#Learning affinity designer how to#
#Learning affinity designer software#
#Learning affinity designer professional#

Apple had some of the best examples of skeuomorphism in its early iOS and app designs, and today it is widely used in many industries, such as music software and video games. To put it simply, flat design gets rid of the metaphors that skeuomorphic design uses to communicate with users, and we’ve seen these metaphors in design, especially in user interface design, for years. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of 'flat design', in contrast to what is known as skeuomorphic representation in design. ( View large version) Introduction: The Flat Design Era The three work environments: draw persona (leftmost icon), bitmap persona (middle icon) and export persona (rightmost icon). You can start working in the draw persona and switch to the pixel persona at any time, when you need to combine vectors and bitmaps. To switch from the draw persona to the pixel persona or to the export persona, you have to click on one of the three icons located in the top-left corner of the main window. By default, Affinity Designer is set to the draw persona. Note: Affinity Designer has three work environments, referred to as “personas”. Of course, along the way, you will also learn some helpful keyboard shortcuts and commands.

#Learning affinity designer how to#

We will also, among other things, learn how to use the Gradient tool, what is a “Smart copy”, how to import a color palette from an image that we can use as a reference for our artwork, how to use masks, and how to create a halftone pattern. We will see how to work with the Pen tool to trace the main car outline, how to break curves and segments, how to convert objects into curves, and how to use the wonderful Corner tool. You know the old saying, “All roads lead to Rome”? In this case, many roads will take us where we’d like to get to, but some are better than others. I will also explain some of the decisions I take and methods I follow as I work. Final image that we’ll be creating in this tutorial. Although the iPad app’s features and functionality almost completely match the desktop version of Affinity Designer, it relies much more on using the touch screen (and the Apple Pencil) and because of that, you may expect to find some differences in the workflows. Note: As of today, July 11, Affinity Designer is also available for the iPad. The illustration will scale up to whatever resolution and size needed because no bitmaps will be used. In this article, I would like to walk you through just some of its very user-friendly main tools and features as an introduction to the software and to show you how we can create a nice flat vector illustration of a Volkswagen Beetle. Unlike some other packages, its price is really affordable, there’s no subscription model and, as mentioned already, it’s available for both Macs and PCs.

#Learning affinity designer professional#

It was July 2015 when Serif Europe launched the amazing software that many designers and illustrators like me are using now as their main tool for professional work. ( This is a sponsored post.) If you are in the design world, chances are that you’ve already heard about Affinity Designer, a vector graphics editor for Apple’s macOS and Microsoft Windows. The author is not affiliated with the product in any way, and the article has been reviewed independently by Serif as well as SmashingMag’s editors.

While this tutorial was kindly sponsored by Serif, the creator of Affinity, we’d like to point out that it is written by an independent design professional who personally enjoys using the software and shares her lessons learned.