Switching to Affinity Designer from Adobe Illustrator - What to know

you interested in affinity designer but not sure you're ready to leave Adobe Illustrator yet well these are the 10 things that you need to know if you're gonna make that switch the thing that initially drew me to affinity designer is the fact that it only cost $50 at first glance affinity designer is a lot like Adobe Illustrator but as a longtime illustrator user the little differences between these programs really tripped me up at first so to celebrate the release of my new udemy course 75% off link down below and promotion here are the 11 things that will help you make that switch easier the first thing is the color picker works a little bit differently than the color picker in illustrator in illustrator if you use the eyedropper tool it grabs everything your gradients your strokes any styles that you have applied to the shape that you're pulling it from affinity designer works a little bit differently if I use the eyedropper tool here it's not gonna grab any of the styles it's just gonna grab the color that you hover over so really it's behaving like the color picker in most standard painting apps so what if you're used to grabbing all those Styles is there a workaround for that yes there is I'm gonna grab my move tool and I'm going to grab the object that has the Styles applied to it that I want if I go over to my palettes on the right hand side and click on styles I can see them here then by clicking this little menu icon I could come down here and say add style from selection and it has just created that style for me so now when I select this object and click here I can pull all of those Styles over the other thing that you're gonna notice right away is just selecting objects really easy to click on an object to select it but if you want to select multiple objects in Adobe Illustrator you just take your move tool and you select them and as long as you grab like just a pixel of that object it is selected that's not the case an affinity designer an affinity designer you're gonna have to grab the entire object speaking of selecting things an affinity designer selecting multiple points is a little bit different than Adobe Illustrator an illustrator slice I'm on the white arrow tool I can just select what I need and move those points around affinity design is similar but if I just take my node tool and I drag to select I can't actually do that I have to select the object first then drag over my points in order to grab them this is such a tiny little thing that I didn't include it but I was always forgiving it within the first day or two that I was using the app number four I want to talk about modifying shape and Adobe Illustrator when you draw a shape you can use your little white arrow tool grab any node on that shape any anchor point on the tip and move it around it doesn't quite work this way an affinity designer and the reason why is shapes have their own parameters to them you can see as I draw this star that there are these little red nodes and when I hover over them you can see this little red line that lets me click on that and adjust that shape I can grab another one and I can change some dimensions there it's pretty cool and it's pretty powerful unfortunately in order to have these kind of extra effects associated with the shapes something needs to give and what gives is how it usually works in Adobe Illustrator with our white arrow tool and anchor points but don't worry you can still modify this in order to do this you have to first convert any shape that you draw into curves you could do that by right clicking and going to convert to curves or in this context menu that always appears right here we can go to convert to curves and I can click it there as well and as you can see this has created nodes out of that shape so I can go in and now I can modify it the way you would expect to modify it in Adobe Illustrator 5 converting nodes in Adobe Illustrator if I click and hold on the pen tool I get some more options one of those options is my Anchor Point tool it's this little wedge shape tool and if I use that on any of my points I can use that to turn that into a curve or grab one of my handlebars and adjust it in some way this tool works a little bit differently an affinity designer in fact that specific tool doesn't exist at all instead we have some options up here in our convert area if you're using the white arrow tool or the node tool you can convert any arc that you grab you can go up here and you can convert it by turning it into a sharp angle so that any selected nodes turn into sharp angles or I can go here and I can make them all smooth angles so any node selected become smooth angles once I turned something into a smooth angle I can come in here and I can adjust the curve as I need to 6 I want to talk about layers layers work differently an affinity designer than they do in Illustrator it's actually similar once you get the hang of it but at first it looks a little off every time I go into affinity designer and I draw a shape you're gonna see over on the right-hand side of my layer palette each one of those creates a new layer that's probably not the way to think about it because you can come down here and you can create your own layer if you'd like to and in fact I can take all of my things and drag them on here and now they are all part of that layer now if I create another layer this is a good way to group things while you're creating your illustration those three new shapes I drew are on this layer too so this works is a nice way to group thing so for example I could grab one layer and I can move everything at once or I could grab the other way and I could move everything at once I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna grab all three of these shapes that I'm going to change their color I'm gonna make them blue and I'm going to move them around so they overlap with some of my other shapes because there's this one other cool feature an affinity designer they that I do want to point out in the bottom left-hand corner of my layer palettes it's kind of hard to see there's a little icon if you hover over it it says edit all layers this is on by default but if I click that now I can only edit the objects that are on the layer that I've selected so since I'm on layer 2 if I highlight this entire thing I'm only gonna select things on layer 2 this is great if you're working on a complicated illustration and say you have a background middle ground foreground and you only want to edit things on that middle ground layer you can toggle that off and you don't have to accidentally worry about always clicking and dragging on the background number 7 is the effects I just like the effects infinity designers so I want to talk about to show how effects work we're gonna use this piece that we created in my affinity designer crash course so I'm gonna grab this foreground element here and there's already a shadow on there and I could just toggle that shadow on and off in my effects panel over here I can change the opacity I can make that drop shadow a lot darker I could make it a lot lighter I just like the ability to have my own effects panel right here in the app and it's really not that different than some of the things you can do in Illustrator but I think the way it's executed is done really well so for example if I grab the background I can go over here and I can add a Gaussian blur to give it some depth perception if I want it way in the background I could blur it way out or I could bring it in till it's just kind of visible but still blurry but even though it's blurred out I can still double-click in here and I could grab my layers and move them around so the effects work extraordinarily well here number 8 is raster stuff there's this concept an affinity designer called personas in the upper left hand corner we are currently in the draw persona that's like our vector persona but there's also a pixel persona and there's also an export persona I'm gonna click on the pixel persona and what this allows us to do is add all sorts of raster or bitmap effects if i zoom in here on my zombie you can see I've already added some effects on top of my vectors so let me scroll up to zombies head here and let's try some stuff out now that I've clicked into his head I'm gonna create a new layer and I'm gonna add a pixel layer so there's there's vector layers and there's pixel layers now I'm gonna grab my paintbrush and now I can come in here and I can spray paint in a little bit of texture you know right along the side of his head just like that and if I want to I could make it a lot lighter let's grab a lighter color and I could come in on the other side of his head and add add a little highlight now this works just like a Photoshop brush it is not a vector brush and so I'm adding these textures and if I want to I could just drag it down here and it becomes a mask just on that layer and then I can come over here I'm gonna close this thing really quick and when I change the opacity and some of the blending modes I've added a little bit of texture but what's great about affinity designers you can use this like a traditional drawing program it has everything you need selections and brushes erasers paint bucket tools all of that stuff how I used to work as I go to Adobe Photoshop I'd maybe sketch something out that looked like a pencil sketch I'd pull it into illustrator I would trace it out create all my vectors in Illustrator then I'd move my vectors back over to photoshop and add a whole bunch of layers and effects and now an affinity designer you can do all of that in the same program number nine is snap settings sometimes when you're using a program and you're drawing shapes are like why is it snapping there or why is it not snapping here sometimes when you're using a program in your drawing shapes you're saying why is it snapping here but it's not snapping there and it could get really frustrating and confusing sometimes when snapping works really well it's awesome and when it doesn't it is frustrating and one of the great things about affinity designer is up here there is a little mag that icon and if I click on the arrow next to it it gives me a whole bunch of granular options for how objects and shapes snap to each other first of all it's really easy to click this magnet and toggle all snapping on and off but you could go way into detail you could snap to grid snap to guides snap to the spread snap to margins and then even below that you can snap to gaps and sizes snap to shapes and key points snap to objects Yama tree you can even force pixel alignment so all of these options are right here and you can toggle them on and off you can even create presets so if you're drawing one kind of thing you can work one way drawing something else change to a different preset number 10 our our geometry tools in Adobe Illustrator these are called Pathfinder tools here in affinity designer they're called geometry tools and just by selecting some things you'll see up in the upper right we have a whole bunch of options we have add we have subtract we have intersect basically these work identically to what you're used to in Illustrator but they're already exposed for you so once you learn what these icons do you can say add okay now that's one shape I can grab these two shapes at the same time I can say subtract now I've cut a hole in that I could grab these three shapes that go over to intersect and change those around all of that is here it's just called something different and it's located in a different spot and number-11 just a little bonus one for you I wanted to talk about gradients and transparencies and how those work because they're kind of cool the easiest way to get a gradient is to use this tool over here on the left hand side called the fill tool it's cool about that is once I have a shape selected I just have to click on that shape and drag and I can create my gradient if I don't like it I can click and drag from another point and create it there and then there's this little line in the middle that lets me change my start and end point for my gradient in my context bar there's a little block that lets me open up my gradient and play with it a little more I can change it to an elliptical grade in I can change it to all sorts of things my conical gradients you can go crazy the other thing I have is a transparency tool which works similarly so if I grab this shave held on let me make it bigger so it kind of covers over part of that now over here on the left I'm gonna grab my transparency tool and now it works just like the gradient I can drag and click I could change the choke point on that gradient I can make it go down further if I don't like it I just drag and click it again and there you go now I have transparencies and gradients so those are my tips if you're jumping into affinity designer near use to Adobe Illustrator those are some things you should know it's all I've got if you've been using affinity designer for a long time or you just want to pass along your own tips let me know down in the comments below or if there's something Infinity designer where you're like just how do I do that let me know that in the comments as well it's all I've got for today I'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 292,151

Keywords: affinity, affinity designer, adobe, adobe illustrator, switching, 10 tips, things to know, vector, drawing, illustration

Id: EeFmmY1802g

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Tue May 29 2018