'This course made me realize the power of Affinity Design. I am understanding the various tools and methods of creating any design that I visualize in my mind. I would recommend this video course to any who really wish to gain knowledge in Design in a very short time.'
Welcome to the Affinity Tutorials section of Design School where we look at all things Affinity Design. From how to use templates right the way to making the most of your fonts and extra glyphs. Our Mac tutorial section of Design School helps you make the most of your design elements on Mac. Aug 31, 2018 A team of 30+ experts has conducted deep research and compiled this list of 6 Best Affinity Designer Tutorial, courses and training available online for 2018. It includes both paid and free resources to help you learn Affinity Designer. These courses are.
Charles Margrave
'This is a good methodical look at Affinity Designer along with an bit of information about use cases. The content is exactly what I was looking for in the course.'
Ben Holtzman
A TRUE alternative to Adobe’s overpriced software has finally come.
Meet Affnity Designer – a piece of vector graphic design software that will allow you to easily create awesome designs without ruining your bank account.
So if you’ve been looking for a cheaper and yet super powerful alternative to Adobe’s products, now you’ve found it.
This course is all about you learning how to use Affinity Designer.
It’s a beginner’s comprehensive guide that will allow you to independently use all the tools and effects to create any design you wish.
Inside you will find
- 50+ lectures in 14 sections
- Clear and concise explanations with lots of visual aids for easy understanding
- Tons of supporting material (design files and presentations) so you can practice as you learn
Let me take you take you step-by-step through all the tools, effects and techniques that come with the software.
This course is not for advanced Affinity Designer users, but if you are a total beginner you will love the course content.
Here’s a comprehensive list of goodies you will find inside:
- If you want to create glamorous designs, you need to have something to create them in. You need Documents that you can create fast and easy and you need to know how to manage them. That’s Section 3.
- What’s a design if it doesn’t have… shapes? Affinity Designer makes creating objects fun and easy. That’s why Section 6 is so… fun.
- You don’t only want to create artwork, do you? You also want to easily customize it, so it looks perfect. That is why customizing and transforming your artwork is covered not in one, but in TWO sections: 7 and 8.
- Once your nifty design is ready, you probably want to put in front of all your friends’ faces, right? In section 12 you will learn how to save and share your work with the world of internet.
- In the bonus section you will learn how to use the pixel tools in Affinity Designer, should you wish to quickly tweak your photos, too.
- I assume that you are a total beginner so in the first section you will learn what Affinity Designer is and what its core features are, including a unique concept of 3 different tool sets called Personas.
- Looking at any piece of software that you are unfamiliar with can cause headaches. That’s why Section 2 is all about painless learning how to use Designer’s interface.
- Are you thinking about becoming a web designer? Then you need to know how to create and use artboards, so your workflow is fast and professional. Have a look at Section 4.
- If pixel perfect designs are all you are dreaming of, jump right into Section 5.
- Almost each and every of your designs is going to use some form of text. If you want to quickly learn how to add and transform type in Affinity Designer, have a look at Section 9.
- The software comes with powerful panels. The most important of them is the Layers panel. You will learn all about panels and layers in sections 10 and 11.
Now you can create stunning logos, web layouts, mobile app designs for a fraction of a price that Adobe is asking for their products… MONTHLY!
Because the best part about Afffinity Designer is that there is
…NO subscription...
You pay for it ONCE and it’s yours to keep!
Say good-bye to forking out hundreds of dollars for software every year even if you are just a hobbyist, a student or a freelancer just starting out your design adventure.
And yes, as always, you are completely covered by a
100% 30-day money back guarantee.
If after 30 days you won’t be convinced that you can use the software independently, simply ask for a refund and you will receive it promptly.
No one will ask a single question about your reasons.
It's your call now.
Click the Enroll button and...
Enroll now!
Dawid
Dawid
PS One more thing.
As a SPECIAL BONUS, you will get a How to get started with Affinity Designer e-book for FREE (worth $29.97).
It’s almost 200 pages, with more than 200 images to compliment your learning process, if you are not in the mood for watching videos or you prefer the old school type of learning.
PPS You will also receive a comprehensive list of ALL the shortcuts used in Affinity Designer.
A true professional knows how to use shortcuts to make his or her workflow super speedy.
- Graphic designers who are looking for an alternative to Adobe products
- Graphic design beginners
- Designers new to Affinity products
Affinity Designer is a graphic design app for Mac created by Serif. It stands between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, with support of vector based tools and raster graphics. While it is a pretty new app and sometimes I miss some functions, it's still quite powerful and can handle day to day design work. Ability to export your work to PSD or SVG makes it easy to work in conjunction with Photoshop or other graphic design tools which is pretty neat.
So, today I want to show you how to create small icon set in Affinity Designer. Let's get started!
Sketches
Usually, I start with sketching the ideas for icons. It shouldn't be a perfect and precise representation of the final icon. The main goal is to communicate the idea to a client or your team. In most cases you don't need serious skills in hand-drawing to make simple sketches. If you can draw a line, circle, and rectangle — you're ready to go.
Here are sketches of icons we are about to draw:
Let's begin with preparing a document in Affinity Designer.
Setting up a document
One of the nice features that Affinity Designer have is its advanced
Grid and Axis Manager
. You can create all sorts of grids using it, but for now, we'll only need 64x64
grid of squares to align our icons.Open Grid Manager by going to
View → Grid and Axis Manager...
By default it'll be in Basic mode:
Hit on Advanced button, uncheck
Use automatic grid
and turn on Uniform
grid. Now you can set Grid Spacing to 64px
, Divisions to 4
and Gutter to 64px
:Our new grid will look like this:
Pretty neat! Now we can draw our icons inside of each of these squares.
But before we dig into this, let's turn snapping to pixel grid, this will ensure that all icons will look crisp without any blurry pixels. Find Snapping Options on your toolbar and turn on
Force pixel alignment
and Move by whole pixels
:It is also important to keep an eye on pixel preview of your icons. Affinity has a nifty feature called Split View, which can be accessed through
View → View Mode → Split view
or just ','
hotkey:Now you can drag a split to see how your shapes will look in pixels:
Always check back to pixel preview to make sure that all your pixels are aligned properly.
Okay, it's time to draw some shapes.
Drawing icons
To focus solely on shapes, I draw monochromatic versions of the icons first. I tend to add colors when all icons are ready. As main color I will use
#FCC6A0
and background #1F2129
, but you can use any colors you find comfortable to work with.Chat Icon
While Affinity Designer has a special tool to draw chat bubbles called Callout Rounded Rectangle Tool, we'll draw it by hand using
Rectangle Tool [M]
and Triangle Tool
:If you want to make your shapes editable, you have to convert them to curves first. I use hotkey
cmd+Enter
for this, but there's also a special button on the toolbar:Here's how you can draw a chat bubble:
Next, we'll apply some rounded corners using
Corner Tool [C]
and our first bubble is ready:To 'cut-out' one bubble from another I use outer stroke with the same color as the background:
If I need to change width of gutter or appearance of some shapes, it'll be easier to do with a stroke, than with real cutted-out shapes:
After we finish with the icons, I will expand this stroke and cut it out from the main shapes.
Let's save stroke settings as a style in
View → Studio → Styles
for further useNow let's move on to the next icon!
Folder Icon
Start with two rectangles:
Using
Node Tool [A]
we can easily create top part of the folder:Now, we can round outer corners using
Corner Tool [C]
:And to finish the icon let's add a circle in the middle of the folder:
Study Icon
Top part of the hat can be made of tilted rectangle with some corner radius applied:
Bottom part of the hat is created using simple rectangle and ellipse:
Finally, add brush-tail and our hat is ready. I also scaled entire icon a bit to match it with other icons:
Food Icon
Let's start with a cup. It can be simplified to just three rectangles:
Taper bottom rectangle and round some corners:
To finish our cup, we'll add drinking straw, which is just tilted rounded rectangle:
Now let's get to the hamburger part. It can be built from a circle and two rectangles:
Round some corners and shrink circle a bit and here's our hamburger:
Now let's put them all together to finish the icon:
Travel Icon
Let's start with a plane. There are lots of ways of drawing it, but for the sake of presentation, I'll show you how to do it using Stroke Profile feature.
Stroke Profile gives you ability to dynamically setup width of your stroke. You can make pretty fun results with it:
You can hold Alt-key to adjust extreme points separately.
We'll use it to create main body shape of the plane. Start with drawing a straight line using
Pen Tool [P]
:And edit its stroke profile to form a plane body:
Wings and tail can be made out of basic rectangles:
Rotate whole thing by 45° and our plane is ready:
Let's make a globe! Start with a circle:
Then duplicate it and shrink virtically:
Finally, combine globe with a plane to finish the icon:
Lamp Icon
Lamp is a bit complex to draw, but bear with me. We will start with a basics — rectangles:
Combine all shapes using
Layer → Geometry → Add
or just hit Union
button on toolbar:Time to get creative! Form a shape that look like thick glass of wine:
Final shape should look something like this:
Now let's round some corners:
Add some details subtracting rectangles from the main shape:
And miror whole shape to form a body of the lamp:
Top part of the lamp is just trapeze drawn using
Trapezoid Tool
with rounded corners:Add brush-tail from our hat icon to create a lamp switch and our icon is ready:
Adding Colors
Usually, I start with a palette. I try to select as many various colors as I can. I might not use all of them at the end, and some of them could be changed in the process but having something to start with is always a good idea. Here's palette I've made for the icons:
To make our life easier we'll use Affinity's Global Colors feature; it will help us manage our colors if we decide to alter them.
First let's create Document Palette in Swatches panel, which can be found under
View → Studio → Swatches
:Now let's add our colors as Global Color swatches, you can do this by clicking on palette icon, like this:
Notice that our colors now have a little triangle at the bottom left corner. It means that this color is a global one. If we apply it to different shapes and then we decide to alter it, this will affect all layers with this color. Pretty useful feature.
Now just select each shape of our icons and apply corresponding global color:
If you ever want to change colors in the whole set, you can just alter its Global Color swatch:
Preparing Assets
I think, it's a good time to get rid of all stroke-placeholders that we've made. You can expand stroke to fill using
Layer → Expand Stroke
menu.Now you can use boolean operations (Subtract) to cut everything out. It's pretty mechanical work, but it takes some patience. Usually, I make background color to something bright to see what I need to cut out better:
I also like to keep my layers clean and organized, so I grouped each icon to its own folder:
Let's move to slicing part.
Affinity Designer has special mode for dealing with assets, called
Export Persona
, you can switch to it, by clicking on the third button on the top left corner:Your toolbar should switch to a new look:
Now create slice for each group in Layers panel:
Now we need to resize each slice to 64x64, grid and Transform panel (
View → Studio → Transform
) will help you make it more precise:The more slices you resize, the easier it will be to align the rest of them:
Now we can select our slices in Slices Panel and configure export options:
I used pretty much default settings for SVG output with unchecked
Set view Box
property.Okay, let's export some icons! First of all, you'll have to turn off your background layer, since we need transparent background for all of our icons.
Now you can click on
Export Selected
button to save our icons as SVG.Turn
Continuous
checkbox on and Affinity will auto update all assets each time you modify your icons.And icons are ready to use on the web:
Conclusion
Affinity itself isn't hard to grasp, but in case you want to learn some basics, Serif's website has a comprehensive section with video tutorials.
There's also active community over the forum, where you can ask questions and request new features directly from the developers. They also have features roadmap, so you can see what's coming next to Affinity Designer.
There you have it! Hope you enjoyed this overview of icon design workflow in Affinity Designer.