Is Affinity Publisher the Real Deal?

okay you guys asked about it some of you even found me by searching for it but now we are going to figure it out we are going to have the definitive or at least a somewhat definitive idea kin affinity publisher handle itself against Adobe InDesign let's go what's going on everybody my name is dick Connery I'm an artist designer based in Southern California and we should talk about the elephant in the room elephant in the room of course being my hair what is going on up here I don't covet no barbers California has opened some of that people are allowing or able to go get their hair cut but I have not yet because number one cope it's spiking again and I'm a little bit gun shy number two I don't know I'm gonna grow it out let's see how it goes you didn't really care about that much but I don't know I felt like I should address it anyway so what we're here to talk about is affinity publisher which is affinities multi page platform for say building magazines building catalogs building books whatever it is that you do multi pages of this program affinity publisher is the one that changed everything for me there was the time when affinity designer existed but it didn't jump in then there was the time and if any photo came around and I still didn't jump in because I was like well I'm not gonna switch platforms yet because they don't have the multi page option that's kind of my background so I've wanted to have some sort of program that still did multi page layout and the only one that I knew how to use the only one that I was willing to use at the time was Adobe InDesign and if I'm gonna I haven't OB InDesign I might as well have the whole Adobe suite but affinity answered the call and they created affinity publisher and I said well let's take a look let's have a look-see and see if it even compares and now you know where I stand on affinity because I have switched completely and I am going to tell you exactly how I feel about affinity publisher right now as it compares to Adobe InDesign this isn't gonna be super comprehensive it's not gonna be one of those things where I say well I like this in infinity and it like that is nobody InDesign it's it's more of just like hey does it do what I needed to do does it do what you needed to do before we get into this I just want to give you a really kind of basic rundown if you're not 100% familiar with what affinity publisher is basically if you were building a magazine building a book building any kind of multi-page document you probably want to do it either in affinity publisher or in Adobe InDesign or something like that like QuarkXPress still I think still exists even though nobody probably uses it anyone back when I first got into design that was the program of record if you wanted to build multi-page documents than you did them in quark Express you can't build multi-page documents in Photoshop you can sort of do it in Adobe Illustrator but it really is more efficient to do it in a program like QuarkXPress like Adobe InDesign like affinity publisher a little bit of background of me so you understand why I have so much knowledge in this topic I spent majority of my design career working as a magazine designer I would build 300 page layouts every single month sometimes more depending on if I had to work on multiple magazines at a single time I haven't built a magazine or any kind of large document within affinity publisher yet I just haven't had the need but I have decided to work on my next book project which is a personal project which is like a content marketing playbook that allows people to kind of organize the the stuff they're doing for the business for the content marketing further whatever content they're making and it was going to show you that but it's turning that to be a much larger project and it would take me about 14 hours of recording a video to show it to you and that really isn't gonna do any good so we're gonna do this differently we're gonna do this a little bit different so that it makes more sense for you here beauty of affinity publisher is that it works really very much kind of sort of similar to Adobe InDesign as did adobe indesign to quarkxpress when it first came out the transition from quarkxpress to adobe indesign was pretty smooth especially if you had been using adobe products like illustrator and photoshop and because products like affinity designer and affinity photo all kind of have very similar kind of layouts and work flow to the adobe products transitioning to affinity publisher is gonna be I don't have a snap very well it's gotta be easy but don't take my word for it let me show you I'm pointing to the screen right there look this way now so as I said before I'm not gonna show you that big multi-page document that I already had established so we're gonna go ahead and create a brand new document there's a couple of ways I could do this I could do this as unfailing pages which means like it's individual pages that you see just like if you had sheets of paper what I'm gonna do for our purposes is just facing pages because this is how I would build something if I was building a magazine when you see this it like if I just pick like say an even number what's gonna happen is that first page that number one page is gonna start out by itself and then every other page is gonna flow from there so I'm just gonna stick with five because I'm only gonna work on one of the big layouts one of the spread layouts you have these presets up here just like you do in any of the Adobe products and the same thing in any of the finis products and you got print you got press ready a photo web and all that when you go to the print one you'll see that most of them are in these European sizes and yeah that's uh that's not you know awesome cuz be in American but whatever you know I mean it's really not that big a deal you can always just come over here which is what I do anyway come over here and type in your inches eight-and-a-half by eleven we just put standard DPI 300 because if we're doing a print project that's what we need change this to where's the inches change that to inches you could change it to pixels you can change it you can change the orientation if you want between portrait and landscape this one's interesting if you want to have your images be linked to which is usually the case for most of these documents that way it keeps your file size down really low essentially you're just linking to your photos and the what you see on the screen is more of a FBO or position only is what that term is called that way you're not bogging down your system but if you want to have them embed it you can I don't recommend this if you're doing large documents because it's just gonna be a dog by the time you're finished got a default master which is these master pages that will appear right up here in this left corner facing pages like I was talking about arranged horizontally this is how they just kind of have they justify themselves up here in this particular pallet CMYK for print you can be RGB if that's what you're doing like if you wanted to do web page design or grayscale if you were doing a grayscale layout that's totally up to you we're just say CMYK for now margins we're gonna go ahead and do one all the way around and and bleed is you know whatever bleeds up the page just gonna create this and like I said you're seeing only one page right now but the layout here is that's page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 this is how bucks work folks square this up now if you're not familiar with master pages essentially if you think about this this is a template so if I were to design something here in master a I am your that's big that's too big don't know why I did that whatever if I'm if I was to do this right and then apply this master to this one well you can already see it it's already applied two here and two here and two here but if I went and did duplicate this creates a master and I changed this one too I am your servant and eyes automatically capitalizing I don't know that's probably a pro a preference thing I applied it to this one down here just drag and drop it there or if I said I can always go here right click apply to or is it apply mastered your pages there we go and then again pick current spread yeah current spread okay there's a master there's a cervical here master master oh why didn't it work and see it didn't work I'm just gonna drop it serve it Smasher okay you can apply the whole strip there you go obviously just by doing that you could see like I can apply half to one side and half to the other things you know this is the same operation whether it's publisher whether it's a InDesign or even if you were still like old guy used in QuarkXPress this is the most important thing when it comes to the multi page layout this is what you need the only other thing that I consider to be one of the most important things would be the obviously the type tools your characters your paragraphs and your text styles this right here this layout is a little bit different than if you were to work this in adobe indesign because they have a separate palette for paragraph styles as well as one for character styles as well as one for object styles we could do a whole video about that whole thing some of the time but essentially if I want to apply certain amounts of characteristics to anything whether it's a full paragraph of text or it's a singular item or a singular word then I can do that with these styles then now here are these already set up styles that they've just imported I would probably I haven't done this yet but I would probably get rid of all of these and bring in a new set specifically for each document or basically just erase everything that isn't body or no style and then start from scratch because most of these like I mean I guess I could keep them because these are kind of standard book oriented things you can keep these if you want and then just adjust them as you want because you can like I can just click on here and click emphasis table body you can see it just changes things that's how you can see you got really look at look at small I got you right good guy anyway so that is text styles it is in one place as opposed to actually now I think about that let let me verify some let's go here to the studio this is where most your palates are at paragraph text styles yeah so text styles covers everything paragraph and character and all that I I can't I haven't dived I haven't douve I haven't dug deep into that yet so I can't explain it but we'll get to that another time now your tools you got your pointer tool you got your node tool which is essentially if you can imagine so this moves the whole thing right grab things if it's not locked why is it locked locked why is it locked Oh cuz it's on the master Doug Dave it's on the master okay this moves the whole thing you can move size that right or you can move nodes and then you know kind of click things but it's text so if it was like say it let's say this I'm gonna draw a little box here and then I'm gonna go to the node and then I'm gonna click well I thought that's what I was gonna do well it should do that but I think it's maybe it's because I gotta convert it to something else let's delete that that's still I guess you can turn any box into a text box just like you can in Adobe InDesign text box if you want to a box of text box of text and if you don't want to type out a whole box of tech backup text if you don't want to type out a whole block of text yourself you go up here to text and I believe it's insert filler text R it's like that just like that you can also all obviously do that in Adobe InDesign to lorem ipsum is your friend this is for you know these things what do you call these tables these are for tables those are kind of cool and you can add and I haven't worked again have not worked with them much but it's cool that you have them right there there is this which is just independent type this is the same thing it operates exactly the same as it does in affinity photo and if any good designer pen tool allows you to draw vector based shapes and you can use these you can fill them like a let's see let's go communed I know I remember how you put something there give me a D I don't remember you can fill it's been a while you can fill this with an image and in then it'll be that shape again you can do the same thing in Adobe InDesign and you have your vector shapes and this is actually something that carries over from designer carries over from photo and something that Adobe does not have you have to build these things yourself in Illustrator you have to build these things yourself in Adobe InDesign and sometimes they take they're a little bit more difficult like building that Crescent tool that Cod come on that cog you tell me that that would be easy to build in Illustrator when I could just have it sitting around like just like that yeah no no that's one of the best things about affinity that I like is having those little tools like that and of course you can create multiples on top of multiples and whatnot of course you've got your shapes basic shapes square and circle or a rectangular circle and then image box find a photo of one of my pieces of art or something and bring that in and and I can do it like that boom and this is a mess don't mind allowed we're not really trying to build anything in particular here prop tool if I wanted to recrawl things like say I wanted to recraft this I could crop tool but I could also do that same thing I believe I could also do that same thing or maybe not maybe it's this tool this tool oh man this node tool is really gonna make me a liar today I'm gonna have to look and see what the difference is between these two tools because it's really kind of drive me nuts that I thought it was something and it's not the thing that it thought it was gradient tool what they call what do they call it they call it a fill tool all right see I just kind of filled that I can't get to do anything I think it's cuz I don't have enough boxes here let's see let's do a cog or let's do a rectangle see now if I fill that but if I change the color right and then fill I think there's a green you kind of see a gradient going on in there this is the transparency tool that way it's kind of a gradient but then it's transparent cuz if I then turn this and bring it up here then it's transparent then eyedropper is pretty simple hand if you want to move the whole thing around but you know I've got a magic mouse it's kind of doing it there we go there we go finally get it my magic mouse allows me to do that I don't need to use that hand tool if you don't have a magic Mouse then maybe you will and magnifying glass of course the palettes here color palette swatch palette stroke palette those are all pretty standard in fact this is almost identical to any other affinity product and it's almost identical to and together Adobe product layers this is one thing that operates a little bit differently in actually it operates a lot differently it operates a lot differently in affinity than it does in InDesign because InDesign you have to create different layers and then you move things around in those different layers very similar to what you would do in Adobe Illustrator but when I'm working here right now what every time I create something new I'm just gonna bring in another circle it automatically creates a new layer anytime I do something new creates a new layer creates a new layer and I'm not sure how I feel about that yet the reason is because I operate in a little bit different way because of my experience in Adobe InDesign and this is unusual to me but what I have decided is that what I'm doing for the time being is just grabbing these different elements like this when I have them and then grouping them and that way they're not like I can move them around and differ places and just move things in it's just a matter of working different in that respect thing is with Adobe InDesign I didn't use layers nearly as much as I do and say like Photoshop or affinity photo I used them mostly just to kind of like move you know have certain things in certain places and then if I wanted to like unsee them or like unclick them so that they couldn't be seen then I could do that just a different workflow and I don't think it's going to be terribly disruptive but we'll find out as I'm working on this other big project you got character character settings your paragraph settings and that textiles wherever I did with them settings right here your justification your jabs you do all this other stuff if you wanted to do full of like text flow between text documents like say if you wanted to flow text from here to here you can by lets you click on this one and you you click and then click to that one and if I just flowed let's go back here and let's insert filler text it just automatically flowed same thing in InDesign very similar then way down here transformed navigator history I I haven't really adjusted my palettes to work more functionally for me yet and everything else is very affinity like you have all of these certain settings up here though here okay stop this right here is one of the most significant things that makes affinity publisher great right now I am in the publisher persona meaning I'm working within publisher and doing my thing instead of me having to jump over to affinity designer or affinity photo all I have to do is change the persona now this is a very unique thing to affinity products it's a little bit different the other products like affinity designer has like multiple little things that you can jump between and photo is the same way has all these different things so all I have to do is come over here jump over to the designer persona and I can just start crafting exactly like I would in affinity designer or if I want to go into the photo persona then I just come over here and it's exact same thing just allows me to bring in these different elements without having to jump between the programs all I have to do is click I'm still not out of that document you can see the document is still active and I can bring in let's do I know there's a way to do it where is it so you got only a layered stock so if I just wanted to say let's bring it in the image let's say dogs because I like dogs I know why it's all caps and bring this guy in I understand I'm bringing this guy in just like that boom yeah I got a dog picture I got a dog picture for my layout so little big now I got a layout I got a dog picture my layout you know what's funny like even though this design is like super crazy and all over the place it's like totally like inline with how some of the design stuff is going these days it's like now I know how these kids are doing it with these crazy layout basically pooping on a page and there you go good design I kid I kid so this is pretty much it I everything that I've experienced in affinity publisher is almost line for line dot 4 dot action for action similar to Adobe InDesign now adobe indesign is a pretty robust program now and it can do some amazing stuff especially if you're working in large groups you're working with big teams like we were on the magazine's you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with interactive it has all these other integrations with the Adobe products that you can do different things and it's cool if you work in those environments but if you are somebody who works for yourself or has a really small team and you don't really need all those integrations this program is gonna do everything you need you could build an entire 500 page magazine 1000 page book ever you want you could build it in this no problem let's say I want to create this and this was a book and I just go export write and export out is all of these things the most important one for us probably PDF sure I get a PMG that's gonna be a lot of PNG pages a JPEG same TIFF TIFF whatever gift tip PSD I can export this whole thing and bring it into a Photoshop document if I wanted to not sure why you would I could do everything in an SVG and it would be weird but yeah you could it's possible EPS TGA I don't even know what any of these go for obviously the PDF is the most important one I want to address what I know is one of the questions I'm gonna get can you import InDesign documents no you cannot import InDesign documents not take an InDesign document and bring it in here but but you can take an InDesign PDF PDF you created from a document in InDesign and bring it in here and it will be editable done it I've seen it it works it perfect I don't know I didn't dive deep but you can bring in a PDF and it will be editable could bring in a layered Photoshop document into here and it will be editable short story is will affinity publisher hang with Adobe InDesign and my answer to that is I'm pretty sure it will pretty sure that anybody who uses this program is going to be happy with it haven't built anything really big yet so I can't say how it handles large projects because sometimes a large project on a machine might get bogged down if it's a hundred 20 pages and you've got all these images you've got all these different things elements if pulling dude I don't know how that's gonna work yet I will tell you more how I feel about that in the future once I finish my first multi-page document what's really truly important is that it does the job from what I can tell there is absolutely nothing about affinity publisher that lacks there's nothing about affinity publisher that shows me that it cannot do the work I would rely on this program no problem now again if I do get to that point and I feel like it's a ram hog we'll talk about that I haven't been there yet I can't say that but for now it seems to be the it seems to work Oh in the future I will go into the details about how to operate in these places specifically how to work more efficiently with masters we'll also go into more of the stuff on textiles and characters and paragraphs because that's important I'm 100% sure if this has object styles which is what they're called in Adobe InDesign there might be something like that I have to do my research on that I personally didn't use them that much back in Adobe InDesign but I did do a video about that if you want to go see that if you are an Adobe user and you want to see my take on object Styles go right there I don't know if that's possible here my guess is it is but I don't know yet can't say for sure talk about these things we'll do little 101 episodes and I'll be learning right alongside you now if you're one of these people who are on the fence are you one of these people that might be doubting it at all I recommend that you just go check it out it's a free trial for a time period and I think if I'm not mistaken it's still under the sale program it might only through July I don't know I don't know exactly when but they're essentially only charging half price for it it's a deal at $50 and a lot of people will discount that just because it's $50 it can't be nearly the quality of Adobe InDesign if it's only $50 I'm telling you you're wrong but now if I'm not mistaken it's even half that twenty-five bucks you could have yourself a secondary program where you could work on this and just play with it and like an experiment and even I mean if you say no this sucks it's still it's only 25 bucks out of your pocket but on top of that they have a free trial go test it for yourself go bring in a document from InDesign go brew a PDF go bring it in and see what you think because you might be impressed I was impressed but somebody who is a dyed-in-the-wool Adobe InDesign user I was impressed in infinity if you're watching please give me an affiliate link they don't have an affiliate program send me money I'm just kidding I would I would say these things regardless I obviously am saying these things regardless because they're not paying me a dime you know if they want to throw some money at me I'm being on I mean I'll take it anyway so that was where I thought it's on if any publisher I hope you really appreciate that I hope you've got something out of it if you have any questions you know what to do go down to the comments and leave a comment ask me a question and I will do my best to answer it and while you're down there make sure you hit that like button and also go over there and hit that little red subscribe button and when you're there go hit that little bell that's right next to that so you never miss a thing and then there's the share button right there to go share that with all your homies in the meantime I'm gonna go take this and upload it on Instagram we've become a you know instant hit because this is super fantastic and Instagram is gonna love this stuff I kid I kid that's it I'm out remember folks be good today be even better tomorrow see it I was fun long but fun you

Channel: Dave Conrey

Views: 24,149

Keywords: affinity publisher, adobe indesign, indesign, publisher, indesign vs publisher, inexpensive design, design software, design programs, art direction, page layout, book layout, magazine layout, magazine design, book design, I quit adobe, affinity vs adobe, serif affinity, affinity photo, affinity designer

Id: dUhGoXvg1fc

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020