Mastering Affinity Designer 17 Tips & Tricks to Speed Up Your Workflow

1. Intro: Hey, there I'm mark In this online class, I'm going to share with you 17 super useful tricks and tips to improve your workflow. In a Pint designer version two. I will not only show you those tricks but I will also ask you to practice with me. For each trick I design a special mini practice for us, so we can use it straight away. This way you will memorize the trick and you'll understand how you can use it in your regular workflow. I hope after this class, your workload will speed up and you will discover a few new tools and few new features behind the tools you already know. I'm going to show you different approach, things that you never think about before. In some cases, a very weird use of well known tools. I hope all of those tips and tricks together, those little changes, but all applied together will make a huge improvement, a huge difference in your every day workflow. I will see you on the first tip. 2. Quick Grid: This online class. It's a bit different than the one you may took in the past. First thing I have prepare some workbook for you. You can see this document right now on my screen. It's include multiple artboards and we will do this one by one. Each video will be for one artboard. All of them are blank and there is only a text. That will work as the reminder for you what you should do on that certain artboard. Because I want you to practice after each video, try to replicate what I did. This is 17 tips, and I want you to try each tip after the video is over. Feel free to watch video multiple times if you get troubles achieving similar results. All right, so at the very first when you open the file, it will be just like that. It will zoom out really far away because the program by default, always try to show us all artboards at once. You can simply press comment plus on your keyboard if your ipad user just pin with your fingers. You can also go to the very top to view menu and there is a zoom in option that we can click using the mouse if you got troubles indicating there keyboard shortcut. All right, so zooming the way that you see one artboard at the time, just like this one. All right, so let's get started with the first tip straight away. It's quick grid. Quick grid was added in version two and it's really helpful. Whatever you draw a shape, let me just grab any shape. For me that would be oval tool. But feel free to open the shape menu. Grab what you need, that's the oval. I will select a color now, and I now click and draw the shape. That's simple, right? The quick grid is when we draw more than one shape at the same time, actually, you can just press now arrow to the right click. Take a look, I'm drawing two shapes. Click again, 345. If I press arrow down on my keyboard, I duplicate this down. If you want to maintain the perfect proportion, just simply hold shift. If you need spacing between those shapes, you can press and hold. Here it is, we can generate spacing. The task in the first artboard is to use the quick grid to draw multiple shapes in the same time. Let me just show you this again with a different shape. Let's grab a star shape. We can modify this shape at the top as well. Take a look. We can modify the shape using slides at the top, no problem. All right, but our task is to use a quick grid. Let's press arrow to the right several times and then arrow down. Feel free to press it to make spacing just like that. And at the end, hold shift to maintain the proportion. Release your mouse, Here it is. We draw multiple stars with one go using the quick grid hack. Now what if we want to change the color? Simply select them all. Again, modify the color from the color panel. You may ask if you want to rotate them, you start rotating them and then you notice that all of them rotate to the center. If you want to rotate them or scale them or stuff like that, after we draw them, it's totally possible. Just keep in mind we must transform them separately. Option for that, take a look at the very top. I'm hovering my mouse over it right now. Transform objects separately. Turn this on. Now if you rotate them, you will rotate them as separate objects. You can even scale them down or up. That's up to you as you can guess by making some custom selection. So I hold comment on my keyboard. This way I can select multiple layers in the layer panel or I can hold shift, and this way I can select multiple stars directly on the layer here. Okay, I will select every second one like that. And this will allow me to transform them just like that because the option transform separately is still on. That's nice. All right, we made it, we use the quick grid and then we turn on separately option. This way we create this interesting pattern very quickly. Try to do a similar pattern, you can use a different shape. That's our task for the very first artboard. Keep in mind you can easily zoom in and out using common common minus. It will be control plus and control minus on Windows. All right, I will see you in the next lesson. We'll take care of the next artboard. 3. Rubber Band: All right, it's time to move to the next art board. The easiest way to move around is, okay, It's time to move to the next artboard. You don't need to zoom out and zoom in each time. You can simply press and hold space bar. You will see this little head. That's the pen tool you can press and drag yourself around. Reposition yourself at the next artboard. This one is all about rubber bending. What is it? It's our option for our pen tool that should be turned on by default. And I don't really understand why it's off when you open up your pen tool over here. That's a really powerful tool, but it's a bit tricky to master. Let's get rid of the field color. I will apply black stroke color. I will make this stroke ticker. You can see my line. All right. When you present hold, present hold. You are able to do those curvy lines from another hand. If you just simply click, click, click, you will create straight lines. All right. So that's our pen tool. Something that you may know already. But did you notice if I do this curvy line, I don't really know where the next one will go. I need to predict, based on my experience, that's why it's really frustrating for new users. But we can change that a bit. Let's turn on rubber bending mode. Take a look at, on the top here. We've got different modes and settings, right? Search for the one rubber bend mode. Turn it on. Let's try to use Penol again. Take a look. This time I didn't click just yet, but there's already some blue line coming out from, it's another line coming out. It's way easier now to predict. We don't need to predict. We see it where the next line will go. Of course, we can still modify that, but at least we can see the line coming out this way. We don't need to act blindly based on our experience. We can actually see the line and close the shape. Let's try to do that. I close my first shape, I'm just making some silly blob and I'm going to use the gradient tool in it just like that. I will also make it semi transparent by reducing the opacity of this layer. All right, I got one block, I need another one. That will be your task as well. Grab the pen tool, don't forget to turn on rubber bending mode. That's the trick. This way we can see the next line really handy. That should be turned on by default. I really don't know why they keep it off. This is my second blop. All right. Again, I'll give it a color, then I will fill it with a grad end and make it semi transparent by reducing opacity on it. I'm done with my second art board. I use the pen tool with rubber bending mode to create some semi transparent blop, nice backdrop. All right. Okay. Two artboards finish. We can now move around pressing the space bar as you remember. Let's move to the next one. Next one will be all about power. Duplicate. See you in the next video. 4. Power Duplicate: Let's talk about power duplicate. What is the difference between duplicate and power duplicate? When we duplicate something, we simply create a copy of that object. When we duplicate, we create a copy of the object and also duplicate the last transformation. Let me show you what I mean. If I create a rectangle like this one, I simply make a copy of it, so I use command V, copy and paste. Copy is exactly on the same location as the original one. All right, if I hold command and then I drag it to a new location to duplicate this next to it, then I can select the option to duplicate that from the menu. That's, you can see it's common J or Control J on Windows. It did not create a copy on the same spot, it created a copy on the right side. It's not only copy the object but also copied the last transformation. If I keep hitting Common J, I can create multiple copies with the same transformation. Apply really nice tricks, can really speed up your workflow in a designer. For example, if we go with the line, I use the pen tool hold shift to make it straight. Make a nice line. Then again, I hold command or control, move it down, nice. And now we can press command J, have multiple copies. I select this whole area now com com and V a bit of rotation very quickly. Just 10 seconds, we create this complex grid. Later on we can use that to play with a shape building. We can select this whole grid, grab a shape builder tool and use that to build something new out of it. Using the shape building tool, it is all right. It's can be really handy and it's very universal. There's also a new option recently added in 2.2 adjusted in 2.3 update, that we can actually power duplicate from the dialog box. Let's take a look. I'm going to create a triangle this time without a field color. All right, instead of playing with the mouse and try to duplicate that, I simply hit Enter or return on your keyboard. There will be a new dialog box, Move Duplicate. From here we can move, if I put 100 millimeters horizontally, you see I move the object, but we can also turn on the duplicate mode. The original object will stay here and I will create a copy. I can make more than one copy. Use the slider here, we can keep it on zero, and instead of changing the distance, we can change the rotation of it. Let's take a look. Let's rotate this five degrees. Let's create multiple copies of that object. As you can see, we got interesting geometric abstraction. We can keep going with that until we go almost full circle. This way you can generate interesting abstract like that. We can also use the Scale menu to scale it down. We've got something totally different. Keep in mind there's a special move, duplicate dialogue box. Now that can be also very, very helpful. There are two ways we can power duplicate manually or using this dialogue box. Remember there's a very useful shortcut command J. First you make your duplicate with transformation, then you hit common J to repeat that step, common J, every next copy will got a transformation. In this case I move it to the right. Very handy. Let's do our practice part. I will draw oval like that. Then I will convert this to curves and select top and the bottom point, I want it to be sharp. Let's make it sharp. Nice. What I want to do with this guy, as I want to hit Enter, I got my dialect box from here. I will try to rotate this ten degrees. Use the copy to duplicate mode. Now I want to create enough duplicates to go all the way around. How many do we need? We got ten degrees. All right. That's will be 17 here. Nice Try to use power duplicate to turn this shape into nice geometry abstraction like I just did. You can reverse and see those steps once more. If you need more help, then try to create this your self. That's the plan. After each video, please go to our document and try to do the practice part yourself. This way you will memorize all of the steps. All right. I will see you in the next one. 5. Cog Shape Tool: It's time for our art board number four. This one is all about very specific shape tool because here in Afin designer we are not limited into like ovals, rectangles and stars. There's a whole shape tool selection for us. Take a look. If you go down here just below the rectangle and oval tool, there's one more option. The icon will, depends on the last use to click and hold, and you will see the whole long list. There is one that looks like a k here. This one is really underrated. Okay. By default give us this little ****. But we can modify it to whatever we need. There's a hole inside and there are several transform controls above. And you can also see there are some orange points around. We've got 12345 orange points. The one here control the hole inside. You can even make it disappear. Nice. The one over here will control how deep it is. Take a look. This one control how wide the end of it is. End of the arm. This can make it when in or just straight line. We control this curve here. This one will control the distance between them. And take a look, you can see the potential of it already, I create some kind of flower, it's totally different than it was before. Keep in mind we can change the number of arms over there at the top. If something like this, make the arm really short, make this here. And you've got some badge like shape ready to use, other way around. Limit number here, change the inner radius of it to be a bit longer. We go here like that and we got some ready to use flower shape. This is really underrated and universal shape tool right there because it's such a unique shape that I found only here in a designer. Not many people really use it. Because if you switch to designer from covered or ado illustrator, you will never search for this tool, right, because you've never used it before. Really underrated for this practice, try to turn one into flower just like this one. We can finish this one up with a simple circle at the center. Keep in mind, if you want to draw it from the center, press comment and shift to maintain the proportion. Nice. Then let's make one more. All right, this time we will make some bad stamp like shape. Let's move this out. No distance can move. Let's keep it straight. But we may need additional arms here, maybe 24. Well do. All right, then make it a dark color. Nice. What if you want to modify it even further? If you grab a no tool, you may notice that you cannot really modify it with no tool because all of those orange control points to modify it manually, just press convert to curves. Now you will be able to select specific nodes. You can drag them around and adjust this even further for us. As the final touch, we will put the corner tool on it. I select the corner tool from the list, now will select all of the nodes, and then I will route everything a bit to give me this seal stamp like shape. We can type something inside like well done or seal of approval and you are done with this. All right, that's our **** tool. It's over there, underrated shaped tool with many control points that you can turn it very quickly into another shape like a flower or batch. Very nice and very underrated. All right, so do two shapes here and then move to the next Rd board. 6. X-Ray View: In some very complex illustrations, it's going to be really hard to tell what is in the art board. Sometimes we've got some elements covered by bigger shapes and that's where we can use the x ray mode. Let's create this situation. So I will use the oval tool like that. We're going to add color to it, so we can differentiate this one from this guy. One more here, maybe smaller one here. Just scale it down. Smaller one over there. Okay. Now I will put it like that and I will grab those two smaller shapes on the layer panel a bit below. If I select all of that, I can see there are some shapes in, but I cannot see them straight away. Let's try to use different view modes to see through this sample illustration. All right, if I go up to the view, take a look, there's a view mode selection. By default you got the vector mode activated. All right, and it's in the single view, we can turn on a split view this way. In the middle of your screen we have this line. I can now load two different viewing modes in the same time Will be on the left, one will be on the right side of this line. I will keep the vector view mode on the left and on the right side, they load a pixel view mode. I will change that. Let's go to view again. View mode, we want to change that. I want to go to wire frame and turn on outline First take a look. The outline view mode is the one that show us the counter, the only the edges of shapes. That's how we do it in the past. Unfortunately, this will not give you any hint about the color in that object. That's why they come up with something in between. There's a happy medium before the full vector mode and the outline mode, and we call it x ray mode, view mode, wire frame. And let's switch from outline to x ray and take a look. It's so much better. Even though we see the outlines, we also see like a bit of color inside each object. This can give us like idea about the composition, and I can see those shapes below. Now I can select them directly. Without selecting the bigger shape, I can pull them out. Just like that. I think that's really handy. This split thing, they can help too. If you use the outline or use your X ray mode a lot, you can keep it on the side like that. Whatever you need it, you move it to the side. That's really handy slide that you have. If you've got very complex illustration, if you don't need it anymore, go to view and switch off split view. And let's go back to the single view. As you can see, I got the single view right now. It's set up to be x ray. By default, we always use vector. All right. As you can see, I cannot select the shape below anymore, but I can still grab it from the layer panel. If you understand the layer structure, you should still be able to pull it out this way. All right, so the x ray mode can be helpful with very complex illustrations. If whatever you need to grab the object behind another object. All right, try to create a sample illustration just like this one. Make some ovals or squares and try to hide something beneath. Then turn on the x ray mode again. View wire frame x ray and use that x ray mode to pull it out of that space. All right, that's your practical exercise for this hard board and I'll see you in the next one. 7. Erase Mode: My next tip is related to a special blending mode called erase mode. To display that nicely, we will need to load image. To do that I will just simply track and drop nice image to this. Artboard here is quite large so I can zoom out a bit to see the edge of the image and as you can see, it's very high resolution. Let me just scale it down a bit. Then in the layer panel, we can move it down below. All of those are the elements, we can see them. All right, next I will draw a very simple rectangle. Here we need one additional shape. Let's search maybe four star and place it at the top of this rectangle. I just load the image and draw two shapes. Now if you take a look in the layer panel, we got our blend mode. It's set up to normal as default, but we can change it. Let's search for the special erase mode at the very bottom. This mode will erase everything below. We erase both the shape and the image to see the white color because the art board, the paper is white. But what if I put this rectangle as a parent layer to this star? Let's move it just a bit above. And then the star, I will drop it on the layer directly. All right, I drop the star on the layer of the rectangle now is a child of that parent layer with the rectangle. And take a look what happened. It seems like I make a hole. And I can see through this hole, I can see this image below. Even I move the whole thing, that's how the erase mode will work. Let's delete that star from inside. Try again. This time I will draw a different shape, maybe a hard shape. First I draw a hard shape, it's a regular shape of the field color as you can see. Then I'm going to change the blend mode into era, it's at the very bottom. If you keep it like this, it will erase all the way through. What we want to do is want to drop it on the certain layer. Drag and drop not above, not below, but directly on that layer. This shape is used to erase this area. Keep in mind I can change it. I can still modify this. Why erasing mode is apply. That's definitely alternative way to masking, alternative way to doing some geometry actions. I think not many people know about this method. Now you know that we can actually set up a whole layer into erase mode and use that layer to erase, to create a hole in another layer just like here. All right, your task is to simply load an image, draw a base shape like this rectangle, and use the smallest shape on it. And set this into erase mode so you can make a hole in that shape. That's our practice for this tip. 8. Edit in Photo: As you know, affinity designer is a two in one software. So we got those vector persona designer, persona, all of those designing vector tools. But there's also a pixel persona. We can switch to pixel persona by clicking this button at the top and take a look. My entire tool set change to Rast Editing Tools, Pixel Editing Tools, but it's not as good as a B Photoshop or Affinity photo. It's more like for quick fixes, adding texture to your existing illustrations and simple stuff like that. What if you need some serious editing done in the middle of your a designer project? Don't worry. We can reopen existing designer file in photo. Do what we need to do using photo tools and then again save it and reopen in designer. That's totally possible. The files are cross compatible. Let me show you that first I will just drag image here. All right, so we got this image and again it's huge. This time I will resize it using those transform boxes. Here's the size of the image. I link the high end, the width, and then I can type from the keyboard, I got my new size. We can reposition the image as well so we can see it exactly here. All right, now I'm going to save this whole file and reopen it in affinity photo. Take a closer look, I just changed the software been using. This is affinity photo version two, the violet program. We are not in designer anymore. I can see all of my artboards and that's another hidden tip in this one. By default we cannot create multiple artboards in affinity photo. That's the walkaround. If you start your project in designer, add multiple artboards and then move it into photo, the artboards will be still there, so we can work with multiple artboards in affinity photo. If you start the project in designer first, as you can see, we can cross open our designer file in photo in case you need some serious photo editing stuff. My image still here, I can access all of the tools from affinity photo. I can use adjustment layers and all of this stuff, all of this good stuff included in affinity photo without limiting myself to only a pixel personal designer. All right, so keep that in mind, If you've got some heavy editing, just open your whole project in affinity photo finish editing there and then go back to designer your task. This one will be if you own affinity photo, of course because maybe you just own designer, that's no problem. If you own affinity photo, load an image, go to the photo, try to apply any adjustment layer you want, Save the image and then go back to the designer. Well, I will see you for the next tip. 9. Copy a Table: We are back in affinity designer, you may notice that in our previous artboard, the one we edit in affinity photo, there is actually additional adjustment layer just like the one we add in affinity photo and it's recognized correctly, even you can double click on it and you will get a proper slider, right? So take a look, this is a proper slide. I can still adjust that in here without reopening affinity photo. Why I'm showing you this because our next tip is very similar. We're going to copy a table. Unfortunately there's no table tool in affinity designer but there is one in affinity publisher. Again, we're going to steal a tool from different software that is cross compatible. This time I don't need to reopen this whole file in publisher, I will just create a new document, add the table to it, and then simply copy and paste from there to here. As I mentioned before, if you own only affinity designer, you can skip this step, move to the next one, but for now let me just open publisher. Here we are. We got blank document in pity published, that's the orange one. Now I'm going to use a table tool to add a table to my blank page on the left. That's the orange icon. From here, you can draw your table. As you can see, we've got columns with lettuce, ABC, we got rows with numbers. That's the proper table that we can modify the size of in any direction. All right, do we need to be so serious and set up everything nicely here? Not really. Let's just grab the move tool, copy and paste. So you can go to eat it, copy, or use the shortcut, common control C. Let's jump back to affinity designer. We are back and now I'll just click right, Click and paste. I got my table from publisher here. Funny thing is it's recognized on the layer panel as a table style of layer. Actually, it seems like the tables are supported same way as adjustment are supported. We just cannot access them from the program. But after we copy them from outside resource, we can still modify them. Take a look is act like a proper table and we got all of the settings we need like a stroke color of the stroke style of the stroke. Everything's here in designer, just no table tool, no icon for it. I don't know what they're waiting for. They just want to add as a big feature inversion 2.5 maybe. Who knows there's a proper table tool, but the trigger is you need to copy the table from publisher. Other thing you can do is to have someone else to give you the file with the table in already, like this one. In that case you don't even need to own a publisher. You can just re use that table. I'm going to also attach this file after we complete all of the artboards. We are right now here on the artboard number eight, almost halfway through this. After we complete all of them, I will also attach the final complete file in the summary section, so you can compare that with your results. Also, in case you need a table, you can always use that file to just copy and paste this table to any document you need. All right, this trick was all about stealing tools from publisher. We can copy and paste a table and it will work as the proper table. Here in Designer, I will see you in the next artboard. 10. Half-time: Congratulations, You finished half of this class already. It's time for our halftime break. I will not wait until the very end of this class to recap on what we have learned. I think we should take time right now in the middle of it, check what we have learned already and what's coming in. The second part, by the way, just by being here, you are already a top student. Only around 30% of people that purchase or enroll to the online training reach the very end and you're already halfway through, just keep going. The big benefit of this style of classes, all of those artboards are separate mini lessons, even you skip one or you jump straight to the one you are interested in. Or maybe you stop this learning process for a whole week. You don't need to worry. They forget something. Because each little artboard, it, little clip is the independent lesson that you can take whatever you want. You can rewatch whatever you need. The very first thing we learned was a quick grid. Remember that whenever you draw a shape, like I'm drawing this nice hard shape, I can press arrows to make duplicates straight away. We call this quick grid. Next one was about pen tool, we turn on this rubber bend mode so we can see the prediction for the next line by default, take a look, I cannot see, I must guess will be the next line. But if you turn on rubber bending mode over here, I will get this line that show me what will happen next. That's really handy if you try to master pen tool. Then we play with power duplicate, that's very useful. Shortcut control or command J to duplicate. It will not only copy the object but also copy the last transformation. So show it is very underrated shape tool for making those mechanical corks. But we can easily modify this shape to be whatever we need. Remember that, take a look, it seems like a little sun. This is underrated, very universal shape. We can turn it into stamp, or flower, or sand or star very quickly. There's also x ray mode for us to see true objects. Then we learn about erase mode that can be used to make holes in different objects. It's non destructive, so we can still go into that group and move that around. That's great. Then we did something unusual. We opened this whole thing in affinity photo to apply adjustment layer that is not available in designer. We apply that here and we can still see it in the layer panel. That's nice. And very similar trick. We went to affinity publisher and copy a table here and it's end up as real usable table we can modify easily. That's what we have learned so far. I hope you're getting value from this. If you need more help, you can always reach me out. You can make a comment. You can ask the question. You can also give me your feedback. I always want to learn something from you. So I want to learn how I can make this class even better. What's missing? How I can make the next class better? Feel free to leave me feedback. Feel free to make a review for this class so others can know what to expect. As, as I mentioned, congratulations. We are halfway through now, we're going to move to the next artboard, where I'm going to show you how we can rotate objects with the interesting twist. See you in the next video. 11. Rotate Around: You may be already familiar with rotate feature. It's very basic thing that we always do. Let's just try a shape and then when you hover your mouse above this point that popping out, we can easily add rotation to it. If you hold shift, you will be jumping 15 degrees, 30, 45. We can also rotate from the transform menu over here. This rotation, we can open up this little slider into a rotation. But you may notice something different already. In that case, the object is not rotating from the center. Take a look, Can pick the rotation point by clicking on this little pictogram here. We can make it from the center. But we can also pick any other point, then rotate on that point. That's really nice, but we can do it even more precisely. Let's try out. I will draw oval just like this one. Let's change the color using the slider over here. All right, now when I try to rotate, it's from the center. Let's undo at the very top. With the move tool selected, you need to search for something called enable transform origin. If you click on that, you will see that the center is marked as the origin for transformation. If I move this point all the way down here, now I try to rotate. Take a look. I rotate around that point. We can try to use that with power duplicate that we learn about already. Take a look. I add five degree rotation. I create one duplicate. It was created from the bottom here. I can see this point. Let's give it a ten degrees and make multiple duplicates. Look, we are duplicating the shape around this point. That's interesting. We can set this up first, then hit Enter and open this power duplicate option. If you miss that tip or you already forget about it, you can always go back and rewatch the video. Power Duplicate. I already show how to operate this move duplicate dialogue box in that tip. All right. We can take it even further. Literally, we can move it outside the shape just like that. Then you can rotate around it as well. Let's try to copy this. So I hold command, I make a copy, and then I make some duplication like that. Now I will use command J, the power duplicate shortcut we learned about before. Just like that. That's nice. We rotate but not from the center of the object, but we rotate around the custom point of origin. Just like that. Keep that in mind. It's possible and it's rather easy to do in my opinion. Simply use the move to drag out the point of origin. Try to create flower like shape using ovals like I just did. That's your practice for this artboard? 12. Style Picker: Style picker tool can help you transfer style from one element to another. Before we can start, we need to create a simple shape with a layer style on it. Let's search for the shape. Maybe I will select a star tool. Then I can modify the shape using some controls at the very top. All right, it's time to recolor the shape. I click on the Field Color Here, I want to select a color using the color wheel. Keep in mind if you feel comfortable with sliders, you can change the 23 sliders, just like that. I know some of you really like to work with sliders, That's option. All right, now it's time to apply layer styles to this layer. In the layer section on the right side, this time there's X icon here. Layer effects, nice. This will open up this window with multiple effects that we can apply. There's a gaugan blur, outer shadow that's popular, one when we can create a radius and offset this shadow like shape. Nice. And we also can create in outer glow, we can add post gradient on it. We can even fill it with color. Again, here, multiple options. Feel free to explore them. In my case, I will stick with this outer shadow and I want to put inner glow. Let's search for inner glow, turn it on, make it a bit larger. We can also change the blending mode from screen to overlay perfect. Now I will simply close. Our challenge will be to transfer this style to another element. Let's just draw this second shape, very simple rectangle. If you hold shift, you will end up with the perfect square. How we can transfer this style? There's a new to added inversion two that can help us. I select this rectangle, search for pickers, that's one orange one, that's color picker. This will only pick the color, That's not the one we need. We need the second one, the blue one style picker tool. This one will everything the color and also layer effects. This way you can very quickly move style from one object to another. Let me also show you the alternative way, how we did that before they introduced the style picker tool. In version one, you have to click on the shape with the styles. Simply copy it so we can go to eat it and copy. Then you click on the shape without the style. Take a look. There are several options. We can paste the style and also paste effects. If you paste the style, you also paste the color. If you paste, you will maintain the original color and only layer effects. Feel free to use color picker to transform your style to different object. You can also modify what will be transfer, take a look. Stroke layer, opacity layer effects, everything's here at the top. By default it's all. But let's try to change that. Let me just do here this rectangles without any style. Now I will turn on style pick. I don't want to transfer fill and stroke. Let's try, here it is. We end up with only effect that was interesting. We can always click all or none to customize what would be transferred with a style picker tool. Let's try once more with another shape. Again, I can de select both. Use the style picker. Click all. Now I will unload it. Pick the style first, and then it's loaded. It fell with the black. And now I can apply the style on multiple objects. All right, let's unload it again. I will also undo several times. Now I will do not carry the fill color. All right, style from here. Now it's loaded. And I can click here. Here. And I'm adding the style, but I'm not changing the original color. Keep in mind we can modify this from the top. You can load the style into it, and then you can use it multiple times. You can unload the style if you need to pick a new style from different elements. All right, so try to do as I did, make one shape, add styles to it using X over here. Then for the next element, do not add styles to it manually, just try to use the style picker to copy and paste style from one element to another. 13. Cornel Tool: Did you know that corner to can be a very effective shaped building method? Most of us think about corner to in the context of rounding corners. We got some rectangle, we want a round corners, so we grab the corner to over here. Then we select those corners, round it a bit. Job done, but keep in mind there are different styles for rounded corners. Of course, there's a default one, the rounded corner. We can adjust that all the way in. We can change this to the second style. Take a look. Cut corner just like this one. Again, we've got nice smooth control of that effect. Next one that's will give us the concave. Very nice for making lables and stuff like that. And the last option for us is this one cut out, very simple square cut out. Look at this shape. Right now, I add round corner tool on four different corners with four different effects. If you are smart about this, you can create really nice shapes quickly. If I need half of a circle round two bottom corners, I can get this effect here. Then for the top two corners, I can use the concave mode. Take a look, we end up with shield very quickly. If you got square again, you round only one corner, you will end up with one quarter of circle. We can change that style of the corner to be cut out and then you got triangle. Keep in mind it's still a live thing, we can adjust that exactly as we need. We can mix and match those corner styles. If you want to take it further, you want to that manual using like no tool for example. From here we can bake appearance. Now we can move separate nodes and continue editing this stuff as we want with the no tool. All right, what else can we do with a corner tool? Let's explore few more possibilities. If you select opposite corners, holding shift, you can apply this effect only to two corners. This way we can create like leaf shape. That's interesting. A very quick and easy method to create a live like logo. And that will be your little task for this artboard. We want to create this little symbol, but we want to put it on a shield. Remember that we draw rectangle. We round the corners at the bottom. At the same time, use the concave at the top corner. Concave, here it is. Let's make it a gray shield with a nice symbol at front. I'm going to select all three shapes holding shift and now I will group them. Command G or Control. Take a look, we've got a group in the layer panel. This way I can move them easily here. No, they are behind the shield. The order that in the layer panel, we can also use command and square brackets up and down. Command and square brackets will help you to move your objects up and down. Try to create a shield with a simple logo using corner tool this time. Keep in mind you may need to beg the appearance of that, it will stop transforming, Okay? All done. Now it's your turn. 14. Transparent Backdrop: This next tip will be rather short, but we need to include it here on this list. Because I see this question every week somewhere on Facebook, on rated groups, people asking, how can I switch my backgroup to be a transparent one? There are a few ways you can turn on transparency. Why creating a new document straight away? The option for that to check box, but we can just switch it right now. Our artboard is white. Artboard is simply a glorify shape. This shape is a rectangle with white color in it. If I go for document set up, as you can see we got several tabs. We got dimensions, colors, margins, bleed and scale. Go for the second one. Color here you can see a color spectrum. Like in my case, that's GB. And there's also option for transparent backdrop. Let's turn it on. Click okay. Now this default white color was replaced by transparency. If you can see this checkerboard that's indicate transparency, that's the easiest way of turning the transparent backdrop. Your next task will be to turn on the transparency in this whole document. All right, let me show you a second method in case you need to export something smaller. Let's create a small composition here. I will grab a hard shape just like that. Next, I'm going to replace the color to be the pinkish red. Let's divide this hard using knife tool. I select this shape, now let's search for this little knife icon. Let's make it more dramatic and we cut through. All right, now we divide this one shape into two separate shapes. What if I want to now export this one, the transparent backdrop, because we switch of the color of the artboard. If I select the whole artboard and try to export that file export as a JPec, there's no support for transparency. Transparency will fill in the white color, but let's switch to PNG. Png will support the transparent backdrop, You can see checkerboard problem solve. But let's jump back and reformat this. Let's turn off transparent backdrop just for a moment so I can show you what I mean. Now if I want to export this even as PNG, by default it's filled with the white color. We can simply select the objects you want to export. In that case, this hard shape file export. Take a look area. This is the name of the transparent backdrop we can export. This backdrop, we can export only selected area, take a selected area, give me the hard shape. But with the white backdrop again, you need to pick the second option, selection. Only now you've got the shape with the transparent backdrop. Even without changing the backdrop into the transparent one in your document. That's a little nice trick. You can select only the object you need. Then in the area, use the selection on Sue, you select PNG as the format and you should end up with nice transparent backdrop around your Clippard. But let's jump back here. Remember, your task is to go to Document, Set up and turn on transparent backdrop. We are ready to go to the next artboard. 15. Multi FX: My next tip is simply a multiple effects for the layer that was the feature added in version two. Why that's a hidden trick tip because version two was just released last year and there are so many tutorials online showing the workflow without this feature. People just assume it's not there, but it's already there. It was added last year. Now you can add duplicates of the same layer effect from the effect menu. You don't need to create any workarounds for that. Let me show you what they mean. Let's create a little donut shape like it is now. I'm simply selecting my X in the layer section, take a look some of those effects got additional plus button on the right side. That's when you can duplicate the layer. So I can duplicate all the shadow gradient color in a shadow and outline. Let's put the outline. If I add outline to it like that and I click, I will have exact copy of this one. Then I can go to the button one because it's on the layer. I click on the button one, modify the color of it, let's make it dark blue or something like that. I make it even larger. Now we can see a second outline. I can click plus again. There's one more outline now. And now I can add, let's say, a white color. Keep in my must, make it larger than the previous one. All right, then I want to add one more plus again, I will make it black. Again, we got a problem. Now take a look. I run out of slider. I cannot make it larger than 100. Actually you can. Let me show you how I click plus again. The next one need to be larger than 100, no problem. Simply type it from the keyboard. 130, enter to. If you run out the slider on 100 pixels, you can always type it from the keyboard. This way you can create multiple duplicates of the same layer effect within the same object without any workarounds. If you ever see in video tutorial that somebody making some duplicates of the same shape, applying different effects and try to group that stuff. That was a workflow for version one. Now you don't need to do it anymore. Simply apply multiple effects by clicking the plus button As I show you and your practice task for this one, you can see it right now. Other shape, any shape you want. And then add multiple outlines. 12345 in my case. Maybe try to add five outlines to it using layer effects. All right, let's move to the next one. 16. 2 in 1: Our next artboard is not for a to trick, it's more like a reminder you have purchased Affinity Designer. It's not simply alternative to Adobo straight or color draw, it's two in one software that was a big deal. Eight years ago, when they first launch in Afin design, we got this nice vector editing workspace called Design Persona. We are in this design persona all the time so far, but whatever you need. There's also another persona called pixel persona. With Raster editing tools, it's like many Photoshop built in. It's great for illustrators because they don't need to take the vector illustration, take it to Raster software for texturing lightning and extra effects. You can do all here in one software. That was a big deal as I mentioned, because before they launch, many people need to start the project in Illustrator and then they take the Photoshop at some point to add those extra effects. You can do it all in the software without third party programs. Let me just demonstrate quickly. Let's go with some oval tool. All right, I'm going to duplicate that. Right click on the layer, search for duplicate, we can flip it horizontally. In the next step, I'm going to match those two shapes using the geometry Add button finishing touch will be to use the corner tool to around those two corners. I hope it's more like apple shape for you, not just a bottom part. Let's add a triangle. At the very top, we got this apple like shape. This triangle will be with dark green. All right? And the apple itself may be a bit like orange, red, something like that. Let's send this triangle behind the main shape. All right, so far we will only work in design persona with vector shapes. What if now you want to add a rasta texture to this apple? Then we switch to the pixel persona from here. As you may notice, all of the tools on the left side change. Let's take a look one more time. That's design persona. Here's the pixel persona. We got a new tool set. Keep in mind, in pixel persona, we are working with raster tools. If you are aiming into achieving pure vector illustration, do not use pixel persona. All right, just to clarify. Okay, I got this curve here. I will turn on intersection mode. It's ten. Now I want to grab a raster brush, just like this one. Let's go for, and explore. Explore different brushes, different. And for this guy, I don't need this one, I believe so. I will need to explore different brushes. So let's search for the one we could use here for this texture. I'm in the dry media, we got very texture brushes here. How about this one cron? Sounds good to me. I'm going to make a color a bit darker. I move my color to be a bit darker. Let's give it a go. I got my assistant here creating a pixel layer for me. I don't need to do it myself. Now, I can test out this one. That's nice. Not bad. A bit too strong. How about this one more like a chalk? Oh, that's what I need. That's perfect. I will make this brush a bit larger and I will reduce opacity. How about now? All right. Seems good. Now I can delete this pixel layer I have created here. Because I will start over. I delete this guy. I click on this curve, take a look, create a new pixel layer for me. The assistant did that. This layer is already a child layer to that vector shape. I cannot draw outside, I can nothing see. Only when I draw in that area of this vector shape, only then you will be able to see it. All right, using that, we can very quickly add some usted texture to your vector illustration. Then we can also modify blending mode. You can achieve exactly result are you aiming for? Feel free to modify blending mode and also adjust the opacity slider. That's also possible. All right, keep that in mind that this is two in one program. We got a very nice selection of pixel based tools to finish up with any illustration you need. I'm going to show you also a lazy man trick. I will delete that layer again and I will stay in the gray scale. I want to reduce, I want to change this color to be simply a gray color. All right. System, create a new layer for me. That's good. And now I'm going to change my color to gray scale, dark gray color. Even darker, maybe a bit brighter, gray color here and almost white. It's like a messy handmade texture that we create for this apple. Now we can change the blend modes to overlay and see how it will blend with existing color overlay, soft light, hard light, that's the spectrum we want to move around. In that case, I think the hard light will do, but we need to reduce opacity. We can get a natural, crafty look with this handmade texture for a vector object. All right, what we did here was to create a simple vector shape like this apple, and then click on it and start painting with the pixel based brush. Keep in mind to use the pixel base brush, you must change from design a persona to pixel persona. This way, we use both personas in creation of this very simple, very rough apple. We can finish this up by making a shadow. Let me show you how I go back to design persona. Let's search for this apple. I'm going to do duplicate this whole apple. Again, duplicate, now I'm going to make it flat. I want to make it black. Let's delete the pixel layer from it. I don't need a pixel layer for the shadow. I can simply drag this layer to the being gone. Now I place it under the whole apple, right? We need shadow under something like this. Will do. I think the final touch will be to blur it. We can click X, use the Gaugian blur. Nice blur here, then reduce opacity we end up with. We turn this simple vector shape into more like rust illustration using pixel persona and using some raster effects on our layers like the blur. All right, so this one is not a trick, is just a reminder. Try to incorporate both personas into one simple illustration like I just did. Can be orange, can be apple, just fruit. Draw the shape of the fruit using vector tools and then apply some texture yourself using a brush. Experiment with blending modes and opacity. And when you are happier, result. Move to the next trick. 17. Bucket tool: The next tip is related to vector field tool. Why it's a tip? Because the tool was missing for the big release of version 2.0 Many people just learn what's new in version two, never find out that few months later they actually add this vector field tool in update 2.1 It was not therefore the big release and many people missed that because of how it was introduced in the way smaller updates a bit later. Keep in mind we got a proper vector field tool now in April, designer, you don't need any workarounds. There are some old videos, they're on Youtube and people show us workarounds. We don't need to do it anymore. Take a look. If I draw a line, then another line here, maybe another line here. I got three separate lines. But if I select them altogether and grab this little bucket from my tool panel, I will be able to fill this intersecting space, the close space, with the color. As the result, I end up having a proper vector shape. Take a look, that's 100% vector shape with very clear edges. Very nice vector shape. Don't forget, you don't need to use only shape builder tool. This is a bit simpler to vector field tool, it will also work with shapes. If I got two shapes together, I can recolor certain parts of this combination. By doing that, I will create a new vector shape in that area. If it was on the existing shape, take a look on my layer panel. It may be added as a child layer of that existing bigger shape. If you want to avoid that, you can simply drag it out and have it as independent shape. But as the default, it may be added into the shape as the child of that shape. Again, all of that pure vector that's really nice, especially with lines. I think that's where the two shines. If you've got like lines, then we can use that little bucket to simply fill this in with colors. As the result we are getting vector shapes. Keep in mind, many people miss on this tool simply because it was not ready for the big lunch. It was added post lunch in up the 2.1 There's a proper vector field tool. Feel free to draw some random lines like that and fill those empty spaces with Cals using the little bucket on the left. 18. Assets BG: This is a very new thing. Now, we can change the asset panel backdrop just introduced one week ago in the update 2.3 but I found it so handy as you can see on my screen. By default, I used the dark theme give me some troubles with my asset panel before when I got black assets. Many of those SVGs that we load into asset panel that are actually black by default, the black asset on the dark gray backdrop, that was really hard to see. Let's first open the asset panel, by default is off, so we need to go to Windows, search for Assets and turn them on. As you can see on my left, I got many asset loaded and I already changed my backdrop to be a checkerboard. Let me just show you what was the standard backdrop before the upgrade? Before the upgrade, we have no choice. It was always same as your interface. In my case, it was this dark gray as my interface. And my black assets look really, really strange. Not easy to spot them. Very hard to see. I need to look at close concentrate, very much to support the one I need. And then I can, of course, just drag out the asset I need. I can recolor this no problem on the artboard later, but I cannot change it in the asset panel now, you can simply click the menu on the right here. Go to Backdrop, and we got three options. We got Checkerboard Light and Dark, and auto to adjust automatically to your default interface color. Light will give you the very light gray, but I found the checkerboard to be a good happy medium option here. How can you save your assets? Let's create a new asset category. All right, here it is. It's now empty category. Let's draw some assets. Let's very quickly create some MOG ourselves. I'm using the circle, all right? I will keep it black, it's easy to recolor later. All right, some white circles for ice. Now, I will subtract those shapes, make holes. And let's use a maybe segment tool to make some surprise expression right at the center. Nice. I will now convert this to curve, so I can modify it slightly by removing this node. Okay. Make it a bit like that. Pushing in using no, right? And this is some MOG we create. I'm going to select both. You subtract again. Now when I select icon my MOG, I can go to asset panel. And from here we've got option out from selection. Here it is, Now it's saving my asset panel. So whatever I need it, I can just drag it out and use it again. It's especially useful if you're ipad user because you don't need to go outside the software. You've got your assets within, You can have multiple assets in different categories. You can also move this window to be in different section of your interface. For example, you can push it here around the layer panel, so you've got your assets ready on the right side if you don't want to use part of your screen on the left, asset panel is very handy. And now we can change the asset panel color. This way it's way easier to see very bright or very dark assets in that panel. Try to make a new asset added to your asset panel and then modify the backdrop of the panel so you can see it without any troubles. Keep in mind, you must click on the menu and see the backdrop section. And adjust this switching between light, dark And finally, checkerboard backdrop. Pick the one that will contrast with your assets. In this case, I got white assets on the light backdrop. Again, I can customize this to see them on the dark. One way easier. Now we can switch between different backdrops in the asset panel. That's a new feature just introduced in November last week. So, try it out and I will see you in our last artboard. 19. Summary: Nicely done. You have learned 17 useful tips and tricks to speed up your workflow in affinity designer. Many of them will also work with Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. That's just an extra bonus for you. We start with the Quick grid, then we use the rubber blend mode for the pen tool. After that, I show you how to power duplicate. We play with a nice shape tool to make a flower really quickly, we turn on the x ray mode to see through some shapes. We test this, erase blend mode, then we open the whole file in affinity photo to make some adjustments. We stall a tool from affinity publisher. We copy a table from publisher. We learn how to rotate shapes around and how to move the point of the origin for the rotation. Then we use the style picker to move style from one object to another. I show you how you can use corner tool for shape building. Then we turn on the transparent backdrop for the whole document, apply multiple layer effects to just one object. We play a little bit with the pixel persona in the next artboard. Finally, we reach the fill tool, the little bucket to fill some areas and end up with perfect vector shapes. I show you how to adjust the backdrop in your asset panel, and finally, we paste icon from the Internet, SVG icon into the program and recolor it without any hassle. Now we are on this very last artboard. You can see well done artboard. It's empty, there's no tip on it. We already learn all of the tips from this online class. Your task will be to modify the text in this last artboard, you can put your nickname here. I'm Crew Mark. Now I'm going to select tips that I like. Don't need to select all 17, That's not the point. If you like the tip about using corner tool, you can copy. I select, come and then paste this artwork from that board. All right. Try to select maybe five tips that you really like, so we will know which one, which are your favorite. Select some of those little artboards me made to practice. All right. And put them on the very last artboard, on the well done artboard. Because this well done artboard is our project for this online class. You don't need to export 17 different artboards. All right. Let's just pick some of your favorite tips from this class. Put those artworks into the Lance Art Board. I also like to rotate stuff around. Pick this one, maybe one more, maybe top five. I think that's a nice number. It will fit nicely on this artwork here. Actually, recently I've been using this table to doing some calendars and stuff like that. I think I will put it here as well. Nice. All right, here are my five favorite tips from this class. Now I'm going to export this artboard as J peck and then submit in the class project section to get your certificate right. I hope you enjoy learning this way. And keep in mind whatever you means artboard. You can do it later. If you feel like you don't fully understand the tip, you cannot get the same result every time you try to use it. Just rewatch the video, redo the board. Okay. Use this class like a book. Very often you finish the book but then re back to check, set ten aspects, check some units again and again. Same with this class. We got multiple video lessons and we got one board per lesson to practice. I hope you did it all. And now it's time to simply put five on the last artboard. Click file, Export, Export, this last artboard, maybe as Jpeg, PNG. Show us this in the project section, and I hope I will see you in my next class by.