Reinventing graphic design on the iPad
With its intuitive interface and touch gestures, Affinity Designer makes creating professional-grade designs easy – with no Mac or PC required
Say “professional graphic design software” to someone and they’ll picture a cluttered interface laden with complicated tools and sub-menus. Ask what kit you’ll need to run it and they’ll probably mention an iMac and pricey graphics tablet.
It doesn’t have to be that way. The all-new Affinity Designer for iPad is tailor-made for touch, with a mix of instinctive finger gestures and streamlined workspaces making it easy to create impressive results.
And just because Affinity Designer is easy to navigate and the controls straightforward to find, it doesn’t mean that the software is somehow lightweight or short on features.
What’s more, while you can use Affinity Designer on your iPad only, it also has a Mac or PC version. They work seamlessly together, so you can start work on one and pick up on the other with all your edit history intact.
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The biggest challenge for a professional graphic design app on the iPad is making touch gestures as second nature as possible. After all, no-one wants to play Twister with their fingers when work needs to be done.
Fortunately, navigating Affinity Designer and using its range of tools via pinching, twisting and swiping is a breeze. For instance, a two-fingered drag will pan around your document; a double tap in the Navigator Studio will zoom to fit; while a spinning top-style twist will rotate the entire canvas.
Affinity Designer also excels at condensing multi-click functions into a single movement. A two-fingered tap on the canvas reverses your last edit, while a single-finger long press and release brings up the Edit menu for clipboard options.
The touch gestures don’t end there: you can use a single finger to lock an image’s aspect ratio as you resize it, swipe up or down on the Colour Studio icon to adjust luminance and group layers with a mere pinch of the fingers. These movements represent a new, more natural approach to graphic design – one that offers the fine-grained control you’d expect from high-end software, but also leaves room for experimentation.
Change your Persona
One thing that lifts Affinity Designer from the crowd is its Personas. These are effectively three different workspaces encompassing key stages of the design process. This means there isn’t one interface jam-packed with tools, but a trio of “rooms” that serve a particular purpose. It feels like a traditional experience – the digital equivalent of passing a design from desk to desk in an office – but changing Personas in Affinity Designer takes a microsecond. Just tap the toolbar in the top-left of the screen to switch effortlessly between the three workspaces. The Vector Persona is where you’ll probably spend most of your time. It’s clean, almost minimalist: all of the main vector tools (such as Move, Node, Pen, Fill and Colour Picker) are located on the left-hand side of the screen, while the Studios (Brushes, Layers, Text, Transform and so on) are on the right. At the bottom of the screen, the Context toolbar displays options for the currently selected tool. So, for example, if you’re using the Pen tool, the Context toolbar will include handy options such as width, colour and the pen mode. It’s far easier than digging around in desktop sub-menus. That simplicity even extends to the labels. Not sure what one of the icons means?
Tap the question mark in the bottomright corner of the screen to bring up its name.
The second Persona is called Pixel and plays host to raster brush tools that you can use to create raster digital art from scratch or enhance an existing vector design. These include a Pixel, Smudge Brush, Flood Fill and Freehand Selection Tool. You can also restrict edits to certain parts of your document, such as placed images, as well as create custom raster brushes and – for a more hard-edged, retro look – use the Pixel brush for pixelaligned painting.
The final Persona is Export, which is a one-stop shop for exporting artboards, layers, groups and objects as export slices to a range of different file types and image sizes.
The workspace is divided into two Studios: Layers and Slices. The former allows you to quickly select layers that you want to export as slices with a tap of the finger. Meanwhile, the Slices studio lets you export areas of your design as universally recognised vector and raster image formats. Again, Affinity Designer’s emphasis is on intelligibility: what could be a complicated process in other software is reduced to a few taps and swipes.
Modern artboards
Affinity Designer has another trick up its sleeve – and it’s one you wouldn’t necessarily expect from an iPad app. Instead of just working on single, standalone designs, you can put together an entire project on an “artboard”. These can be of any size and allow you to place multiple design elements – for example, a range of promotional flyers of different sizes – in the same document. Or you could use an artboard to compare slight variations of a design, such as a business card.
You can create an artboard using the settings in the New Document dialog and then add more boards with the original document’s dimensions – which is perfect if, for instance, you’re putting together a multi-page leaflet or brochure – or other preset sizes. However, if you’re unsure about how to best position objects, Affinity Designer allows you to include unique guides and grid layouts on each artboard. You can then automatically snap objects to these guides – not just in the current artboard, but in all other artboards in the document. So no more laborious flicking between separate designs.
You have a few choices when it’s time to export artboards. You can export it as a single image, concatenate – essentially link together in a series – all of your artboards in one image, or export multiple artboards as multiple images. Whichever you choose, the process is smooth and will only take a minute or so, which is ideal if you want to share ideas with colleagues or keep clients updated.
If you’re looking for a powerful vector tool that blends traditional graphic-design prowess with game-changing touch gestures for the iPad, Affinity Designer is an excellent option. The app’s sheer attention to detail – there’s even a left-handed mode – makes it ideal for the modern, mobile professional.