Serif have made available the new versions with a 40% discount from what the price is going to be as standard. If you buy the whole kit and caboodle it’s costing €119 and that covers all three applications across three platforms. I use these applications across the Mac and iOS platforms and that makes it a no-brainer to buy the full set of applications. At least we don’t have to think about how much it’s going to cost with a subscription. Of course there have been some people complaining about the cost. Maybe they’ve only recently bought version one, and that would be justified if they only did it last month. I suspect if they talked to the company they might get some sort of deal in a special circumstance. It’s possible just to buy whatever you need and the cost could be fairly low.

Since this new version of Affinity Designer arrived I’ve been busy making videos to put onto YouTube. Affinity Designer tutorials 2022 showing users how to do things with the software. Most days I’ve been able to create a YouTube shorts video and also a longer video. The longer video going into more detail and highlighting certain aspects of the app with the shorts. If you haven’t already subscribe to the Good and Geeky channel then go and subscribe now. You’ll be able to keep up-to-date with the new tutorials I make as they become available.

First Impressions Of Affinity Designer Version 2

On the surface it doesn’t look too different from the previous version. However, there are additions which are especially welcome, such as the vector warp tool. This is something designers have been waiting for for a long time, the ability to warp vectors without them being turned into bitmaps during the process. It’s surprising it’s taken them so long to add this, because I remember when I used to use CorelDraw it had that ability. That was over 20 years ago. When you’re working on design it’s quite often you want to warp text to fit into a specific shape. When you tried to do it before it would send you over to the Affinity Photo Application and do the warp. The problem with that was, when it came back it was a bitmap. This might not be a problem, if you was doing it at the end of a design process and no more changes were going to be made. That’s not really the way the world works. When you give the design to someone or it’s a design you’re working on over a longer period, it’s highly likely you’re going to make changes to the design a number of times. It’s definitely necessary to keep your design as a vector to make it easy to make changes when you go back to it later.

Affinity Designer Warp Tool

The Affinity Designer warp tool works fairly well. You have a number of different types of warps available. There are simple ones such as quad and perspective. These are fine to use if you’re just using the four corner nodes to distort your design. I found when I put a quad warp onto anything and then changed any of the sides of it to a curve, it turned into a mesh type warp. A simple mesh with just the four corners which is different from the mesh you get from the Affinity Designer warp choices. The Mesh Warp has more nodes in it in the centre of the rectangle.

Can’t Warp Bitmaps in Affinity Designer

It isn’t possible to warp a bitmap file such as a PNG file or a JPEG file from within Affinity Designer. What you have to do is to send it off to Affinity Photo to get that picture warped to fit a perspective or whatever other shape you need it. When doing this on my new MacBook Pro M1 Max it takes no time at all to swap to the other application and apply the shape needed. Bringing it back into Affinity Designer happens in a split second. I found it best to create the shape I wanted to have a bitmap fit into, in Affinity Designer first. This made everything ready to go when I got to Affinity Photo. Watch the video to see how I did it.

There are two warps which will put a curve in a text to either vertically or horizontally. It kind of curves in on itself rather than making a curve of the text similar to when you put the text on a curve / ellipse. There is a Fish-Eye Warp and a Twist Warp which have the ability to really mess up the shapes you are working on. It’s a good job these tools are easy to recover from. Click on the Reset Button to get it back to the starting point, or hit the Mute Warp button. It’s fun to play with these warp tools and get all sorts of weird shapes happening. I found that if you rotate the object the warp doesn’t rotate with it. So you get unexpected weird changes happening when you do that. Something to watch out for as you work

The Affinity Designer Shape Builder Tool

It was always possible to put shapes together, cut them up or dissect them with the simple compound shape building tools available before. You could take two objects and put one over the top of the other, use the add tool and make one object out of the two. Or you could use one object as a cookie cutter to cut a shape out of the other object. There is the intersect tool and the XOR options which remove various parts and leaves other parts of your objects. These tools are still available in Affinity Designer Version 2. What they have added is another tool which extends what those older tools could do. The new Shape Builder tool is more interactive and in some ways is easier to work with. So if you have a couple of shapes overlapping and selected you can choose how you want to deal with them. The first choice would be to use the add tool. Then you would choose how you want to select which bits to keep. You use a line, a freehand line or a marquee selection. I prefer using the freehand line which works best when I’m working with the Magic Touch Pad. I can easily draw over the areas I want to keep or delete by moving my finger around on the track pad. Have a look at the video to see how this works. If you have two objects, perhaps two circles which are overlapping that gives you three areas. You need to run your selection line across all three areas you want to join together.

Using The Symbols Tool

I don’t think this is a new tool for version two of Affinity Designer, but I have made a video using it within this new version. It’s a really good productivity tool. You may have a design where you have the same shape repeated in numerous places. Using the symbol tool you can create extra instances of objects or group of objects. Whenever you change one of these you will change all of them. It’s also possible to go in and make changes just to one of the shapes that has to be different for whatever design reason. Change everything about the object from the colour, shape, stroke size and effects and still keep all of the other instances of the object in sync.

Have a look at the video and see how it works. I found that it can be a little bit fiddly sometimes. You have to make sure you select the correct object in the layers panel to make sure that you change everything within that shape and have it synchronised across all of the other linked objects. It isn’t too difficult to get the hang of it if you give it some practice and spend time using it. While I was testing it I did find a couple of times I messed up I had to go back to the start with one of my objects. I found it difficult to detach the synchronisation and then reattach it afterwards. I think it’s just a case of practice though.