Transcripts
1. Opening a Document and Basic Tools: are I gang and welcome to text and offended the designer. So this course is structured in a way where we're going to start building a lot of different projects. So we're gonna cover all the tools that you're going to need as a successful artist in affinity designer. But we're gonna cover him as they would be used in actual projects. So this course is 100% project based. So let's go ahead and kick up a project. So this is your affinity designer workspace. And if you do not know any of the tools, that's okay. We're going to show you the bare bones tools that you're gonna need along the way. So let's go up to file and let's go ahead and open a new document. Now, this new document, I'm gonna be in the Web persona, and I'm gonna have a 1000 pixel by. Let's go with a 500 pixel workspace. Now. I always set my dp I to 300. For those that don't know d p. I is dots per inch for print work. 300 is the bare minimum for all print work. However, because we're in web, it won't really matter. It's just good practice that I like to do. Okay, so now you've got your workspace. Now, you realize that a whole lot of things opened up over here. This is the tool bar up here. There's also a tool bar up here, and then over here is what we're gonna call the context to a bar. Now, the last part of the interface you need to know to get started is the studio panel and the studio panel has these different tabs. The tab we're gonna want to make sure you have is the layers tab. Now what if you don't have it? Come over to the window, go to view, go to studio and make sure layers is selected right here. All right, So now that's all we're really going to do on the interface. I guarantee you, you will learn the interface through doing projects. So now let's go ahead and introduce you to the text tool. I'm coming down here and you see the A has the artistic text tool. Let's go ahead and click it. Now you see how we've got this cursor here that looks like a cross hair click and drag and up comes text. Let's go ahead and put down affinity. Now you see, I missed and I As long as the text tool is selected, you can add something. So that's the text tool. And you see how when I go from inside to outside, my cursor changes to this old cross hair. This will allow us to move it anywhere on the workspace. And now the last thing that I want to show you here is if you grab these nodes, you'll notice I used the nouveau cap term nodes. Go ahead, click and drag an node, and when you drag it out, you'll see that it expands and contracts in proportion. So that's extremely critical. Watch what happens when I grab one of these other nodes. Oops, You'll notice it disappeared. Just click on it. Bring it back. Grab one of these nodes down here and drag you see that the proportions get all jacked up, right? Same thing is true. With either of these side notes, the proportions get all jacked up. So in text, once you've drug your text out in and you've got it relatively the size you want. If you wanted to move in proportion. Grab a corner. All right, so now we've got a kind of where we want it. Notice I've got my cursor around here, and we've drug into the center of my workspace. All right? Now, the last tool I'm going to show you here in this introductory lesson is the move tool, which is right here. The move tool we're gonna use all the time. Now you'll see here that this just allows you to move it around the screen. The move tool is a frequently used tool. All right, so where I want to end this brief introductory lesson, you learned how to open affinity designer for a new workspace, 1000 pixels by 500 pixels. You've learned the toolbar, the context to a bar and the studio panel, and you have your layers in your studio panel. And lastly, you know, when you re size your text, how to grab a handle to resize the aspect ratio, and then how to resize it, using the corner handle to keep the aspect ratio where you needed to be notice. Earlier, I was using the term proportion. Now I'm using the term aspect ratio. All right, keep it up. We're gonna go into the next lesson. We're gonna continue to build on this particular piece of text, and we're going to get you into a project right away. Here, this is Step one. All right. See the next lesson?
2. Basics of Layers Finished: All right, gang. Welcome back to text. An affinity designer. So in this lesson, we're gonna show you all about layers. Layers are fundamental to all digital art. And if you already know about layers, great. If you already know about layers and affinity designer even better. But if you don't, let's go ahead and do a real quick introduction. Layers are found into the studio panel. You see here we've got the layers tab, and now the affinity logo that we put in in the last lesson has this A on it. You see this a right here. This is what is called a text layer. So let's go ahead. Name it. Textile Blair. All right. Text layers are a certain type of animal. Okay, now what? I just did there to rename it. Just click, rename it and then click often. Now you know how to rename a lair. Now to add a lair, watch this. We come over to the rectangle tool. Let's pull a rectangle here and you notice I'm pulling from the corner. I'm making it the entire size of my sheet. And look what happened. A new layers created. Now let's go ahead and call it back ground. That is how you create a new layer. You can just grab a shape, create a new layer. And now let's go ahead and make this background. Oh, I don't know. Let's go ahead and make it red. Now, we haven't covered that. So to make it red, go to your color tab and you see the circle, not the outline. Double click on the circle. Bring it over to any shade of red and it close. All right. Now, layers have structure there, like stacked on top of one another. So you notice we can't see the text layer right here. It's there, but we can't see it. The reason is the background is in front of that. So whatever is up here is closest to us as the viewer. So how do you reorder a layer? Watch this. We click and drag and bring it down to the base. Now affinity becomes visible because background is below the affinity layer layer. Order matters, folks. All right, so now let's say you wanted to create a brand new layer and you didn't want to create a shape. You can create a new layer by coming down here and clicking on add lair. Now, this will add a new layer. Let's say you don't want a new layer and you want to delete it all you have to do with the layer selected. Sit, Delete. All right, cool. Now we're gonna show you one more thing. So stay with me in this lesson, working to grab the background layer. So stay with me. You've already renamed it. We're gonna come back up, and we're gonna double click on this, and we're gonna adjust it over to Ah, I don't know, somewhere in a light blue. Let's say maybe somewhere in an aqua. All right, we're to make that pretty light there. Alright, so I've now changed it over to a lighter blue and I hit close. All right, so the very next step, what I want to show you here, there's one more way to get a layer into this. Go to file, go to place. And now in your downloads. For this lesson, we have included a metal texture. So the metal texture reference file was in the downloads. Go ahead and hit open. Now you'll see what my cursor just did. It became this blue circle with the download click on the corner. Drag this out until it fills the space. And now how do you drag it out This way? You grab this middle handle and bring it this far. OK, now let's look at layer structure, text layer, metal texture, reference file, and you'll see that we'll just call this texture okay, and you'll see that this is what is called an image layer, some text layer image layer rectangle. So you now have three layers. And here's the structure. What do you think's gonna happen if I take this in the middle? It obscures the texture layer. If I drag it back down, it then makes the texture layer visible. All right, so that's all I want to do on this introduction to Layers were setting up for the project. So every one of these particular activities is leading you toward the project. All right, we'll see in the next lesson. Make sure your structure looks like this going into the next one. All right, folks, seeing the next lesson
3. Nesting Finished: all right, gang. So now I want to talk a little bit about how do nest layers inside affinity designer, Because this is going to be critical to pulling off some of the illusions off artistic text , especially this metallic text that we're working with. So here you're gonna take the texture layer and now watch what happens. I've got my text layer right here. I've got my texture layer here. Watch what happens. I click and drag and you'll see how now, all of a sudden, all my texture just went inside the text. So let's go and release it. This is what is called nesting. You'll see the indent that occurs. This means that the text layer is what is called the clipping mask for the texture layer. So now if you don't like that, you wanna undo the nesting click drag, pull it back out and you see where my blue is now and now we're back out. So this is key to figuring out how to nest inside of text. Now watch this Click dragon inside the text. Notice the little turn down the little toggle arrow that I'm working with. Okay, move out. Just move it back out. All right, Now, I want to show you how powerful this is. Let's go ahead now. Goto file place. You know how to do this now and let's go ahead now. And there's some downloads that I gave to you. There's some download photos that I gave to you in this lesson. So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna download, and we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna download this particular picture here that was taken from peck cells dot com. We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna open. Okay, Now you see, the same placement comes. Watch this. Click and drag, click and drag. And now, how do you think we get this inside the affinity logo? Click drag. Nest it. All right, now watch what happens. I'm gonna show you something new. Take the texture layer and you see how this is checked. Take it off. Notice. What we've done now is we have made this layer invisible. Now, let's say you don't like where this photo is positioned. You can go around now with the move tool selected and this layer selected and you can reposition your piece. Now let's say you're font is not quite chunky enough. And when I say chunky, I mean, maybe it's not showing enough of the picture. Watch how you can change this. Go to your text layer. Make sure your text tool selected. Select all of the text in there and now come up to your font. And now you can use a chunkier font. I might use something. Let's say impact now. You don't have impact. You can do whatever you want to do, right? All of the fonts you have available in your computer you have available for affinity designers. So I'm gonna find my impact font. And now that's a lot bolder. And now, if I wanted to bring this up, I could make it a lot bolder here. And you see, because I'm working with the text, the picture underneath scales with me. This is exactly how you take pictures of sunsets and do what is called mask the photo using text. Okay, so you've learned a new trick. How to take a photograph nested inside a text layer and then you're good to go. You could take the sunset pictures. You could take those beach type scenes, whatever you wanted to Dio. If you don't like where the photo is positioned, you grab the photo and you could manipulate the photo anywhere you want. You could even make the photo smaller. We could definitely do that. So it would really depend on what your desire Waas. All right, so you got a brand new skill. You know how to crop a photo using text. Alright, folks, let's go ahead and take the next step. Move onto the next lesson and I'm going to show you how to make that metallic text seeing the next one.
4. Adding Effects to text: are I, gang. Welcome back to texting, affinity photo. So in the last lessons we got this far, I showed you how to nest an image into the text layer. So now we're gonna practice what we did on layers. Find the image of the elephant and hitcher. Delete key. All right, back again. Now you see the texture layer for you metallics. Go ahead and click on the texture layer. It brings it up and then nest it into your metallic lair. All right, so I got text layer, texture, layer, background This key, folks, this is the basic flow for all sorts of text. If you get nothing else from this early lesson, realize that if you put your text layer on top nest any texture inside of the text layer and then go with background, you will win every time. That is the basic structure for all artistic type of text in affinity designer and in most text programs. So this is the file structure you should strive to emulate. This is the common thread. All right, now I'm gonna show you the next step. I'm gonna show you something called adding an effect, so make sure the text layer is selected. Make sure the texture layer is nested inside the text and now come up to effects. I'm gonna show you one of the coolest things in here with effects. Hit the three D button. Bam! Three D in text. Phenomenal. All right, now what happened to our layer panel notice here, a little f X has been created. This says that this layer has an effect on it. Now, if you don't have the effects tab go up to view, go to your studio, make sure effects is selected. Okay? Now, you see that this border, this bevel, is kind of uninspiring. It's just kind of a little flat. A little bit. I'm gonna show you how to do this. So select your text layer. You see this little Kong click on it. All right. Now you see, the three D is selected. That's the effect that you have applied. Watch what happens when you adjust this radius slider Pau. But it's round round is not really inspiring for metal. Okay, so what you're gonna have to do, we'll talk a lot more about this later, but I want you to see how powerful it says click on profile and just choose a standard profile. Watch what happens. Whole different ballgame now in your metallic text and go ahead and hit close. Look at that. That thing is beefy. That thing is chunky. All right, so that's extremely powerful in terms of how to get your layer structure with an effect to create this metallic Look. Now we're not done here, right? We're gonna take this. Where to crank it up a notch. Let's go ahead and grab an outer shadow. Click on the effect of outer shadow, increase the radius, increase the opacity on the shadow, and then kick the offset up a little bit. All right, So totally up to you in terms of your preference in your taste. But the shadow in the drop shadow is a nice way to take your text from boring and flat against the background. Just something stellar that stands out. Okay, so you now know, using the exact simple text layer method taxslayer texture nested inside background. There it really is that simple, folks. Now we're gonna show you to take you to put zero from hero here. Stay with me. Let's say that you wanted to make transparent text. Okay. You want a transparent background? Watch this. Take the background. Hit the delete key. Now you see, you still got a white background When you come up, go file export. And now when you click on PNG right now you're saying Jeremy, what is PNG? PNG supports transparency. This is the way you're going to export. But not yet. Stay with me because you see you still have a white background. Goto file documents set up. Go to color and click on transparent background hit. Okay, now you are good to go. Affinity is now transparent on it background. And now we export to PNG. You must export to PNG. J. Peg does not support transparency. Other than that, don't worry about any of these settings. And go ahead and hit. Export all this affinity metal and go ahead. And I'm just gonna put it in desktop and I'm gonna hit save All right, folks. Now, this could not be cooler if you had a website or you had a document that you wanted to use this on. You now have something that is transparent that you can take into any document, any power point presentation anywhere and bring it in is in this image. Let me show you. We're just gonna go here. I'm gonna go to Microsoft office, and we're gonna click on the power point, all right? And again, you don't have to use office. I'm just showing you what you might apply this to. And if you went into insert picture, we go to desktop, and I find wherever it is that I put this affinity metal watch what happens. Power. Instant metallic text for any sort of application that you're looking for. You might use this in Microsoft Power Point. You might use this in Web design, but now you have a file that will last you the rest of your life. You officially made what is called an asset. Good for you. All right, folks. There's one project down. Let's go ahead and take the next step and I'm gonna show you how to apply this now, in multiple areas of complexity. All right, Have a good one.
5. Choosing the right font to convey the message: All right, gang, welcome back. So this is actually gonna be a bit of a design tip. This is not quite a technical tip, but as we're talking about text, I think it is extremely important as a text designer, as somebody that does logos as somebody that does tattoo work that you make the text match the message that you are trying to send. So notice that I use the term beefy, chunky when we were starting to talk about this particular metallic text. Now, if it was a wedding invitation, beefy and chunky and wedding invitations do not even coexist in the same area. But I see a lot of designers make this mistake. So when you're talking about metallic text, notice how the texture on this is pitted. It's gross. It's kind of warn its weathered. It's resistant. It's resilient. You're using a lot of things to describe the texture. One of the things I tell you all the time. Make sure that the text you use conveys the message that you want to send. So in order to do this, let's take a look at how this works. We're just gonna go ahead and we're gonna turn this down and I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm just going to delete the texture layer. Okay, Now, I'm also gonna go ahead and I'm gonna turn off. Let's keep it on. We'll keep the effect on. But now, because it's a text layer, I can grab my tool and I come over here. Let's go ahead and make it something maybe a little bit more conservative. Now we're gonna grab, shift and I'm gonna drag this down, and then we're gonna move it into position. Notice how this communicates a completely different message than what we were doing before . Now, if you wanted to trial this out, watch what you could do. Select the layer right click, duplicate the layer. Now watch what happens. I click on either layer doesn't really matter, and I drag it down. Now I have two different layers of the exact same text. So now with this one, I can come over and I could keep this one. Let's say let's make this impact. Okay, so BV chunky, all those things we talked about, right? This thing is a monster. We're gonna go ahead and shrink that down a little bit, but this bottom one a little bit more refined. Now let's go ahead and go to here. You can also copy and paste. Now, I did that by right clicking, and then you can move it up and over to here. So this is a nice way. Is a designer to test the font that you're using to send your message and let's go ahead and choose something different. So here, let's do something really kind of floaty, really kind of screw Lee. Oh, I don't know. Let's see, we got going through fonts is one of my favorite things to do. Adding new fonts. I'm certainly a font geek. All right, I'm looking for something. I'm talking about Lee at, like a French script. There we go. All right, completely different. So you'll notice how this font sends a completely different message than the other thoughts . So you're absolutely going to want to make sure that from the type of font you use, this kind of says traditional refined. This one says beefy, chunky, strong. This one says really whimsical. And all of these types of things, the font you choose will dictate the message that you send So in the further lessons when you get into the challenge portion of the scores, what I want you to think about, what is the message that I am trying to send with the font that I am choosing? So if it's a beach scene you're talking about, life's a beach. You're gonna probably want to put something a little less refined, a little more freestyle in. There always is a designer. The font choice is a strategic decision. No, the audience know the message and convey the font appropriately. All right, folks will see in the next one. Have a good