved when you created a character's style. So for example you might have text that's set to bold, you create a character style. And then when you apply it you have regular white text. So something that you can do is go through each one of these settings in the left here and make sure everything is just how you want it. So we have our color showing up correctly here but under font traits, to make sure we get the right weight, I'm gonna select Black and click OK. And here's our new character style here. And just like with the paragraph style, we can switch between any of these and have the attributes automatically applied. And then we can go back to our blue heading to get right back where we started. And if you ever don't need a text style anymore, the way you can get rid of it, is by right clicking on that text style and then from the context menu here you can choose to delete it. Alright so that wraps up all of the essentials of working with typography in Affinity Designer. In the next lesson, we're gonna move onto some of the new features that were added into Affinity Designer in version 1.5. And we're gonna start with Art boards. Art boards are an incredibly useful function. They're great for creating multiple views in the project, so things like the front or the back side of a flier, or multiple device sized previews for application and website UIs. So we're gonna go through how you can use all of those in Affinity Designer in the next lesson. I'll see you there. Hey welcome back to the bonus lessons in Affinity Designer in Quickstart. In this lesson we're gonna go through how you can use Affinity's art board functionality. So if you haven't worked with art boards before, they essentially allow you to create something like multiple documents inside one document. Let's say you need to create the front of a flyer and the back of a flyer. And you need those to be independent of one another. Well with Appboards, you can have both of those but inside the same document. All right, so let´s go through the different ways that you can create app boards in Affinity Designer. So one of the ways is from the word go when you first create a document. So we are gonna make a new document. For the type we are gonna choose devices and we'll leave this set as iPad Air. This is gonna give us a space to work in that has the same dimensions as an iPad Air. And now we just want to make sure that this box here is checked, that's Create artboard. So now instead of just making a document that is this size here, it's gonna create an artboard within a document at that size. So let's see what happens. Right so now this is our art board. Now this space works just like a regular canvas in Affinity Designer. But you can create multiple art boards like this inside this single project. So like in this example we've just created an art board that is designed to be the size of an iPad that's in landscape orientation. And we can also add others in different orientations and at different device sizes. So from here, if you wanna add another art board, we can choose the art board tool up here. And now, with this tool, we can either draw out an art board at the size we want. Or from up here, we can choose a predetermined size, so, we've already got our iPad, so let's choose an IPhone as well. And now we hit Insert Artboard, and there's our second art board here. So with these two, we can have examples of how the same UI will look in different layouts. So you'll notice that this one's been automatically labeled iPhone 6, but this one still says art board 1. So we can rename that by going to the layers menu here, double clicking and now we can change that so it says, iPad Air. So now, what happens if there's some other arbitrary size that you wanna cater for? What you can do is draw out an art board at any size you please. And if you wish you can come down here and you can directly enter the size that you want. So you need to be a little bit careful because working in points here, as we set this to use retina sizing. So we have two pixels on the screen here for every one pixel that we are going to have in [INAUDIBLE]. So this means it will let you use half pixels. So we'll just change that to a full pixel amount. So that size can be set into anything that you like. And you can also. Any art board that you draw out, you can resize it in basically the same way that you would if you'd just drawn out a regular square shape. So you can grab the corners, you can resize. The same thing all basically works the same across the board. And those types of transformations can be done with either the artboard selected or with the move tool selected. So that's the same thing there. And these can also be moved around in the same way. So you can click and drag them to position your art boards just as though they were regular shapes. You notice that right now I can click on any of these art boards to select it. And as long as they're empty, you're going to be able to select them in that way but once you have something inside the art board, you're no longer gonna be able to select that art board by clicking on it. I can still select the other ones but not this one. So, once you have something inside your art board to select it, you just want to click the label up here instead. And you can always select your art boards directly from the layers panel as well. And depending on the kind of color scheme that you're using in whatever design that it is that your putting inside these art boards. You might want to change this background color here. This might be too light or too dark. So the way you can do that is by going to edit preferences going into user interface. And then here, you can see we have art board background gray level. And with this dragger, you can make the whole background darker, or lighter, anywhere in between black and white, you can set that at. Now another really handy thing if you're working with art boards particularly if you're using art boards to show off different device previews is these transformation buttons up here. So let's duplicate our iPhone 6 Artboard with Ctrl + J. We'll just move this over. Now, with this art board selected, if I wanna have a landscape orientation, all I need to do is hit one of these Rotate buttons here counterclockwise or clockwise. So now, we've got the same device shown with the two different orientations. Now as you're moving around in between these different art boards and working on your design. You're also going to often want to zoom straight in on the one that you're working on. To do that, make sure that the art board in question is selected. Then go up to View>Zoom And then hit Zoom to Selection, and you can also use Control-Alt-0, or Command-Alt-0 to do the same thing. So now we're zoomed in on the iFind 6 Landscape Artboard. And then to go back to looking at the entire document, with all of the art boards, you can hit Control-0. So now what about exporting your art boards? Now there are a couple of ways that you can go about exporting individual art boards. One of them is to select the art board that you want to export. Go up to File, Export. And now here you see that we have an area drop-down. By default that's set to export the entire document, so it says whole document here. But if we hit that drop-down you can see that it's populated with a list of all the art boards we have in our document. So in this case we can choose whichever one we want to export. And then we will be able to export that alone in whatever file format we need to. So that's one way to go about it. The other way you can go about it is to switch into the export persona. And here you'll notice that each one of our art boards has already been automatically sliced. Each one of those slices has been named according to the name of the art board. So to export one of these all you have to do is hit this little button here. And there you're gonna be able to export your art board with whichever file format and settings you have setup here in the export options. But what if you don't need export an art board, what if you just need to print an art board directly off your machine? Well for that the process is almost the same as doing a regular file export. But instead of going to File>Export, you head to File>Print. And then in the range drop down here, this is where you'll be able to choose the art board that you wanna print out. So you can choose whichever one you need and you'll get a little preview here of that artboard so that you know that you're exporting the right one. So that's it, that's all pretty straightforward just like most things are when you are working with Affinity Designer. And art boards are a function that a lot of people have really come to depend on in a workflow. So, now you can use them in Affinity Designer as well. In the next bonus lesson, we're gonna be going through another one of the new features that came out with Affinity Designer 1.5. And that is the constraint system. Constraints allow you to control to how a child object will respond when its parent is resized. So with that functionality you can save some time when you're trying to reuse objects throughout your designs. And to a degree you can kind of simulate responsive functionality as well. You can't fully simulate it as you would expect to see in a web browser, but you can certainly get part of the way. So in the next lesson we're gonna go through how to access the constraint system, how to use it, and what the different settings are that it involves. So I'll see you in the next lesson. Hey, welcome back to the bonus lessons in Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna go through how to use the constraint system that was added in Designer 1.5. Now, constraints are really cool because what they'll do is to decide how a child object is gonna be affected when its parent is scaled. So let's just draw a couple of quick shapes and we'll have a look at how a child object is affected by its parent by default. So I'm just gonna draw out a square or a rectangle, rather. Let's change its color. Turn that down a little bit. And then we're going to put a circle inside that. Give that a different color, And we'll nest that inside the rectangle. Just center all of this, because, I'm a little bit obsessive. All right, now let's look at what happens if we select the parent object and then we resize. So you can see that as we shrink and stretch the parent object, the child object goes along with it. But what if you don't want that child object to behave that way? What if you wanted to keep its aspect ratio or to scale in one way and not in another, for example? Well, this is where the constraint system comes into play. To use the constraint system, you need to open up the Constraints panel. So go to View > Studio> Constraints. Now this little interface here represents the constraint settings on the currently selected object. So we're gonna select our child object because this is only relevant to child objects, not to parent objects. And now we can start messing around with the settings. So to have a quick overview of what each of these are. So these lines here in the center, the horizontal and vertical lines here, these control how the child object will scale. These dotted lines around the outside here control how the child object is anchored relative to each one of the four corners of the parent. And then these two little icons here allow you to decide whether you want your child object to maintain its aspect ratio, and if so, if you want it to be clipped when the parent is resized. So let's start by looking at the Scaling settings. If any of these lines are solid rather than dashed, like these ones on the outside, that means they are active rather than inactive. So if we click on this horizontal line here, that's become dashed, and what that means is we've turned off the horizontal scaling of the child. So now let's select the parent again and we'll transform the shape. Now this time, you can see the child is not scaling itself horizontally. It will, however, still scale itself vertically because we still have that setting active. And if we go back into our child again, and now we turn off this scaling as well. Now it won't scale in either direction, vertically or horizontally. So we'll just turn those both back on for now. These other lines around the outside here control the anchoring of the child object. So if you turn any one of these lines one, it means that the child object is not gonna shift its position relative to that side of the parent when it's scaled. So let's turn on the top anchor and now we'll scale the parent again. And this time, even though we have the vertical scaling, you can see the top position on the child is not moving. It's anchored in that one place. You can turn on multiple anchors and that object is not going to shift, relative to any side that you have this switched on for. So we'll just turn those off again, and then finally, down in the bottom right corner here, you can control whether the aspect ratio of the child is retained or not during scaling. If either of these are active, then the aspect ratio of the child is gonna be preserved. The difference is, this one is called min fit, on the left, and on the right, this is called max fit. So when you have min fit enabled, the child is always gonna stay smaller than the parent, and it will never be clipped, no matter what the size of the parent is. So if we select the parent again, now you could see that we're maintaining the aspect ratio of our child. And it doesn't matter how small we get the parent, we can always see the child in its entirety. On the other hand, if we go back in and we select max fit instead, then this is still gonna keep its aspect ratio, but it will allow the child to be clipped. So when we scale this way we can clip this off. When we scale vertically we can clip it off as well. When we scale in both directions, you'll see the child is scaling down, but we can only see all of it as long as the aspect ratio of the parent allows that to happen. But if the aspect ratio doesn't allow it, then it will clip that child. These two options are useful for different things. Min fit, where you make sure the child always stays smaller than the parent, is good for things like icons or headings, for example, where no matter what you don't want any part of that child item to be clipped. Max fit, on the other hand, is good for thing like a nested image, for example. You might need to make sure that that image always fills up the height of its parent so that you can avoid letterboxing, even if that means that it has to be clipped in the process. So you got both of those options available to you depending on exactly what it is that you're designing. So that covers the constraint system. You can use it with any child object but just remember, it doesn't have any effect on parent objects. In the next bonus lesson we're gonna move on to working with symbols in Affinity Designer environment. Now symbols are another thing that are really popular from other design apps. And they came to Affinity Designer in version 1.5. Symbols are really fantastic for creating reusable items inside your designs and for giving you the ability to edit multiple items simultaneously by just editing one instance of a symbol. So in the next lesson, we're gonna go through how to use the symbol system in Affinity Designer. I'll see you there. Hey welcome back to the bonus lessons infinity design and quick start. In this lesson we're gonna go through how you use this symbol system that was added into infinity design in version 1.5. The symbols are really really great tool for efficiency and they let you do a bunch of really cool useful stuff. And the basic process of working with symbols is you create an object that you know you're gonna wanna reuse throughout your document. You save it as a symbol, and then wherever you need to use that object you place instances of your symbol out onto your canvas. And then any time you make an edit to one of those instances, those changes are going to be reflected across all of the other instances as well. So let's go through how this works. We're just going to knock together something really quick. It's probably not going to look great because we're just trying to focus on the functionality here. So let's say we're working on a button. That's probably a little bit too big. Let's give it a gradient. Go with some red. Gonna grab the gradient tool and just change the angle of this gradient. And we are gonna give it, A little stroke. All right, so that's a rough, quick job. But that gives us something to work with so there is our little button and we wanna turn this into a symbol so that we can easily use it in multiple places across that document. So what we are gonna do is open up the symbols panel. So we go to view. Sorry, studio, and then we're gonna choose symbols, now what we want to do is convert this little object here into a symbol. So all we need to do is select it and then up here, we just press this create button. That has automatically turned our little button into a symbol. So now we can drag out as many copies of this as we want. If I decide that I wanna change something about this symbol, then all I have to do is first make sure that this sink setting here is switched on. So, that's depressed, meaning that it's switched on. And then, I can change my button here. So let's say I decide I actually don't want a red button, I want a blue button. So what I can do is open up the symbol. Inside, you'll find nested the shape that we originally turned into a symbol. Now, we can edit this one and it's gonna affect all the other instances as well. So if we change this fill color to blue, you can see that it's simultaneously affecting the other buttons as well. Another thing that you can do with symbols is you can actually detach certain attributes of a symbol from the original source so that you can have specific attributes different to the other instances of the symbol. The way that you do that is select one of your instances, and then you're gonna turn off sync while you work on this, so we'll go inside the symbol, select the shape. Now let's say I want only this symbol to have a ridiculously great big border. You'll notice that without Sync switched on, only this instance has the silly border. The others don't have the giant border they've just stayed as they were. Now I can turn Sync back on again if I change, The border property of this instance that we separated from the symbol it will change by itself. But for these other instances, if we change their borders, they are all still connected. So now just this one instance has it's own independent border settings. However, at the same time all of the other properties are still connected. So now if I jump into the gradient for this button and I start tweaking it, all of these instances are affected along with it. So with this approach you can decide exactly which attributes you do and don't want connected to the source symbol. Now let's say you don't want to have any attributes still connected to the original symbol. So for example you might want to just use this symbol as a template. So you might drag it out. And now if you notice here, this is a symbol that tells you that you are working with a symbol but if we hit detach it changes to regroup. So now, This button can be changed to anything we want and it doesn't affect any of the other instances of the symbol that are on the screen with it. So as you can imagine, that symbol system is super, super useful. You can use it to put icons all throughout a design and easily update the look of those icons. You can use it to give yourself a kind of template base to work off. So if you have general shape and style of certain UI elements and then you can detach them and edit them independently from there. Or you can fall somewhere in-between where you make only certain elements of a simple independent enabled to be altered separately to all the other instances. So it's a great time saver and it's a really powerful feature. All right so in the next lesson which is the last of our five bonus lessons we're going to go through how you can use the assets panel. And that is another addition that came into affinity designer in version 1.5. So what the assets panel allows you to do is to build up a library of objects that you've created while you've been working on various designs. And access that library from any project that you work on. So you can build yourself up a bunch of different form elements, and buttons, and icons, and anything else that you find yourself using often in your work. Not only can you create that for yourself to use, but you can also share these asset collections with other people if you would like. So in the next lesson, we're gonna go through, hey, you can use the asset management system in Affinity Designer. I'll see you there. Hey welcome back to the fifth and last bonus lesson in Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna go through how you can use the Asset Management panel that Affinity Designer built into version 1.5. Now this functionality is really cool because what it lets you do is build up a big library of all the different assets that you create over time. Any time you make something you want to keep, you can put it in your Asset Library. And then if you want, you can also export that library and share it with other people and the reverse is also true. Other people can share their Asset Libraries with you. So, this is a really powerful and really useful feature. All right, so, let's go through, and have a look at how it works. So, the way to access the Assets panel, is to go to View > Studio, and then open up Assets here. By default you're gonna see that there's already a bunch of assets in here that you can use. This is just a UI kit that comes with the Affinity Designer by default, and it lets you have a look at how the Assets Management panel works. So we've got a bunch of different categories here. And inside each of these categories we have a ton of different assets that you can drag and drop into your designs. So for example, we'll grab this little toggle. We can just drag and drop. And these assets can be regular objects, or they can be symbols. We can see here it says Symbols, so we know that what we've just dragged in is a symbol. And if what you have is a symbol, then you have access to all the same type of things that we went through before, like being able to change the color of everything on the fly. And all the different aspects of your symbols, and have them synchronize throughout your design. So let's have a look at how you can create your own collections of assets and how you can add to them. So the way that these assets are organized is into categories and subcategories. So right here we have iOS 10. This is a category of assets. These little sections here are each subcategories. So if you wanna make your own collection, you wanna head up here to the top right button on the Assets panel and click Create New Category. By default this is gonna be called Assets. So then, you want to rename the category from the same menu. We'll just call it test category, just to give us something to work with. Now to add something into your asset collection, all you have to do is select the object in question, then choose the subcategory that you wanna have it added into. Hit the little menu on the right of it, and then choose Add from Selection. So then they can see a little modified switch turns to green is in our test category. Now if you wanna start organizing your collection into subcategories as well, then it's back up to this menu on the top right. And then click Create New. So I create subcategory. And then to rename it, click the menu to the end of the subcategory in question, hit Rename and then give it whatever you want. So now if we wanted to add something into our new category. Let's say we have a new shape. Now we can just select from this one. And now that object is going into the new subcategory. And you can actually also reorder the assets that are inside your subcategories. So we just got a couple in here so we can demonstrate. And if you decide you want to have this little object here over first in the line here, all you have to do is hold down ALT. Then you can drag and you can drop the assets into whatever order you need them to be. So it's fairly straightforward to add assets into a collection and organize it with the subcategories in the order that you want. So now let's say that you've built up a really great collection of assets here. And you have a colleague that you wanna share them with or you wanna sell a set of assets online, for example. You can actually take all of these and have them exported into an Affinity Designer specific asset collection file. To do that, all you've got to do is click this little menu up on the top right of the assets panel here, and just click Export Assets. There's a specific Affinity Assets file extension, so you just give it whatever file name you want. Hit Save and then any other Affinity Designer user will be able to import that file. And it will open up in this panel in the same way that you saw it when you saved it out. So let's have a look at that in action. I'm gonna import the Grade UI asset collection that I got as part of my purchase of this software, so you might have access to this UI kit as well. So what I'm gonna do is back up to this menu again. I'm gonna hit Import Assets. And this is the grade UI asset kit. So I'll just select it and open it. And now here is this entire collection of assets, so tons and tons of stuff to use. And all of this stuff can get dragged and dropped straight into your document. And these are normal Affinity Designer objects fully editable, just like anything that you might create from scratch in Affinity yourself. When your assets start getting bigger, it can get more difficult to try to find your way around them and find the things that you're looking for. So there's also a little search field down here. For example, we can search for check to find all the check boxes in this collection. Or we can search for input. And that gives us a bunch of input fields to choose from. And now, there's just one more thing that you wanna be aware of when you're working with asset collections. And that is, that what whatever shows up in this list here, is specific to the computer that you're working on at the time. So just because I've imported Grade UI here, if I go and work on another computer, it doesn't mean that that Grade UI kit is gonna be available there. I would have to import it over again. Or if I'm working on a collection of my own and that's helping me with the project, unless we take advantage of this function here, which is Embed in Current Document. So if I embed this category of assets into this document, it won't matter which computer I'm working on. All of those assets are gonna continue to be there and available for me. All right so that's it, short and sweet. That's how the Asset Management panel works. That's how you can add your own assets into your own collections, how you can import collections that are being created by other people. How you can organize those collections, search those collection,s and embed them into your own documents. And that wraps up our five bonus lessons. And it shows you some of the really awesome features that have been added into Affinity Designer since we first created this Quick Start course. So I hope you really enjoyed the new features and the new lessons. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you soon.

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 921,009

Keywords: affinity designer for beginners, affinity designer, affinity, graphic design, illustration, adobe illustrator, drawing, vector, adobe, illustrator tutorial, logo design, typography, design a logo, affinity designer tutorial, kezz bracey, affinity designer logo, affinity designer vector art, affinity logo tutorial, affinity designer tutorials, affinity tutorial, affinity designer review, affinity designer beginner tutorial, affinity vector, designer, affinity for beginners, tutorial

Id: Gd7FmjUxFnE

Length: 162min 35sec (9755 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018