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

Workspace customization – the Tools panel and toolbar

The next two areas we will look at for customizing the interface are the Tools panel and toolbar. The process here is pretty straightforward.

The Tools panel

To customize your Tools panel, go to VIEW | CUSTOMIZE TOOLS. This will temporarily expand the Tools panel to show you a view of all of your available tools. Here, you can individually drag any of the tools into your vertical Tools panel, drag any of the tools out of the vertical Tools panel, or even rearrange the tool order in your vertical Tools panel by dragging and moving a tool either up or down to reposition it in the column. See Figure 3.20.

For example, if you find you are using the speech bubble geometric shape repeatedly, you may want to make it more accessible by dragging it out of its default nested position and onto the Tools panel directly. Alternatively, you could drag all of the geometric shapes out onto the Tools panel directly; it's all...