Intro to the New Affinity: Vector, Pixel, and Layout Studios

1. 1 Intro: Hello, and welcome to this course, Intro to Affinity, designing and takeout menu. My name is Ben and I'll be your instructor for the course. I am a media design educator with many years of experience teaching people both in person and online. Affinity is a new program as of the creation of this course. It used to be three separate programs, affinity designer, affinity photo, and affinity publisher, and now it's been combined into one. So in this class, we're going to design a takeout menu because that will allow us to take advantage of all three of these types of design that we're able to do. We'll be able to edit our graphics like logos and things like that inside of the vector editor. We'll be able to edit the photos for the menu inside of the pixel editor, and we'll be able to edit the entire layout of the menu inside of the layout and so this will allow us to see kind of the entire breadth of what affinity can do by utilizing the tools from each of those different personas or studios as they're calling them now. One thing I want to say is that you don't need to have any prior experience here. If you have used the old affinity programs, that will come in handy because you'll already have a good understanding of how it works. But this program is new, and we're all going to be learning it together. So as we dive in, just know that you don't need any prior experience, all you need is a computer that can run the new affinity program. So that's affinity with the green logo. Okay, I hope you're excited to get started. Let's dive in. In the next video, we'll talk about what the project for this course. 2. 2 Project: Project for this class is, of course, going to be to design your own takeout menu. So this is going to be one of those menus that you would grab from a restaurant to keep at your house. Now, we don't use these as much as we used to in the days before cell phones, but it's still a really useful kind of exercise to think through the process because there's so much of the design work that you have to do when you design something like this. So it's going to be a one or double sided takeout menu, and it's just going to be one of those cards that would sit inside of a little stand on a counter or something like that. So it's not going to be the big fold out menu, just a little one that people could grab and take for this project, you need to make sure that you use all three of the studios in affinity. You're going to use vector, you're going to use pixel and you're going to use layout to do all of these different aspects. You want to make sure that you have enough things to have explored, not everything in affinity, but at least a lot of the things that we're going to talk about here. Make sure that you include at least one logo, text that you are going to use paragraph styles to control. Don't worry if you don't understand what that means right now, we will talk about it. Then you want to have photos that you have edited in the Pixel studio. Before you get started this project, you want to make sure that you sketch out what you want to design because that will really help you once you get to actually making it. If you have a good rough sketch of where you want things to go, it makes it so much easier when you get into the computer and actually start designing it. Okay, so now you know what the project is going to be. We're going to go ahead and dive in and we're going to get a little tour of the affinity interface to help you get oriented to where we're going. 3. 3 Affinity Tour: Alright, so here we are. We have landed inside of the new affinity. And what we are looking at now is kind of the layout here. And we are looking at what we're going to do during this course. So we are going to be creating this takeout menu, and you can see that I've done a bunch of iterations on this. This is how design works. You iterate and you iterate and you iterate in order to refine your design. And you want to make sure that you save those iterations. This is made really easy in affinity by being able to duplicate your artboard or your page. So I just duplicate this and then I make adjustments as we go, and that allows me to see where I've come from. So let's take a tour around the space so you kind of know where you're at. Right, we're going to start up in the top left. Now, I'm on a Mac. So here on a Mac, I have my colored dots to close a window, minimize a window, or expand a window, okay? That's what you've got there. And you can see that it pops up and shows you different options. You have the affinity logo, which you can pop open to see kind of the welcome menu that you would have seen when you first came into it. You can see that there's different documents here, images that we're working on, and then you've got your welcome to affinity things down here as well. All right, we can X out of that. And now up here at the top, we have what are now called the studios. So the studios are what used to be in the old affinity personas. So right now we have a vector studio, a pixel studio, and a layout studio. And we are going to use all three of these in order to accomplish our designs here. Now, you may also see the Canva AI studio. If you click on this three dot menu, you can see that I have turned off Canva AI because you only have access to those tools if you pay for the premium Canvas subscription, which I don't have. So I have this turned off. You can see there are a couple of other premade studios, slice retouching, color grade. And you can turn those on if you need to. And there's also create a studio. So you can customize this to be exactly what you want, exactly what you need, which is pretty cool. So those are the studios uptop, and every time you change, you're going to see that things adjust a little bit. Things don't stay exactly the same between studios because it's changing the tools and the panels that you have access to. Now, here you have a couple of options for your view mode. You have vector view mode and you have Pixel view mode. Depending on whether you're working with vectors or pixels, you can switch between this. You also turn on Pixel view mode when you want to make sure that you're getting something pixel perfect for playing on screen. You want to know exactly what it's going to look like in pixels, you can turn on your Pixel view mode. Then along the top, we also have some other features. There are a bunch of quick menu items over here on the top right. These are things that you might need to use regularly, and you'll see that those change when I change my studio. So those are different in each studio, and those can also be customized. Well, then right below that, we have what's called the contextual toolbar. The contextual toolbar changes depending on what tool you have selected. So our tools are all on the left hand side. So right now I'm on this one. This is the move tool. And if you hover over anything in the new affinity, it will give you a nice detailed view of what that tool is. If I switch to my artboard tool, this up here in the contextual toolbar above is going to change what settings are available to me because there are different settings for each tool. So, again, the no tool is going to have different settings. They're all going to have different settings. Let's go back to the MO contextual too for the move tool is also changing depending on what you have selected. So right now I have the text box selected. This will change if I select an image instead. If I select an image, I'm no longer going to have my font options and things like that. So this is really important because you need to understand that if you change your tool, you might not see the option you were used to and you might not have realized that you changed tool. You might not consciously have been thinking about that, so make sure that if you feel like you're missing an option, that you check what tool you're on. That can help with a lot of frustration when you're first getting used to a program like this. So that's the left hand side. On the far right hand side, we have what are called the panels. Panels come in all different kinds, and these help you deal with the details of your project, things like your color, your texts that are here. So right now, I'm in the stroke panel, which helps me deal with the outlines and the layers panel, which helps me deal with the way my layers are stacking on top of each other, and I'm in the Transform panel, which helps me deal with the size and position of my shapes. So there's lots and lots of different things here, and I just want to show you what will happen if I accidentally grab my layers panel and I drag it out. This can float on top. Now, that's really cool because you can position it where you want. But if you get frustrated with that and you accidentally click the X because you think that will put it back, it won't. It disappears. And a lot of people can become very concerned about this because they're worried, Where did that go and how will I ever get it back? So I'm going to show you how to do that. You're going to come up to the window menu, and then you've got panels, and this is just showing which panels show and hide. But then you have different panels here, okay? So these are actually the panels underneath. And if you look, you're going to see a bunch of different ones. So under General, I can find layers. Okay? So I pop that back. It goes exactly back to where I had it the last time. And if I want to add it back into my docked layers on the right hand side, I'm just going to click and drag that over here. Pop it right back where it was before. No big deal. We're all set. So that's kind of the layout here. There's one other thing. You will get some information down here in the very bottom. There's a little bar down at the very bottom. I'm circling with my mouse, and that will give you some information. It can give you some help information. So it's talking about picture frame. That's what's selected, telling you how to utilize it. All right? It also shows what page you're on. So there's a few things there. Warnings can also appear here. So just know that that's another little area that people sometimes forget about. So that's the basics here in affinity. That is how everything is laid out by default. It can be customized a lot, though. There's a lot of customization that can go into it. And just so you kind of know when you change, if I change to layout here, I get a new panel on the left hand side, which is my pages panel. That's more useful in layout than it is in vector. So that's why that pops up here, and you might need it a lot. So it pops up on the left hand side instead of popping up in the right hand side. Of course, I could grab it. I could drag it and I could bring it over here, too. For those of us who used Affinity Publisher before, it's very comfortable to have it on the left hand side, so that's where it is by default. Okay, so now you've kind of seen where we're going and you know kind of what the layout of the program is. So in the next video, we're going to go ahead and get started by making a new document for our takeout. 4. 4 New Document: Okay, now it's time for us to set up our new document, the document that we are going to use for our takeout menu. This can be a little bit confusing in affinity if you're coming from some other programs because vector programs traditionally have artboards and layout programs traditionally have pages, and pixel programs often don't have anything like that at all. You just work on a single image at a time. So this can be a little bit of a new idea. But basically, artboards are going to be pages, and individual photos can also be pages. But you can use those all kinds of interchangeably. You can see right now I have the pages panel open, and I have artboards. But we're going to create a whole new document, and we want to create it to the size that we want our final document to be. So we're going to go ahead and come up to file menu in the top left, and then we're going to go to new. This is going to pop up the new dialog box, and there's some different options that you have here. You can see that you have these page sizes. These are CMYK. CMYK is what you would use if you were going to print this professionally. If we were actually creating a takeout menu for a real restaurant, we would use CMYK, most likely because we would get those professionally printed. We wouldn't just print those off on the home copier. So that's CMYK. There's also page sizes in RGB, as you scroll down, there's also photo sizes, canvases, video on the web. There's a ton of different options, including devices so you can set up to do UI design in a specific type of device. We're going to use page sizes, and we want to create something that is half the size of a letter. But you can see that this half letter here is 5.5 by 8.5, which is not what we want. We want ours to be the long half. So if you cut that letter sheet right in half, we want it to be the long half because that's more of the style of a menu. Now, takeout men may not be exactly that size, but I want to make this easy for you to get set up. So we all know that a letter size is 8.5 by 11, right? So that's 8.5 by 11 right there, and it's working in inches. You can change this if you want to work in points, picas, feet, yards, pixels, whatever you want. There's also a metric here, millimeters, centimeters and for us, we need to put in a custom amount. So right now we have a page width of 8.5 and a page height of 11. 11 is what we want, but we don't want our width to be 8.5. We need to take that down by half. So we're going to do half of 8.5, which is 4.25. So I'm just going to type in on my keyboard, 4.25 and hit Tab. And now that updated it's 4.25, and I'm still in inches. And because I didn't have this link turned on, it did not adjust my page height. We wanted to keep our proportion, we would turn that link on. Okay, our color format, CMYK eight, that's great because we're going to print this. And then there's a bunch of other things here. I don't want you to worry about all of them but we do want artboards turned on. So this Artboards one, we're going to click and turn that on so that we can have individual artboards within this. Then as you come down here, you're going to see margins. Margins are the space within the document that you wouldn't want to work inside. Now, for this, 1 " margins would be huge. That wouldn't make any sense at all. So we're definitely going to trim that down. We're going to turn that down to a quarter of an inch margin. So 0.25. Now, when I update this, it doesn't update any of the others, and that's because that link there was turned off. And we really want to turn that link on so that we have all of the same margins. So let's go ahead and click that, and we'll put this in here, 0.25. And now they all update 2.25. Great. Bleed. What is bleed? Well, bleed, you can see here if I move this out a little bit, you can see this area that's blue around my selected artboard. That is bleed. And bleed tells you how far you need to go outside of it for printing. So basically, when a printer prints something, they print it on a larger sheet of paper, and then they're going to trim it down because a printer, the machine can't print all the way to the edge of the document. And so they're going to print on a larger piece and then trim it down. So bleed is what you need in order to make sure that that trim works without ending up with white space on the. So bleed. You have your left, right, top and bottom bleeds. I'm going to set all of that to a quarter of an inch right now. So let's go ahead and do 0.25 to a quarter of an inch. This was set to link, so they all update together, and now we're going to click Create Document. So this will give us a new document with an art board that is 4.25 by 11. Okay, and now I have a new document. One of the things that you will notice when you see this is that we now have two tabs up at the top, where we didn't before. Now we have takeout Menu Practice file, which is this one that we were looking at before, and we have Untitled, which is our new document. Alright, and that's how you're going to go ahead, getting your document set up. Now in the next video, we're going to go ahead and get started using some of our vector tools. We're going to start out with the shape tools because those are kind of the basic building blocks of anything you do in graphic design. 5. 5 Shape Tools: Alright, so now it's time for us to start learning how the vector tools work, and shapes are really the building block of everything that you do in vector design. Now, for us, we need to design a really simple logo for this empanada restaurant in order to be able to put that on the menu. Now, when you are designing a menu, you may already have a logo that you're bringing in. But for the purposes of learning how to use some of the tools in each of the studios here, we're going to design the logo right. Important for you to understand that I am not going to teach every single tool in this class. The purpose of this class is to help you learn how the studios work together in order to create one document. So we're going to learn some of the tools, but we're not going to do every single tool, and that's just for the sake of time. We want to be focused on doing this project and learning how the studios work together instead of focusing in on every single tool, which is a ton within affinity. Of course, there are other courses that go into different tools that you can learn as well. Let's go ahead and get started with shapes. Shapes are the basic building blocks. So if we come to our tool bar on the left hand side, going to go down about halfway until we find something that looks like a rectangle for me. Now, if you've already selected a different shape, it might look like a different shape for you. When we click on this, that will pop out a flyout menu here of all of the different shapes available. Affinity has so many different shapes available for you. Rectangle is, of course, a very basic one, and then you also have ellipse, which is right next to it here. Rounded rectangle triangle. There's just a ton of different ones. You can get into some pretty funky ones with the doughnut and the double star tool, but you can get exactly what you want. Now, we're going to use these shapes to then create the shape that we want. For us, that's pretty simple. It's a half circle. Now, when you're designing a logo or anything, you should have sketched ahead of time. So we already kind of know what we're going for from the example here, and we need a half circle in order to make that happen. Half circle is not too hard. We're going to go ahead and take our Ellipse tool here and we're going to drag out a circle. You're going left click with your mouse and drag out. Now, you can see I can make this all kinds of different ovals, ellipses, whatever I want. But if I want a perfect circle, which in this case, I do. I'm going to hold down the Shift key on my keyboard, and that is going to snap it into a perfect circle. Doesn't matter what size this is because it's vector. Vectors are infinitely scalable. So I can kind of design this at whatever size I want now, and I can scale it to the correct size from my document later. So I'm just going to go ahead and let that go. Now, there's a couple of things to know about shapes. Shapes have a few different properties. They have a stroke on the outside and a fill on the inside. In order to mess with those, we have to go into our panels on the right hand side. That's going to be our color panel over here. And we also have a swatches panel right now. Now, when I am first designing, I'm not going to use my color palette for my final design. I'm going to use blacks, whites and grays. So if I click here where it says pinatas, that's my special palette for the menu, but I want to switch to my gray palette. Okay, and this gives me all the shades of gray, and this helps me to not try and include color in my design too soon. It works better if I don't do that because then I can just focus on what the shapes look like and how I'm working with the layout. So if we want to just change this to another color gray, we would just click here and it changes that fill to another color gray. If we want to change the stroke, we would need to select the stroke from behind the fill. It looks like a little black doghut. Bring that up to the top, and then we can change that. So if we want that stroke to also be a gray color, we could go for a dark gray color. And you can't see it. Let me zoom in. You zoom by holding down option on your keyboard and scrolling with your mouse. There's no stroke there. That's because our stroke in the stroke panel is set to 0.2. We can't see that. So if we want to see it, we would drag that make it bigger. And this panel is where we have all the options for our stroke. Now, we don't want a stroke right now, so I'm going to go back to swatches and with my stroke on top, I'm going to select this white circle with the red line through it. That says, no, nothing. Don't want it there. So we're going to click that, and now we don't have a stroke. So now we have our circle, but we need it to be a half circle. There's a couple of different ways that we can do this. So I am going to duplicate this a couple of times so that I can show you the different ways you could create a half grab my move tool from the top left of my toolbar. And to duplicate this, I'm just going to hold down Option on my keyboard, click and drag. Option on my keyboard, click and drag. So now I have three of these. When I click on the circle, you are going to see a couple of options for this shape in particular. It's up in the context menu, of course. There's a fill and a stroke up here as well, and a stroke size. But right now, we also have Convert to Duut and convert to Pi. That's because the doughnut and the Pi tools are really just subsets of the circle tool, which makes sense. They are circles. We also have convert to curve Curves basically says, Hey, I want to bake these vector points. I don't want it to be recognized as a special shape tool anymore. So I'm going to click that. And now I don't have Convert to doughnut and convert to Pi anymore. A lot of food metaphors here. What we needed was convert tamponata. But I don't have convert to doughnut or Pi because it doesn't recognize this as a circle shape anymore. It just recognizes it as vector points. So if you see these four points around it, vectors work by telling the computer, there should be a point here, and the line should exit the point at this angle, and it should go this far until there's another point. So if we click on this, we can see that these have these handles, and the handles are what tell it how far to curve. So a circle is made up of four vector points, and each of those has equally spaced handles on it in order to create a perfect circle. Now, for us, we want this to be half a circle. So what we can do is we can click on this lowest most point, and we can hit Delete on the keyboard. That's then going delete it. Now, our circle is not a perfect half circle. It's kind of rounded here. And why is that? Well, if we click back on our node tool, we can go ahead and click on these, and we can see that we still have these handles pulling outward. So they don't have a point to go to anymore. So these handles on the left and right are interacting with each other. To make that flat, pull down Command on our keyboard and click and drag that in. Can also hold down shift to keep it in alignment. And once I get up here, I can make that pretty much straight. It's not exactly straight. I'm going to zoom in option and scroll to zoom, remember? And we're going to try and get that all the way straight without messing up the other one. So that's pretty good. That's one way we could get to the half circle. Another way we can get to the half circle is by using our geometry operations. And geometry operations in some programs are called Pathfinder operations or merge operations. But basically, it allows us to combine two shapes in different ways. So for this one, we're going to need two. So let's click on the second circle, drag this up to give us a little space, and then we also are going to need a rectangle. So we're going to go to our shape tools, choose our rectangle. And we are going to drag a rectangle right across the top. Now, you can see that as I come along here, I'll get different options that appear automatically. So this gives me a red line showing me that I'm lined up with the middle of the circle. And it kind of snaps to that. Now, I have snapping turned on. That's in the top right corner of the screen, and it looks like a magnet. That is useful to have turned on most of the time. But if things are kind of like snapping together and you don't want them to, you can always turn it off. So I want this to snap right to the center, but I want to kind of be outside it, and you'll see why in a second. When click and drag through here, now we have a shape stacked on top of a shape. If you look in the layers panel, you're going to see a rectangle right here, and that is over this circle. You can select things by clicking in the Layers panel. This will be easier to see if we turn our rectangle into a stroke so that we can see what's inside. So up here in my swatches panel, I can flip my fill and stroke by using this double headed arrow next to the eyedropper. When flip that, and now I have a rectangle with a stroke around it and a circle that is filled in so that I can see a little bit better. Scroll in here and in order to use this geometry operation, I need to have both selected. I'm going to hold down Shift on my keyboard and also click on the circle. Now I have them both selected. From up here in the top right menu, I have all my geometry operations. There's add, subtract, intersect, X or and divide. For this one, I want subtract. I'm going to click subtract, and it's going to subtract the top shape from the bottom shape. So the top shape gets subtracted. The bottom shape stays with whatever's left. And so now I have a perfect half circle. This is going to be a little bit more perfect than the one that I had up on top because I didn't have to adjust the curves. I just did a flat slice across. So it's going to be more of a perfect half circle. Now, there's one more way for us to do this. Let's grab this third circle, bring it up here. And we're going to do the same thing as we did before. We're going to make a rectangle, and we're going to come out, and we're going to drag across this we could use the geometry operation, but we also have another tool called the Shape Builder tool. But in order to use it, we need to have both of them selected. I can click and drag around both of them and they are now both selected. Now, the Shape Builder tool is right below the shape tool. We're going to click on that. Now we have the option to add or subtract from this shape. We need to hold down option to change it to subtraction. You can see it turns red, and we can then subtract from this shape. We want to subtract both the half pipe thing here and also the bottom half of the circle. I'm going to click and drag through those and it erases. The shape builder tool is sometimes more intuitive and a little bit faster than using the geometry operations, especially if you're doing something more complex than this. Alright, I'm going to go back to my move tool. So now we have three different versions of essentially the same thing. They are all just half circles. So that's going to be how you use shapes. Now, there's a couple of things I want to show you here just so you kind of know about them, even though we won't be using them in this project. Come to these shapes here, and I choose something that's a little bit more complex than our basic shapes. Let's say I choose the double star. You can click and drag that out. I can still hold down Shift to keep it in proportion. But when I'm done drawing, when I let go, you're going to see little orange handles appear. And these orange handles are special properties that that shape has. So this one you can choose how far in it goes. So this is your inner radius, and then you also have what's called the point radius, and you can choose how far out these come these inner star points here. So those are special properties, and different shapes have different special properties. Those can be adjusted with orange handles like here. But they can also be adjusted up in the contextual tool bar when you have the shape selected. So you can choose how many points it has, and you can adjust the inner and point radius as well here. So there's going to be a bunch of shapes that have those special tools available to them as well. We'll go ahead and hit the lead on our keyboard to get rid of that. So that's the basics of shapes. There's a lot more you can do with them and just remember that using the Pathfinder operations or the Shape Builder tool is kind of the building blocks of how you create the shape that you need for something like a logo or an icon. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and learn how to use the Pen tool when we need a line that's a little bit more free form than what we get with shapes. 6. 6 Pen Tool and Power Duplicate: Now that we know how to use our shape tools, we're going to go ahead and learn how to use the Pen tool. Now the Pen tool is how we draw basically lines, free form shapes, that kind of thing inside of a vector program. The Pen tool is the thing that causes people the most trouble when they first start using vectors because it can be a little confusing and it doesn't work like a pen in the real world. So we're not going to go into absolutely everything about the Pen tool today because that would take a long time and divert us from our project. But I do want you to get a basic familiarity with it. We really just need it to draw a couple lines here. So let's go ahead and select the Pen tool, which is about a third of the way down on your toolbar on the left, click there. And you can see when you hover over it that you're going to get the tool tip, and it's going to tell you a few of the things that you need to know as far as your keyboard shortcuts go. So clicking and dragging, you can create a point or a curve. Dragging with shift will constrain the node to a tangent. So that will basically keep your angle in a specific snap it to a specific point. And then using the Control key, you can create a straight line using the option key. You can ignore snapping, so you can kind of get the point where you want. Using the command key, we'll actually give you the node tool. So that's the tool that we used to go ahead and click on individual points and delete them in the half circle video. So now you can get that tool from the pen tool just by holding down command. So that's kind of good to know. Now, we're going to go ahead and we're going to draw a little line. We need to draw our crimping lines here. But let me just show you how the Pen tool works first. So if we click, we'll lay down a vector point. So instead of clicking and dragging to draw a line, like we would if we had a pen in our hand, we'd kind of just drag. Here, we just click to lay down a point, and if we want to lay down another point to create a straight line, we'll just click again. Now we have this line here. Now, my stroke up here in my swatches panel, this is my stroke. It looks kind of like a doughnut. That is set to right now. So that is why my line here is black. Now, if I continue to click, I would continue to draw a line. To get out of this line, I need to go ahead and hit Escape on my keyboard. Now you see that square, that point became white now. And so now I can draw a new line. So far, I've only drawn straight lines. But if I want to draw a curve, which is why I want for my crimping on my empanada, I'm going to go ahead and click, and then I'm going to click and drag. And as I drag, I'm going to pull out those handles that we saw before, and that's going to create the curve there. I can go ahead and I could continue to draw, but this is all that I need for the crimping that I'm going to do. But I can also, if I want to adjust that, I can hold down command to get that node tool. Let me zoom in a little bit here, holding down option and scrolling. And to get that no tool, I just hold down command on my keyboard, and now it changes to the white arrow and I can click and drag. It changes to a black arrow when I'm over the point that I can move. I can move individual points. I can move my handles. If I want to move the handles independently of each other, I'm going to hold down command to be in the no tool, and I'm going to hold down option so that I can move that handle independent of the other one. So then I'm only moving one side of that. And that's how you can create lines with the Pen tool. Now I want to go ahead and take that and put it into my binata here. Now, in order to make this a little bit easier to see, I'm going to go ahead and click on my half circle. And I'm going to change it to a lighter gray. Here we are with a lighter gray. Now we can kind of position this where we want it to be. We can rotate an object by going up to this top handle here, kind of above the transform handle, and we can click and we can rotate it. So I want to look kind of like that. Now, eventually, I'm going to use the subtract to make this negative space, so I can kind of overlay it here, and it doesn't matter if it comes out a little bit. Want to do is go all the way around this circle. In order to do that, I need to be able to do what's called a power duplicate. I want to duplicate this over and over again, but I want to duplicate it with a specific set of instructions. Okay. So in order to do that, I need it to go instead of rotating here around itself. It commands you to undo that. I need it to rotate around the center point of this half circle so that it can go all the way around and just make copies through there. So in order to do that, I need to actually use this gear icon up in the top contextual toolbar. And you can see enable transform is there. Turn that on, and then you'll see a little point appear right here. It's a little blue point, and that we can now drag to change what point this transforms from. And we want this to snap right into the center of this half circle. And now if we transform, we're going to transform around that point. To get all of our transform options, we need to hit Enter on our keyboard. It's going to get this move duplicate box. So that's Enter on the keyboard while you are using the move tool. You can choose how you want to rotate and move your object. So, for us, we are going to rotate it, and I have this set to rotate at negative 15 degrees. And then if we turn on the duplicate option, will show us how it's going to duplicate around the entire thing. And currently we're set to 11 copies. We can change that. We could do less copies. We could do more copies. We could adjust our rotation angle so that we fit more or less into here. But this is going to work for us now. So let me go back to 11 copies, and we're rotating at negative 15 degrees. And we're going to go ahead and click Okay. And now we have all of these curves. And if you look in your layers panel, we have curve curve curve curve curve, and they all are slightly different angle. So that was way faster than us doing that in order to be able to complete this subtraction, we actually have to turn these lines into shapes. So right now they are just lines. They have a stroke, no fill, and we need to change them into shapes. So let's go ahead and make sure that we select all of them. This is going to be easiest from the Layers panel. So go to the Layers panel. Make sure you clicked on one of the curves, and then holding down Shift, click on the last curve. Now they are all selected. And what we want to do now is we want to expand these. So we are going to go up to our vector menu, and we are going to select Expand Stroke. Click Expand Stroke, and these all now become objects with fills instead of strokes. You can see if we come in here, these now have a blue outline around them instead of that line going down the middle. Okay. Now, before I perform any more operations, I want to duplicate this whole thing so that I have a copy of it. I don't want to perform an operation that's going to be destructive until I have created a copy. So let me select over this, and then I'll just do my copy again by holding down Option clicking and dragging. Now I have a copy of that, and my old one remains intact. So now we can go ahead and we can perform our subtraction. So we're just going to go back up to our geometry top right. We're going to subtract again. When we do that, we've now cut this away so that now we have this negative space, and this is one object. So that's the basic shape of our logo. And now in the next video, what we need to do is add text to it. 7. 7 Text Tools: All right. Now that we've got the basic shape of our logo done, we're going to go ahead and add in our text. Now, in this case, if I go back to our example here, I want the text to curve around the object. So we're called this EmpanadaRstaurant, Ben pinatas, because this is been Designs. So we need that text to curve around. So let's go ahead and come back here. And in order to do that, we need to learn about the text tools in affinity. And in the vector studio, you have access to the text tools. And you have a lot more text tools in the layout when you're designing like this, you really want to be in vector, and that's going to work out just fine for you because you don't need some of those more copy fitting features. You just need more of the design features. So we're going to come over here and we're going to go about two thirds of the way down on the left hand side, and we're going to find the artistic text tool. And if we hold on that on the flyout, we can see that we also have the frame text tool. Generally, when we're doing design like a logo design like this, we're going to use the artistic text tool because the frame text tool is more for laying out body copy. Artistic text tool allows you to come out here and when you click and drag, you're going to determine the size of the text. You can see it's showing you the size and points that the text is going to be. If we type out Ben pinatas here and if we come and resize it, as we resize the box, we will resize the size of the text. That is in contrast to the frame text tool, which if we use that when we click and drag out, we are going to drag out a text box rather than a size of text. So now if we type out Ben pinatas, you can see that it fills in the box. But if we were to type out a whole sentence, it's going to jump down to the next line, and then if we resize it, just go and resize that text box and some of the text can be hidden. We can make the line longer. Well, we can't resize the text that way. So that's the difference between the artistic text tool and the frame text tool. For our purposes, we want to use the artistic text tool because we want to be able to control the size and we drag out. But we also want to be able to attach it to a path so that we can write along if I come in here and I try and get onto this path, this path is not going to work very well because we've cut out these shapes from it. And so it would try and put text all running along here. And we don't want that. We really want to be able to do the exact half circle that we've done before or maybe a little bit bigger so that it sits outside. So it's a good thing that we saved our half circle from before. We want to have the exact same one. Let's go ahead and grab our move tool, grab our half circle, and we're going to duplicate it by holding down option and clicking and dragging. And we just want to bring that down here. We just need this to make our text, and then we can position our text along our logo. So this doesn't need to be in the exact right position. Go ahead and grab our artistic Text tool. We're going to come in here, and we want to do text on a path. So as we come along here, you're going to see that we get a T with a little squiggly line on it. That's going to give us text on the path. We're going to click on that. You can see we then lose our coloring because we've now turned this into a text path. And then we can type in what we want. We're going to turn on Cap Sock here, and then we're going to type in Ben panadas. You can see it starts to curve around the edge, which, you know, is cool, but it's not what I want. I have two little arrows here, a green one and a red one. And one is the starting point and one is the ending point. So if I click and drag back on the green arrow, I can pull this back around. Okay? My red arrow, if I click and drag that, I can actually start to flip the text over because it's pushing it into another position. Once I do that, you'll see I get another set of green and red arrows that are slightly different colors. Now, that's not important for what we're doing right here, but I want you to see it so that if you accidentally do it, you know what's going on. You can always just grab that arrow and pull it back again. Alright, so let's position this like this. And then we can use our move tool, of course, to bring this down here. Now, when we do that, because we used a half circle that's exactly the same size as our logo, it sits exactly on top. That might be a little bit crowded. So we might want to just enlarge this a little bit. We can do that. Using our move tool with the same kind of transforming that we've done before. Click on one of these handles, and we can and when I click and drag out, I want to hold down command on my keyboard so that I can do this around the center instead of from a corner. I want to do this around the center here. Just give us a little bit of breathing room. And now, if we go back to our text tool, we're going to see our green and red arrows again, and we can reposition this to just get it nice and centered. Now, because we are in the Text tool, we can now change all the things about our text. So let's go ahead and select it by clicking and dragging across our text. When you turn off Capslock. And now I can change my font. I can change my style, all of those things. So let's go ahead and see what we've got. Now, I have a bunch of fonts here that, you know, I've acquired over time, and you may not see all of the fonts that I have. You may see different fonts that you've installed on your computer. So for this, I want to use kind of one of these rougher fonts, give it kind of a vintage feel. So this is barley aged. This is one that I got in a bundle of kind of vintage fonts, and I like that, but you can use whatever you want for your logo. Going to put this right here, and I could adjust the size further if I needed to. Okay, I'm going to take a look at my reference here and see how close I am. It's looking pretty close there. Okay, and the last thing that we would do with Logo design would be to go ahead and add in some color, but we're going to add color to this whole document all at once. And so we're going to leave this like that for now. And in the next video, we're going to switch over to the layout studio, and we're going to start learning how to lay out our document. 8. 8 Layout Studio: Alright. Now we are ready to go ahead and start to work on the actual layout of our menu. So we're going to switch over to the layout studio. Up in the top left, we're going to click on layout. This is going to change us to pinkish peach color here. And now you can see we have our pages panel on the side, and things have just switched up a little bit in order to help us with the types of tools that we have and things for when we are doing layout design. Now, I need a new page to work on. I'm not going to just delete everything on this page and start working here. I want to save each of those iterations, like we saw in the example file here. We want to see each of these iterations as we go along. Go ahead and click over here into our untitled document, and we're going to go over to the pages panel because we need a new page, and we're going to click the New Page button, which looks like a page with a plus in the top right corner. We're going to click that and it's going to add a new artboard, so we had Artboard one and we had Artboard two. The reason they use our artboards is because we chose to use Artboards at the beginning. Now, I can still see my Point transform here. I don't want to see that right now, so I'm going to go back up to the gear icon and deselect enable Transform origin. We can always put that back on if we need it again. I got this document that I'm going to be working in, but I also want to have some guides to help me as I'm laying this out. Guides are super helpful when you are doing layout work. For me, I want basically a two column layout here so that I can set up my menu in two columns, which will make it easier for the viewer to actually use and read. We're going to go and get those. Got to go up to view, and we're going to go to guides. Once you have your guides open, you can choose how many columns you have, how many rows you have, et cetera. I'm going to go ahead and set mine to two columns. So you can see this in the preview over here on the page that I now have two columns. The trick here, though, is I didn't keep the margins that I set up and put them into my guide, so I need to add margins. Make sure that link is turned on so that they all get set to the same thing. I'm going to put back in my quarter inch margins, 0.25. And so those now apply to the guides as well. So instead of going across the entire artboard, they're set within the margins, which is really quite helpful. You can change the color of this. If you were working in blue, you might not want the color to be blue. So you might go ahead and change the color of your guides to be a different color. The next thing that we want to deal with is the gutter here. The gutter is set to a third of an inch. Now, we've been using a quarter of an inch for everything, so let's just stick with that. That's the design principle of repetition. So we'll go to 0.25 for our gutter. That's the space in between the columns, and that shrinks that up a little bit, makes it a little bit neater and more like what we have going on everywhere. You can go ahead and close our guides. Now we have these guides to help us out as we are laying out the document. Now, the very first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and pull over my logo onto this. So I, of course, don't want to take my original, so I'm going to duplicate it. Click on my text here and also hold down Shift and click on my panada. And then I'm going to drag them over while holding Option on my keyboard, and I can just drag between artboards like this. And now I have this here, but I do want to group them together. So I'm going to go ahead and right click and choose group because I don't really want to use those two things independently of each other anymore. They are one logo, and I want them to stay together. I can use my snapping to kind of position this, and I'm just going to drop it towards the top of now, you should be working off of a sketch. When I did the original designs here, I worked off of a sketch, and that is how you should always be working when you're designing is make sure you have a sketch and then create iterations and continue to reference those as you figure out what your layout's going to be. I can resize this if I need to, but when I do that, it's going to not resize the size of the text. So that's not going to work out well. So what do I need to do there? Well, I need to go ahead and expand that text. So let's make sure that we get here. Let's go into our layers. We've got our group, open up our group and go to that text. With that text selected, we really need it to not be text anymore. We need it to be set. We want to resize with the object. We're going to go to the vector panel, and we're going to choose Convert to curves. Click that. I no longer is text anymore. It is now a curve object, and you can see that within it, there's each letter is a separate curve. So now we've got those. And so now if we resize, they'll resize together perfectly. And that is exactly what we want. Okay, so that's how we'd get our initial artboard setup to start doing our layout design. In the next video, we'll talk about adding text to this document. 9. 9 Adding Text: Now it's time to start working on our layout. And if I take a look at the example file here, you can kind of see we've got some different things. Now, I had tried kind of a title up at the top and then the logo underneath. I eventually get rid of that title at the top and just stick with the logo. But looking kind of at the structure here, we have some bigger headings, and then we have some body text that kind of displays the menu items, and we're also going to have some text for our prices that kind of fall in with the headings here. Just want to get this basically laid out first. So we're going to kind of drop those blocks in. We're going to have heading text, we're going to have body text, and we're going to have images, and we want to drop in that layout. And we won't worry too much about the style of them at this point. We'll get to that later. In this iteration, we really just want to get our blocks laid out. So, of course, have our same tools, but they're no longer nested together. We have our artistic text tool, and two tools above that, we have our frame text tool. So let's go ahead and get our artistic text tool right now because we're going to be doing this heading. We're going to click and we're going to just drag out that to a reasonable size. We can always change this and the way I have this divided up, if we look back here is I have this as early empanadas, now empanadas, and late empanadas. So our breakfast menu is going to be the early empanadas. So let's go ahead and type that in. And if we see that that's too big, we can resize it down, and that's the nice thing about using the artistic text tool. Now, we do want to put in our pricing here, which I think was $2 for the early Impinas. That seems like a pretty good deal to me. Let's go ahead and type in $2. Okay, so we've got that set there, and we can kind of see where we're laying it out. And this, of course, is going cross column here because it is a heading. So it's going to be able to span our two columns here. But then when we go ahead and lay out our frame text, we're going to lay that out in two columns that match. Go ahead and grab our frame text tool, and we'll click and drag this out, and we didn't quite get it to where we want it to be. Let's make sure that we're matching that up, snapping that to the margins. And now we've only got one column, so we really need to get this to two column. So up in the contextual menu at the top, you're going to see a thing that looks like columns, and we're going to go to two. And once we do that, we get gutter controls. Now, you remember our gutter was set to 0.25. It's automatically set this to a third of an inch. So we have to type in 0.25 here. Now our gutters match the gutters of our guides. Then we can type in what we want here. I'm just going to go ahead and look at this. I've got bacon egg and cheese, sausage egg and cheese, ham eg and cheese, and just egg and cheese. I'm just going to go ahead and copy that so you don't have to watch me type it all out. I'm just going to go ahead and copy that, and then I'll bring it over into here. And I'll click Paste. All right. So now we've got these. The thing with columns that you need to remember is that you run through column on the left and column on the right. You can't select them independently. They're not two text boxes. And this is good if you want text to flow between them. But if you want to just have a thing on the left and thing on the right, then you need to use two separate text boxes for that. Because if you can see right here, if I shrink this down, going to start pushing it over, and then I will get this red eye here, and that means there's overset text. There's a red arrow and a red eye, and that means that there's more text there than it can show. And that's because it's going to push these between the columns. That's how we add our text in both artistic text and frame text here. In the next video, we're going to see how we add our blocks for images. 10. 10 Pictures and Frames: So we've seen how we can block out text here. Now let's look at how we can block out an image. We're going to go over to our toolbar and just about halfway down, we're going to find a rectangle with ex throat and a circle with next throat. These are the picture frame rectangle tool, and the picture frame ellipse tool. These work like shapes, but they are intended to hold images. That's the idea behind them. Let's go ahead and take our frame tool and we're going to come out here and we're going to lay out a spot for our frame to be. Let's click and drag this out. And we can always adjust the size of this later. As you can see, there's an X going through it to show this is where an image is going to be. Now, we don't have any image in there right now and we might want to put one in. Now, maybe we have an image, maybe we don't have an image. Kind of depends at what point you're working on the layout at. Sometimes when you're working on layout, you may be waiting for photographers to actually deliver an image to you. So you might not have them, and you might want to put in something else or you may not have specific photos that you want to put in. You might want to use some stock photos. The nice thing here in affinity is there's a stock panel that can help you out. Mine is right here on the left by my pages and assets. So I've got stock right here. Now, if you've never used it before, you might not see it there. You might have to go to Window and then go down to. Want to see stock. If there's not a checkmark Byte, you need to check it, and then it will appear over here. Okay, so you can see I've already searched empanadas. There are two basic stock sites that you can search for. This is Pexels right here, and you can also choose to go to Pixabay. So there's Pixaba you can search for whatever you want in either of them. Obviously, we are currently searching for empanadas, and you can look at both of them to see now, if this is the first time you're using it, you will have to agree to terms and conditions for Pixels and Pixab in order to use them there. Now, the nice thing about them is they are royalty free images, so you can use them without worrying about copyright and that kind of thing. And it's nice to have access to it right here inside of affinity rather than having to go out and get it from somewhere else. For now, we're just going to fill it in with just kind of some random ones, but I want them to at least look like they are because I'm not showing the process of making empanadas. I'm trying to sell actual cook empanadas. Okay, so let's go ahead and grab this one here, and we can just click on that and then we can drag it into our frame. And it's then going to drop it into our frame. Now, let me show you how that's different than just dropping it onto the document generally. If I click and just drag this onto the document, I get this huge thing I have to zoom way out Option Scroll to Zoom, and it's because it is posting at full resolution, which is not what I want. I just drag into the frame and then it puts it there proportionally. Let me scroll in. Now, image frames are one of the things that mess people up the most when they first get into layout that's because it can be confusing because your image is actually separate from your frame. It's very much like in the real world when you put an image inside of a frame and you could put a mat around that, you could crop it down. You could change the image inside of the frame. And that's what you can do here. There's this circle in the middle with four arrows, and that tells you you can move the image, not move the frame. So we can move the image inside of the frame. But anything we put outside the frame won't appear. The frame is like a little window onto the image. And we can also, let me just put that back in the we could resize the image. If we double click here, well, we're going to need to grab our Move tool. And then if we double click here, we can get the image. So you see that bounding box get bigger and we can make the image bigger. It's still cropped to inside of the frame, but we can make it bigger. So if we want to be zoomed in here, click out, click back on it, and now we can move it with the arrows again. And we can kind of get exactly the part of this picture that we want. You also have this bar down at the bottom, that's the Zoom in and out bar. So if you don't want to resize that way, you can zoom in and zoom out like. If we resize the frame, we're going to resize just the frame. We're not resizing the photo at all. So you can see that. We can crop it way down like that. I'll hit Command Z to undo that. So that can be really tricky to understand at first, these are two separate objects that are interacting. So when you resize the frame, you don't resize the picture. When you resize the picture, you don't resize the frame. Once you've got that figured out, then you can really get it to kind of work. Now, if you do want to resize them together, there's actually a special handle for that. That is this little handle in the bottom right corner of the image. It's off from where like the regular handle is. You come there, and that will actually resize the frame and image oh, that's a little trick for you just depending on which thing you need. There's a handle there for you, but it might not be immediately apparent. Okay, so now we have our basic layout here. We have a heading. We have some body text, and then we have an image. We want to be able to duplicate that so that we have three of them. So let's just select all of them together. Click one, hold down shift, click the second, and then click the third. And now hold down option, click and drag. Hold down Shift to keep it in alignment, and we're just going to snap that right into play we're going to do that one more time. It's not going to fit because there is more text here than we'll have in the final document, but just kind of laying this out roughly right now. At this point, we can make a couple of adjustments here and bring in our actual text. Let me go ahead and copy my text here, and then I'll paste that over into this spot. We can kind of tighten up our spacing here a little bit. It's a little bit more room. These are going to be a little bit more expensive, and you're just switching back and forth between tools all the time, but the move tool is kind of where you're going to end up the most. Now, when I paste this in here, you're going to see that now Apple and Natla are in the same column. And that's just because this text box is way too big for them. So we can go ahead and bring that up. Natla will jump over, and now we have space to bring our image back up. I just hold down Shift to always keep it in alignment there. Now we've got our basic layout done. We basically translated our sketch into a rough draft in the digital space. Last thing that I want to do here before we start on a new version is I want to change out these images to be different ampinata. This one here looks like a little bit more like a dessert ampinata. Well, it looks like I forgot to change my text here as well. We do this. Double check my pricing here, $2. Yes. And so now I've got this image here. And I might want to scale that down a little bit so that we can see a little bit more of the empanada. Choose another picture of empanadas here. Go ahead and go with this one. And we're going to have to scale this guy up so that he fits inside the frame and reposition it like that. Okay, so now we've got some stock images in there. We've got our text, and we're ready to basically start modifying this iteration over and over again until we land where we want to. And we're ready to start thinking about how we want this to look stylistically. So how we want the text to look in particular. So we're going to start learning how to use styles within affinity in the next video. 11. 11 Text Styles: Now we're ready to start styling our text so that it looks like what we want it to. Right now, we've basically just been blocking it out, but we haven't changed the font or the size really at all. And so we really need to solidify that and figure out how that's going to look. But we don't want to do this on this page because we want to save our iteration of our original layout so that we can always reference back to that. So we need to make a new page. So let's go back to our pages panel, which is on the left hand side. In the Pages panel, we have previously added a new page by clicking this new Page button. We don't want to do that in this case because we want to keep all the content that we already have on Artboard two. So we're going to click on Artboard two, and then the duplicate button becomes active. So we can click that and we will duplicate that Artboard. So now we have Artboard three, which looks exactly like Artboard two. Now we can modify it with worrying about changing artboard, too. So, let's go ahead and we're going to zoom in, and we're going to take a look at this. If you are working with a brand, you might have brand fonts and sizes and things like that that you are already working with and you know what to do. If you're not, then you might be selecting things on your own. In this case, we're going to click on here and we're going to set this heading to look like what we want it to. It might take some experimentation. There are a lot of fonts in the world. Even if you haven't added any of your own fonts, there's a lot of fonts. I have this set to Arial right now, which is a very standard computer font, but that is not what I want it to be on my menu. So I'm going to go ahead and click the dropdown and I can look through a bunch of different types. And of course, each font that point size varies, and so it may get too big or it may get too small and we might have to adjust it later. That's one of the benefits course of the artistic text is it will be pretty easy to do. I've used this barley aged up at the top, and I could use that again here, but I want to create some contrast between my logo and the text of my document. And so I'm not going to use that again. What I used before was this Bloomsbury one. And Bloomsbury has a couple of different types of fonts. We have Sands and script and serif. I like the regular Bloomsbury, which is Bloomsbury Sands. I'm going to click on that, and I don't want this extending out beyond the edge of my column. So we're going to go ahead and adjust this down. You can see as we do that, it's going to change the point size. Now I don't really love to be at kind of a weird point size here. So I'm going to go ahead and just change that to be 20 and see what it looks like. And we can also try 21. Looks like we're overset just slightly, but I can actually see here that we have a little bit of space right here where we didn't quite get that lined up with the margin. So now at 21, we are exactly across. Now, that might change as we get into some of our other headings, but for now, that's looking pretty good. And if we take a look back at where we were on the menu over here, we can see we were at 21 there as well. Well let's jump you could go and we could make those changes to each one of these things, but we really don't want to. We really want to set this up as a style because we're going to need to use it over and over again, particularly if we were going to do other types of signage, we would want to get this setup as a style that we could use and then in every document, we could set up that style, and we could just use it over and over again. So let's go ahead and make this a style. On the right hand side, in our panels in the row with our Layers panel, we're going to see TST. At least on my size screen, that's what I see there. I'm going to click on that, and that is going to take us to text styles. Currently, we are set to no style. But we want to make a new style. And because we have this textbox selected, it will base the new style on what we have in this textbox. So it's going to take the font, the font size, the color of the font, the spacing. Everything that we have here is going to take and pull into this new paragraph style for us. So come down to the bottom right of this textylesPanel, and you will see what looks like a backwards P that is called a Pilcro and stands for paragraph. And we're going to click on that. It says Create Paragraph style. We can now name this style. So we're going to call this empanada. Heading. And you can see it's got all of these things set up. We're currently showing the spacing on the left, and we are left space, space before, space after all of that is all set up here. If we go up to the top to where we have font, we're going to see that we are set to Bloomsbury. The style is Sands and the size is 21. Alright, so this is all set up here. We're going to go ahead and click Okay, and that is going to create the new empanada heading. Now, to apply that to the others, we're going to click on them. Shift click so that we have both of them selected, and we're going to choose empanada heading. That then pops that in. Now, these are still set to 21, but they don't go all the way across. 21 is basically as far as we can go, though, because we don't want these to be a different size than the first one. But let's do line them up with the margin on the left, just so that we are in the correct spot, holding down Shift to keep them in their original alignment. That's what makes this super easy. We just need to do the same thing again for our body text. Let's go ahead and get in here on our body text, and we're going to style this to be what we want. Now, one of my favorite fonts for body text for easy reading is Quicksand. Now, Quicksand is one that is probably not on your computer by default, but it is available for free. So you can get that through a site like Font Squirrel. I'm going to go ahead and click on Quicksand, and we have a bunch of different options with Quicksand, which is what makes it really good. It's very versatle. We're going to set that to Quicksand there, and we can set this size to be smaller than our heading size. So we're currently at 15. That's looking pretty good. I'm just going to go ahead and check where my size was at. Here on my other one. Yes, 15. And where I'm losing a lot of space here is in this space after. So the space after the paragraph causing us a little bit of trouble. So I'm going to show you how to adjust that within the paragraph style. So we're ready to make a new paragraph style based on this, and we're going to go to plus that Pilcrow again and pull that up here. And we're going to call this empanada body. Alright, you can see it's set to Quicksand here, all of that. But what we need is to go back to spacing, and we have this where it says space after it's currently set to 12 points. We don't really want it to be set to 12 points, so we're going to go ahead and set it to zero and see how that does. So then that pulls it up. This is just going to give us a little bit more space. But the problem is, it now makes it really difficult to read because it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends because they're going on to second lines here. That won't be so much trouble in the other ones that don't in this early Impinats one where there's a little bit more to tell, it can make it hard to see where one starts and where one. Order to change that, we really need to be able to do what's called a hanging indent where we can get that text underneath to bump out so that it's clear that it belongs with it. Then that's the design principle of hierarchy. So this is still in our spacing setting. You can tell there are tons of settings that you can change here. You don't need to worry about all of them because a lot of them don't have to be set for every single style, but just know that basically all of the options that you need are here. Now, still inside of spacing, we have our left indent, right indent, first line indent, and last line out dent. So what we want is that left indent to come in a little bit. So we can up this. But you can see our first line is coming with us. So we need to get this where we want, maybe 0.1. And then we can take that first line in debt and we can set that back to zero. And now you can see we've created this little bit of hierarchy here, which just makes it a little easier to tell what's going on. Now we can go ahead and click Okay, that's going to create that textile, and we can apply this to our other textboxes. Shift click to select both of them and apply ampinata body. Now you can see that what we've got going on under now ampinatas because we got rid of that spacing beneath is now we just have Vegan on its own line here. So we can actually adjust this textbox so that we can push that so that we have three on one and two on the other. And that's going to give us a little bit more space. Now, we're going to need a little bit more space because what I forgot to do was add in the hours and the location of this. So we're going to need a little bit more space here or to add in our hours and location at the bottom. So we can always just re kind of structure this here. Make sure everything is lined up correctly. I also notice that I forgot empanada emporium under here. So in the next video, we'll do another iteration. We'll add in empanada Emporium, and then we'll add in our hours at the bottom using our textle. 12. 12 Saving and Iterating: So now we need to do a couple of things. We need to make a new duplicate artboard of Artboard number three. So let's go back to our pages panel, click on Artboard three and duplicate it. We now have Artboard four, and now we can mess around with this without worrying about that. And this just helps you to see your progression over time. If you need to get back to an old version, you can easily do that. The other thing that we haven't done so far is we haven't actually saved this doc. Now it will try and recover a document if you have a crash or something like that, but it's always good to be saving. So let's save at this point. We're going to file, and we're going to save. Now, this is a good time to talk about what types of files you have in affinity. So the new version of affinity uses a new file type dot AF. And the AF file type is exclusive to affinity, and this is the only program that's going to be able to open it. The old versions of Affinity had their own file types that could switch between them. There was a photo, a design, and a publisher file type, but they could all open each other's file types. Here, because they've all been combined into one program, the AF file it's just that one file type. And the important thing to note is you can bring old affinity files in to the new affinity, but you can't take new affinity files into old versions of affinity. So just note that. Now, we've got this, and we're going to save this as our Ben Panata takeout menu. Click Save. And now it's got a name up here in the little tab at the top. Ben PanataTou menu. And so now we're save. We're good to go. If we have a crash or something, we'll be able to get back here. Now, let's add in our Empanata emporium text and our hours text. So we might need to do some copy fitting here. We might need to move things around a little bit just to make sure that everything fits nicely. Here, I'm just going to duplicate my early empanadas by holding down option, clicking and dragging, and holding down Shift to keep it in alignment. Get rid of the word early and the $2. We'll call this empanada Emporium. Now, this one could be a little bit bigger. It is set to the empanada heading, but that doesn't stop me from changing its size. So it's still artistic text, and I can just click and drag it, and I can make that a little bit bigger. That's going to take us up to 25.1. It's kind of a weird number, so let's just go to 25. Now we just need to move this to give this a little bit more hierarchy here, and we can trim down our box here. We don't want to go this far, but we can go that far just so that it's just fitting. Then we can move everything. And a lot of layout design is doing a lot of little movements to make sure that everything is fitting. Can be tricky. When you have a lot of information to convey, which is true of something like a menu, even a simple menu like this, and there are much more complex ones can be tricky to get everything to fit. You've got a lot of information to convey. So you've got to take your time really thinking about how everything lines up, how everything is situated. Alright, so now I need a body text box, so I'm just going to option, click on this and drag it down. Now I can fit in my hours here. Just go and go ahead and copy these. And paste these in, like so. Alright, so now we've got our location and we've got our hours. And now that we kind of see where that's fitting in, we can adjust our position of the main part of our menu here. I'm going to go and move this empanada emporium down a little bit. So now we've got things set up pretty much the way we want, but we still want to go ahead and add in color now. So we've designed without color besides the photos up until this point, but at this point, we do want to add in some color. We need to learn how to create our own color palette so we'll do that in the next video. 13. 13 Color Palatte: Now it's time for the fun part where we actually get to add color into our menu. I know it can be boring to design in gray, but it's really important to do that so that you can work through those designs before you start confusing yourself with color because color adds in kind of a whole nother host of considerations. So designing gray is really helpful first, but now we get to make a color palette. So we're going to come in here to color.adobe.com. So this is a site that anyone can use for free. You don't have to sign in for it, at least not right now, and you can create a color theme here, and then we will be able to screenshot that and bring it into affinity. So let's go ahead and find a theme. There's a lot of different things you can do on this website, but for us, we're just going to go with this empanada menu, I wanted something that felt kind of Spanish. So I was in Spain not that long ago. I really enjoyed eating mpanada. So that's kind of what I think of with mpanadas and that's the feelings that I want to invoke. So I'm going to type in Spain here, and we're going to see what we get. You'll notice that we have one that looks very similar, in fact, the same to what I was using in the example menu. Now, you can use any color scheme you want, but I do suggest using one that's kind of thought out and planned rather than just selecting random colors because that's not going to work so, this one right here was the one that I ended up using, and I find the easiest way to do this is to just take a screenshot of it. So screenshot command on Mac is Command Shift four. And screenshot command on Windows is Windows Shift S. So I'm on Mac I'm going hit Command Shift four to get my cross hairs, and then I can just screenshot this. Now for me on the Mac, it's going to appear here in the bottom, so I'm going to jump back to affinity. And I'm going to pull it in. You probably couldn't see where it was on the bottom of my screen simply because of where the screen cast cuts off, but it appears on the bottom right hand corner on a mac, and then you can pull it in like this. So now I have it. And I can go ahead and set up my color palette. So let me go to my swatches panel on the right. And right here, I'm currently in grays, but I can make a new palette. If I go ahead and click on my dropdown menu on the top right, then I can choose to add application palette, add document palette or add system palette. Add an application palette if I want this to be available in the application all the time. But if I just want available in this document, I'll just choose Add document palette. I'm going to choose Add application palette, and I'm going to give this a name. I'm going to call this ampinata class because I am teaching you how to do it, but I already have one that's made with the same colors. I'm going to click there's a couple of different ways that we could add our colors in. We could double click on the fill here, and that's going pull up this color chooser, and we could type in the hexadecimals right here where the hex is. So that's one option that we could do. Another one that we could do is we could grab it with our eyedropper tool, so we could click on our Eyedropper tool right next to our fill there, click and drag over and we can pick up the color because we were selected on it, it applied that color to it. So let's hit Command Z and make sure we're selected off. Now we use our Color Picker tool to pick that up, and then that pops that into our fill there. And then we could click this button that looks like three squares and a plus. We can click that and that will add that fill in right there. This is the one that I find to be pretty easy. So we can just go ahead and click drag grab each of these and pop them in. Drag, add and add. And then we get our different colors, which is great. We've got our color palette, and now we can go ahead and we can apply it. And one thing you might find is that sometimes the hexadecimals when you do it with the eyedropper, do not match up exactly to the hexadecimals that are here. So if you need it to be very, very exact, you are going to have to type those in manually. Alright, let's go ahead and change up our colors here. Now, we, of course, want to do this on a new artboard so that we have our iteration here, so I'm going to come over and click on Artboard four. I know my face is kind of covering up this part, but I will click. Duplicate, and now I have Artboard five. Now we can go ahead and change this all out. If I look at my example file, you can kind of see I have a background color here. The way to do that is to add another shape. So this is good for us to practice with shapes. Even within the layout studio, we still have our shapes. We're going to get our rectangle tool, and we're going to drag out a rectangle here. Now, it's using our last fill, which was the brighter orange color there. That's probably not what we want. We probably want a lighter color for this. So we can just switch that there in aches. But now this is in front of everything, and we don't want that. Let's jump to our layers. We need to see where we're at in our layer. We have this rectangle on top of Artboard five, and we're going to drag that all the way to the back. So click on it and drag and scroll down to get all the way down to the bottom of Artboard five. Alright, so now we've got a background that's already giving some pop to it. And now we want to go ahead and color in this logo. So on the logo, we've got a group. We need to open that group up in our layers so that we can select our empanada. And for this one, let me just check my example again. Yes, I used my lighter color. We're going to use our lighter color there. And then for the text, click on that group, we're going to use one of our darker reds here. Now, as you are doing this, you might find that things start to get a little bit cluttered with all these frames and different boxes and things, and that can be confusing. So sometimes you want to see it without anything. For that, you're going to go ahead and hit Control W on the keyboard, and that is going to make those all go away. And then you can see it without any of that stuff. So that, again, is Control W on the keyboard. You can also find that under view and you can go to preview mode. But you sometimes have to do it a lot. So learning the keyboard command Control W can be really helpful. Now we're ready to add color into our text. But remember, our text is set up in styles. So the best thing that we can do is go ahead and modify our styles. That will make adjustments to some of our earlier iterations that use the same style, but we can mitigate that by duplicating the style. So let's go back to our text styles panel here. And under empanada heading, we're going to go ahead and duplicate that. So if we come here and we choose this menu on the right hand side, we can choose duplicate empanada heading. Instead of calling it empanada heading one, we're going to call it empanada heading color. Now, with this, we then want to select a color for our font. We're going to go to color and decorations, font color, and you shove all of your color options here, but you don't need to use the wheel. You can go to Swatches and then you can select the color. Alright, we're going and click Okay. And then we need to apply this. So let's click first here, and we will click Eponata heading color. And you can see that what it did was it shrunk it down because you remember that was set to be left aligned and 21 font. So we'll need to adjust that again because we'd made some manual adjustments. So center line. And then we're holding down Command to pull out from the center. We're right there. We're back at 25 points. That's great. And then on these others, we'll just select them all using shift, and then we'll just apply Eponata heading. And now we get color there. Same thing we're going to want to do here on the empanada body. Go ahead and right click and choose to duplicate it. And we'll call this empanada body color. Now, for that one, we want it to be easy to read. We can go ahead and change that font color, be our darkest option from our swatches because we still want that to have a really high contrast. And I currently have this checkbox turned on, apply style to selection. So since this is selected, it's going to go ahead and make it the darker there. We can go ahead and click Okay, and we can apply that throughout. Now, I'm noticing it's a little bit hard to read, so I'm going to check here and see what I was set to here. And this was set to Quicksand bold. So let's go ahead and modify that one more time. At empanada body color, and we're going to change our font from style regular. Let me move this over so that we can see what it does to style bold. And that's just going to make that easier to read. Now, if we want to apply that to the others, we're just going to chip click on all of them and apply empanada body color. Now, we're having a little bit of trouble here on the address, and that is because it wants to indent that. So we just need to make sure that it is on its own paragraph. Alright? And now it'll start on the left hand side. And now we're looking pretty good. We can go ahead and hit again Control W on our keyboard to see what it's looking like. And everything is looking pretty nice here. And so with this layout pretty much done, I want to go ahead and start working on photos. So this is where we're going to transition to the Pixel studio, and we're going to start working on a photo of Empanats that's our own photo rather than a stock photo. 14. 14 Opening a Photo: Now it's time for us to jump into the third studio, which is the Pixel studio. This is where we are going to work on photos. Now, I want to show you this working on one of our own photos rather than one of the stock photos. Stock photos tend to have already been processed quite a bit. They've already been edited to look good. So we're going to take our own photo and we're going to see what we can do with it. Now, to work on a photo in affinity, you could do it within the same document because it's all here, but it's a lot easier to work on a photo and make the kind of composite edits that you need to pick on it in its own document. And then you can place that document inside of another affinity document. So I want to show you how that works. Let's go ahead and open up a photo as a new document. So we're going to go to File and Open. Now, I have saved here a photo of some empanadas. So I'm going to go ahead and click Open. Now, this is a JPEG photo. Affinity can process raw photos as well, and so it doesn't have to be a JPEG. You can get more data out of a raw photo, but this one that I took in Spain happens to be a JPEG photo. So now I've got my empanadas here, and it opens this as a new document. Opens it so that you can see the full size of the photo here, and it just makes the size of the document the size of the photo. So instead of placing this into, like, a letter size, we're a half a letter size, something like that, I have just opened this photo and I'm just working with it and all of its pixels. Now, you will notice that I automatically moved into the pixel persona for this document. Exel Studio is a huge studio, photography is really an art form unto itself, and even compositing photography is an art form unto itself. So we aren't going to go into everything here, just like we did in in vector and layout. We're not going to tackle everything, but I'm going to give you enough to know what the basics are and kind of see the powerful tools that you will have access to as you learn. So in the next video, we're going to get started with that by talking about adjustment layers. 15. 15 Adjustment Layers: So one of the really powerful things that you can do inside of the Pixel studio is to add adjustment layers. And those are going to go over the top of the document, and they're going to change how that document looks. So you can see we still have a layers panel here and we have this background layer, which is our main photo, and we're going to put an adjustment layer over the top. Think of this as if you took a colored sheet of, like, see through plastic and you laid it over a photo, it would change how that photo looked. So let's see what this looks like. Adjustment layers are found down at the bottom of the layers panel, and there's a whole menu of different things here, but we're looking for the one that looks like a black and white circle. When we click on that, that's going to show us our adjustment layers all laid out before us, and we can do a lot of different things here, just so you can kind of see exactly what it's doing, we're going to choose the black and white one. So if I click black and white here, it's going to immediately make that photo black and white. Now, it hasn't changed the photo itself. If you look in the layers panel, you still have your background layer and you have a black and white adjustment layer. Now, I can turn this layer off by clicking on the eyeball on the right of. If I do that, the color comes back. And if I click the eyeball back on, then it shows the black and white again. Now, each adjustment layer has settings that can be changed about it. So this one, you can change how dark or light each of the colors is. So there's a lot of reds in this photo. If I make the reds more dark, this photo is going to get more dark in terms of adding contrast to that black and white image. You can always close out of this dialogue by clicking the X, but it's not like you can't get back to it. You can double click on the adjustment layer icon. In this case, the black and white circle next to Black and White adjustment, and then you can change that further if you need to. Also get rid of adjustment layers. If you're selected on a layer, you can just hit the trash can in the bottom right corner of that panel, and that will go away. So adjustment layers are very powerful. They can adjust all kinds of things. One of the things that we probably want to adjust on most photos is the brightness and contrast to kind of get it into a good spot. So we're going to click here and we're going to choose our brightness and contrast adjustment layer. This one has different sliders. It has a slider for brightness. That's how much light there is in the image, so we might want to pull that up and make it a little brighter. And it has a contrast slide. Contrast makes the dark parts of the image darker and the light parts of the image lighter. So you can do this, and it's always good to just kind of go to the extreme to see what the adjustment layer is doing. You would never use that in your actual edit, but you can see how the dark parts have gotten super dark and the light parts are getting blown out. If you drag that down, though, it's going to make everything more kind of washed out and gray because the light parts are getting darker and the dark parts are getting lighter and everything's kind of meeting in the middle. So this one, we would add a little bit of brightness too and a little bit of contrast. We want to pop when we're on that menu. So we can add that in there. Now I can click out of here and I can add another layer. But there might be times when I want to adjust just a part of my image. I want to do that, that is a time when I need to be able to use a selection to select just part of it. So we're going to talk about that in the next video. 16. 16 Selections and Masks: So say I wanted to be able to adjust just part of this image. I want to be able to manipulate just a single part of it. I want to select something. Selections are basically a way that you say just this part of the image. Now, there's all kinds of selections that you can use, and most of them are represented in their tool by a dotted line. So if I come over here, you're going to see a dotted line right here that says Object Selection tool and one down here that says Rectangular Marquee tool. Underneath each of these, there are more tools. So if I hold down on it, I get a selection brush tool and a flood select tool. Flood select is what's often called a magic wand tool. All right. If I go down here, I have rectangular marque, Elliptical Marquee, column marque, Row Marquee, and freehand selection tool. These tools will all be used at different times, depending on the selection that you're going to do, but right now I want to show you the most powerful one, which is the object selection tool. Now, Object Selection tool is going to use machine learning, which is a form of artificial intelligence to figure out where an object is in the photo. Is the only artificial intelligence feature that is available without a Canva subscription within here, and that's because it predates Canva coming in on affinity. So you can use this tool. Now, if you do, you have to enable the machine learning algorithm. You do that by going up to the affinity menu top left, and going into the settings. You have to have this right here. So you're in machine learning models, and this is segmentation. You can see where it says install. I've already installed it, but it has to be installed so that it can figure out where the objects. See that there are a number of other machine learning models here, and they have the little Canva crown on them. That means those are for premium subscribers. So you can't use them unless you are premium subscriber, but this one you can. So now we can come and it's analyzed the image to make objects. So as I go over these, you can see it selected each empanada as a different object. So let's just say for fun that I wanted to make some empanadas, like different colors. And so let's select this one in the back here. Click that. And now you'll see these marching ants. That's what we call this line going around. It's selected that, and it's done a pretty good job of that. You can use other selection tools to further refine that selection, but it's looking pretty good to me. Now, if I go ahead and add an adjustment layer, say, I want to make this a different color, I'll come here to recolor. And it's going to apply that to only my selection. So now I can make that whatever color I wanted. Say I really want to have a blue empanada, I wouldn't, not for the menu that we're doing. But if I did, I can adjust its hue, it's saturation, and it's lightness here. Alright? So I've got that. Now, of course, I can always get rid of that again. And to deselect something, I'm going to hit Command D on the keyboard, Command or Control on Windows, D on the keyboard. And now that selection is I can do another selection, of course, with my selection tool here, make sure that I'm on my background layer because it can't select on the adjustment layers. And if I wanted to make this empanada another color, I could do the same thing. Add a recolor here, and I can make this one green. Now, if I created the adjustment layer first, it would have just applied it to everything the way it did with our brightness and contrast layer. It does this by creating what's called a mask. And the mask is what this black and white thumbnail is. If you look over in the layers and you see the recolor adjustments, you'll see little black and white thumbnails. Those are the down option and click on it, we can see what it looks like. Basically, any place where there is white, it is allowing the adjustment layer to take effect. Anywhere it's black, the adjustment layer is not taking effect. That's called masking. Masking is a really important idea whenever you're doing photo compositing. Now, we don't really need photo compositing for this particular project that we're working on with the menu. I want to at least introduce this idea to you so you know what affinity can do. Now, I'm going to go ahead and option click on that again to come back and I'm going to delete my recolor adjustments because I don't need those anymore. But you can see how powerful this is. It can select the table, it can select the board. I can select this little bowl over here or just the individual you can really dial things in, make different stuff happen using this object selection tool. Now, if that's not working for you or if you need to refine things a little bit, your next best option is to use the selection brush tool, which is found underneath the Object Selection tool. We can hit Command D on our keyboard to deselect and this is going to select things based on a number of factors that it's looking at, but it's going to do it where you are clicking. If I want to select the Sempanata here, click here and it's going to try its best as I click to select where it thinks the edges of things are. I can always hold down option on my keyboard to deselect part of an area if it got it wrong a little bit. I can also make this brush bigger or smaller by using the bracket keys on my keyboard. Right bracket makes it bigger and left bracket makes it smaller. The smaller it is, the less it's going to try and select. We could select it that way. Now, at this point in this photo, it's easier to use the object selection tool because it did a pretty good job, but it might not do a great job on every. I can create my own mask manually at this point by going ahead and clicking the mask button, which is found in the layers and looks like a black circle inside of a white rectangle. If I click that, it's going to mask this layer. So instead of masking an adjustment layer, it masked the background layer. When it did that, I now just have this empanada. So if I just needed my empanada, I could do this. Now, everything has not disappeared. It's just been masked. It didn't delete anything. I can get this back by clicking this little drop down arrow on my layer and clicking on the mask and choosing delete. It then deletes that mask, and I can see my whole layer again. Masking is a really important concept. If you're bringing two photos together, say you're trying to replace somebody's face on something or something like that, you're going to use a mask to hide most of a photo in that kind of situation. I'll hit Command D to deselect again. So now that we know how to do adjustment layers and we know how to do selections and masks, in the next video, we're going to learn how to use a filter to kind of blur out parts of an image. 17. 17 Live Filters: Learned about selections. We've learned about masks. We've learned about adjustment layers. Filters are kind of the next really powerful tool. Again, in the layers panel, right in between the adjustment layers and the mask, you're going to find the filters. And they look kind of like an hourglass. These filters can do a bunch of things. For us, we might want to blur kind of out part of the image because we might want just those front pinatas to really be in focus. So let's just try this with a Gaussian blur. When we add this Gaugin blur, you can see it kind of adds it as a layer. This is what's called a live can still apply destructive filters, but there isn't as much of a reason to. Destructive filters basically change the underlying image so that you can't go backwards. Whereas a live filter is much more like an adjustment layer where you can go back and change it. So let's go ahead and what we have here is the radius, and we can just blur this thing out. Now, the problem is, it's blurring our entire image, and we don't really want it to blur out our entire image. So this is where selection would come in. Let's go ahead and delete this Gaussian blur. And let's go back to our object selection, and let's select these empanadas together. We want these to stay in focus, but we want to blur out around it. Okay? So we've got our setup here. Now, if we come here and we click on our filters and we choose our Gagen blur and we bring our God and blur up, you will notice that what's happening is it is basically blurring out just what we had selected, which is the opposite of what we want to have happen. So let's go ahead and hit Command C. We don't want to do that. You can see that it applied a mask to this filter, just like we talked about before. So let's get rid of that whole filter there by clicking Delete. And now, what we want to do is we want to invert our selection so that we select everything besides our front empanaus here. So from our pixel menu, we're going to have Pixel selection, and we're going to choose invert. Now, the only thing that you might notice changed is we now have marching ants around the outside of the image. So those marching ants are telling us we've now selected everything outside of the empanadas. It basically just flipped it. Now, if we apply our filter, Gag and blur, we can go ahead and we can blur everything else. Now, I'm going to the extreme here so that you can really see what's happening. But I would just do a very subtle little blur here. And this is just to put the emphasis on those empanadas. Now, once we get back, of course, we're not going to see all of this. We're not going to see the elbows on the table and kind of the edge of the table and stuff because it's going to crop it in based on where our frame. Just blur that out a little bit, gives us a little bit more focus on what we want there. I will X out of the Gaussian blur and hit Command D to deselect. And this is what our photo is looking like now. Now, we can make more adjustments. We can do lots of things to this. The last adjustment, though, that I want to make here is just going to be a really simple temperature adjustment just because I think this is looking maybe a little bit yellow. So we're going to use an adjustment here and we're going to go to white balance. This is where we have our temperature control. They call it white balance here, but it's looking a little yellow so I'm going to drag to the blue. Now, we wouldn't go all the way to the blue, obviously. We really want to do this in a very subtle way, but we just want to come back here just a little bit, so we're not looking quite so on the yellow side of things. Do a couple of adjustments to get your photo looking the way you want, and then you need to bring that photo into your other document. So first, we want to save this as an Affle. We don't want to save it as a JPEG because I will destroy the JPEG underneath. So we're going to come and do File, Save As, and this will save it as an Affle. I'm going to go and save this as Epanata edited and click Save. Now I'm going to have an Affle there that I can then bring in, which we will do in the next video. 18. 18 Linking the Photo: So we're back in our main document now, and this is where we're going to go ahead and embed our photo file into it. So let's go and select. We needed to be on our Move tool, and then we're going and click on our image frame here. I want to replace this middle one. And we get this option called replace Image. Let's go ahead and click Replace Image.'s going to pull up our files. I can choose empanataEdited dot af, and I can click Open. Okay, so now that has been placed in there. It's been placed at the size of the frame, and I can zoom in, and now I can adjust it. Let's go ahead. We'll double click in here and we're going to make it big so that we're just seeing these empanadas here like. Now, one thing that I'm noticing is that maybe it's, like, too much in focus here. There's too much contrast between those two. Like, this is very starkly in focus, and then this is out of focus. So we want to blur that line a little bit. And in order to do that, we want to go back to our original, adjust it there, and then update this here. So let's go back to the empanata edited. And we're going to go back to our Gaussian blur filter here. The thing is, there's just no blur coming out in front, and that makes it seem unnatural. So in order to adjust this, we need to actually paint on some blur. So we're on this mask here. We can paint with black and white. But for that, we need our brush tool. The brush tool is going to be on the left, about a third of the way down, paint brush tool. Go ahead and click that. And we're going to go to our color over here, and we have black and white. Now, remember, black is going to hide it, and white is going to bring it out. We want to bring out some of that blur. So we're going to change white to be in front. We're going to make our brush size a little bit bigger, and we're just going to paint on just a little bit here. Just to make this seem a little bit more natural. So then we need those updates to show up in our document here. Okay, so when we get here, we can see that it has not blurred out yet. And the issue is that it doesn't know that the original has changed. Because when we placed this in here, we placed it, and that photo was already embedded. It wasn't linked. And linked means that instead of bringing it in and holding it in this file, it's just linking out to the original. In this case, we've embedded it. So to change that, we need to go to what's called the resource manager. The resource manager is going to be under document resource manager. So when we click that, we're going to choose Make Linked. So we're on ampaaadited dot Af, and we're going to choose Make Linked, that then changes to a linked file. Then we can go ahead and click Close on that. And when we come in here, we'll see that now it's showing the blur, and that is because it's a linked file. So anything that we change. So you can see this pretty dramatically if we come over here and we do something crazy like a recolor adjustment. Let's say we come in here and we do a recolor adjustment. We make everything red, and then we're going to Command S to save it. And once we do it, you see link resource changed. So the pinata file has been updated, so we can pop over here, and we can see that now it's all red. Now if I jump back again, of course, don't want that to be red, I delete my color adjustment, say Command S to save, and it will once again update it. And that is a super powerful way to be able to work with your images inside of affinity because you can make those really detailed adjustments inside of the document itself, and then because it's linked, it'll just feed that back in to this new document. So we've got a pretty good setup here. Things are looking pretty good, but I am not liking just how stark the images are. I want to add some transparency to them so that they'll kind of fade into the document itself. So we'll do that in the next video. 19. 19 Transparency: Main document, we are once again going to duplicate our artboard from the pages panel, and that's just so we can go ahead and fade these out and still keep this looking the same. So I'm going to go ahead and click on my first image. And in order to make these adjustments, I'm again in the layout studio here, and looking down the left hand side, I'm going to find the tool that looks like a wineglass. This is almost at the bottom, and it's called the Transparency Tool. Click on that, and that will allow us to drag out a transparency, which is very similar to a gradient. And as I do this, you're going to see nothing is getting more transparent. And the reason for that is because I'm selected on the image frame and not on the image itself. I need to apply this to the image. Let's go ahead and hit Command Z on the keyboard or Control Z on Windows. And we need to go over to our layers panel on the right again, and we need to hit that arrow on the picture frame so that we can get to the photo itself. There's the photo, and now we need to apply the transparency to it. So now we can click and drag out a transparency, and you can see it fades to the side. So this is actually very similar to how masks worked. The difference is here, black is showing the photo, and white is making it transparent. So if we want to fade from each side here, we and drag this all the way to the side, and we need to add a new what's called a stop or a little circle in the middle. So if we click in the middle, we'll get a new one here, and we need that to be black. But we can't use our color swatches to do it. We actually have to go to our color menu, and instead of changing the color of it, we actually need to change the opacity. So there's a little opacity slider here. It looks like a checkerboard. We drag that all the way to the top. We're going to turn this one black by doing that. And then the one on the left hand side, we want to turn that one white or transparent. So on the opacity slider, we'll slide it all the way to the left. And now we have this nice little fade going on here. And we want to use that over again. So let's go ahead and click with our move tool on our second picture here. And we want to use this eyedropper tool here, but we want to use the second one underneath. It's called the style picker tool. And the style picker will allow us to pick this up, but we got to make sure that we are on the photo itself to make sure that we're on the photo. And then we're going to hold down option on a keyboard to do a pickup, click that now this eyedropper tool has picked up that style, which in this case, is the transparency. Now, this is a little tricky because of the frames, but we need to get to our empanata middle photo here. So we're going to make sure that that's opened up in the Layers panel. Click on that and then we're going to just click to drop this style onto it. And the same thing with the last one. Make sure that you've got it in the layers panel, open it up, click on the photo itself, and then drop that style onto there. And now we've used that style picker to make that style uniform across the entire thing, which is the design principle of repetition. With that all done, the last thing that I really want to do is add a little bit of a border to this. Just to give a little contrast between the page and its edge, I'm going to go ahead and add a border, and we're going to do that in the next video. 20. 20 Adding a Border: So the last thing that we want to do to this document is to give a border to it here. So let's go ahead and once again, we will duplicate this so that we have another copy, and then we can compare the two. We can compare it with a border and without, and we can really see if it's making a difference or not. Now, to add the border, I really just want to add a stroke onto my existing rectangle. Go down to our rectangle here, and we want to add in a border. So we're going to go to our swatches and we're going to bring our outline or our stroke to the front. And then we want to add in our red color as a border. You can see that that border is tiny. So we're going to go to our stroke, and we want to make that larger. Hold that. Nine. Now, currently, our alignment for our stroke is set to being in the middle. So it has half on one side of the line and half on the other, but we can't see the other part. We can't see the outside there. So if we set this, you would see how thick that actually is. Now, this is important. Let me go ahead and hit Control W so that we can see everything again because we have a bleed on this document, and we want this to go outside of it, but it won't show us anything. There's some kind of bug in the affinity program where it won't show you outside of your artboard when you are looking at this. So there is a bleed it is going outside, but we can't see that. We need to set it based on basically the width here and know that half of it is outside that will allow it when it's printed to have a nice clean cut. That's why we set that bleed there to begin with. It's a little annoying that we can't actually see it, but at least there is a bleed there. That is how we would set up our border around it. I think it looks better with that border. I might even go just a little bit bigger, maybe up to 11 and that will give it more pushout on the bleed here as well. The last thing we need to do with this document is export it, which we will do in the next video. 21. 21 Exporting: So we're here. We finished our design. Hopefully, you've been able to follow along with me, and you are also ready to export. If not, go ahead and go back and work through your own project. You can do what I've done or you can design for your own restaurant, whatever you want. But we're going to export now. So we're going to come up to our file menu, and we are going to choose to export. Export, and this is going to open up our Export dialogue. Now, for printing, we are going to want to do this as a PDF. So we're going to go down until we get to PDF. And then we have a bunch of different options. We have PDF for print, PDF Press ready. PDF Press ready is probably what we want if we are sending this off to a professional printer. You can see there's a difference here when we go to PressReady, we suddenly get that bleed showing up around. And so, obviously, our border doesn't go all the way through the bleed. It's okay, though. I extends far enough out so you can see the difference here. Takes it a second. Much further out our border extends. So now that will give us enough bleed that when they cut it, it will look right. It will look like it goes all the way to the edge, which is the important thing. And that's the difference between print and press ready. Press ready is getting Ray for a professional printer. Alright, there are going to be a bunch of settings here, but the main one you want to pay attention to is your area, and this is artboard seven. And you have preview export when complete. If you turn that on, you'll be able to see it when the export is done. Most of these you can leave to exactly where they are at, and that's going to be okay. You do want to scroll down here and make sure that you have include bleed turned on. If you need that, if you turn that off, you're not going to see the bleed anymore, but we want that turned on. You are sending to a professional printer, you often want to include printers marks. This shows them where they need to be at in terms of their printing and their cutting. The last thing you're going to do is click Export and then you're just going to save this. You're going to save this as whatever you want to call it and save. Then it should pop open and show us the file here. There we go. I don't know why it popped open Safari there, but now we can see the final file, and this is where we go ahead and we would check everything, make sure that all our spelling is correct, and things are looking right before we sent this PDF off to the printer. That's it. We've done it. We've used all three of the studios inside of Affinity to create a final takeout menu. 22. 22 Wrap Up: Alright, I hope you've enjoyed taking this course on how to design a takeout menu in affinity. I know that it's a lot to kind of take in all at once because we are using what used to be three different programs to design this. So it is a lot to learn. If it takes you some time and practice, that is totally okay, but I do want to make sure that you do share your project with me. I want to see those projects and be able to give you feedback on them so that you can continue to improve. And also, I want to know if you have any questions. Please feel free to reach out on the discussion tab and let me know if you have any questions, and I will do my best to answer. If you want to continue to explore things further, I have a lot of other courses. Even my old courses for Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and affinity publisher will still teach you a lot of the skills because a lot of the tools have remained the same. So you can feel free to check those out, and you just have to do a little bit of translation for them into the new programs. Of course, I'm making new courses all the time, and so you will see new courses coming out on affinity and the different aspects of it as we go along. Alright, that's it for this course. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next course.