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Affinity Designer is a vector or raster app. It’s a competitor to Adobe’s Illustrator and allows you to design various elements for print or digital publication.
It’s part of the Affinity package of design tools made by Serif. Use it to do anything from making a business card to mock up an app. Affinity Designer is made for Mac iOS, Windows, and the iPad.
Here, we’ve collected some of the best for everyone from beginners to more seasoned pros, a mix of video and written tutorials. It’s a great place to start for upskilling with your first steps in Affinity Designer!
Affinity Designer UI Overview
If you are new to Affinity Designer or just want an overview of the tool and what it looks like before making a purchase, this UI overview is the place to start. The video lasts less than 5 minutes and walks through the user interface, highlighting a few key elements of the software.
Affinity Designer: The File Menu
Another beginner tutorial, this video takes you through the file menu and looks at each option and how to use it. Rory Townsend, who made the video, also has similar video tutorials with each of the other menu options to help you really get a good hold on all the things you can do with Affinity Designer and where each individual tool or option is located in the menu.
Affinity Designer: 10 Basics
This is the ultimate getting started video guide for Affinity Designer, with all the basics in one video. You’ll learn how to get started with a new document, use premade and custom shapes, work with colors, see how layers work, combine shapes, work with vectors and the vector brush and pen tools, add text to a file, and save and export. It’s all in an easy to follow video and you can get all this information in less than 20 minutes. Plus, the video host Jesse Showalter, has plenty of energy so this tutorial anything but boring.
Affinity Designer Basic Logo Design
Affinity Designer is a tool that allows you to work with vector or raster images. That means you can create logos that can be scaled for any use with the software. In this tutorial, you walk through all the steps to create a simple vector logo using tools in Affinity Designer.
How to Create a Flat Vector Illustration in Affinity Designer
Because of vector functionality, Affinity Designer can also be used to create illustrations. This tutorial takes you through the steps to create a flat illustration, such as the example above, that you can apply to full-scale illustrations, logo, or icon design. The tutorial includes step-by-step instructions and plenty of screenshots that you can use to follow along on your own.
Using the Layers Panel
Using layers and groups is a powerful function that can help keep files organized and a lot easier to manage. Using them in Affinity Designer is fairly easy. Learn everything you need to know about layers and groups in this short video from the makers of the software.
How to Create an Icon in Affinity Designer
Icon design is something almost everyone comes across at some point. Affinity Designer is the perfect tool for creating all manner of icons. This tutorial takes you through the process step-by-step, and even includes some bonus information such as how to choose the right size when designing an icon and how to use various tools. Every step includes screenshots to make understanding easy.
Symbols in Affinity Designer
Using symbols as linked objects allow you to edit one element and it impacts everything in the design. Adobe premiere pro cc 2017 dmg. (This is an awesome feature.) This tutorial shows you how to use symbols as intelligent linked objects for great global editing capability. (Learn this pro trick in less than 5 minutes!)
Using Text Effects
Text manipulations can be somewhat controversial. Purists say you should never mess with a typeface, but sometimes you have to use certain effects to make it work for your project. This Affinity Design tutorial shows you how to do just that. You’ll get an introduction to text effect manipulations in this easy to follow video.
How to Create Patterns in Affinity Designer
Patterns have a lot of practical use from website backgrounds to the main artwork for a poster or brochure. From subtle repeating shapes to something a little bolder, there are a few different ways to create a pattern in Affinity Designer. This tutorial explores three options. Note there are a lot of steps here, but the instructions and screenshots are easy to follow. Don’t let the depth of the lesson intimidate you.
Affinity Designer for iPad
The recording of a live session provides an overview of everything you need to use Affinity Designer effectively on an iPad. You’ll get an overview of tools and the software as well as creating specific things (a playing card, book cover, and poster) using tablet-based tools. The tutorial lasts over an hour and is comprehensive.
Pen Tool Masking in Affinity Designer
Use the Pen tool in Affinity Designer to create a dynamic mask of a selection of an image and apply modifications. This is a cool feature that can take some time to learn and this tutorial gives you a jumpstart.
Shapes Around a Curved Line in Affinity Designer
In less than 5 minutes, you can apply shapes to a curved line. You’ll learn how to create a brush from a shape and use that to apply to any shape or size of curved line. The tutorial explains this function clearly and shows how to apply this highly functional feature.
Advanced Color Features in Affinity Designer
You can create, save, and store colors and fills in Affinity Designer. This is great for palettes that will be reused so you don’t have to manually renter color mixes every time. Using these advanced color features is easy to learn if you know the tricks offered in this video tutorial.
Everything You Need to Know About Affinity Designer Brushes
Brushes can help speed workflows and allow you to create custom stroke styles. This tutorial shows you how to use the tool including basics of the brushes panel, how to set up vector or raster brushes, how to create your own brushes, how to install brush packs, and how to use brushes from Photoshop or Illustrator.
Affinity Designer Point Transform Tool
Use the point transform tool to change the look of a geometric shape in Affinity Designer. This tool lets you change shapes and alters the look of objects.
Web Authoring Tool
Advanced Axonometric Grid Setup
An axonometric grid shows a three-dimensional object at a skewed angle so you can see multiple sides in the illustration. Affinity Designer allows you to set up an axonometric grid for projects. This tutorial takes you through creating the custom setup.
Affinity Designer Templates
We're covering the basics of Affinity Designer, helpful tutorials, comparisons with other apps, and the best templates and assets to use.
If you are an illustrator or graphic designer, chances are you have used an Adobe product at least once. Maybe you’ve been using them for years. Unfortunately, not every designer and illustrator has the funds to pay the Adobe subscription every month. Thankfully there are other options out there. From free apps like Inkscape to one time purchase apps like Affinity Designer. In this Affinity Designer Review, we’ll take a look at Affinity Designer from the workspace to the tools. We’ll look at the pros and cons so you can make a decision for yourself if you want to try it out.
A Little Background on Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer was created by Serif, a software company in the UK. They created a large number of software for Windows in the span of 20 years. What they learned during that time is that software with a heavy load of legacy code was bloated and slow. They decided to create a new suite of desig software that would have little bloat and be faster to use.
Their first project in 2014 was Affinity Designer, intended as an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Now the suite consists of three software programs, Designer, Photo and Publisher. Both Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo are available for Mac and Windows, as well as iPad apps.
Let’s take a look at Affinity Designer for desktop and iPad. I will give you an overview of the software and some pros and cons towards the end.
Affinity Designer Personas
The most loved aspect of Affinity Designer (apart from the one-time-pay system) is the Personas toggle. Designers can use Affinity Designer in three different personas; Designer Persona, Pixel Persona and Export Persona. The value in this toggle is that designers can switch from a vector workspace to a pixel workspace with one click. It’s like Illustrator and Photoshop together in one place.
Designer Persona is the default workspace to create vector graphics. The workspace for the designer persona has tools for drawing shapes and curves, vector brushes, fill and stroke options, transparency controls, and place and crop tools for images. The Designer Persona is the most similar to Adobe Illustrator. A significant tool in both personas is the Pixel Preview button. This viewing tools instantly shows you how a vector graphic would look as a raster graphic in both normal and retina screens.
Pixel Persona is a raster workspace with tools that resemble Photoshop tools. There are different shape marquee tools, a freehand selection tool, artistic pixel brushes, an eraser, a pixel tool which set solitary pixels on the canvas. Apart from those, there are also photo manipulation tools like dodge, burn, smudge, blur, and sharpen. 1password mac app store. The brush tool in the Pixel Persona comes with many artistic brush options. This feature on its own has made Affinity Designer a favorite with digital painters and artists.
Export Persona is a space where designers can select areas of their canvas and export as new graphics.
The Affinity Designer Ipad Advantage
Affinity Designer has a powerful iPad version with almost the same tools as the desktop version. In fact, the Affinity Designer iPad App is one of the best iPad design apps on the market. The Apple pencil works seamlessly with both the Designer Persona and Pixel Persona tools. In Affinity Designer, points are called “nodes” and they are infinitely customizable on their own.
The Affinity Designer iPad has to be purchased separately from the desktop App. Once both are set up and you are logged in, the platforms communicate with each other so projects are updated seamlessly on desktop and iPad.
When comparing the Affinity Designer iPad App to the Adobe Illustrator Draw App, the Affinity Designer App is definitely better. If on the other hand, if we compare the Affinity Designer iPad App to Procreate for iPad, each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Both are amazing for illustrators and digital artists and it really comes down to a personal preference.
Affinity Designer Pros and Cons
All in all, Affinity Designer is a rockstar alternative to Adobe Illustrator. When designers switch from Adobe to Affinity, it’s usually due to the economic factor, but then they end up loving the features and the workspace. Nevertheless, Affinity designer has a few cons in comparison to Adobe Illustrator. Thankfully though, it’s not enough to say that Affinity Designer is way behind Adobe Illustrator.
As part of our Affinity Designer review, here is a list of the pros and cons for Affinity Designer for Desktop and iPad.
The Pros
- The undo button can be pressed up to 8000 times. Meaning that there is pretty much no limit to how far back you can go in the design history. Added on to that, when a project is closed and openend again, the design history is still available. It doesn’t reset.
- Designs can have more than one stroke or fill. Numerous strokes and fills can be applied to single objects. This permits the designer to create many layers of depth in their art.
- When you click on a tool, the bottom bar showcases all the ways in which to use that tool. When to click, drag or use click + keyboard shortcuts.
- The pen tool and strokes have a customizable arrow ending.
- The Affinity Designer iPad App is a huge pro for the software.
- There is no legacy code bloat in the software, making Affinity Designer faster and lighter to work with.
- Affinity Designer doesn’t have a subscription based system. It’s a one time pay software.
- The ability to toggle between vector and pixel workspaces with the different personas.
- The zoom function is off the charts at 1000000%.
- The isometric grid helps designers create isometric and 2D designs seamlessly.
- On both desktop and iPad, the nodes can be personalized for curvature and angle. This is a huge plus for illustrators.
The Cons
- The multiple strokes and fills option works for only one object at a time and not on text or groups of objects.
- You can’t export files as AI, which some clients are insistent on having.
- There is no natural perspective grid. Not all designer use this, but for those who do it’s a big con.
- The Designer Persona doesn’t have a vector eraser which makes editing small vector errors a bit messy.
Who is Affinity Designer For
Affinity Designer is perfect for illustrators and graphic designers who regularly work with vector graphics and raster images at the same time. Due to how the workspace can toggle back and forth from vector to pixel, it’s also a favorite with digital painters. There are lots of interestings effects which can be achieved by using both personas at the same time.
If as a designer, you work with clients that are always asking for Adoibe Illustrator source files, then Affinity Designer will not be of great help. If you can send PDFs of your designs, then Affinity Designer can give you everything you need.
Conclusion
Web Authoring Affinity Designer Download
In this Affinity Designer review we showed you the basic ins and outs of the software to give you an idea of what the program can do.
In conclusion, Affinity Designer is a great software for designers, illustrators and digital artists. Not only as an alternative to Adobe Illustrator, but also on its own. Since the software has a one-time-pay, it is much more accessible. Especially for students or freelancers at a moment where they can’t afford to pay the monthly subscriptions of Adobe products
Web Authoring Applications
Along with Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, the Serif owned design suite can easily replace Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign. All Affinity software have a one week free trial if you want to try them out for yourself before committing to the purchase.
Featured image via PROKOPEVA IRINA / shutterstock.com | Affinity Designer Screenshots courtesy of the Affinity Designer Press Kit
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