I could nudge in centimetres, but I think that would be too large of a shift. In Tools, I’ve changed my Nudge Distance to 1mm, Nudge Modifier Distance (this is when you hold down the Shift key) to 10mm and the Nudge units to millimetres. In the software preferences, there’s a lot you can change by clicking the dropdown menu (at the top next to the forward and back arrows). I’ve also adjusted the software using the Preferences menu (I think this should be in the main File menu in the Windows version). This is really easy to do – just right click in the left hand corner where the two rulers join and the unit settings will appear. I prefer working in centimetres, but there is an inches option too. These will always appear in whichever unit you set them to when you first set up your space. You can also set your rulers to always show by going to your top menu and selecting View>Show Rulers. It sits just underneath the top toolbar and doesn’t affect the rest of the interface, it’s just something to get used to. This appears only when you’re using a tool or have an object selected and there’s some extra things you can do with it – for example, fill and stroke only appear when working on shape vectors. The toolbars at the top and side have different tools they can contain – you can’t move them from one to the other unfortunately – plus in some circumstances, the tools you’re looking for appear in a “context toolbar”. You can always change what you have open by going into the menu as described, plus there’s the option to reset it to normal at the bottom of the studio menu. I have Layers, Stroke, Brushes and Transform active in my studio panel, you don’t really need any others. You can add and take away panels by going to the top menu and selecting View>Studio. The selector panels on the righthand side are called the “studio”. In terms of the interface, you don’t have a toolbar on the right hand side, but you do have one at the top of the screen. I’ve therefore listed the shortcuts for the tools in the table below, though there’s also a full list of shortcuts on the Affinity help page. Most of the shortcuts you’re used to in Illustrator (and those used in the Pattern Lab tutorials) are the same – cut, copy, paste, etc – though many of the tools have different shortcuts. I don’t really use this software for much in my filmmaking business, just the occasional logo design, so it’s no problem for me to rearrange my toolbars. Designer is actually the persona you’ll need for pattern cutting, so it’s helpful that it’s the default. The default persona is Designer, which is for working with vector shapes, then you also have Pixel (digital painting) and Export (for choosing isolated areas of artwork to export). Affinity Designer has three “personas” – essentially workspaces – which are set up for slightly different types of working. One of the major differences between Illustrator and Designer, however, is that you can’t save a separate workspace just for pattern cutting. The few tools that are missing are minor inconveniences for pattern design, though I’ve seen the developers confirming they’re working on several tools which have been asked for. For people new to design software, £20 a month might sound appealing, but £50 forever is a far better deal.ĭesigner has most (but not quite all) of the same tools as Illustrator, though some have different names. For just £50 per application (they also have Photo and Publisher), you get lifetime updates – bargain! These updates do actually improve and add things to the software, plus the developers listen to feedback about bugs and tools you want – and, for those of us jumping ship from Adobe, Affinity opens Illustrator and Photoshop files natively. So I set about looking for alternatives to Adobe and discovered Affinity. I was also shocked when I discovered hundreds and hundreds of “temporary” files created by Adobe had been stored indefinitely on my computer – it was little wonder I kept running out of storage space! Most of the time, it just looked as though Adobe threw a new interface on top of the old one to make it prettier and that would be about it. For that amount I didn’t feel as though I was getting all that much in terms of bug fixing and upgrades to previous versions of the software. My bill went up each year to the point where I was spending well in excess of £600 per year on software (I had the full suite of software for my filmmaking business, though Illustrator by itself will set you back around £240 per year). While it’s true that Adobe are the market leaders for many types of creative software, I’d simply had enough of them.
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