#Affinity designer tutorial how to

This is the result of the mess I was explaining above. You can experiment and place them both the other way around to see the result either. I placed the largest shape at the top because this will act as a sort of inverted mask to our combined rectangles. We need to select these two and apply an Intersect operation. Below that, we have the resulting shape of the two rectangles we combined on the previous step.I colored it magenta to make it stand from the other shapes.

First, I’ve duplicated the largest “ M” shape we made a few steps ago.

The image above may look confusing, so we gonna break it down right now: Select both and perform a Subtract boolean operation. Draw a second one, trying to make its top-right corner touch the yellow point shown above. Extend this rectangle vertically, beyond the character’s area. To create the bottom insets of our “ M” letter, we need to draw a rectangle that touches the points shown above. All of this takes some practice to figure out at the beginning, but with time and a little patience, you’ll be able to solve these tiny puzzles almost on auto-pilot. Repeat this step two more times for the rest of the legs. It’s like solving a little puzzle, sometimes tricky, but always fun. As you can see cleaning up it’s just a matter of using our existing shapes and combining them with different boolean operations. Now, to clean up the bottom part, duplicate the bigger shape (I colored it yellow just to show this step better), move it above our rectangle and select both shapes. Apply a Subtract boolean operation to clean the top of our rectangle. Since this typeface has no straight corners, try to draw this rectangle across the middle point of the rounded corners.Īgain, let’s duplicate the top shape, select it and also select the rectangle we just created. To create the bottom of the legs, draw a rectangle, touching the points shown above. Select this duplicate and the hand-drawn path we just created and apply a Subtract boolean operation.

I know, that mess at the top, just feeds my anxiety too… let’s fix it! Getting Cleaner ShapesĪs we did before, duplicate the top “ M” shape. Repeat the same steps to fill the other gap. Select and and, merge them together using the Add boolean function. Draw a path touching the points shown above. Now, following with our join-all-verticals technique, let’s fill the remaining gaps. See? No matter how tricky the extrusion might look, the same techniques work like a charm every time! Mind the gaps! I duplicated the bottom “ M” letter and my hand-drawn shape and merged both by applying an Add boolean operation. What follows shouldn’t be new to you at this point. It looks almost finished in one step now, we just need to refine it. Notice what happens when we fill-in our path. In the image above, you can see that we don’t need to care about all letter’s legs at first.

But if we apply the process we’ve been following from the beginning, we’ll notice that the same vertical touch points are present here too. This “ M” letter might look like a nightmare to extrude. You’ll see the principle is the same for all letters, no matter how intricate they might seem.

#Affinity designer tutorial how to

Now, we’ll take a look at a more complex shape and how to go about it. With both shapes selected, we’ll apply a Subtract boolean operation. To clean up the mess at the top, we gonna duplicate our original letter, we gonna keep it selected and, we’ll also select the bottom shape. This way I’ll be able to move around all individuals letters independently. I grouped all these shapes to keep everything neat. Homework: using this method, complete the rest of the letter. However, this would require mad Pen Tool skills to match the precision of the original shape. Can you guess how to fix this? We’ll get onto it later.ĭid you know? We could have avoided all steps above, drawing our path by hand. Even though it’s being hidden by the top white “ S,” we still know that awful curve it’s there. Now the bottom curve looks perfect! Notice that the top part of our path still looks terrible. Using Affinity Designer’s Add boolean operation from the top context menu, I will merge both paths into one. I’ll bring back my original path and, now I’m going to select both, the hand-drawn path and the resulting bottom part of the “ S” letter. This is how our final shape looks without the extra nodes we just deleted.