Affinity Designer Website

Most designers coming from Adobe Illustrator may think making the switch to Affinity Designer is a trivial task due to its similar look and layout. This guide is meant to highlight and explain some of the subtle differences and quirks I stumbled into when I first started using Affinity Designer.

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This video demonstrates a design process for laying out a website design. This will not teach you how to code in 20 minutes.In this Affinity Designer tutoria.

This post gets updated while I am learning more about Affinity Designer. You can grab a 10 day trial version of Affinity Designer on their website. Share your experience in the comments and be sure to leave any questions you have here!

We will get our hands dirty and explore all the tools and techniques professional web designers use to design a website inside Affinity Designer. That includes: Building wireframes and grids – the building blocks of every website. Using assets to make the design process ultra-fast.
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I mostly do stuff for web design, which often includes logo work and modding and touching up various images. I have a XP-Pen Artist 13.3 Pro Display drawing tablet and Affinity Designer. After Adobe moved to a subscription model, I looked around and tried a few different apps trying to find a replacement for Illustrator.
Serif Affinity Designer Key. Serif Affinity Designer Full is a rather interesting program for working with vector graphics, it is a relatively new project, it has worked well both on a Windows platform and on MAC OS X. First of all, software will be interesting for graphic designers, illustrators, web designers, in general I think the meaning.

Tool switching

Switching from one tool to another works the same as every other application. Pressing the same key twice is a bit different however which took me off guard.

Hitting the same key toggles you to the previously selected tool or cycles to the next tool of the same type. Having the Artistic Text Tool (T) selected and pressing T again would switch the active tool to Frame Text Tool (T) for example.

Selection behaviour

Affinity Designer’s default selection behaviour only selects items completely within the bounds of the marquee selection of the Move Tool (V). I prefer to be able to select all of the items touched by and/or within the marquee selection. Fortunately this can be enabled at Preferences > Tools > Select object when intersects with marquee selection.

Another setting I recommend turning on is Preferences > User Interface > Show selection in layers panel, this makes the layers panel scroll to and highlight the item you have selected, this is useful when making clipping masks for example.

Clipping Artboard/Canvas

Affinity Designer makes a distinction between artboards and canvases, a document without any artboards is a canvas and always clips all shapes. Uncheck View > View Mode > Clip to Canvas to turn off clipping or use the “” Hotkey.

Artboards also clip shapes, but dragging shapes out of an artboard makes them visible. This works if the shape is moved completely outside of the artboard. It’s not possible to turn off this behaviour unlike canvases.

Clipping Masks

Clipping masks are a powerful tool in a non destructive work flow but work quite different from Adobe Illustrator. Select which items you want to mask and nest them under a parent shape, this shape now functions as a clipping mask. Nesting items in the Layer tab is a bit precise however, more on that later.

Finish Typing

In Adobe Illustrator cmd + return is the shortcut for finishing typing. The same key combination converts the shape to outlines/curves in Affinity Designer. Press escape to finish typing instead, I learned this the hard way.

Typos

By default Affinity Designer has a spell checker enabled, something I didn’t expect. Spell checking can be very helpful but I find I have it disabled most of the time to keep those red lines out of my designs.

Spell checking can be disabled by toggling Text > Spelling > Check spelling while typing. Alternatively you can get fix those typos by using Spelling Options ( Shift Command ; ) This lets you review the errors and change them quick and easily.

Pathfinder & Align Tab

Affinity Photo Designer

Affinity Designer has no separate tab for boolean operations and aligning functions. These tools are always in the top bar unless you remove them yourself. The align functions are somewhat hidden in the top bar but are often found in the context toolbar when needed.

Minimising tabs

Affinity Designer’s user interface can get quite claustrophobic if you’re using all its features. In Illustrator its self explanatory hot to minimise a tool tab. In Designer you can minimise a tab by clicking on the name with your middle mouse button (MMB).

I hope Serif will implement Illustrator-like tabs as this behaviour doesn’t seem very intuitive.

Colors in Tools panel

For some reason the current colors are not displayed in the Tools panel by default, opposed to how it’s always visible in Illustrator’s toolbar. Fortunately it’s possible to change that!

By going to View > Customize Tools… and then setting the Number of Columns to 2. After closing the customization panel your current colors will show up, right where they should be.