
Explore Affinity Designer foundations as the instructor outlines structure, video navigation, bookmarks, captions and transcripts, plus a paper cue approach to learning keyboard shortcuts, Designer two updates and new tools.
Create and manipulate basic shapes in Affinity Designer foundations by drawing rectangles and ellipses and adjusting colors. Use the move, rotate, and resize tools with precise controls.
Master layers in Affinity Designer 2 by manipulating the layer stack, nesting shapes, and establishing parent–child relationships to move grouped objects together with precise clipping and color control.
Create a 1024 by 1024 square canvas in affinity designer and build a Mondrian-inspired composition using vector shapes, the eyedropper to sample colors, and a document palette.
Explore snapping to edges and centers while arranging rectangles in Affinity Designer. Learn to manage layers and groups, adjust stacking, and use front stacking and visibility for Mondrian-style compositions.
Customize your Affinity Designer 1.9 workspace by using view studio presets to dock panels and place Gaussian blur controls for efficient text work with a DC general text setup.
Learn to create and transform vector shapes in Affinity Designer, using the rectangle tool, color palettes, and transform origin to align, rotate, and snap shapes accurately.
Trace and match shapes in Affinity Designer by rasterizing vectors to pixels, using rectangle and ellipse tools, and refining with transform origin, snapping, and eyedropper color.
Explore built-in shapes in Affinity Designer using the little red dots to adjust radii and independent curves, then create polygons and stars with snap-to guides.
Explore stroke properties in Affinity Designer, adjusting caps, joins, dashes, and a miter; examine line alignment, stroke order, scale with object, opacity, and thickness variation via the pressure graph.
Explore the quick grid tool in Affinity Designer: drag shapes, duplicate with arrow keys, adjust spacing with modifiers, and learn when to commit by releasing the mouse.
Explore how the corner tool and nodes in Affinity Designer let you add points, create and edit curves with direction handles, and convert shapes to curves for flexible, resolution-independent designs.
Practice time guides tracing shapes in Affinity Designer using the node and corner tools, converting to curves and adjusting points, with opacity, snapping, and rounded corners to build complex shapes.
Master boolean operations in Affinity Designer to combine, subtract, intersect, xor, and divide shapes into editable logos, then use compound shapes and the history panel for non-destructive editing.
Tackle your first serious project by building a fire engine from simple shapes in a coloring book style, tracing sketches, and organizing with groups and layers.
Learn to order shapes and groups in the layer stack, move items to front or back, and use shortcuts to jump to the top or bottom; flip and rotate shapes.
Build a fire engine vector in Affinity Designer by shaping the cab with straight and rounded edges, converting to curves. Use snapping, transform values, and the alignment tool for precision.
Learn to use the alignment tool in affinity designer to align and distribute multiple shapes, using selection bounds, left/right/center alignment, and adjustable spacing with auto distribute.
Build the fire engine cab in Affinity Designer by aligning and snapping rounded rectangles, creating wheels and mud guards, and managing groups and layering for precision.
Apply boolean operations in Affinity Designer to construct and refine the mid section of a fire engine, using precise shapes, radii, groups, and snapping for a clean compound shape.
Reuse shapes like wheels and squares from the fire engine, apply powered duplicate, and manage layers, guides, snapping, and stroke and fill to finish a clean vector illustration.
Create a new file in affinity designer using web or print presets, explore color spaces and formats like rgb, cmyk, and grayscale, and set margins and bleed.
Learn how RGB and CMYK color spaces govern color on screens and in print, with additive vs subtractive mixing, white point, and Adobe RGB and Pro Photo RGB roles.
Open dwg and dxf files in Affinity Designer 2, importing CAD drawings as editable shapes with background transparency and override line weights.
Discover how color spaces affect available colors in Affinity Designer, compare Pro Photo RGB, sRGB, and CMYK profiles, and learn to align document setup with printer guidance.
Master the pencil tool in Affinity Designer to draw curves and edit nodes. Adjust stroke width, color, and end point while exploring layers and boolean mode.
Discover why the pencil tool is fiddly for vector sketches with a mouse and many points, and why a better tool speeds clean designs in Affinity Designer.
Master the pen tool in Affinity Designer, building curves with nodes and direction handles. Convert shapes to curves, manage strokes and fills, and edit nodes with modifier keys.
Explore advanced pen tool techniques in Affinity Designer, including closing and breaking curves, managing nodes, and converting between smooth and sharp points to create precise shapes.
Master the pen tool and snapping in Affinity Designer to snap to geometry and selected nodes, align curves precisely, and manage multiple selections with transform and alignment handles.
Master Affinity Designer 1.9's select by name and select same to quickly group hair strands, fur, and leaves, then tag colors and adjust stroke weight, blur, and opacity.
Compare the pen tool with the pencil tool in Affinity Designer by focusing on drawing fewer points for smoother curves, planning draw order, and using command keys to adjust nodes.
Learn to use warp mesh tool in Affinity Designer 2 to bend shapes with mesh and quad modes, adjust with control handles, and convert to curves to bake the effect.
Explore the shape building tool in Affinity Designer version two, turning simple shapes into one solid form with snapping to object geometry, wireframe view, and precise alignment.
Learn to use the shape building tool with a pencil sketch to build a dragon's body, eyes, teeth, and spines in Affinity Designer, with curves, nodes, and duplicates.
Learn the knife tool in Affinity Designer 2: slice shapes, undo easily, and switch between rope and window modes to draw sharp or soft curves.
Master the measuring and area tools in Affinity Designer 2 for CAD drawings, with DPI adjustments and pixel-layer workarounds.
Learn to convert a pixel-based brain illustration into crisp vector outlines using affinity designer, mastering the pencil tool to create a main outline and inner lines.
Refine a brain illustration by adjusting strokes and colors, lowering the base opacity to emphasize visibility, then restore outer and inner lines with precise thickness and color tweaks.
Explore global versus local colors in Affinity Designer by applying a global color palette to car sketches, and see how changes propagate across objects.
Explore dynamic line work in Affinity Designer by varying stroke width with pressure, adding control points, and shaping thick and thin sections to create expressive car outlines.
Explore color spaces in affinity designer, learning rgb, CMYK, hex codes, and LAB color spaces, and master how bit depth, profiles, and sliders affect color in design.
Create and manage custom color palettes in affinity designer by deriving palettes from images or documents, exporting as application or system palettes, and exploring color codes and complementary tones.
Discover how Affinity Designer's vector brush lets you see and customize brush strokes in real time, compare it with the pencil tool, and apply varied brush styles, colors, and widths.
Explore the transparency tool to sculpt opacity along shapes, using linear, radial, and elliptical gradients, adjust bias and midpoint, and control axis independence for brush strokes and shapes.
Use the fill tool to create and edit gradients by adding and coloring nodes, adjusting opacity, and shaping bias and midpoint, with options from linear to radial, elliptical, and conical.
Explore creating and refining color gradients with the fill tool in Affinity Designer, using radial gradients, gradient nodes, color swatches, and group-aware applications to craft car gradients.
Explore Affinity Designer 1.9's contour tool to create and refine outlines, tweak colors, apply gaussian blur, and build complex shading by expanding or contracting shapes.
Explore how the history panel and alternate undo work in Affinity Designer, using cycle futures to view alternate histories, set visibility, and revert to earlier points.
Design a web page mockup from scratch using guides, margins, snapping, and image placement to learn workflow and begin exploring the tax tool and layout concepts.
Master global colors and an application palette in Affinity Designer, then arrange, group, and align images for a web page mockup with a top banner and footer.
Add text to a web page mockup using artistic and frame text tools, choose web-safe fonts like Arial, manage colors with a global palette, and organize header elements.
This lesson demonstrates using frame text versus artistic text to build a web page mockup, resize text boxes, group elements, and adjust document setup for flexible workflow.
Master text layout in Affinity Designer by setting up an A4 page with bleed and margins. Place and fade images, then build two-column text guides for clean typography.
Explore different kinds of fonts in Affinity Designer, from sans serif and serif to script and handwritten, and learn to adjust bleed, kerning, and convert text to curves.
Explore the Affinity Designer character panel to manage fonts, colors, gradients, and text effects, including favorites and outlines, and master kerning, tracking, baseline shift, and leading for optical typography.
Explore open type fonts, ligatures and glyphs in Affinity Designer, including Georgia's open type features, ligature use, and the glyph browser for Greek symbols and Spanish tilde.
Explore the frame text tool in Affinity Designer, fill frames with text, adjust fonts, paragraph spacing, alignment, and justification, and create reusable styles to streamline layout.
Master text on a circular path in Affinity Designer by using artistic text, start/end indicators, and path alignment; adjust kerning, baseline, and gradients to fit text inside shapes.
Explore the point transform tool in Affinity Designer: move the transform pivot, rotate and scale shapes by selecting points, with snapping on or off, and observe text baseline behavior.
Design a logo for a jar air freshener by turning rough sketches into shapes with the pen tool, guides, and a seven-petal motif.
Design a logo by expanding strokes into shapes, converting lines to curves, and adjusting nodes and pivot points, then build diffuser sticks and create a flexible symbol.
Master symbols in Affinity Designer by using a single symbol to drive multiple instances, synchronize edits, and detach variations for client requests.
Use the grid and snapping tools in Affinity Designer to build precise ukulele chord diagrams, customize grid presets, and create reusable symbols for consistent diagrams and client edits.
Create and align fret diagrams using the grid and snapping in Affinity Designer, detaching symbols to edit safely and maintain synchronization for an efficient workflow.
Learn to build a multi-slide presentation in Affinity Designer, using symbol libraries, art boards, and background lines, while optimizing for 800 by 600 projectors and practical design decisions—no PowerPoint tutorial.
Learn to build a bold title and body copy in Affinity Designer by selecting a sans serif font, centering text, applying bright yellow, and adding outer shadow, with safe-area margins.
Build reusable templates in affinity designer 1.8 to enforce house style, manage swatches and global colors, and use adjustment layers for flexible, non-destructive background color variations.
Organize and reuse design assets in the assets panel by creating client-specific categories, dragging items from the screen, and exporting backups for easy reuse in PowerPoint-style presentations.
Update the asset library by replacing the old logo and adjust its size and color on slides. Save and export updated templates, backups, and share changes with the studio.
Build a presentation in Affinity Designer using art boards to create sequential slides from a template, align text and logo, and name boards for easy client edits and export.
Duplicate slide, add stock images, and clip photos into framed elements for a balanced presentation. Explore the stock photos library, download royalty-free images, adjust sizes, align text, and refine colors.
Double click the embedded document, copy its contents, and paste them as individual objects after removing the embedded layer to prevent slide edits; then adjust logos, colors, and effects safely.
Apply layer effects and styles in affinity designer to enhance text and logos. Experiment with outer shadow, bevel and embossed, gaussian blur, color overlays, and blend modes.
Explore how to create and apply paragraph, character, and group styles in Affinity Designer, enabling rapid, consistent text across a web page mockup.
Master text styles in Affinity Designer by creating paragraph, character, and group styles to quickly apply and edit fonts, sizes, tracking, and emphasis across long text projects.
Create and manage text styles in Affinity Designer by building character and group styles from a base, applying color, italics, and decorations, and using inheritance to streamline documents.
Explore the appearance panel to stack multiple strokes and fills, adjusting color and blend modes. Use expand stroke and outline view to convert to separate objects and control edges.
Discover the style picker in Affinity Designer 2, load styles with the Alt key from color picker, and drag them across objects to copy character settings, stroke, and layer effects.
Compare vector shapes and pixels in Affinity Designer's pixel persona, noting dpi, anti aliasing, and rasterization, then learn to edit photos and paint with pixel brushes for natural media.
Affinity Designer can import Photoshop files with smart objects, but smart filters are baked into the layer, limiting re-editing of liquify and Camera Raw.
Learn to crop and rotate images in Affinity Designer by placing photos, using a clipping rectangle, and adjusting with non destructive adjustment layers such as levels to fine tune brightness.
Use adjustment layers in Affinity Designer to perform non-destructive edits, and adjust dark to light values with levels, gamma, and histogram for richer contrast while preserving detail.
Adjust white balance to correct color casts using white balance and tint sliders, color picker readings, and layer-based adjustments; handle sun, clouds, and tungsten lighting while avoiding false neutral assumptions.
Master color balance to prepare photos for design, leveraging levels and white balance, and adjust shadows, midtones, and highlights to preserve luminosity.
Explore how curves adjust tonal values and contrast from white and black points to midtones, using anchor points and control nodes for precise image edits.
Apply curves to balance color in photos, adjusting shadows, highlights, and color channels (green, red, blue) using anchor points and the picker to fine-tune cloud detail and sky tone.
Practice time: rotate and crop to a 5 by 7 aspect, then balance darks, lights, and white balance using levels and curves with adjustment layers for a polished photo.
Master adjustment layers in Affinity Designer to control color balance, hue, saturation, and tonal range with levels and curves, using layer masks for precision.
Explore the rectangular and elliptical marquee tools in Affinity Designer to create precise selections, using new, add, subtract, and intersect modes, feathering, anti-aliasing, and layer masks to control visible areas.
Explore how to use round-area selections in Affinity Designer, comparing rectangular and elliptical marquee tools with freehand, polygon, and magnetic options, and refine edges with feathering and anti-aliasing.
Explore Affinity Designer's auto select tools, including the selection brush, color range, and tonal range, and learn to refine selections with feathering, add/subtract, and the refine tool for precise cutouts.
Discover how to create brushes from selections in Affinity Designer 1.9, using place image, rasterize to pixels, and adjust spacing, dynamics, and rotation for varied brush effects.
Master the principle of layer masks in Affinity Designer, painting with black to conceal and white to reveal for precise edits.
Explore uses of layer masks in Affinity Designer by masking a color group, using a hue shift layer and curves to selectively recolor a mushroom, and refine edges with brushes.
Learn to use blend ranges in Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo to control color adjustments with underlying composition ranges, replacing luminosity masks for precise, flexible color grading.
Learn to refine complex selections in affinity designer with the refined selection tool, isolating hair and fine borders, previewing with overlay and black-and-white, and outputting as a layer mask.
Practice refining selections with the refined brush in Affinity Designer to cut the squirrel from the background, place a new backdrop, and fine-tune color, contrast, and depth with adjustment layers.
Explore how to alter the selection borders in Affinity Designer by using invert pixel selection, grow and shrink, circular smoothing, refined selection, and outline to create precise borders.
Explore how layer blend modes affect underlying layers in Affinity Designer, covering groups from darken to luminosity, with practical examples of multiply, overlay, soft light, color, hue, and erase.
Learn practical uses of layer blend modes in Affinity Designer by stacking duplicates, adjusting opacity, and applying modes like multiply, overlay, and soft light to control contrast, color, and saturation.
Discover why the brush, blur, sharpen, and dodge and burn tools are avoided, and embrace non-destructive edits using layer masks, duplicate layers, overlay or soft light, and curves.
Export from afdesign to formats like jpeg, png, tiff, pdf/x-4, preserving layers and styles; adjust quality, resize with aspect lock, and compare versions for web or print.
Learn how the export persona lets you export a design in multiple formats and sizes at once, including slice-by-slice export, with visibility controls to include or exclude elements.
Affinity photo 2.2 introduces practical brush and guide enhancements, from shift-based brush hardness with bracket keys to move and duplicate, create shape dialog, and customizable guides.
Celebrate finishing the Affinity Designer solid foundations course and reflect on the useful information gained; stay safe, stay healthy, stay creative, and consider leaving a review to help next learners.
Updated for Version 2.2! This course was first made using Affinity Designer 1. But I've added new videos to cover the important updates for Version2.2.
'I've done some Affinity Designer tutorials on YouTube, but they just cover one tool or technique. How do I actually create good designs, start to finish?'
'There are so many tools in Affinity Designer! So many things to remember! As a beginner what do I need to know and what do I not need to know?'
'How do I know when I've learned the really important stuff?'
Enrol on this course and find out just how well I can answer these questions. I've been a designer for nearly 30 years. I've spent thousands of hours working in various design studios and now I'm bringing that experience to Affinity Designer. Over the years I've learned what matters when you are creating good design and what doesn't. What clients want to see and what keeps them coming back to you. What tools work and what traps there are to catch you out. Also things like where to start when enhancing an image for your design work. What steps you should take and in what order. Things like selecting the right tool for the job because just learning a tool isn't enough. How to use a tool but also when to use it, what problems you may encounter and, perhaps most importantly, why to use it.
The course gives you a thorough grounding in the tools and techniques you need to know when you are producing good design. These tools and techniques are so fundamental that I make sure that they are covered properly and in detail. Practically every image you see is available as a download so you can follow along and I've also created many practice videos. Not a multi choice quiz where you just have to remember the name of a tool. That's not enough - you need practical exercises for a program like Affinity Designer and I give you exactly that in a unique way.
Your practical exercises are consistent. After you've watched the tutorials I'll give you a task and tell you what I want you to do with it. Then you have a choice. You can listen to the advice I give you about how to do the job, or you can skip the advice and try doing the exercise. Then come back to the video and I'll show you how I did it. I'll also give you some valuable tips about tools, techniques and workflow along the way so you can really nail down the fundamental concepts and be ready to move on to more advanced subjects.
Did you notice I said 'fundamental' twice instead of 'basic'? There's a reason for that. This course is aimed at beginners and existing users who want to round out their knowledge but that doesn't mean it's over simplified. Heck, no! You will learn the same tools and techniques that are used in professional studios. I've been in quite a few design studios in my time and - just between you and me - there's things on this course that I've had to explain to people who use Illustration programs on a daily basis. That's something I can do for you too. As well as being a designer for decades I also spent some time as a teacher and my university degree is all about how people learn. And it is my firm belief that the right way to learn something like Affinity designer is not to just learn the tools. The right way is to learn the right workflow. You learn the right workflow by using the right tools for the job, and the best way to use them.
After learning about vector based tools we'll tackle more topics about enhancing photos for use in your design work. You'll also practice these new techniques. Things like half a dozen different ways to select areas of your picture and the pros and cons of each. Learn best working practices and gotchas while you learn about vector based shapes, text, artboards, gradients, selective colorization or pro level dodge and burn techniques. Layer blend modes? So many people get confused by them. Give me 20 minutes and you'll wonder why anyone would ever find them challenging. Learn the differences between vector shapes and bitmaps. Layer masks? So useful yet sometimes so confusing. Let me explain them to you and make them a vital part of your new skillset.
By the end of the course you will have mastered various effective workflows, start to finish. You will gain the confidence to tackle your own vector illustrations, be able to enhance photos, and one day soon you may well be looking at one of your own designs and thinking 'That looks fantastic! I did that...'
Enrol now. Don't forget you have the 30 day money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose and so much to gain. Learn Affinity Designer from someone who knows what's important and knows how to teach. Get ready to be an effective designer. Get ready to make your work shine!
I'll see you on the course,
Simon