The Beginner's Ultimate Guide to Affinity Designer

Looking at any user interface of any piece of software that you are unfamiliar with can cause headaches and be somewhat discouraging. If you ever starred at the blank canvas trying to figure out how to draw something, you know what I am talking about. 

Luckily Affinity Designer’s interface uses concepts, commands and options you might be already familiar with. 

Let’s take a look at the options you can set in the Toolbar

The Toolbar customization in Affinity Designer begins with turning its visibility on and off and you can do that by going to the View menu and choosing Show Toolbar (Ctrl+Alt+T). Toggling this option on and off will make the Toolbar visible or hidden.

The Tools panel contains tools available in the active Persona, and by default it is docked on the left-hand side of the document view. 

Affinity Designer provides quite a lot of flexibility when it comes to customizing the way the tools are displayed in the Tools panel.

Creating a new document is the first, probably the most crucial, step in any digital design process. If you want to avoid problems with your documents when handing them out to a web developer or a print shop, you need to know how to properly set up your documents for different design jobs. 

Let’s take a look at how to create documents in Affinity Designer and what the most important document options are.

Each of your previously created documents can be opened in one of three different ways

Viewing documents inside a design application is much more important than the word might suggest.

Smooth design process can’t live without flexible and efficient zooming. Designer offers several zooming and panning options, including the Zoom tool, the View tool and the Navigator panel. Let’s take a look at each one of them step-by-step.

Artboards are discrete design areas that encompass the artwork that will be printed or saved for web, depending on the type of design you are working on. Anything falling outside the artboards will be basically considered as notes or sketches that you don’t want your audience to see, therefore it won’t print, neither get saved for the web.

There are three major ways of creating artboards. 

When working with multiple artboards inside one document chances are that you are going to need to know how to handle them easily. You’ll want to know how to reposition them to retain a smooth design workflow and how to rename them to keep everything logically organized.

If you need to save your artwork as images, Designer lets you export your artboards in a single file or as separate files. You could approach this process in two different ways: if you need full control over the exporting process, use the Export Persona. 

Precise shape creation and transformation would be extremely difficult without guides. 

Dynamic guides are Designer’s way of assisting you in creating and positioning objects in relation to artboards and other objects.

Grid is another way of helping you in aligning objects on the artboard. The grid, just like the guides, won’t print nor be saved with a web file. It is grey by default, but you can change its color to whatever you want.

By now you should have a decent idea on snapping: how it works and what its main purpose is. Now let’s take a look at the most important snapping options.

Drawing shapes in Affinity Designer can be done with the Pen tool, Pencil tool, Brush tool and Shape tools. There is also the Node tool that allows you to edit the already created shapes. Let’s take a look at the Shapes tools as most probably they will be the first ones you’ll be using to create artwork. 

Creating a simple rectangle is boring, right? How about rectangles that you can convert into rounded rectangles? Or rectangles that you can convert into rounded rectangles with varying corner radius values and styles?

Affinity Designer comes with a variety of predefined custom shapes. If you are wondering how to create arrows, stars or hearts, head over to the custom shapes tools in the Tools panel.

In here you will find almost 20 shape tools. Each one of them has unique customization features. Let’s take a look at the tools that you are most probably going to use in your day-to-day design routine:.

The Pen tool is undoubtedly one of the most important design tools ever.

But before we learn how to use it in Affinity Designer, let’s understand curves and lines themselves.

Pen tool’s humble sibling, the Pencil tool is one of the most underestimated and underused design tools. It’s a shame that so many designers don’t even want to acknowledge its existence. If you are having a hard time making the Pen tool work the way you want it to work and you need those fine curves in your artwork, give the Pencil tool a shot.

The Vector Brush tool allows you to paint vector brush strokes. You will find quite a lot of different brushes in Affinity Designer’s library. Let’s take a look at how to paint brush strokes using the vector brushes.

With the Fill tool you can change the fill and stroke colors of shapes and text objects. Interestingly enough, the Fill tool should really be named the Gradient tool as it shines when it comes to adding gradients to fills and strokes. It even has a keyboard shortcut (the letter G) which is more suitable for a gradient applying tool!

Symbols are reusable pieces of artwork, especially useful for web and UI design purposes. The best thing about them is that each symbol instance is dynamically connected with its parent symbol – each change in a symbol is instantly reflected in all its instances.

There are essentially two different ways of creating clipping masks in Affinity Designer. But if you are not familiar with clipping masks in general, let me quickly explain.

Creating objects, paths, curves and combinations of those is one thing, but freely adjusting their appearance so it looks exactly as the designer intended is another. Let’s take a look at customizing the objects in Affinity Designer, starting with the Corner tool

Customizing paths and shapes can’t be full if you can’t control the paths and path segments independently. Affinity Designer’s Node tool is meant to do just that.

The Transparency tool is a very specific task oriented tool. It allows you to adjust the opacity of solid color fills and gradients applied to vector and text objects

The Vector Crop tool is a great way of non-destructive removal of parts of objects or groups of objects. Even though its name suggests that it’s only meant for vector object operations, you can also crop raster images with it

The golden rule of transforming objects says: Before you can transform an object, you need to first select it.

This may sound obvious, but if you just remember this simple rule, you will save yourself from a lot of unnecessary frustrations. So let’s take a look at selecting objects in Affinity Designer.

And there are different ways you can do that.

I got to confess.

I am a symmetry buff.

When objects don’t align properly or the spaces between them are not equal, I can’t sleep at night.

Well, maybe I am being too dramatic, but aligning and distributing is extremely important, especially for UI design. Affinity Designer deals with the challenge using its Arrange options.

There’s a number of ways how you can create more complex shapes from simple objects using Affinity Designer’s joining options. You will find them in the Toolbar sitting in a separate group.

Changing your mind over and over again is designer’s bread and butter.

Will it look better if I rotate it a bit to the side? Or maybe I should flip it?

Transforming objects till they look exactly the way you intended is common and natural so the tools designed to do just that should be easy to use.

Let’s take a look at the transformation tools offered by Affinity Designer. 

Working with text is one of the most common tasks on a typical, graphic designer’s workday. A good designer knows how to handle his type, so let’s take a look at how to work with typography tools in Affinity Designer.

There are two main typography tools for you to use:

• The Artistic Text tool
• And the Frame Text tool

Controlling the text you created either with the Artistic Text tool or the Frame Text tool is done the easiest with the help of the Character and Paragraph panels. Let’s take a look at them now, starting with the Character panel.

Text styles, which include character and paragraph styles, are a quick and convenient way of adding a custom appearance to your text.

Before we wrap the typography section up, let’s quickly take a look at creating text on a path in Affinity Designer.

On the right side of the document view you will find all the panels available to you inside the program. Those panels, as a group, have a distinct name – the Studio. 

The Stroke panel is one of the most powerful panels allowing you to take full control not just over the color and weight of the stroke, but also over the curves, shape outlines and vector brush strokes. Let’s take a closer look at its abilities:

The Swatches panel allows you to use predefined colors, but also to create, store and reuse your own color creations. All the colors you used recently are stored here.

If you are familiar with Photoshop®, it will be easier for you to understand the effects inside remove certain effects so let’s take a look Affinity Designer. If you are not – don’t worry. The Effects panel makes it easy to add, adjust and at it now.