The brush tool has a number of tricks, too. As well as regular colour fills, you can apply transparency and gradient fills to objects, customise them and save the appearance of objects as styles. You can keep these as customisable ‘smart’ shapes or convert them to regular curves and work on them with the Node tool – the equivalent of Illustrator’s Direct Selection tool. Draw a cog object, for example, and you can adjust the number of teeth as well as their width, depth and angle of cut. The shape drawing tools have 18 custom types on top of the basic rectangle, oval and rounded rectangle objects, each with a broad range of customisation options. Turn on one of the pixel-based view modes and you’ll see exactly how the work will appear as a bitmap at the document’s resolution setting.Īffinity Designer is surprisingly feature packed. If you’re making print graphics, leave this switched off and objects appear sharp at all zoom scales.

In a nod to Apple’s latest high-resolution Mac screens, the program offers a Retina Pixel View mode, which doubles the pixel pitch of the regular Pixel View mode.

These enable you to work on different parts of a project without having to rearrange windows or toolbars manually. Affinity Designer has three Personas – one for drawing and shape creating, one for pixel-orientated painting and one for exporting, with features for creating sliced parts of designs and generating images at different resolutions.

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