Up and Running with Affinity Designer

Kevin House

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781801073158
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Graphics
• Index: Computer Science

Add Affinity Designer to your creative skillset while creating innovative designs and illustrations, building a solid foundation for your future with the help of this color guide

Key Features

• Understand Affinity Designer's interface and setup, discover its capabilities, and develop an efficient workflow
• Harness the power of an easy and flexible vector and pixel workflow in one application
• Learn practical skills and gain the confidence to power your own creative projects

Book Description

Affinity Designer is a widely adopted creative application, and in a reasonably short space of time, it has become a leading design and illustration application. Affinity Designer, along with Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, is part of a suite of award-winning creative software applications developed by Serif Europe. Built on the latest technologies, which make it fast and smooth, Affinity Designer is quickly becoming the go-to professional creative application for vector drawing and pixel-based painting.Up and Running with Affinity Designer is a comprehensive hands-on guide to the Affinity Designer software. Whether you're new to the creative industry, a seasoned professional looking for a proven alternative, or an enthusiastic hobbyist, this book will help you get up to speed in no time. You'll learn how to create documents and explore workflow best practices while working through practical exercises using the knowledge and skills developed in each chapter to solidify your understanding of the fundamentals. Finally, you'll bring it all together with real-world practical applications by building a fun logo and professional illustration, forming a base for in-depth exploration in your own projects.By the end of this Affinity Designer book, you'll have gained the knowledge and confidence to use Affinity Designer as part of your creative toolset.

What you will learn

• Explore the interface and unique UX characteristics of Affinity Designer
• Discover features that allow you to manipulate and transform objects
• Apply color, shading, and effects to create unique compositions
• Employ layers to organize and simplify complex projects
• Use grids, guides, and snapping features as design aids
• Adapt to Affinity Designer s custom workspaces and keyboard shortcuts
• Explore the workflow and design best practices for more predictable and successful outcomes
• Identify potential stumbling blocks in your design process and learn how to avoid them

Who this book is for

This Affinity Designer book is for graphic designers, artists, illustrators, and hobbyists. Anyone curious about Affinity Designer's unique toolset and vector and pixel workflows or looking for cost-effective alternatives to the Adobe suite will find this book useful. Experience in working with other similar tools will be helpful, but not necessary.

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Section 1: Getting Familiar with Affinity Designer's Interface and Layout

Each journey starts with a first step. Our first step will be to take a look at the landscape of Affinity Designer's UI. Knowing the general layout and where things are will give you the confidence to take on the chapters that follow.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Getting Familiar with Affinity Designer's Interface
• Chapter 2, Getting Familiar with the Three Personas of Affinity Designer
• Chapter 3, How to Customize Your Affinity Designer Workspace

Chapter 1: Getting Familiar with the Affinity Designer's Interface

Welcome to the first chapter of Up and Running with Affinity Designer.

Success when learning any new software application is to know enough to be able to get it to do what you need it to do. Starting out, you don't necessarily need to know every aspect of the interface, just enough to help you to take that next step. The goal of this chapter is to get you comfortable with the layout and location of Affinity Designer's main interface panels, toolbars, and menu items. Later, we will be discussing each of these areas in more detail, either in a dedicated section or as part of the three practical exercise chapters.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• What is Affinity Designer?
• What's new in 1.10.x
• Understanding the user interface and its menu
• An overview of the Menu bar
• Main tools – Tools panel overview
• Toolbars – overview
• Studio panels – overview
• The document view and artboards – overview
• Navigation tools – overview

Technical requirements

To follow along with the chapter and to get the most out of this book, it is recommended that you have an installed copy of Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer is available for Mac, Windows, and iPad and can be purchased, or a trial version can be downloaded, from the Serif online store https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/store/ or from the Mac App Store. The exercises, examples, and screenshots in this book were created using a Mac desktop setup with an extended keyboard and mouse.

What is Affinity Designer?

Affinity Designer is a modern, state-of-the-art vector design and illustration application. It's used in everything from logo and illustration work to websites, advertising, UI/UX, and icon work. Since its introduction in October 2014, Affinity Designer's popularity has grown steadily and despite it being a relative newcomer to the creative industry, it is fast becoming a go-to, high-performance alternative for creative professionals, teachers, students, and enthusiastic hobbyists alike.

The future is very bright for Affinity Designer and since its introduction, the team at Serif, the creators of Affinity Designer, have also introduced Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, two companion applications that run seamlessly alongside Affinity Designer as part of the Affinity range of professional creative applications. Now is an excellent time to get to know Affinity Designer and add it to your creative toolset and with Up and Running with Affinity Designer, we're going to discover together why you should consider adopting it as a permanent part of your creative arsenal.

What's new in 1.10.x

The most recent update to Affinity Designer version as of this writing is 1.10.x. It is basically a performance and stability update with little to no real new features added. Since the initial 1.10 update there have been incremental updates 1.10.1, 1.10.2, 1.10.3… each addressing bug fixes and general improvements. Rather than listing all of them here as they are dynamic in nature and keep being added, please visit the Affinity user forum News and Updates page for the most recent up to date information.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/4-news-and-information/

Serif, the makers of Affinity Designer, themselves described the 1.10.x update in an online News and Update post on August 5th 2021 saying that "We're proud that the Affinity apps already offers class-leading speeds in many tasks, and for our latest update, we wanted to take a step back and really see what further levels of performance we could achieve". - Ashley Hewson, M...

Table of contents

• Up and Running with Affinity Designer
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Getting Familiar with Affinity Designer's Interface and Layout
• Chapter 1: Getting Familiar with the Affinity Designer's Interface
• Chapter 2: Getting Familiar with the Three Personas of Affinity Designer
• Chapter 3: How to Customize Your Affinity Designer Workspace
• Section 2: Deeper Exploration of Affinity Designer's Documents, Tools, and Workflow
• Chapter 4: Document Setup and Modification
• Chapter 5: Main Studio Panels and Managers
• Chapter 6: Tools – Designer Persona
• Chapter 7: Tools – Pixel Persona
• Chapter 8: Tools, Panels, and Process – Export Persona
• Chapter 9: Workflow: Layers and Objects
• Chapter 10: Workflow: Symbols, Assets, and History
• Section 3: Bringing It All together
• Chapter 11: Creating a Professional Logo
• Chapter 12: Creating Astronaut Ricky and Sidekick K9
• Chapter 13: Rocketing into the Pixel Cosmos
• Other Books You May Enjoy