Affinity Designer for beginners

In this lecture you will get an impression of the location of toolbars. Then you will learn how to create a new document and also set the background to transparent. Next you will see how to create some basic shapes, to do some transforms and convert them to curves. Finally you will learn the absolute basics of layers.

In this lecture you will learn how the Boolean operations work in Affinity designer. Operations like Add, Substract, Intersect, Divide and Combine. Finally I will explain how the pencil tool works and how to generate a fill for it.

When using the pen tool you will access the actions and snaps. Here I will go through all of these actions and snaps. I will discuss: Break curve, Close curve, Smooth curve, Join curves, Reverse curves, Snap to selected curves, Snap to geometry, Snap all when draging.

Here you will learn how the corner tool works with all of its settings. Corner types, and Bake Corners will be explained.

In this lesson you will learn how to use the stroke settings. Cap, Join, Align, Draw behind fill, Scale with object, Mitre, Dash and its settins will be explained.

In this lesson you will learn how to use the vector brush tool. How to select new brush styles and how to use the basic blending modes.

Here the most powerfill tool in Affinity designer will be explained: the symbols. You can compare it with instances. With this tool you can do beautifull symmetrical designs. I will also explain how to disable sync for a while to do some changes to a single symbol.

The fill tool will be explained in detail. All of the fill types, Maintain aspect ratios, reverse gradient, rotate gradient will be explained.

Be ware that the project file is included! In this part I will explain how to create a new document with the correct settings. Next I will create the grass with the pen tool and corner tool. I will use the Paste Inside, use symbols and some Boolean operations to create the raw shapes of the castle.

In part 2, I will continue with creating the gate. Here I will show you how to fake shadows and to use the Flip Horizontal button. I will also use the Tear tool, create a shape with a doubble stroke, create the flag using the setting to join/close curves. Finally I will generate some trees.

In part 3 you will learn how to create a radially arranged flower and create clouds out of rectangles. Next you will learn how to create a fence with fake shadows using symbols. Then change the colour settings ready for print (I forgot to do this in the beginning of the course), use the vector crop tool and export the project to png.

Project file included.
Be ware to enable Force pixel alignment and Move by whole pixels (and enable snapping if you need it) before proceeding.
In part 1, you will learn how to create your document using artboards. Next we will create two artboards (one for a narrow mobile website and one for a regular), create a title with the rounded rectangle tool and the Artistic text tool. We are going to apply some layer effects. Then use symbols and snapping to create a pattern. Next you will create a tillable pattern and generate a new artboard of it. Then you will create a shadow effect using the fill tool.

In this lesson you will learn how to create a lollypop using the pen tool, ellipse tool, rectangle tool, paste inside and layer effects. You will also create a new pattern and generate artboards.

In part 3 you will create the buttons for the website and populate the regulare website artboard.

Part 4 is mainly fixing problems. You will learn how to fix overlapping artboards and how to deal with a project if you forget to turn on Force pixel alignment (which will cause unwanted borders around the exported images). We will also start exporting the images to RocketCake and create the first containers.

Part 5. Here we will continue building the website in RocketCake. We will use containers to place the backgrounds and use image to import and position the title image. We will also see how the website reacts on resizing. We will add the buttons, delete them (to use a different method) and use a template and MasterPage to create a uniform template for the rest of the website. Next we will recreate the buttons in a index.html page

In Part 6 we will preview the website in the explorer. Next we will create 6 new pages for all of the buttons to link to. We will add text, links, images and a youtube video to the website. Finally I will show you how to export your website to your hosting platform.

In this lecture you will learn how to instantly draw symmetrical shapes in Affinity Designer.

In this lecture you will learn how to create copies of your shape/drawing along a curve. Just as text along a path.

In this lesson I will try to explain you what the difference is between raster and vector images. In affinity you can create both. So if you are going to use raster images, you need to directly choose the resolution you want to end up with. Of course I will also explain about resolutions and dimensions.

In this lesson, I will go through the different presets for creating a new document (the first thing you do opening Affinity Designer). I will explain why the presets come in handy to work with.

Quick video explaining how to use opacity and export for use in other applications

Learn how to create inner opacity using two shapes. Also learn how to create opacity inside the shape, add custom strokes and add text.