Affinity Designer 2 - The Crash Course for Beginners

1. Introduction: Do you want to learn Affinity Designer to? Yes. Then this is the right course for you. Welcome to Affinity Designer to crash cost. In this course, we're going to cover all the important basics to get you started quickly. We will start with the fundamentals. After getting turnover user interface and how to navigate confidently, we will jump straight into the different tools. You will learn how to create and manipulate shapes easily. You will learn how to work with color, gradients and swatches. Event. We will take a look at how to create custom shapes using the pen tool. After we covered all the basic fundamentals, we will jump right into our first practice project, a simple flat design character. Throughout this project, you will get to know the layers panel. You've learned how to use the oil New Shape Builder tool and get overall more comfortable with all the different tools we've covered. Thus far. We will be learning all we text tools and how to import and work with images by creating a second project, a beautiful web design hero section. So do you want to get started with learning Affinity Designer to master all I've mentioned and more today. When start watching today and I will be seeing you inside the class. 2. Creating new Documents: Now if we open up the software, we are greeted by this floating window right here, which is the new window. And here we can create a new document. Now, if you've opened up, if you need to design a before and you uncheck this box right here, which says show on startup. And you do not have this window right here. You can simply open it by going over to file the main menu up here and clicking on New. Now that opens up a new window. So what exactly are we looking at here? Now, on the left-hand side, we have a bunch of different presets. Right here. We have different presets for things like print. So we have a ready-made A4 template or a letter size template right here. You can select a preset by simply clicking on it with your left mouse button. As you can see, the right side actually changes depending on what we have selected. Now we don't only have print presets, we also have things like photo presets or research as well, and even a couple of different device sizes. Now, for our case, let's go to the web section right here and click on full HD, F H D, ten ADP. So as you can see, this looks a bit weird because the orientation of our preset is actually wrong. Now, you can flip it. You can change the orientation from horizontal to vertical or the other way around by clicking one of these two buttons so we can change it to landscape, to portrait. We want to keep it at landscape. Now, let's take a closer look at the actual options that we have to customize our presets or our document. Now, under the Layout tab, we can change the page width of the page, right? So let's say we want a document to be taller, so let's say 2000 pixels height. Confirm it with Enter. And now you can see our preview changed. And we now have a Toile document. Below that. We have our DPI or dots per inch option. Now for web work, be usually keep it at 72 dpi. But if you work on a product, e.g. a. Flyer or something like that, coupon and select a higher option, e.g. like 300. Now, we can also change the document units right here. So right now it's a pixels and we're going to keep that bad. But if you prefer working in inches or centimeters, you can select that as well, right here. Now, let's go over to the next tab. Lead color to it. Right here, we can change the color format. Rgb eight is selected right now. And that's what we're going to work with. But e.g. once more, if you work with print e.g. coupon or select CMYK instead. Now, we can also add some margins right here, or some bleed as well if you work with print products. And that's pretty much it now to create this document right here, as we've created, just simply click on the Create button. And now we have our new document. Just like that. 3. The User Interface: Alright, let's take a look at the user interface of Affinity Designer. Now, in the middle right here, this large space occupying majority of the interface is our Canvas. Right here. We have our document that you've created previously. And here we create all of our designs. Here, do most of the work. Now, on the left side of this Canvas, we have our toolpath of all these colorful icons. Now, you have different tools such as v currently selected Move tool, the Pen tool to create different shapes and paths. He have the fill tool, which will allow us to create gradients and work with color. We can insert a place images right here. We can crop our Canvas. And we have access to these different shape tools, such as the rectangle tool, the ellipse tool. Now, one very important thing is below some of these tools in the right-hand corner, we have this little white arrow, e.g. on the diamond tool right now, if we write right-click on a tool with this arrow, you can open up a menu which hides more tools. So as you can see right here, we have a lot of different shape tools available to us, which can be a really good time-saver in some cases. Now we also have the all new shape builder tool which just came with Affinity Designer to. And also some texts tools such as V artistic texts and different text tool. You're going to look at the difference between these two in a later video. Now, if you've noticed, depending on the tool we have selected, this context menu up here changes. So right now it's on the Shape Builder. But if you e.g. go to the pen tool, you can see the options change drastically. So now we can set e.g. we fill the stroke, we can change the options of our stroke, David and stuff like that, the different modes. Or if you go to the fill tool, you can actually change where the gradient should be applied, is that e.g. on the fill or the stroke. You can write here. If you have an object selected, you can change the type of gradient. And a lot of different things can be done in this context menu. Now, let's move on to the right side, which if you're using Affinity Designer for the first time or you have not changed, anything about the software should look exactly like this. This is the default configuration. Now, on the right-hand side, we have all these different panels, such as the color pattern, swatches, stroke of the layers panel, e.g. our different brushes. But you can use now, as you can see, a lot of different functions built into his panels. And we can actually modify what panels we want to have on the screen and which ones we don't know, e.g. let's say we don't want the quick FX styles right here. Let's say we don't want be Styles panel. Click on it, invented click and drag until it's out. In Venice. Simply click on Close Panel. And now we don't have it anymore. But how do you get the panel back if you need it? At a later point? For that, we go to our main menu up here. Click on Window. And then we can open up all these different panels right here. Now, if I say checkmark the pen, it is already present on your screen. If there isn't such, e.g. on the assets panel. You can enable that panel by clicking on it like so. You can also disabled panels like that as well. Now let's move on to this bar right here. The special thing about Affinity, which you've probably heard about already, is the different personas that we have. Right now. We are in V designer persona, which allows us and gives us all the different tools to modify vector shapes and work with vectors in general. However, we can also switch over to the pixel persona. And now we have a raster based workspace where we can paint and draw in. We can make selections and move things around, just like in Photoshop e.g. and one use case that e.g. is where you can create a character design in a vector art. And when we apply different texture and shading to it in the pixel persona using raster based brushes, all in one single software, which is incredibly powerful and really nice to have. A third persona called the Export persona. This looks a lot simpler, which it, because it is, you don't have that many tools right here. Now, this persona is incredibly useful when you work on large UI designs, e.g. and you need to export multiple different assets for the developers of an app, e.g. which you have designed. And you can do all that stuff with great control over everything in the export persona. Now the last thing I want to show you is this main menu up here. Here we have different types such as file edit of even though tab, which we've looked at. If you click on one, you open up another menu, e.g. under File, give all the different options regarding files. So we can create new files, we can save off pirates and stuff like that. Now, one important thing for you to take note of is wet. On the right side of these menus, we have keyboard shortcuts. Specific actions, e.g. the safe function. You should use Ruby off just to be safe so you don't lose progress when anything should happen, if UPC crashes or the software crashes, safe RBI often. Don't have to go to this menu all the time. You can simply click Control plus S on our keyboard and safe that way. Now, that's pretty much everything but I wanted to cover in this video. And in the next lecture we're going to take a look and learn how to actually navigate on our Canvas. You can zoom in, how you can move around. You can rotate the entire thing. All that stuff we're going to cover in the next lesson. 4. Navigating our Canvas: Alright, now navigating in Affinity Designer to is actually incredibly easy. Now for most things, there are multiple ways to do the same thing. I would show you the quickest ways to do them. So if you want to move around your Canvas, you can simply hold down the space bar like so. Your mouse changes to be hand. It's actually toggles V hand tool. And now you can click and drag around in your navigator, like so. Now, if you want to zoom in, you can hold down the Control key on your keyboard. And now you can simply scroll with your mouse wheel. You can scroll in and out. Now, we also have a specific panel for navigation. That's V navigator panel. Now, usually you, if you have the same user interface, you haven't changed anything. The navigator can be found down here. If you don't have it, simply go over to Window and click on Navigator. Now, wifi navigator, you can click around on this canvas or you can also drag. I want to move around. And you can zoom in and out right here. You can also type in a specific value like let's say you want to zoom in 100%, type it in, and now you're zoomed in 100 per cent. Now, we also have two different tools to zoom in and to move around. And these can be found right here. They are the final tools in our toolbar. One is the View tool, which is a little hand icon. Now, without holding the space bar, we can actually move around on our Canvas. And the other is via Zoom tool. Now we can click, simply click on your canvas and you can zoom in. If you hold the Alt key, you can toggle between zooming in and zooming out. Like so. With both of these tools, you also can zoom in using this slider right here. Now, that's pretty much it about navigating. These were just the fastest ways to do it. I prefer the keyboard shortcuts and I recommend, but as you get used to them as well, they will simply speed up your workflow immensely. 5. Working with Shapes: Alright, let's take a quick look at how to create and manipulate different trips in Affinity Designer to. So if you want to create a shape, Let's say we want to have a rectangle. Go to your toolbar and select the rectangle tool right here. Now to actually create the shape, you simply click and drag onto Canvas. And you drag out a rectangle. So now this shape has all these different points in each corner and the middle of each side. And these points let you change the shape after creating it. So if he, if we hover over the middle right here, e.g. we can see our cursor changes. Now, we can make it larger, e.g. same applies for this side as well. And if we do the same thing in a corner, we can change both sides at the same time. Now, what if you want perfect square where it's going to be pretty difficult if you're trying to eyeball it. However, if you click out and drag out a new rectangle, but instead of simply eyeballing it, e.g. like. So, you press the Shift key and that will lock the proportions in place and create equal sides like that. Now, if you want to rotate the object, you can click on this handle right here and drag it to rotate it. If you hold down the Shift key Here, we'll do that in 15 degree increments, like so. Now, we can also change the color of our rectangle by going to our color panel up here and simply selecting a color from the color wheel. Or you go to the context menu up here, click on fill and change the color that way. Now, we can also apply a stroke to it, a border, and that we can do up here. Next to stroke, we click on this little line which is currently crossed out. Then on the solid line. A border like that. We can also train a dashed line. Or we could use a vector brush for our line. Change the size. It's simply use this slider right here. Now, we have some other options as well to manipulate the border so you can align it differently if it should be outside of the outline of our object, this blue outline, but we have or if it should be inside on the middle, e.g. and stuff like that, we can change the caps. So if you have an open line, it'd be created with the pen tool e.g. which we will take a look later on. We can create, use different caps for that. If you want to remove the line, simply click on this little icon, no line style, like so. Of course we can also change the color by clicking on this color field next to stroke and changing its color. Like that. Now, to delete an object, you will simply have it selected and venue press V Delete key, like vet. Now in the end, all shape tools work pretty much the exact same. Sum will have a few more options to them. Like the Star Tool e.g. down here. Let's drag out this star. You will see that we have a few more options in our context menu, and we have these red dots as well. Now, this will simply allow us to manipulate the shape a little bit more like so. We can add more points next two points. Most of these things are pretty self-explanatory. However, so it's really nice to have all these different options. So if you right-click on this icon, you can see we have a lot of different shape towards way, way more than we have in a different software like Adobe Illustrator, e.g. this can be real-time savers. And actually using them, it's actually really, really easy. So if you need to create a shape that could be derived from one of these tools are the exact same shape that you need. Just use it, try it out and manipulated to your liking. Now, trading ellipsis works the same as creating different rectangles. If you want a perfect sphere, press V Shift key, and you will have a perfect circle. Like so. That's pretty much it about manipulating and creating shapes. I will see you in the next video where we're going to talk about the color panel. 6. Working with Colors & Swatches: Alright, Next, let's talk about the color panel and v swatches panel. Now I'm going to divide the lesson about color into two different parts. In the first lecture, we're going to talk about V color panel, how it works, how it functions, how the eyedropper box and affinity designer. And we're also going to talk about Swatches, how they work, what they are, and how to create swatches as well. And in the second lesson, we will learn how to work with gradients as well as with global swatches. Now, let's start out with the color panel. So the color pen can be found by default. Up here in the right top corner. If you don't have that, as always, go to Window and open it up, right here. Click on color. Now, let's take a closer look at this panel and dissect it a little bit. Let's start out with this top-left corner. The large color in the front is the current fill to the current fill color. To change red color, we can't pick one from our color wheel right here. This contains S, can see V3 changes and V color in the background. If you click on that, you can bring it to the front and edited is the border color. So what we have right here, the red border be wet stroke, is if you build tool, we can edit that as well and change it with our colors right here. Now there's another icon with smaller one in between the tool. By clicking it, you can completely remove evil, the bottle, or the fill. Completely erased the color from it. To bring the color back, simply select another color from the color wheel. If you want to swap both colors. So if you want e.g. the blue color over here, maybe it looks better as a border and we bought our looks better as we feel, or we just want to play around with it. You can press on these arrows and v's swap colors. Now, next, we have the eyedropper, the color picker tool as it's called in Affinity Designer. And now how does this work? The color picker works a little bit different when an alpha software, if you click and drag on this icon, you can see if you go into your Canvas, behalf of this zoomed in view and we see the individual pixels right here. We can actually select a color. So if we want e.g. this red color, let it go. And now we have this color space next to the eyedropper is this red color. Now if you can click on that. And VFD red color selected as our field. And that's how the color picker box. Now, it's pretty useful. It saves color we have picked so we can apply to multiple different objects at once. And if you want to change it again, simply hover over a different color. So you can change the colors. Now. If you don't like working with a color, we'll put one sliders or a rectangle instead. Click on this burger menu. Here you can see sliders, boxes, or just be tinned like so. I prefer to geography, color wheel. So it stays February. Now, if you work on a project which has a predefined color code, e.g. we have just found this amazing color and want to use it in your illustration project. You can type in the hex code for that color in this field. Now of course, you can also change the opacity of your color. Right now be filled is selected. You can change the opacity of all fill. Same goes for the bottom as well. Now, next up, let's look at swatches. Swatches panel is by default next to the color panel. If not, go to Window and open it up. So what our swatches, swatches are pretty much just saved colors. So if you have e.g. a sudden blue tone that you use throughout the project. You can save it as a swatch and David, readily, readily available all the time. Now, all of these colors here, our swatches. So if you select. Oh, circle. And click on this orange color. We can apply this specific orange color to our object. Now that goes for both Borda and fulfill. So you can see if you can change the fill color using swatches as well. Now how do we create our own swatches? So to create our own swatches, Let's say if you want to have this red border color as a swatch, select the object, make sure that the color is selected or indifferent. And press this icon right here at current fill to palette. Now this edit, the current fill to our colors palette. We can also create our own pellet to keep things a little bit more organized. To do that, go to the burger menu appear. You can either add a application pellet, which is a color palette that you can use on on all documents. No matter what. You could use a document pellet. And vet pellet is only available and linked to recurrent document that you've created. The palette for. This just gives you a lot more flexibility to keep everything organized. So if you have a set of colors, but you want to, you know, you're going to use across a lot of different projects. You may want to create an application pellet. If you know you only use these colors in this document. Just create a document panel appellate and you can keep things organized very easily. So let's create a document to pellet. Click on it, change its name, let's just call it cost. Confirm with OK. Now we have a new palette and it's at the top of our list. Trading a new swatch is just as before. Simply apply it and click on this button. And now you can change the color using our swatches. Like so. Now that's pretty much all I'm going to teach you in this lesson. In the next one, we're going to look at how to create gradients. How to create global swatches. Which will be very interesting and very useful, especially for the people that want to go into UI design, e.g. maybe it's not that many colors and you can play around with them rarely, very easily. But I'm going to show you what I mean by that in the next lecture. 7. Gradients & Global Swatches: Alright, next up in the second color video, we're going to talk about gradients and global swatches. Let's start out with gradients. Now there's two different ways to apply a gradient. So first of all, select the shape that you want to use, the graded on. Now, we can either go to fill and go to this gradient tape right here. Or we can take the fill tool and we can click and drag and create a gradient bad way. Now, this way it gives us a little bit more control Over the actual gradient. Now, how do we change this gradient? How do we adjust this? How do we change the colors and stuff like that? Click on the color box right here. And now you can see we have this new window. We have this gradient, a gradient preview. And here we have these two points, V beginning point and the end point right here. Now, with this point selected, you can change the color by going onto the scalar field and simply apply a color right here. The same cost for the end point, select the point and apply another color. Like so. Now, you can change where both of these colors meet. Using this middle point. You can adjust this in this menu right here. You can also adjust it right here, directly on our Canvas. Now, as you've just seen, I have accidentally edit a different point, a new point by accident. Now how do we add new points? A week? Simply click on our previous somewhere. To add a new point. B. Click on this little gradient line. To add another point right here. We can move these points around by clicking and dragging on them. And we can also change the type of colors meet right here. Now, what if you don't like that? How do I delete a point from our gradient selected? Click on Delete on your keyboard. Just like that. Now, we can change the orientation of our gradient. Let's say we want to be pink to start up here. And the gradient to flow down here. You can hover over this point and move it around. Like so, it's really easy. We'll make it just a straight line. B, possibilities are endless. Now, there are more than just linear gradients. We have different types as well. So under type, as you can see, if you can click on it and this drop-down opens, we have elliptical, vf, radial, Chronicle and bitmap. Let's take a look at a radial gradient. You can see the gradient starts at this point. And the blue color, we end point goes all the way around it. So I can see, you can change all of this right here. Pretty much. It works exactly like the linear gradient. Old gradients work the same, but they behave simply a little bit different. Now, the same goes for the elliptical. It's really similar to the radial gradient. However, we can change the width, the form of the circle itself with the center right here. As you can see, it's locked right now. It stays a circle. If you click on the lock icon appear maintain, fill aspect ratio. The uncheck that you can see, we can change the shape of this gradient right here. That's pretty much our gradients work. Very simple, easy to use. Now, let's talk about swatches. Of course, you can add a gradient swatch. Select the shape with the gradient selected up here, and click on New Swatch. And now you have three swatch. So SIF mentioned in the beginning of the lesson, you're also going to talk about global swatches to finish up our basic understanding of how to use color in Affinity Designer. Now, what is a global swatch? A global swatch is just like a normal swatch. You can apply to multiple different shapes. However, if you edit the swatch itself, you can change the the shapes for taffy swatch applied to it will change throughout your project alongside your change of this swatch. So you can get e.g. if you create a website with a lot of different buttons, you can immediately make one change and you can change the entire color of all buttons used extra Waze website at once. So it's a real time saver if used correctly. How do we create a global swatch? Easy. Let's select a color first. Open up color chooser. Let's go with this color. And let's make this a global swatch. So you click on your burger icon at global color. Give it a name, and select the color that we have chosen. Click on Add. Now we have this new swatch, but compared to the other colors, we have this right the rectangle in the left, bottom corner of it. And vet says that it's a global swatch. Now let's create some more objects that have the same swatch applied. And let's change this swatch. Right-click on it, edit, fill. And as you can see, all the colors change at the exact same time. Now, especially in UI design, web design, these things are incredibly powerful and time-saving. You can add a global swatch to whatever object you want. You can make it any color you want. You can edit to borders. You can make a gradient, a global color. That's how you create global swatches. It's incredibly powerful, extremely time-saving. And you can pretty much applied to any object, any text that you needed to be on. 8. The Pen Tool: Alright, let's talk about the Pen tool next. So what is the pen tool and what can we do with it? Now, with the pen tool, we can pretty much create any shape. We want. Any shape you can imagine, as long as we know how to draw it or trace over it, he can create it. Now, the pen tool can be found in the toolbar right here. It's this little pen icon. You can also use the keyboard shortcut P to select it instantly. Now, how does this work? Now, you can click on the canvas, wants to set your starting point. And then you can click another time to create the second point. Let's see, you've created a straight line. Now. You can also create a curved line by clicking and dragging on the canvas like so. If we click again, the curve will follow along it, like so, until this next point from Ben on its straight lines again. Now, if you click and drag and you create a curved line, but you want a perfectly straight line after click on this point once it, now you can create a straight line. Now, how do you close a shape so you can actually change the color and you have it finished. Simply click on the beginning point, this closest V-shape. Now, you can go to fill and you can apply any color to it. The same goes for vibrato as well. Of course, you can change the colors and work with them exactly like you do with objects. Now, the Pen tool consists of two different tools. We have the Pen tool to create the shape itself, but now we have all these different points. What if I want to edit these points? Where we know to do this, right arrow comes into play. This, this, we can select each individual point, B can move them around. You can drag these handles to manipulate the shapes. We can add more points to our curve as well. So shapes, these lines are called curves. Now you can manipulate them further. You can also delete points by, let's say we don't want this one right here. We selected and we press V Delete key on our keyboard. Now we deleted it. We can also change how these points behave. So we have this node, this point right here. But let's say we wanted to curve around. Now, we have these different options under convert in our context menu. So let's look at V6. If you hover over them, you can actually see what they do. So this one converts them to a sharp point like this one. And this one, smooth swim out. And this one kinda like adjusted smartly. It all just depends on what you're working with here. Let's focus on VDS converted to smooth option. E, F is point selected with sharpen, we click on the converters move. Now we have a smooth curve. And we can also edit this curve using our handles like so. You can drag these around. Now. That's pretty much how the pen tool works. I quickly want to show you some more useful things to know. So if you create a curve using the pen tool and you hold the Shift key, you can create a perfectly straight line, e.g. at a perfect 45-degree angle. These things are just good to know. In case you need to create shapes better use these straight lines. Now, I'm going, we're going to use the pen tool a lot more in our practice projects. This was just a quick introduction. I recommend that you just play around, create some real shapes like this one. Just get a feel for the pen tool, how it works, how it behaves. Before you actually start working on bigger projects. It can be a little bit overwhelming if you've never used design software before. If you've never created something with a pen tool before, just play around with it and you will very quickly get the hang of it. I'm sure of it. 9. Project 1 - Setting up the Document: All right, Welcome to be first off to practice projects, but we are going to be doing in this course. Now, in the following section, we are going to be creating a simple flat design character. Just so we can learn a few more tools like the shape builder and how to create a rounded rectangles and such. You're also going to touch on the Layers panel and stuff like that. We are going to be learning through a project, but we are going to create. So let's get started and set up our new document. So we got over to File. You click on New. And let's say we want a little bit more space, just so we have a little bit more room to work with. Fh d v full HD ten ADP. Preset seems fine. And we're going to be using that one. So make sure to select it in your preset list under the web category. And click on create. Just like that. Now next up, we're simply going to save our document. Cestodes a little bit more structured. And what we can save it easily to our destination file throughout the project so we never lose any progress. Now how do we save the project? We go over to File and click on Save. Now we're just going to name our project, so we're going to call it led. He signed character. You can save this wherever you can find it again on the desktop in a specific folder for the course. It's your choice. Now, now that I've selected, you can see we actually have the name, but we just named it up here. So if you have multiple documents open, we can always tell which one is which. Now in the next video, we're going to be taking a look at the layers panel. And we're going to create the basic shape of our character. 10. Project 1 - Creating the Body Shape | The Layers Panel: Alright, in this lecture, we are going to create our character's face shape and overall body shape. So what we're going to do is we're going to be creating a portrait of a character, of a flat character. Something that you maybe see in these landing pages and stuff like that. And while creating this, we're going to learn how to create rounded rectangles and work with the so-called corner tool. And we're also going to take a look at the layers panel, how it works, how to move things around. And you're also going to learn how to create of objects. Now, let's get started and select the Rectangle Tool and drag out a tall ish rectangle, something like this. You don't have to copy me exactly. Free to work along me. But create your very own character if its very own style to it. Maybe a different hairstyle, a little bit of a different face shape and stuff like that. Play around with it. Have fun. So let's go for something like this. Let's move this to the middle and in a bit. Now next up, let's change the color of this rectangle to a more skin tone. So go with your color wheel between orange and red, something like this. Adventure. Tone it down a bit like so. This seems fine for now. If you want, we can change later on. Now, let's create some rounded corners, because a phase is not a square. So I want to round these bottom two corners. Now, the round the corner tool is right here in our toolbar, this one. And now you can see if you have the object selected, if we have our rectangle selected, the points in each corner have turned into this white square. And veterans means that they are not selected. Now to select a point, if I click on it, you drag over it and make a selection that way. Now to round this, to create a round corner, simply click and drag like so. To create a rounded corner for multiple points if you want, because a face is symmetrical, both sides look the same. You can simply drag a selection over both corners and round them at the same time. Let's go for something like this. And that's how you create a rounded rectangle. How you create with rounded corners. It's really simple. Now next up, I want this character to have some ears, of course. And I am going to create some basic yields using some see as some ellipses. So let's create a perfect circle by selecting the Ellipse tool, holding down the Shift key, and dragging out this circle. Let's go. Yeah, something like this. And now to properly align these years, I want them to be like this. The whole do you do this? At first, you need to make sure that you have a snapping turned on. Now where can you find this? It's right up here. In vitro, in the little menu bar that we have right here. This magnet is called snapping. And if it's enabled. And Affinity Designer makes sure that if you align objects with one another, they will snap together. So move fewer soccer to be sight of your rectangle. And you can see this green line appears and your circle will kind of like snap in place and not move as easily. You can move it alongside the x's. Like so. Now the middle of it is aligned to our rectangle. Like so. Now of course, we have two years. How do we do that? We duplicate this circle using the Alt key. And if you hold down the Shift key at the exact same time, it will move on the same height. I guess you could call it. Let's move it right here. Now, it did not snap. So we have to move it alongside with x's. Again. If you hold down the Shift key, when you move an object, it will stay in line like so. So we can't. Where we can move it at 45-degree angles, but it will not move down some, a few pixels. So let's align it. And you can see that it's perfectly aligned. Affinity Designer, no sweat. Both these objects are in the same row, I guess, and heavy, same height. So let's just keep it at vet. Now we have a phase, a phase shape with two ears. What if you want to move it? If we can make a selection, of course, like that. But what if we accidentally move our face like that? It will not stay together? So how do we make sure that if you click on it, select the entire face? Well, it's extremely simple. Right now, if you look at your layers panel at the right side, you can see we have three different objects. We have two ellipses for our ears. And we have this curve, which is our rounded rectangle. Now let's select all of them. You can see that we selected objects are highlighted blue. And if you press Control G on your keyboard, selected objects will turn into a group, a layer group. Now, if you click on this arrow, you can open it up to modify the individual pieces. But now we can move it around very easily and it's just more organized. So if you're working with large projects, if you have a lot of details and stuff like that, make sure you group things up. So it's just a little bit more organized. Now of course, we can name this group as well. So if you double-click on this, we can name the object base, e.g. now we have the face group, which is this right here. Now let's inspect the Layers panel a little bit more. So we layers panel is here on the right side. It's a panel. So if you accidentally close it or you don't have it at all, go to Window and click on layers, just as with every single panel infinity designer to. Now, we have a few more options here. So this, in this large area, we have all of our different objects. The higher they are. So if e.g. this ellipse is a different color, as you can see. It's indifferent. So what's at the bottom is in the bag, and what's at the top is indifferent. Now, we have some options so we can change the opacity of individual objects if we want to write here using this slider. Next to that, we have some blend modes to change how the color behaves. And down here, we have a couple of more options. We can create a mask layer, we can add adjustment layers. And a lot, a lot of these different advanced techniques and things. Now we're not going to take a look at all of them in this crash course. We just want to get you started quick so you can create your own projects. Now, two really important things. We are on the right side, right here. Yeah, if we add layer and we have the edge pixel layer. Now, the difference between these two layers. So in Affinity Designer, if you have different persona's, so if we add a simple layer, It's always a vector layer, so we use different shapes and stuff like that. So if we scale it, it does not lose quality. Now, a pixel layer is used with the pixel persona. So we use our raster brushes on them and all these things. So this raster based tools are used on pixel layers. That's the main difference between the two. And on the far right. On the far right we have the remove layer. So it's pretty much just a delete key. It deletes the currently selected object. Now, if we want to lock something in place, we have this lock unlock icon appear at the top right. Now we can move it anymore. So if you select this, you can see the points are crossed out. And if you try to move it, make a selection set. And this layer will not be selected. We can remove it by clicking on this icon right here, or simply unlock it up here. Let's go back until we have all our stuff. Unlock our object again. And let's create the neck real quick. And we can move on with our actual character design right here. Now for the neck, Let's just create a rectangle. Like so. I'll be like, I want it to be a little bit darker. So I am going to make this shape a trusted little bit darker like so. And now we need, as you can see, the neck is in front of the face. Now, if we go over to our layers panel, it's at the top. If you click and drag on this object, move it all the way back down until this blue line appears. Move it below the face group. Just like so. Now, that's pretty much it. And I will see you in the next video where we're going to create some shapes. We're going to add some details to the actual face. 11. Project 1 - Adding Facial Features: Alright, welcome back to the next lecture of our first rectus project. Now, in this lecture, we are going to be adding a few details to our character, some facial details. So we're going to treat the eyes. You're going to create the nose and the mouth. And maybe add some shading to our ear. Maybe we added later, we'll see depending. So let's get right into it and start out with creating v. I's, I guess. So. Let's start out with the ellipse tool and draw out some perfect circles, holding down the Shift key like that. Next up, we're going to make a copy of this circle. You can do it by pressing Control Z and Control V to paste it in place. Now as you can see, we have made a copy and it's visible in our layers panel. Let's change the color to a blue. Maybe a little bit darker, maybe this one. Now, this will be our pupil. Now I want to resize this one, the circle next to the blue one, so it's in the center of our circle. How do we do it? Simply drag it down. Now, if you hold the Shift key, the proportions will stay the same when resizing objects. But I want it to be centered. How do we do that? We don't hold the Shift key, we hold the control key. Now. It's centered. So we, changes are made and the object stays in the middle. Holding down the shift key again. So Shift plus Control Enter, you will re-size it proportionally while it's being centered. So let's go with this one. A little bit big. So let's go back again. Shift control. Like so. Now I personally like it if it has a little bit of shading on the eye itself. So let's do that. Now. What I'm going to show you next is called layer masks, or masks groups, I guess it's a really super simple in Affinity Designer to trade these masks. So let's start out with a basic rectangle and just drag it over this shape until be, red line appears, until it snaps to be middle. Now, let's make the color a dark gray. Light gray, something like this. You can play around with the slider. Now this doesn't look quite right. So how do we make sure that services are shading? How do we make sure that it only covers the area of our right? Soccer? Simply select the rectangle in our layers panel and click Enter, drag it into the ellipse. Now as you can see, everything that's not within the circle disappeared. Now that's because we've made a mask group. And if you open up the ellipse, we have this new arrow down here. You can see we have our rectangle. We can still move it around and manipulate it if you want. But everything that's not in V-shape, in the main shape, the ellipse in our case, just gets hidden away. So it's really quick, really simple and very powerful feature of Affinity Designer to it. So one of the reasons why I love working with it's so much because it's so convenient. Yeah, play around with it. So next up, let's add some eyebrows to his character because this looks a little bit I've tried to write. So let's go with something like This. May be some very bushy eyebrows, a little bit smaller maybe, and darker as well. Now let's move this rectangle to be very top. You're going to make an AI group later as well. And let's round these corners by selecting the corner tool, selecting all corners and rounding up to the maximum. So if you zoom out, it looks a little bit grumpy. Maybe shorten them a little bit. Like so. Now let's make a group so we can copy and paste it easily. To select objects. In the layers panel. We can hold down the Shift key and click on the integral objects. And you can see if you make a set, can make a selection that way as well. Now, group them up with the shortcut Control G. Now we have a new group, double-click on it and call it I. And let's make a copy of it as well by holding down the Alt and Shift key. Like so. Space mode, maybe like this. Now next up, they are not centered in on our face. So by holding down the Shift key and clicking on the other group, you make a selection. And now just move them a little bit to the middle until it snaps into place. Like so. Now the ears don't quite look right. So let's go to our face group. Open it up, and select both the ellipsis by holding down the Shift key and clicking on each object. And just move him down a little bit. Maybe like this seems fine for now. At least we can always, as you can see, change things up and manipulate our groups as well. Nothing is fine. Alright, next up, let's create the nose. Now, we're simply going to make a rectangle. Let's start with a rectangle first, maybe something like this. He has a little bit of a bigger nose for the color. We're going to be using the color picker. So going over to our color panel and we're simply dragging it out to be colored vinegar. Selecting it now will be fused to the color picker again. So all these things are very repetitive. But that just tells us how important are these small features and small tools are working on actual projects. That's at a little bit of face socket to snows. Like so. Maybe move it down a bit. Just manipulate the shapes. This looks, this looks fine for now. Select both objects and group them are fifth Control G. Now, to keep things organized, always name your layers by double-clicking on them and typing out your name. Alright, next up, let's create a simple mouth shape. We could use the crescent tool to make a smiling mouth. Let's do that Actually. No, let's use V segment tool instead. I think it could look a little bit better. So select the segment tool in our shape tools. And proud this shape. He looks incredibly grumpy. Let's change the color of the mouth to a little bit, maybe a darker red. This could work. This could work. Yes. I want to add a little bit of shading to the back of the mouth as well. So we're going to create a circle and drag out a shape depending on how we need it. Next up we're going to create another mask layer. Drag the ellipse into V segment object, like so. Then to darken it up a bit, change up the color until you are satisfied. Like so. Maybe we should reverse the colors instead. So we're going to pick this color and apply it to this shape. We're going to darken this shape. Instead. I don't quite like this. So to go back, so if you're not satisfied with something, simply press Control C answered you add the step that you want to go back to like that. Let's play around with this color a little bit more and it's not so overbearing, so overpowering. Let's keep it at that for now. He looks very tired. So maybe he is a workout coming home from a hard day. So what are we going to do in the next video? We're going to be learning how to use the shape two shape builder tool. And we're going to give him a nice style. 12. Project 1 - Creating Hair using the Shape Builder Tool: Alright, welcome to the next lecture in our first practice project. What are we going to do in this lecture? We are going to be giving our character some hair. Now, in this video, you will not only see the process of grading the hair itself, but we're also going to be learning how to use the shape builder tool. Now be Shape Builder Tool. Rubbish rod that Leah explained allows you to combine shapes very easily. We can merge shapes together, create some unique shapes and stuff like. Now, it has been in Illustrator for a very long time. But it's only recently got edit to Affinity Designer if Affinity Designer to 0.0 update. So it's a really, really new feature. And a lot of people have been waiting for it because it's extremely powerful. And now we finally have it. So let's work a bit. Now. Let's get started with creating some basic hair. First. Select the rectangle tool and just draw a simple shape like this may be no, I want to go with this darker color. I don't want to go pitch black. I'm going to go with this darkish blue. And let's round the corners of it as well. Select the top corners and round them up just a little bit. Not too much. Depending on what you're going for. Like this maybe. Yes. Next up, maybe we can spread it out a bit more. Like so. Next up, I want to add some darker hair to be back off and the head. So let's select the rectangle. To trust rod this shape, make it a darker color and move it all the way down in the layers panel like so. And also I'm going to round up these corners, just a touch so it's not too sharp. Little bit smaller, like that. Now next up, I want to actually use the shape builder tool. So let's add some small details to be here. Select the rectangle tool. Actually, I want to have the same hair color. So let's pick that with our color picker. Maybe have some hair sticking out up here, maybe a little bit longer down here as well. He had a rough day at work. Something like this. Maybe. Let's round the corners of these shapes. Just a touch. Just to keep it consistent. You can play around with this and I recommend it to just play around with different hairstyles. And you try something out for yourself. Because you will, you will learn a lot from it. Not only working with these different shapes, but you will also get a feel for navigating and everything. And it will get more comfortable and just overall more natural with time the more you use it. So what do we want to do next? I want this entire front, heavy entire front of the hair to be one unique shape. Right now. It's just split in different parts. Now, does it look good? Yes. And we want don't want to really see a different at first. But if it's one shape, it will actually be a lot easier to add details to it later on. Because right now if you add a layer mask to this shape, only if we add some shadows, it won't actually reach this part here. This part here will be cut off, so we want it to be one unique shape. How do we do it? We make a selection of our parts, all the parts, but we want to be in this shape. Now. Right now, you can see the selection vf is intersecting lines right here. And you will see exactly why I'm showing vivid. So select reshape below the screen to down here, directly under our shape tools. And now all of our lines off with different shapes. A little bit thicker and highlighted. Now how do I make? Now? Now we need to make a selection of what should be in our new shape. How do we do it? Is simply drag. Now been highlighted. Area is selected area. We can add to it easily by simply dragging over it like so. Now, all the, all these shapes with different areas, different intersecting areas, the parts of it stand out, are all selected. And if I click on the plus icon in our context menu, we turn it into a single shape, the kind of merge all of these together. Now, as you can see in our Layers panel, we only have one layer left. If you hide it, you can hide things by clicking on this little circle next to the layer. You can see we have one shape, only know exactly what we wanted. And that's how you use the Shape Builder Tool. Alright, now that we have our hairstyle finished, we have worked with the shape builder tool. Make sure to finish the hairstyle of your own character. And I will see you in the next lecture. 13. Project 1 - Creating the Clothes: Alright, in this video, we are going to be giving our characters some clothing. Now in our case, you're simply going to be creating the neck itself, clubbing around the neck. Now, I've been thinking about it and I want to give him something similar to a simple shot, like a business shirt, right? So let's start out by creating a basic rectangle. Like so. Make it a little bit bigger, just so we have a little bit more room to Biograph down a bit like so. And let's give it a miss. Pale bluish color, like so. Now, I want to be a little bit more triangular towards the bottom. So how do we do that? Now? We could just merge it with a triangle. However, we can also manipulate these different points by themselves. However, before that, we need to convert it to curves, just like the pen tool. So with the objects selected, go to your context bar and click on convert to curves. Now we have, we can use the node tool and we can drag these points around. And we can also add new points to it. So if we go to the center of our illustration, we have our snapping enabled. We can click and add a new point and do the exact same at the bottom as well. Click and add a new point. Now, we can simply drag down this middle point down here to make it a triangular shape. And I'm going to do the same for this point right here. Like so. Now I do want to keep or add a dark background, the back. So let's do it. Create another rectangle. Make sure that it's aligned properly and give it a little bit of a darker color and move it behind this curve. Like so. Let's make sure that we actually work in the same area of our neck. So let's move these two new objects all the way down here. And move the rectangle that we've created, the dark one behind the neck, like this. Alright, now we have this basic shirt credit. You have the back right here. Actually, let's move this up a little bit. So convert it to curves at the new point and just move it up just a bit so it matches the front. With just gives it a little bit more dimension. Let's add some detailing to this as well. So let's make this side a little bit darker than this side. So the light hits from this from up here. And this is just a touch darker. How do we do with it? You simply create a rectangle. Unfilled. It's aligned in the middle. And move this rectangle from all the way up here into our curve, give it a darker color, is false. The wrong curve. Put it towards the front. Actually, select a color. Now this doesn't need to be that much darker, just so it's not that land like this. Let's add some buttons to his shirt as well. So let's create some circles with the Ellipse Tool. Make them white. Maybe a touch smaller. Align them to the middle. Maybe second one as well. I want these buttons to be within the mask shape. So we don't. The second one doesn't overlap here. And as you can see, the layers work the exact same within this mosque groups. So whatever is at the top, is at the top and all the things at the bottom in the bag. Now we've created our basic t-shirt. Let's now we've actually given our characters some clothes as well. Alright, now you've learned a little bit more how to use and manipulate these shapes. You know how to convert existing objects into curves, just as with the pen tool. So you can manipulate them with the node tool to get some more customization going. And yeah, as you can see, it's incredibly simple and easy to use as well. So make sure to play around with it gives you character some clothes. Maybe something different than a basic shot. And I will see you in the next lecture. 14. Project 1 - Exporting our Character: Alright, in this lecture, in the final lecture of the first practice project, we are going to be talking about how to actually export our file as a PNG file. Now we have finished our character design. Now we want to export it and get it out there as a PNG. How do we do that? So first of all, let's make sure that our dog, our actual object right here is completely grouped up. This just makes things a little bit cleaner and easier to do. So make a selection over all of the character and press Control G on your keyboard. Let's name this group character. Now, we have two different ways of exporting something in Affinity Designer. First of all, you can go over to File Export. Now here we can export the entire Canvas, right? So if we export this as a PNG file, you get this result. We will have our character in the middle right here, just as we flagged. But we have all this whitespace as well. Now, how can we not too bad, right? How do we make sure that only this right here is export it? Well, we could do it in the so-called export persona. Now, as mentioned in the beginning, we have a few different persona's. We have worked in vitro sign-up persona so far, which utilizes vector tools. But we also have the export persona, which fully focuses on exporting your files. Now click on the Export persona up here in your little persona area. And now we have this new screen right now. Pfe Slice tool selected. Now what's a slice right? Now? Be Slice tool allows you to separate your Canvas and actually export different parts of it, pretty much so e.g. right now we could create a slice of this character, so we only have this character selected. But a better example would be if you work in a July design, you have a bunch of buttons and different elements. You can create a slide for each of them and export all of them at once and send them over to your developer. As an example of a use case of the export persona. Right? Now, how do we create a slice? You could simply click and drag it out. Like so. Now this is not really useful because we would need to really look deep into it. Make sure that we actually heavy corners properly and everything is in it and we don't accidentally leave something out. We don't want that. You can simply select our group in the layers panel and click on Create slice. This slice is set up perfectly and makes us perfect selection around our character. Now, we want to export. Exporting is actually really simple. We simply go over two slices to be slices panel, which is next two layers. By default. Now, how do we export a file now beyond these slices panel. And up here we also have export options panel, right here, e.g. we could select the file format, which by default is a PNG. But let's say we want to export an SVG, e.g. maybe even a PSD jpeg. You have all these options right here. Keep it at P&G. And to export the character slides that we've made selected and click on this little icon right here. This opens up your file explorer. Now you can simply, as you can see, PNG files as we save type. Let's just keep it at character. Click on Save it. Now you've exported your character. It's really simple. And that's how you export characters. And the basic functionality of the export persona. 15. Project 2 - Setting up the Document & Guides: Welcome back to the second project of this crash course. Now, throughout this section, which will consist of six different videos, we are going to be learning how to create this rep, design right here. Now, we're going to learn how to work with the different types of texts, meaning texts such as this, which is trust, a single word or a single phrase. But we're also going to learn how to work with larger chunks of paragraph texts. Now, you will also learn how to work with these guidelines and how to import and edit these images. So let's get started by setting up our document, as well as our guides. Go over to File, click on New. And since this is going to be a web design, you're going to over to that category. And just as before, we're going to use the full HD ten ADP preset, which is 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels. Now, all with different settings we can leave at default. Next up, we're going to create our guidelines just so we have a little bit of constraint of where our content actually is. Now to create guides, we first have to activate our rulers. You can do it by pressing Control R on our keyboard. This will bring up our rulers. Now, you can hover over these rulers on each side and click and drag out these guidelines. To delete a guideline, just simply click and drag it back into the ruler. As you can see, that's how it disappears. Now, for this design, I want these guidelines to be about 100 pixels from each side. So how do we do that? Well, we could use the rulers to measure that out, but I feel like the easiest way to do that is simply create a rectangle with a 100 pixels width. Simply align the wilderness that way. Now, if you want to make a specific, if you want to set a specific width to be rectangle, you can go over to your Transform panel and type that in right here. Now, next up, we simply click and drag out a guide until it lines indicated by this green border. And then we're going to move our rectangle with the Move Tool to the other side and repeat the process. Just like that. Delete your rectangle. And now we've set up our basic document. 16. Project 2 - Working with Images: Alright, next up, we want to set up our background image, just as we see in this example right here. Now, there are a few different ways to import a new image. The most obvious would be to use v Place Image Tool. Now how does this work? You simply click on it. And now your File Explorer opens up and you can select the image you are going to use. Click on Open. And now you have this new cursor. And you can now either click and open up the image at its full size. You can simply click and drag out the image like so. Another way of importing an image would be to simply open up your folder with your image and simply click and drag it into your new document. Like so. Now, this will be at a very large resolution. So I'll zoom out a bit and scale it down. Like so. About that. Now we have our image in place, so let's make sure that we name it hero image. Now, next up, I want to create an overlay for this image just so it's not that bright. So let's select the Rectangle Tool and drag a rectangle on top of our image. Make it black. Turn down the opacity a little bit. Just like that. Now this allows us, and so we can use white text and we can actually read and see the content displayed on top of this image. It will just create a little bit more contrast like that. And that's how you work with images. Now, later on, I'm going to show you how you actually apply some effects to it as well. So you can see we have this little bit of a blur going on in the background right here. We're going to cover that at the end of this section. 17. Project 2 - Working with Artistic Text: In this lecture, we're going to take a look at the Artistic Text tool. And for audit, we are going to be creating this simple type based logo, as well as with navigation items right here. So let's get started. First of all, make sure you select the correct type tool. Now, as you can see, if you hover over V type tool, we have this right arrow which indicates there are more tools hidden behind it. With a right-click, you can see we have the Artistic Text tool and the frame text tool. Now we're going to cover the Artistic Text tool in this lecture and different texts in a later one. But we differences that you use the Artistic Text tool for short texts like a headline or a logo, or the navigation items. And different X2 to work with larger chunks of texts, Different paragraphs and such. So select the artistic type tool. And now you can either click and start typing or you can click and drag out how large you want the text to be. Let's call it Ireland. Relatives. Make sure that there's no space between it. And now you can see we have these different options in our context menu. When working with texts, I prefer to use via text panels. So let's go to Window and open up our text penalty Character panel right here. So let's take a look at this panel. Now, up here we have all of our options for our font. So we can select a font. You can change its size, we can change its weight, as well as be fun to color. Now, for this logo, we are going to be using the UI font, which is by default installed in Affinity Designer on your PC. And we're going to make the font color white. Now, 35 points seems fine for the logo size. You can change it by either selecting one from his presets or typing it out yourself. Now for the wage, with this logo, you can see we have two different rates applied to the same text. How do we do that is simply go in and we make a selection of texts we want different rate to be in. So let's select island. Now go to your font style or your font weights. Open up the drop-down menu and select Bold. Like so. This looks much better than before. Next up, let's create the navigation items. Once more. Select the Artistic Text Tool. Click on your canvas and type one item out home. Before we create the other menu items, Let's style this one. First. We are keeping the font the same, but we're giving it 18 points or the size. And a regular rate. Now, 40 remain. Probably other options in this panel. We're going to keep everything as it is. We don't want any declarations, any declarations such as underlines or double underlines. And we also don't want to play around with the different transform options right here. So right here we can select the tracking of different letters so we can make them space, be spaced apart a little bit more, or we can change the line height and told much space is between each line. All these things we can manipulate in this section right here. But for now, let's ignore that. So with our first menu item set traded, let's make some copies of it by holding down the Alt and Shift key and clicking and dragging on it two times. Now let's see what menu items we want. You want an About button and a locations button as well. So let's change this up by double-clicking on it. You can highlight the entire text and change it and locations. So let's move this a little bit to the right. Just about that. We are going to be creating a pattern right here and Ranvier, once we have time and you're finished, you're going to align everything properly. But for now, I think we are making decent progress. And I will see you in the next lecture where we're going to create a nice button, nPr also going to learn how to align different objects, easily, refund another 18. Project 2 - Aligning our Elements: Alright, let's create the button and finish up our navigation menu. So first of all, let's start out with creating a basic rectangle. Just about this size. We can always adjust for Plato if you want to. Let's change the color of it to a bright white. And also, I want these corners to be fully rounded. So let's select the corner tool, select all points and round them up to be max, like so. Now next up, I want to have some texts with inverse button obviously. So let's select a menu item and copy it on top of the button. Change its color for now, let's go with a solid black. Also makes sure that the text is above the background of the button. Like so. Change the text to form rotations to book. Now, this is a call to action button, but we're going to use, yeah, This looks good. However, I want the color to be a little bit on the more dark gray side, so it's not this pitch black, like so. Alright, now let's talk about alignment. So we could align the button perfectly in the middle. Like so. However, we also have a few, we have a different way to align it as well. So by pressing down your shift key, you can select multiple objects at once. And then we can go over here to this icon alignment by clicking on it, be opened our alignment options. So up here we can make the horizontal alignment. And down here we can align it vertically as well. So we want the button to be perfectly aligned to V center. So what we're going to do, we don't want to align it to the left, not to the right. We want to align it to the center, like so. Same goes for the vertical alignment as well. It could align it to the top or the bottom. Well spaced it out equally. But let's align it to the middle. Now PIP perfectly VFA texts perfectly aligned in the center of our button. Let's group them up as well. And let's call them button in our layers panel. Alright, This looks good for now. But I think we alignment is a little bit messed up still. So let's change that. First of all, we want to have the same space between each of these four objects. So let's select all of them. Go to your alignment options. This time, you're going to use the final option space horizontally. This mixture of at the exact same space between each element. Also align vertical, alignment vertically in the middle as well. Like so. Let's group them up so it's a little bit cleaner in our document. Now select both the menu we've just created as well as V logo. And go back to your alignment options and align them to the middle. Now, everything is perfectly centered as well. Just so we don't mess this up. Let's select both of our elements and group them up S1. And call that group mitigation in your layers panel like so. And that's how you use the alignment options to perfectly align and space out your content. 19. Project 2 - Creating Paragraph Text: Alright, next up, we're going to create all of this content right here in the middle. Meaning you're going to create our headline, sub-headline as well. And we're also going to be working with paragraph text. And I'm also going to show you how you can insert with filler texts easily. So let's start out by creating this main headline first. Let's go to our document. Select the Artistic Text tool. Drag out some texts and type out E headline. Like so. Now for the styling offers headline going with a 96 point size, as well as a bold font weight. The color will be white, like so. Let's drag that just about here and we can align with perfectly later on. So next up, let's create this tagline up here. Let's select it in our layers panel to make it a little bit more easy. So as you can see, this has a light font, a light font weight, and 2020 points in size, the font stays the same. So let's create it. Go back to your document. Let's zoom in a bit. We see it better. Type out your tagline. Traveling has never been this easy. Now, let's start out with font size. So it's not in our face like that. 20 points. And change your font weight to light. Select the Move tool and move it down just a little bit. Just like so. Maybe a little bit higher up. Like this. Next up, let's work. If the frame text tool. Now in the nth different text tool works very similarly to the Artistic Text tool. The main difference being that we simply click and drag out a container for our texts to be. Let's make it just about this big. And we can fill this container with filler text by right-clicking on it and clicking the insert filler text. Not select your text box and let's get to styling it. First of all, change the color to white so we can see it, as well as the font family. To our UI font. For the font size, we are going with 18 points, just as we've been navigation items like so. And that will be it. Make sure that we frame text is actually above your colored rectangle. Like so. Now one thing about the filler text is wet. It adjusts to the size of the container. So if you make it bigger, it will start filling up the new space. And if you make it smaller, it will remove the old space as well. It's really convenient, but we don't have that much control over our vice. Now, next up, we want to increase the spacing between these lines so it's a little bit readable. So let's select your frame text and go over to your character panel. Now, where do you, where do we actually change the distance between two lines? They can do it down here. It's called leading override. I'll be could either choose a preset from this right here. We can type it out ourselves. So let's go with 24 points. This looks a lot better and much more readable. This text down as well, a little bit. Just about here. We are almost done with this design, but we still want to have our two call to action buttons right here. Now we've already created one of these buttons. So let's just go over to our navigation. We can do it in the layers panel and simply copy the button from here and paste it in up here. Like so. Yes, No need to work to create the same element twice if you're going to use it multiple times. If we element you trade is copy and paste it within the groups. So let's say it's right here. It's still within the group and we can easily move it around or weekend. It's still part of this big thing, so it will move. Once we move the navigation, you can just drag it out of bed group by clicking and dragging it up here. So we want two buttons. One is be white book now button that we have right here. But we also want a little bit not so intrusive. Contact Us button as well. So let's create that to do with copy and paste your pattern, holding down the Alt and Shift key. Let's make the space just like that. So we want this button to be transparent with a white outline of one pixel. And we text within it. We also want to be white. Let's start with the actual background. Now we could, we can easily swap our colors in the color panel by clicking the double-sided arrow. Now, we have a white outline, but we also have a black background. Let's remove it by clicking on TV, move color pattern in our color panel. Next up, select your text and simply change the color to white in the color panel. Just like that. Now, we have almost finished our design. The only thing we have to do is look at the quick fx panel right here and learn how to create this little blurry background that we have going on in this design right here. 20. Project 2 - Adding final touches with the Quick FX Panel: Alright, let's wrap up this project by trading a Gaussian blur on our image. So how do we do that? It's actually incredibly easy in Affinity Designer. The only thing we have to do is select our image in our layers panel. And then go to the quick fx panel, which is in the same group, SV layers by default. But if you don't have it, go to over to Window and click on Quick f x right here. Now, in the quick effects panel, the FA bunch of different objects. We can create outlines, we can create shadows and color overlays. But we also have the Gaussian Blur option right here. By enabling it, you can create the Gaussian blur. Now, nothing changed so far because we first have to select the radius. It should have. You can make it extremely blurry like mad or just a little bit like so. Now what this does in the end, investors IN is the main focus will be on the headline and vector content of it and not so much on the image. So we attention will be where we want it to be. Let's go with, let's go with one pixel for our Gaussian blur. Now, all of these different options, but we have such SV color overlay, e.g. in the end paper very similar to each other. E.g. with the color overlay, you can simply select the color, change, what pairs or do you like that? You can also disable it by clicking on these checkmarks. Now, depending on what you have in mind, play around with these options into quick effects panel. Because creating shadows and drop shadows and all this stuff is actually incredibly easy and quick to do. So. Now. So that's how you create a simple web design in Affinity Designer to make sure to practice it yourself. Maybe you can make a variation of it and make sure you share it with the other students as well. I would love to see what you come up with and see your progress with this amazing software.