Book Image

Up and Running with Affinity Designer

By : Kevin House
Book Image

Up and Running with Affinity Designer

By: Kevin House

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Familiar with Affinity Designer's Interface and Layout
5
Section 2: Deeper Exploration of Affinity Designer's Documents, Tools, and Workflow
9
Chapter 7: Tools – Pixel Persona
12
Chapter 10: Workflow: Symbols, Assets, and History
13
Section 3: Bringing It All together

Document setup

Once you have the sketch downloaded, let's create the Affinity Designer document that we will be using to build the illustration. With Affinity Designer open, go to FILE | NEW. For my setup using this sketch, I am once again going to start out with an 8.5 in x 11 in vertical format. If you need to resize the document after you create it, go to FILE | DOCUMENT SETUP and reconfigure your options.

Refer to Figure 13.3 for the document settings that I chose for this logo project. I'm using a vertical version of the Letter size at 300 DPI using Inches for Document units. Similar to the previous chapter, I'm not using the Create artboard option and I've set Image placement policy to Prefer Linked. I'm also again going with RGB/8 for Color format and an sRGB profile, and I'm deselecting Transparent background without any Margins or Bleed settings:

Figure 13.3 – My document settings

Keep in mind that we will...