Affinity Designer Tutorial - Top 10 Things Beginners Want to Know

hello and welcome to an affinity revolution tutorial my name is Ezra Anderson and today we're going to learn that top 10 things beginners want to know how to do an affinity designer the very first thing new users to affinity designer want to know is how to set up a new document to start our new document we just come up to the top to file new once this dialog box appears there's a couple of options that I want to highlight the first is that you can change the color format of your document if you're making a design that will go on a computer screen you'll want to keep your color format in RGB but if you plan on printing your document on a commercial printer you'll want to change the color format to CMYK I'll keep mine set to RGB the next important option is that you can change the page width and page height if you want to quickly switch these two numbers you can check portrait and finally I want to highlight that you can check on transparent background if you leave this option unchecked then when you make your new document it will have a white background however many people want to export their work with a transparent background if you want to do this make sure that you check this option after you set up the document the way you want just press ok after starting a document the second thing beginners want to know is how affinity designer is organized over on the left side we have all of the tools that you need to create your design as you click on the different tools you'll notice that different options appear up at the top this is called a contextual toolbar as you try out the different tools an affinity designer make sure you change the options up in the contextual toolbar to suit your needs over the right side we have all of our panels two of the panels that you'll be using quite frequently are the color panel and the layers panel we'll go over each one of these panels later in this video and finally a Finity designer has personas you can find the personas up at the top left right now we're working in the draw persona but there's also the pixel persona and the export persona you can think of a persona as a workspace as we click on the different personas you'll notice that our tools on the left side change for this video we'll stay inside the draw persona I just want to make you aware that there's also these other two personas with different workspaces and different tools in future videos we'll learn about how to use these other two personas the third thing beginners want to know is how to use the pre-made shape tools that come inside affinity designer all you need to do is click on one of these tools and then click and drag to make that shape if you want to give it a different color just click anywhere inside the color panel I'm going to come over and select the ellipse tool now and make a perfect circle by holding down shift as I click and drag holding down shift will allow you to create a shape that has perfectly proportional sides so if I came back to the rectangle tool I could hold down shift to click and drag and make a square a Finity designer has many other premade shape tools that come with the program underneath the triangle tool you can see that there's this little grey triangle that means there's other tools hiding underneath this tool just click and hold on the triangle and then you can select any of these shapes I'm going to select the star tool now if I hold down shift click-and-drag i'll make a perfect star many of the shapes inside affinity designer have extra options that allow you to modify the shape you can find these options up in the contextual toolbar or you can modify the shape by clicking and dragging on these orange circles on the shape as I click and drag on these orange circles notice how up at the top the inner radius also changes in addition to clicking and dragging on the orange circles we can also click on this triangle and set a specific number depending on which shape you've made you'll have different options appear in the contextual toolbar if you ever want to move any of your shapes around you can select the move tool which is this black arrow and just click and drag on any of them you can also resize them by using any of these handles on the side if you want to rotate the shape you can click and drag on this circle above the shape holding down shift will keep your rotation and 15 degree increments as you resize a shape you can hold down shift to keep your shape perfectly proportional just as you did when you are making it number 4 on our list is a short but very important topic and that is how to navigate inside of your document to zoom in and out you can press command or control + to zoom in and command or control - to zoom out if you press command or control 0 you'll be able to see your entire document to move around your photo just hold down on the space bar and then click and drag there any other ways to navigate inside of a document but though shortcut keys are the easiest and most important ones to know number 5 on our list is how to work with color as we've already seen if you have an object selected you can choose any color you want from over inside the color panel it's important to know that each shape has a fill and a stroke the stroke is the outline of an object right now we can't see the stroke because it's so thin if we come over to the stroke panel though we can increase the width now if we come back to the color panel we can change the color of the stroke by clicking on this circle and then changing the color over here whenever you're trying to change the color of a shape just make sure you have the fill or stroke selected depending on which one you want to change if you want the shape to have no fill or stroke you can press on the none option right here if you prefer working with sliders rather than with this wheel you can change that option by pressing on this menu and then selecting sliders now you can click and drag on any of these sliders to change the color up next on our list is how layers work if we look inside the layers panel we can see that each one of the shapes we've made has become its own layer each one of these layers can be turned on and off by clicking on this check mark layers also stack on top of each other so depending where they are in the layers panel they'll appear differently inside of the document for example if I click and drag to move this circle you can see that it's behind this rectangle but in front of this rectangle to change this we can come over to the layers panel and click and drag this layer to the top or bottom now that's at the bottom of the layers panel it's behind both of these wreck tangles inside of the document number seven on our list is how to combine multiple shapes as an example I'm going to combine this rectangle in this star so we can see it better I'm going to reposition and resize the rectangle and star using the move tool right now we have two separate shapes by using the boolean operations up here we can combine both of these shapes first we need to select both shapes that we want to combine right now we have the star layer selected but we can hold down shift and click on the rectangle layer so we have both layers selected now we can come to our boolean operations to combine both of these shapes or subtract the top shape from the bottom shape let's combine both of these shapes by pressing on the add boolean operation now if you look in our layers panel you'll see that we just have one layer that's because these two shapes have been combined if we move or resize it you'll notice that it's only one shape I'm going to undo all of this though by pressing command or ctrl Z to undo with both layers selected we can hold down alt or option and then click on the add boolean operation to make a compound group this is particularly useful because now it acts as if it was one shape but if we want we can always open up this compound group by pressing on the triangle then we can select either one of these layers to move them around just as we could before we can also change the boolean operation by clicking on this icon over here by using the boolean operations to combine and subtract shapes from each other you can make some pretty good designs but if you want to move beyond simple shapes affinity designer also gives us many options to draw our very own objects the easiest way to do this is to select the vector brush tool with this tool all we need to do is click and drag to begin painting but before we do so we want to make sure that we aren't working inside this compound group I'll press escape to make sure we have no layer selected now we can begin painting you'll notice that the curve we made has become its own layer at the top of the layer stack with the vector brush tool we can change the color and width of our paintbrush up in the contextual toolbar another great way to make your own curves is to use the pen tool we can find the pen tool over here if you're new to using the pen tool I recommend you change the mode from a pen mode to smart mode smart mode makes it so Affinity designer will automatically make Bezier curves for you all you have to do is click and then click once again and affinity will automatically curve your line for you to close your shape just click on the node that you started on then you can give your shape a fill from over in the color panel if you don't want to close your shape you can just start clicking to make points and then press escape to finish your curve the great thing about making vector designs is that you can modify any of these nodes after you've laid them down you just need to select the node tool this white arrow and then you can click and drag to move any of these points around by using the vector brush tool and the pen tool you can create unlimited designs just click on the curve you want to modify and then you can move the nodes number 9 on our list is how to add text to a document before we add any text though I think we should clean up our document because it's starting to look a little overwhelming if you want to select everything in your design you just need to get the move tool out and then click and drag to make a selection marquee then you can press Delete on your keyboard now that we have a blank document I'm going to select the text tool so we can begin typing with this tool out just click and drag to specify how big you want your text to be then you can begin typing if you want to modify your text first press escape to exit type mode you can see that the flashing cursor at the end has disappeared and this box has now appeared going around the text now we can change our text from up in the contextual toolbar we can change the font and the font size we can also use the Move tool to resize or reposition our text and of course you can always give your text a different color if you want to continue typing all you need to do is select the text tool again and then click inside of your text box to begin typing then you can get the move tool and continue resizing and repositioning your text if you want to Center the text all you need to do is press on the center align option and finally we are to number ten how to save and export your work if you'd like to save this affinity designer file so that you can continue working on it later all you need to do is come to file save or save as but if you're completely done and want to export your work as an industry standard format you can select export two of the most common formats you'll export your work to are PNG or jpg the great thing about exporting your work as a PNG is that it will maintain this transparent background but before you export your work make sure that you change the size to an appropriate amount when you're ready to export just press on the export button down here then you can give your file a name and choose where it will be exported thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed learning about affinity designer if you'd like to learn even more about this program I'll leave a link in the video description for our complete beginners guide to affinity designer it shows every tool and you need to master this program once again thanks for watching and I'll see you next Saturday for an affinity revolution tutorial

Channel: Affinity Revolution

Views: 443,118

Keywords: affinity designer, tutorial, beginners, top 10, quick start guide, easy, getting started

Id: WGYjO_z0Q-U

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 21 2017