What is Affinity Designer Used For? Understanding Vector Images
Affinity Designer is a program used by both artists and graphic designers to create vector images. These images will then be used for company logos, promotional uses or even personal work, both in print and digital form. So what is Affinity Designer used for? It is typically used to create illustrations, charts, graphs, logos, diagrams, cartoons of real photographs, and more. While the program may be difficult to understand initially, the final product will be well worth the learning curve.
Affinity Designer is the fastest, smoothest, most precise vector graphic design software around. Built from the ground up over a five-year period, every feature, tool, panel and function has been developed with the needs of creative professionals at its core. Affinity Designer Best in class for creating concept art, print projects, logos, icons, UI designs, mock-ups and more, our powerful design app is already the choice of thousands of professional illustrators, web designers and game developers who love its silky-smooth combination of vector and raster design tools. Was $49.99 Now only $24.99.
If you’re interested in learning more about Affinity Designer, follow my YouTube tutorials.
What is a Vector Image?
Creating vector images allows you to create clean, beautiful works of art that can be scaled up and down infinitely without ever losing quality. Have you ever created an image in Affinity Photo, and then realised that you should have created it three times larger than you did? You go into Image Adjustments, increase the size, and … oops. The image is now pixelated and looks horrible. If the image was too small to begin with, you’ll need to start all over again. The same does not remain true for Affinity Designer. Unlike the familiar gif, jpeg, tiff, etc images – known as raster images – vector images are not made up of a grid of pixels. They are instead created by paths – a combination of a starting point and an ending point with a combination of shapes, angles and lines in-between. These paths relate to each other by mathematical formulas, allowing them to be scaled and rescaled infinitely.
This makes Affinity Designer a more ideal program for companies than Affinity Photo, since they can create images and logos that can be small enough to be a tiny icon or large enough to appear on a billboard.
What Can You Really Do With Affinity Designer?
Many people are intimidated by Affinity Designer due to the fact that they believe they have no artistic skill. If you can’t draw on paper, what makes you think you can draw on the computer? While this self-doubt is certainly not the right way to look at things, Affinity Designer actually doesn’t require any prior knowledge of drawing or painting. You can use this program to create freehand drawings, but you can also import a photograph and use that photograph as a guide to trace and recolour a particular subject – turning it into a work of art that looks as though you drew it freehand.
As a graphic designer, you can use Illustrator to easily create sleek, aesthetically pleasing company logos. Do you want to type in a circle around a particular image or logo? Not a problem! Do you want to type in the shape of the CEO’s head? You can do that as well, and it’s not as complicated as you’d assume.
Affinity Designer is not only limited to artists and graphic designers. Those who are looking to create a website can create a mockup through Affinity Designer, which they can use to create vector images that can be used over a wide variety of platforms. Since it is an Affinity Serif product, Affinity Designer works seamlessly with other Affinity Programs in the Suite, Photo, Designer and Publisher. After creating your initial image, you can drag it over into Photo to further edit it and apply filters, or drag it over to Publisher for flawless printing and digital booklets or magazines. Want to turn your illustration into a game or animation? Import it into iMovie and watch it come to life! You can even add your logo and illustrations to videos or animate them through iMovie Stop Motion.
Versatility
Still not sold on using vector images? If you decide you no longer want it to be a vector, you can easily convert it into a bitmap or jpeg image. Unfortunately, illustrations that are created as a a raster image cannot be converted to vector images after the fact. If you’re unsure whether or not you’ll need to resize your image later on, it would be wise to create a vector image to begin with – especially if it is an image that will be widely used around the company or the office. Another perk is that vector files are actually smaller than their raster counterparts.
Since vector images are created of different lines, curves, shapes, and points, you have virtually unlimited editing opportunities. Let’s say you draw a heart in Affinity Photo, and you decide that the bottom of the heart is a bit too narrow. Too bad! You’ll either have to live with it or start over. Now, let’s say you draw the same heart in Affinity Designer. Since your heart is comprised of many different points, you can go back in an adjust the bottom of the heart so that it becomes fuller. You can make it smaller or larger, without worrying about ruining the quality. This allows you easily make changes throughout your creative process, and doesn’t restrict you to the images you have already created.
And then there’s this: the transparent background. Unless you create a background for your vector image, it will always be transparent. This is helpful in many different situations, when you simply want to put a logo on top of something else or a small illustration into a larger picture. If you’re working with purely raster images, you’ll need to separate the image from the background before moving forward. While programs such as Affinity Photo make selecting your subject fairly easy, you’ll be thankful that you’re using vector images when you begin to create more complicated designs.
Is It For You?
I’ll be the first to admit that Affinity Designer is an in-expensive program, as are all programs within the Affinity Suite. Yet It is truly created for professionals who are going to utilise it to its fullest capacity. If you are unsure of whether or not this program is for you, Affinity offers a free 30 day trial that will give you time to dip your toes in and complete a couple of self-guided tutorials. Building on the Fundamentals gives you a more in-depth look at everything you can do with this versatile program.
Just as feature-packed as the desktop version, Affinity Designer for iPad is a professional graphic design app with everything you need to create stunning illustrations, branding, icons, UI/UX designs, print projects, typography, concept art and much more — all completely free from the confines of your desk!
No subscription and 50% off
Affinity Designer for iPad does not require any subscription, it’s simply €21.99 – and right now available with 50% off!
Craft perfect vector curves or combine objects and shapes using complex Boolean operations. You can also create abstract shapes or an offset path with the powerful contour tool.
Easily combine vector and raster graphics. You can use raster paint brushes to add texture to vector work, edit single pixels on icons and more — it’s a whole new way of working.
Apply advanced grids and guides, draw directly on isometric planes, and use precise snapping controls including snap to pixel and pixel alignment.
CMYK, RGB8, RGB16, Greyscale, LAB and even RGB32. Work in any colour space, with full confidence that any documents taken from the Windows or macOS version will always render with 100% fidelity.
Work with unlimited layers, including real-time blend modes with range adjustment and simple drop zones to mask, clip, reorder and group all layer types. Text layers, vector layers, pixel and image layers all fully supported.
Super smooth gradients, transparency, glows, shadows and more — gain full control over the appearance of all your strokes and shapes. Even add multiple fills and strokes to the same object.
Organise your work with artboards. You can have as many as you like, whatever size you like.
Include unlimited instances of the same object across your work. Edit one and the rest update instantly.
Get a live pixel preview of your work so you know exactly how your vectors will export in raster format. Or switch to outline view to see all those beautiful curves.
Affinity Designer Free Download
Enjoy full text capabilities, including OpenType and text styles. You can flow text along any curve too.
Directly output your work from iPad into professional formats, including EPS, SVG, PSD, and PDF X, ready for print.
Fully optimised for iPadOS, with the ability to drag and drop to import and export images from any location on iPad. You can even work directly on PSD files and save back to PSD.
Create your own shortcut keys using a keyboard attachment for an even more streamlined workflow.
Affinity Publisher Free Trial
No subscription and 50% off
Affinity Designer Trial
Affinity Designer for iPad does not require any subscription, it’s simply €21.99 – and right now available with 50% off!