Affinity Publisher Tutorial For Beginners - Top 10 Things Beginners Want To Know

are you new to affinity publisher if so you're in luck today we're going to be learning about the top 10 things that beginners want to know how to do inside of affinity publisher after watching this one video you'll be well on your way to publishing like a pro let's get started so here we are with publisher all opened up but before we get started inside of publisher I want to show you what we'll be making today as we learn the top 10 things that beginners want to know we'll be creating this lovely project together I've always found that hands-on learning is the best way to get new skills to stick so make sure you're following along and you'll have your own lovely document completed by the time this video is over so the first thing we need to learn is how to start a new document when you first open affinity publisher you'll be welcomed with this welcome screen if you bike you could check or uncheck show this panel on startup if you'd rather not see this when you open the program from here you can click new document or you can come to the top of the screen to file then press new now in this dialog box we can change the settings of our new document in this top section right here we can change a few of the general settings for example we can change which type of document this is if we're going to be printing it printing it commercially printing it like a photo for a website or for a specific device you can also change the page preset and for this one I will choose a4 you can change a few other things here but for this particular document let's just come down to number of pages and change this from 1 to forward to do this we can click on the side arrow to increase it to 4 or we can click in the box twice then type in 4 then press ENTER and now we'll have 4 pages when we start our new document down here in this section we have a few more options that we can change underneath this layout section we can give our page exact width and height change it between portrait and landscape and check on facing pages facing pages just means that while you're working an affinity publisher your pages will be displayed side by side like a book now we can go to color and I don't usually change things in this section because when you change your type the color format will automatically update to what's best for the type of document that you're using so if I were to change this to web this color format would change so that it's best used for the web I'll leave this as is and move on to margins inside of margins we have a few default measurements that you can use as margins or you can press retrieve margin from printer if you have a printer hooked up to your computer and the last section is for bleed it's a good idea to have about an eighth of an inch or three millimeters through your bleed so I can click in here and I can type in three and then press Enter and because these boxes are locked together with this icon here they all update to three millimeters as another handy trick if I were to click in here and type in an eighth of an inch and then press Enter it will be converted to millimeters since that's the document unit that we have this set to with our document all set up with four pages I'll go ahead and press ok the next thing that beginners want to know about affinity publisher is how to understand the interface now that we have a new document set up we can look through all of the tools and options and figure out what we need to be doing to alter our document if you come to the very top of the screen you'll see a menu bar appear this menu bar includes things like file which if you click on it you can create a new document save this document or export your document which are options that we'll learn about later we also have a help menu up here which can really come in handy if you get stuck looking for something inside of this program below this menu bar we have another toolbar right here this toolbar has a few useful tools that you might use while working inside of your up here we can find options like snapping text wrapping and the other personas that we can use inside this program if you own a Fendi designer or affinity photo you can access these other personas from within affinity publisher here's the designer persona and here's the photo persona you can see the tools over here change depending on which persona were inside of I won't go into too much detail about how to use these personas in this video but it's good to know where they're located over on the left side of the screen as we just saw is where all of our tools are located we can hover over a tool to see it - name appear and its shortcut if it has one for the move tool we can see in those brackets that the shortcut is the to select any of the tools just click on the tool to select it there's one tool in here that's a little bit different from the others and that's our shape tool the reason that this tool is different from the others is that there's multiple tools within this one shape tool if you can see it right here there's a tiny grey triangle if you click directly on that triangle you'll open up all of the shape tools that we have here inside this program so right now you can see that I have the triangle tool but you might see a different shape tool appear there if it's hard for you to click on the triangle you can also double click on this tool to open up all of the other shape tools as we switch between these different tools you'll notice that right here we have a context toolbar which changes based on which tool we have selected it gives new options that are specific to the tool that we have for even more specifics about a tool you can go to the bottom of the screen where it will give you directions on how to use the tool or it might give you different shortcuts you can use with the tool next to this status bar we can also navigate through the pages of our document if we click on this little arrow we can switch between our pages if we click on this last arrow we can go all the way to our last page of our document and if we click here we can go all the way to the first page of our document the last thing about the interface that we need to go over are all of these panels that you can see we have panels right here on the left side and over here on the right side over on the left side we have our pages panel and our master pages panel which allow us to double click on any area of our document to go to those pages we can also right click on the pages to manipulate them such as adding pages duplicating or deleting them and up here we have our master pages which we'll go over a little bit later in this video over on the right side we have other panels like the color swatches and stroke panel below that we have our layers character paragraph and textiles panels and below that we have our transform navigator and history panels each of these panels have specific options that you can use while working in your document but these aren't all of the panels these are just the default panels the publisher has put out for us to use if you're looking for a different panel you can come to the top of the screen to view stew and then you can click on any of these other panels huh click on effects and you can see we now have an effects panel added over here I can click and drag on any of our panels to adjust where they go I could tuck it up here if I wanted to or pull it out and when I'm done with it I can press on this X to get rid of it but I can always go back up here to get it out again when I need it the next thing that beginners to Affinity publisher want to know is how to use layers and shapes to get started I'm going to select our rectangle tool and then click and drag to create a shape once you've clicked and dragged to create your shape you'll notice a few things first you'll notice that you have a blue selection box surrounding your shape this blue selection box means that this shape is selected so anything that you do will affect the shape for example if I came over to the color panel and clicked anywhere in here to change the colors you can see that the shape is being affected because it's selected you'll also notice that down here in our layers panel we now have a green rectangle anything that we add to our document will appear in our layers panel as a new layer I'll go ahead and come back over to our shape tool and I'll select the ellipse tool if I click and drag we can create an ellipse as a shortcut while clicking and dragging if I hold down shift we will now have a perfect circle I'll release my mouse and then release shift you can see that we no longer have a selection box around our rectangle and now we have one around our circle I can change the color in the color panel as I did before and you'll also notice that we now have an ellipse layer in our layers panel I'll come back to the shapes once more and I'll select our triangle tool I can click and drag to create a triangle and if I hold down shift it will lock the triangle in place so we don't have a squishy triangle or a super skinny one I think for this one though I'll make it look like that I can change the color one more time in the layers panel you can see that our yellow triangle is on top of our other shapes I'm going to select the move tool which we can use to move our shapes around to show you why having the triangle on top is important to understand if I move this triangle it will appear on top of our other shapes because it's on top in the layers panel if I select the circle by clicking on it you'll notice that it's beneath our yellow triangle but above the rectangle so if I move this it will appear above our green rectangle but below or yellow triangle if we ever want to adjust the positioning of our layers we can click and drag on our layers in our layers panel to adjust where they sit in our document now our ellipse is on top of both of these shapes if you ever want to get rid of one of your layers you can either have it selected and press Delete on your keyboard or you can have it selected in the layers panel and then press on this trashcan the next thing that beginners want to understand inside of affinity publisher is how to use colors we've briefly looked at the color panel to change the main color of these shapes every object inside of publisher will have two colors applied to it their fill color and their stroke color if I click on our rectangle in the color panel we can see that the fill color is green the fill color is the object's main color and it's applied to the center of the object if I click here this circle represents the stroke color the stroke color is the color of this around the border of our shape I'm going to select the fill color circle and show you that you can change this fill color circle to anything you bike you could also press on this little circle right here to give your object no fill and you could also double click on this fill color circle to get a more exact color for your object you can see over here that we can customize the exact amounts of each of these options or even put in a hex code to get a specific color now that we understand the fill a little bit better let's take a look at the stroke I'll press on this circle to have our stroke circle selected but right now it's a little bit hard to see our stroke to fix this I'm going to come to our stroke panel and increase the width so we can see what we're talking about when we're using our stroke then come back to the color panel with the stroke of an object we can affect it just how we did with our fill circle we can press here to give our stroke no strokes color and we can adjust what color our stroke appears as in the color wheel we can even double click to bring up an exact queue for our colors just as we did with our fill circle we can also switch these colors if we press on this arrow up here we can switch our fill and stroke colors let's go back to the stroke panel to see a few more options within this panel we can affect our stroke even more you already saw that we can adjust the width of our stroke but another thing to keep in mind is that we can also check on scale with object this option is important to have checked on if we want to keep the stroke and size of our shape proportional if I were to resize this shape right now by hovering over the corner and shrinking it down you can see that our stroke remains the same size and as we shrink it down it looks pretty huge compared to the fill if I have scale with object checked on and then resize it the stroke will shrink in proportion to the size of our shape I'm going to go back to our color panel and give you one more tip when working in the color panel right here we have a very important tool called the color picker tool if I click and drag on the color picker we can select any color in our document to sample it once the color is sampled it will appear right here then we can select whatever we want to affect for example we might want to change this stroke color so I'll press on it then we can press on the stored color to change that stroke to the exact color of our triangle to finish off this section I'm going to make a design using these shapes and the fill and stroke settings to get started with this using my rectangle here I'm going to give it no stroke and then I'm going to select the fill circle and change its color to black then with the move tool still selected I can click and drag on these corners to stretch it across the entirety of our document you may have noticed at this point that sometimes we have lines appear that help us to snap our object into place right now you can see a green vertical line and a red horizontal line these are snapping lines and if you can't see them on your document make sure that you have snapping turned on up here snapping is great for keeping your objects aligned and centered and your documents now that we have our black background I'm going to play with this triangle a little bit to create our design to do this I'm first going to make sure that I like this color so I'll go ahead and adjust this to maybe a little bit more of a golden yellow and I'm also going to get rid of our stroke now I'm going to place this triangle at the very bottom of our document making sure that it's snapped to the center and to the edge of the bottom this is a good trick to know if you ever want to duplicate an object you can hold down alt or option on your keyboard and then click and drag on your object to duplicate it I'll release my mouse and then release alt or option for this duplicate triangle I want the stroke to be this yellow color in the fill to have no fill to do that I'll come up here and then press on these arrows to switch our stroke and fill colors I also can't really see the stroke right now so I'll go to our stroke panel to increase its width once I have it add a width that I think looks good I'll go ahead and hold down shift and then resize this triangle then I'll make sure it's centered in the document and bring it about right here I'm going to hold down alt or option one more time and then click and drag to duplicate this triangle for this triangle I want it to be a little bit smaller so I'll hold down shift to keep this proportional and then I'll click and drag it so that it's aligned with the bottom of our bigger triangle and it's centered in our document I'm going to bring down the width of this triangle to 1.5 then I'll click on this skinnier triangle and while holding down alt or option I'll click and drag it up here I'll make sure that it's centered in our document and place it about right there I also want this triangle to be a little bit bigger so I'll hold down shift and then click and drag it out and with that we have our design finished for our front cover of our document the next thing that beginners to Affinity publisher want to know how to do is how to use the artistic text tool the artistic text tool is great for titles and small amounts of text I'm going to select the artistic text tool which you can find right here in your tools panel and then I'll click and drag and begin typing as you can see my letters are black so it's a little hard to see them I'll click a few times to select all of the letters or I can click and drag to select them then I'll return to our color panel and change their color to white I'm going to click in our text once and then press return to make the text onto two lines now I can begin adjusting our text up at the top in the context toolbar we have so many options for adjusting our text we can change the font right here to any font that we think looks good for our title however to change the font we need to make sure that our text is highlighted or have the move tool selected and top the text selected by having a selection box around it then I can go back and change the font next we have options like changing the size of our font but we can also change the size by using the handles on the side of the box we can also change the alignment of our text right here which I'll Center mine and then we have even more specific options to change in the character panel I'll come down here and press on the character panel at the top of this character panel we've a few settings that we can change which we can also change in the context toolbar so I don't usually come to the character panel to change things like the font or font size but below all of these options we have a few things we can change with the positioning we can change things like the tracking right here by clicking on these arrows to increase it I'll change mine back to zero we can also change the letting override for anything that you have on two lines I'll press command or control Z to undo that or I can click back to auto to put it back to where it was another thing that I noticed about this particular text is that I have a little problem with my F in my eye if I go down to the typography section I can click here to separate them as you can see the character panel has a lot of different options that you can change with your text I won't be going over all of these options here but if you'd like to learn more about them I go into much more detail in my complete beginners guide to a finiti publisher which I'll have linked below this course is jam-packed with video tutorials just like this one if you're a beginner it has everything you need to know all in one place I worked on this course for a very long time it's like a child to me I love it if you want more videos like this one go ahead and check it out the next thing that beginners want to know how to use inside of affinity publisher is how to use guides before we move on to using guides I'm just going to select the move tool and make sure that our title is centered in our document then I'll double click on page four and all set up a few guides here on this page to do that I'll come up to the top of the screen to view and then I'll press guides manager in the guides dialog box we can add guides to our document that will help us with our alignment when we're setting up text or images inside of our document to add a guideline come to the bottom of the horizontal guides column and press here and you can see that we now have a horizontal guide right here we can move this by just clicking and dragging or we can type in an exact measurement of where we want this guideline to sit we can even change this from a measurement in millimeters to a percent for example if I wanted this to be exactly 25% now the line is sitting exactly a quarter of the way down from the top of our document we can do the same with our vertical guides which you can see that this one is sitting directly in the center and we can also change this and type in an exact measurement if you ever want to delete one of your guides just have it selected and then press delete or if you want to remove all of your guides just press remove all guides on the other side of our guides box we can add column guides we can come down to columns and then increase the column amount to any number of columns that we want added into our document we can also change how these columns appear whether that be this gray fill then column or an outline surrounding your column I'll change this back to filled and show you that we can also adjust our margins for example if you wanted more space on the bottom you could increase this number to anything you biked you can also click and drag on the word bottom to adjust the spacing of that margin you can actually do this for any of these options including the number of columns I'll change this back to 25 and this back to 35 35 there we go for now we don't need these guides on our last page so I'm going to change the number of columns back to 1 and then press close the next thing that beginners - affinity publisher want to understand is how to use master pages to show you how master pages works I'm first going to come to our master pages panel and double click on our master pages by default these master pages are applied to every page in our document to show you what this looks like I'll select the shape tool and click and drag out a triangle I'm going to switch these colors so you can see the triangle a little bit better you can see that because we have a triangle on the left side of our master pages every left page of our document now has this triangle applied to it I can do this again on the other side and now you can see that our right pages have a triangle applied if I double click on our cover page you'll notice that you can't see the triangle I'll come to our layers panel and show you that by default the master page is at the bottom of our layers because this rectangle is covering up the master page triangle you can't actually see it but if I checked this off you can now see that just like the other right-hand page we have a triangle on this page - if I didn't want the master page applied to this cover page I could right click on it and then press clear masters you'll notice that our master a layer is now gone going back to our master pages panel I'll go ahead and delete these triangles by pressing on them and then pressing the trashcan for a more practical way of using master pages I'm going to add column guides to this page we already know how to do that just come to the top of the screen to view guides manager I'm now going to add three columns to each of our pages and before I close out of this dialog box I'm going to increase the bottom margin so we have a little bit more space for a page number then press close it's a little hard to tell but if we click here we can see that the main pages of our document now have these column guides applied to them I'll double click on our master page again and now I'm going to add a page number to the bottom of this document to do that I'm going to select the frame text tool which is another text tool that we'll talk about in the next section I'll click and drag down here then add in a page number I'm going to come to the top of our screen to text down to insert fields page number we now have a page number inserted into this text box I'm going to make sure that it's centered and I'm going to select our move tool and Center it right here to duplicate this page number on to the other side of the page I'm going to hold down alt or option and then click and drag it across then I'm going to line it up with our other page number we now have column guides and page numbers and I'm just going to add one last thing to our master page I'm going to come to our shape tools and select the rectangle tool then I'll click and drag a rectangle to the bottom of this page you can see that by default we have this yellow color applied to our rectangle which is the exact color of the triangles that we added earlier if for some it didn't turn gold like this color remember that we can always use the color picker to sample that exact color then you can come back to the master page select your rectangle and then select the sampled color to make sure that those yellows match for this particular document I want to make sure that this master page is being applied to these main pages here but I actually don't want it applied to our last page so I'll right-click on this page and then press clear masters the next thing that beginners to Affinity publisher want to understand is how to use the frame text tool we briefly looked at the frame text tool to put on our page number the frame text tool is found right here it is great to use for large blocks of text while the artistic text tool is great for small amounts of text the frame text tool is great if you ever have large columns of text that you want to include in a document to show you how this works I'm going to make sure that we are on pages 2 & 3 which we are and then I'm going to hover over our column guide and click and drag out a text box over this first column now that we have a text box here we can insert text into it I can see that it's Center aligned right now so I'm just going to click to make it left aligned and then I'm going to come to the top of the screen to place text if you had specific text that you want to put into your document you can go to file and then place to place in specific text I don't have specific text right now so instead I'm going to go to text insert filler text we can now see that we have our text and because I left aligned it beforehand it's perfectly left aligned along the call of our text I'm going to draw out more text frames on these other columns so make sure you have the frame text tool selected and then you can click and drag text frames across these column guides if I want the text here to be linked to our other columns I can press here on this white triangle and then press on which column I want the text to be connected to so I'll press here and now these two columns are connected together if I were to click on this column and shrink it down you can see that the text over here is being affected that's because anything that doesn't fit in this text box anymore is being pushed into that text box I can continue to link my text frames all the way across the document and you can see that because they're all linked together whatever I do to this first one will affect all of them I'm going to select the move tool and with this text box selected I'm going to come to the paragraph panel the paragraph panel is very similar to the character panel that we looked at earlier when we were affecting the title of this document the paragraph panel is used with the frame text tool to affect large blocks of text here we can adjust things like giving our text indents at the beginning of the paragraphs we can adjust any of our spacing after or before our paragraphs and just like the character panel there are quite a few options in here the next thing that beginners want to understand an affinity publisher is how to put images into their documents to put a few images into this document I'm to use the place image tool which you can find right here in the tools panel press on the place image tool and then you can navigate to where your images are that you'd like to use for your document in the video description I have a link where you can find these three images to use for this document I'm going to click on the buildings image and then press open we now have our cursor and it's been loaded with the image I'm going to press on page number four and then with our loaded cursor I can either click once to insert the image into our document or I can click and drag to insert this image into our document once we have the image inserted we can move the image around however we think looks good I'm going to return to pages two and three and add in our other images so I'll press the place image tool again and then I'll add in our trees image I'll click and drag to insert this image if you ever have an image and do you like how it looks but you wish it was just cropped a little bit differently you can use the vector crop tool once you press on this tool you can bring in any of the sides of your image however you bike to make it fit better with your project then press the move tool so you can move the image around again right now we have our text hiding behind the image so I'll select the text box and bring it down so that we can see all of our text I'll make sure the columns are snapped together at the same height and now it's time to put in our last image this image is a little bit different from our other images because it's a PNG image this means that our image is actually transparent around the edges of the image which makes it perfect for text wrapping I'm going to click up here on text wrapping and now I can adjust the settings so that the text wraps around our earth image I'll press tight for this one and then down here I can adjust the distance from text and I'm going to click here to lock these distances together and then increase the distances I can also move the earth around to see how the text looks and how it's being affected you might notice some weird gapping here that you're not seeing on this other side that's because of the alignment of our text if we wanted this to hug the earth a little bit closer we could select the text and then change the justification so that it's justified left now we have a nice smooth gap all the way around but the spacing of our letters looks a little odd if you're ever going to justify your text in this way it's a good idea to come to our paragraph panel then go down to hyphenation and press use Auto hyphenation this gets rid of some of the weird gaps but there still might be some spacing issues feel free to adjust the earth a little bit more to see if you can improve that spacing if you still don't like how it looks you can always change the text back to left aligned with our document now finished the last thing that beginners to infinity publisher want to know how to do is how to save and export their work if you want to save this affinity publisher file to come back in and work on it later all you need to do is come to the top of the screen to file then press save here you can name your document and then save it to wherever you'd like this allows you to double click on this file wherever you've saved it and it will open up right back inside of publisher and you can pick up wherever you left off I'll press cancel and now show you how you can export your document come back up to the top to file and then press export you can see up here the different options that you have for exporting for this one I'll export it as a PDF then you can decide how much of the document that you want exported you can use all spreads all pages individually or you can type in specific pages that you'd like to export if this file is for print be sure to include the bleed so that if you're printing on a commercial printer you will have that included all the way to the edge of your document with all the settings set up how you'd like you can press export to export your document great work on completing this project this was just a brief look at how to use affinity publisher if you'd like to learn even more be sure to check out our complete beginners guide to finding publisher which I've left linked in the video description I'm sure you'll love it and I can't wait to see you in the course bye

Channel: Affinity Revolution

Views: 182,849

Keywords: affinity publisher, tutorial, beginner, top 10, guide, get started, basics, new, indesign

Id: py6fqmvlaqY

Length: 44min 15sec (2655 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2019