Affinity Designer 2 (Desktop) Quickstart Guide

On launching the app, the initial dialog lets you create your document from a preset that sets up your document easily. You can configure:

• Type of deliverable (for print, press ready, photo, web, devices, architectural)
• Page size and orientation
• Page transparency (for PNG web assets)
• Colour management settings
• Margins and pro-print bleed

From the top left of your workspace, you can instantly switch between Designer Persona (vector mode) or Pixel Persona (raster mode) all within Affinity Designer itself.

Personas swap your design disciplines in one click, so you could be creating crisp vector-based artwork and then immediately incorporate raster textures, without having to change to a different app, simply by switching to Pixel Persona’s unique brush tools.

Export Persona (object slice mode) offers finer export control by exporting slices made from your design’s objects, groups or layers selectively, all at the same time and continuously as-you-edit if needed. Use this for icon or web graphics design.

In Pixel Persona, you’ll be offered primarily pixel selection and brush tools instead.

Some tools are concealed within flyouts; to expand, simply click and hold on the tool’s icon to reveal extra tools.

Press a tool’s letter key to select the tool. Hold a tool’s letter key to use the tool temporarily. Release the key to switch back to the previous tool.

The top Toolbar offers commonly used operations, including defaults control, view modes, transformations, Boolean operations and object arranging, as well as snapping, alignment and Affinity account access.

Studio panels

If you haven’t specified an artboard-based document on document creation, you can convert to artboards using the Artboard Tool at any time. The tool creates artboards based on a preset (e.g., an iPad Pro device mockup), any selected object or the original document size.

Because artboards are independent design areas you can create design variants across multiple artboards. Common design elements across artboards (such as the letter A in the T-shirt example) can be kept in design synchronisation by using Symbols. In essence, you create a symbol based on one design element using the Symbols Panel, then duplicate this symbol to other artboards—changes to any symbol instance will then replicate to all other symbolised instances.

The Pen Tool allows you to plot out a curve by connecting together individually positioned dots, called nodes. These nodes let you reshape your drawn curve in a variety of ways including closing the curve to make an irregular shape.

With the Pen Tool selected, you can adjust how the curve will be drawn by selecting a smooth (Bézier), smart, polygon or straight-line mode on the context toolbar.

Once you have drawn a shape or curve you can adjust it by holding down the ⌘ key (Ctrl key) or jumping to the Node Tool, and then moving a selected node or its off-curve control handles emanating from the node.

You can click on the curve to add a new node, drag on the inter-node curve segment and convert a node to either Sharp (cusp), Smooth or Smart, reshaping the curve in different ways.

Affinity Designer allows for quite complex node adjustment, allowing you to select multiple nodes at once for easy adjustment. Node snapping, advanced alignment options and in-depth corner radius/corner type controls are available too.

Booleans are destructive operations that help you create complex shapes from simple shapes that would otherwise be difficult or time consuming to do. Add, Subtract, Intersect, Xor and Divide operations are available from the top Toolbar.

Compounds perform these same Boolean operations but in a non-destructive way, i.e. shapes that have been joined together (e.g., added) can still be transformed independently by simply pressing the Alt key as you apply your chosen operation from the Toolbar.

The Shape Builder Tool lets you add simple shapes together to form more complex ‘combined’ shapes. You can also delete areas.

In contrast to shape building, you can cut objects up into fragments using the Knife Tool. By drawing a knife cut across any selected item(s) you can reposition, transform, reshape, recolour or delete the resulting fragments. Full, partial or internal splits are possible, and even click-by-click scissor cuts on open curves.

Optional stroke stabilisation produces smooth cuts in shapes and text.

Designer Persona’s Vector Brush Tool lays down editable vector brush strokes, while switching to the Pixel Persona gives access to both the Paint Brush and Pixel Brush tools for painting raster content.

Adjusting your stroke’s brush colour, width, opacity and blending can be achieved from the context toolbar above your workspace; stroke stabilisation can also be enabled for beautifully smooth strokes. The brushes themselves can be edited on the Brushes Panel.

For any brush tool you can either apply pressure-sensitive brush strokes by default when using a graphics tablet or create a curved Pressure chart on the Stroke Panel (set your brush controller to Velocity).

Over 20 adjustment layers let you change the look of specific objects or layers, even your entire design, via either the Layer menu or Layers Panel. Adjustment layers are non-destructive—if you’re not happy with the results you can modify the adjustment at a later time, reposition it in your layer stack or just delete the layer altogether.

Some popular adjustments include Gradient Map and HSL as shown above, along with White Balance and Brightness and Contrast. In particular, the Gradient Map adjustment maps a design’s greyscales to a specified colour gradient so your design looks colour-coordinated, while HSL adjustments alters the Hue, Saturation and Luminosity of your design—the latter is often applied during final fine-tuning.

There are various ways to export your documents and a multitude of formats available to choose from. The easiest way to begin your export is by using File>Export, where the dialog lets you select the exported area (if applicable) and access advanced settings via the More option.

Alternatively, you can export using Export Persona, which takes a slice-based approach to the simultaneous mass export of multiple objects, groups or layers.