Affinity Designer Tutorials

A Selection of Tutorials - Learn Affinity Designer

Here are a series of video tutorials you can use to learn how to do things in Affinity Designer. Designer is an amazing application which benefits from not being a subscription service. Many people are changing from Adobe products to using other software because of the need to pay for Adobe on a monthly basis. Affinity Designer by Serif is a highly accomplished vector design application. There are some things it doesn’t do compared to what’s possible with Adobe Illustrator. For the most part and for most people Affinity Designer will do the job, and do it elegantly. In the past in my pre-Mac days I used to use CorelDraw on a daily basis for my sign writing business. It was fantastic software and was perfect for what I used it for. It took me a long time to find similar software to use on the Mac. Affinity Designer certainly fills my needs for vector artwork creation.

Answering Affinity Designer Questions

There’s a Facebook channel for Affinity Designer and people are often asking how to do things in the software. I quite like to make a video to answer these questions. Sometimes I have to learn how to do the task myself first of all. I quite like learning how to do something new and to pass the information on. Even though for some of the things there are already tutorial videos covering some of these processes already. I’m often able to put my own spin on it and to show things that got missed in other videos. I’ve made a video showing you how to place vector art inside text. There is a tutorial showing how to remove the background from a photo whilst using Affinity Designer. You can find out how to use the Affinity Designer vector crop tool and also how to do something simple like making a trapezoid shape. Have a look at the video in which I detail how to put text on a curve.

Making a Copy Of A Design In Affinity Designer

I took the bitmap of the design someone wanted to copy. I put it on to the working area in Affinity Designer. I sized it up to make it fit the working space. It’s a good idea to lock the reference layer so when you’re putting things on top you don’t accidentally move your it. The first thing I did was to place a rectangle to be the background for the design. I can start putting things on top using the Affinity Designer tools.

The centre part of the design are three letters which have been altered to make into a logo. The easiest way to do this was to trace the straight edges of the letters using the pen tool. I had snapping working for me making it easy to have the new nodes line up. If I hadn’t done that I would have used guides. After getting the nodes for the letters in mostly the right places I was able to go to the node editing tool and fine tune the shapes.In the design there is a shape which goes around the centre part of the logo and is broken up by text at the top and the bottom of it. It was simple to create this shape by making two rectangles and using the internal rectangle to cut out the inside of the shape. This made a frame and I placed two more rectangles on top to remove the area by using Subtract, where the text was going to go.

I show one way of putting a bitmap pattern or texture into a design. This is to do it on a per shape basis. With this design it was easier to to put the single copy of each of the backgrounds behind the main shape. I then used the Boolean tools to do a cookie cutter allowing these backgrounds to show through. It was necessary then to mask certain areas of the uppermost bitmap pattern allowing the lower pattern to be shown in the right places.The main logo letters also included an outline. I added a copy of the letter A on top, made the fill empty and added an outline in white. Where I had used the method of making the background mask with the rest of the letters I would have had to make copies of those before using the Boolean tools. Failing that, I could have also just use the pen tool to recreate the shapes. Sometimes it’s necessary to do some planning beforehand to work out the best way of doing the job or to find workarounds. I could have made a copy of the cookie cutter shape and deleted what I didn’t need to do the job.

The marble effect in the background of the main letters was easy to apply. I didn’t have anything quite so similar to the gold coloured background for the letter E and the word ‘ELITE’. This was just for a tutorial so didn’t really matter too much. If it was a job for yourself then you would have spent more time looking for the right background or pattern. The text was similar to the font Arial Black and for many people it would have been good enough. For a professional job you would identify the proper font for the job.

Affinity Designer Versus Illustrator

I did try using Illustrator for a short while, a few years ago. I didn’t like it in comparison to CorelDraw and is seemed to be more difficult to do some of the things I found easy to do in my previously preferred vector design software. This hasn’t been the case with my use of Affinity Designer. Most of the things I want to do with the illustrations I’d like to produce, can be done easily using this software. The one main thing missing, is the vector warp tool. Hopefully we’ll get the ability to warp the vector shapes we create and keep them as vector shapes. If you have Affinity Photo it’s possible to warp your design, but you have to turn those parts of the design into raster, bitmap artwork. If you need to make text into warped shapes you can do it on a shape by shape, letter by letter basis. Whether you would do this or not depends upon the complexity and amount of text you need to work with.

Affinity Designer is highly accomplished software and it gets the Good and Geeky recommendation and a huge thumbs up.