From the course: Affinity Designer Essential Training

Overview of the Interface - Affinity Designer Tutorial

From the course: Affinity Designer Essential Training

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Overview of the Interface

- [Instructor] Before you start using any new software application it's good to familiarize yourself with the user interface. In this movie I'll walk you through the Affinity Designer Interface so you have a good understanding of where things are and how the tools are organized. Let's start from the top and work our way down. At the top we have what is called the menu bar. The menu bar you should be familiar with, it's in every application and this is where you would create a new file, or do some editing, or have any text editing that you would like to make. So you'll find that here. Of course, you'll also find "Help" up here too if you have any particular questions. Moving on down to the left hand side, we have what is called the toolbar. In the toolbar, these are all the tools you will use to manipulate the objects on your screen. The first tool is the "Move" tool. Below that you have your "Artboard" tool. The "Note" tool. Your "Corner" point tool. Your Pen tool, pencils. And so forth, and so on. All the tools for creation is found here on the left hand side. The middle area of your screen is called the Canvas area. This is where you'll actually create your art. So any time you grab one of these tools, like over here on the left hand side, I will grab the "Shape" tool, and I'll click and I'll hold, and you'll see there is all these other shapes under here. Let's just select the "Cog", and I'll draw that out onto the canvas. On the right hand side of the screen, what you have is the studio panels. This is where you'll interact with your objects by changing their colors, or picking a swatch, or changing the stroke of your object, or changing the brush type that you've used for the paintbrush. Down here you'll have "Effects", "Styles", "Text Styles". So this is all the studio panel area for manipulating those objects. Up here at the top, what I'd like you to notice is the context tool area. Anytime you select a tool, you'll notice that options for that tool are changed at the top of this screen. So you can directly manipulate your object by selecting one of these tools. For instance, I'm going to go back to "Shape" tool, because I drew out this cog here, and you'll see there's these little red marks, and those red marks directly correlate with the options that are up here at the top. So if I go here and I grab this whole radius, you'll notice that the percentage changes. And that's true for all the other orange options here for direct manipulation. If you look down at the bottom, if you're getting lost about what type of shortcut keys or options that you need to manipulate these objects, you can also see here and get a little status hint of the different shortcuts that you can use on your keyboard to manipulate different parameters. So hopefully by now you have a clear understanding of where everything is in Affinity Designer. Throughout this course, I'll be using just about all of the tools found here. And if you get lost, you can always come back and watch the movies anytime to refresh your memory.

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