ClarityDynamic

This was the first thing a thought. A Dali compsition! Well done! Compliments! 

Hi everybody 🙂

After recently buying all 3 of the Affinity programs, this was the 3rd thing I made with Affinity Designer. The other 2 were a Christmas post and a new years post for Instagram. My first impression of AD is that it has potential, but to me it still has a long way to go if it wants to compete with Adobe Illustrator. But of course, it's very difficult to get to the Adobe level, since they have so much experience and money 😅

I bought the Affinity programs to hopefully get less dependent on Adobe software, because I really don't like the 'subscription only' principle Adobe has adopted. I don't like to pay Adobe 'ransom money' to be able to have access to my own documents. And since using Adobe Creative Cloud I've had several bugs that have never been an issue back when I had Adobe software that I bought. So even Adobe isn't as good (anymore) as it should be for that price.

Most of the things I design are T-shirt prints for my webshops and since I'm addicted to designing letters (typography) most of my designs contain custom made text. This 'L' was made for Instagram only. From time to time I design single alphabet letters, to have something more to post on Instagram. I post far less than the algorithm wants, but I don't want to be a slave to the algorithm, so I follow my own rithm 😋

Is anyone else into designing typography?

✌️ Luc
 

This was the original. I wasn’t commissioned to do this, I just thought it would be good practice to create something better.

For the main image I generated a prompt using Playground AI. I then edited some details using Affinity Photo, adjusted the lighting and colors, added half-tone, and used some overlay textures. I think it's definitely more attention grabbing (lol)

Don't forget it can be in the paragraph style decoration settings, and you won't have to move your lines each time you modify your text, and can in a bulk modify this line on all the titles when modifying the decoration of your paragraph style.

Hi,

With the pen tool , click on the   line mode

Hold the Shift key if you want to make an horizontal line for exemple (when holding the shift key you have 45 degrees rotation each time when moving the mouse.

Hope that will help.

With the Pen Tool selected, the Context Toolbar provides choices for Fill and Stroke, with the Stroke providing a color-well you can click in to set the line's color, and the next field providing the option for size of the stroke/line.

You can also use stroke panel.
Yes, there is no line tool and we have to make do with pen tool. Hopefully we can use automatic style "decorations" instead.

Using the pen tool holding down shift applying styles from the style studio would be sufficient for me , but...
 

You have to manually synchronize the Assets between the two applications. You can do that by exporting the Assets categories from one application and importing into the other. Or, at least on Windows, by copying the assets.propcol file from one application to the other (but that is a one-time, total replacement).

Let us know what you think. 

Download all the trials and create a brief mockup, single page, and see for yourself but I cannot see why not.

We always improve and learn new tools and tricks… Keep this project to look at it in a few years

It was a school project, creating a magazine cover and 2 articles.  I could have used a basic app to make the cover but you really can't beat the quality and realism with a "realistic mockup" and it wasn't as hard as I thought although I am sure if I keep practicing in the future this one will look like a first grader did it LOL  

Nicely done! Shouldn't you add the magazine name, numero, month and the year on the spine? (It's nearly invisible).
And can you tell us what was the exercice about? Creating a cover and learning to use a mockup?
 

Hope this helps. 

Ok, I changed the model and adjusted the size a little.  is the model big enough or should I try and find one that fills the entire cover and just change the background color?
 
there is white border on the right size for a 3d perspective look also
 

These I believe are designs created within Affinity Design - stunning work!!  

Well, standard "I can only speak for myself" disclaimer...
I don't know about LaTeX for desktop publishing, and haven't needed to ever. And my choice of word processor is either Pages, Nisus Pro, Storyist or Scrivener (or a combo of them all). I find it's just easier to work on the content in a dedicated Word processor and then import a raw TXT or RTF file into a Desktop publisher. This has been my M.O. since PageMaker (RIP).
Currently, I've been using Designer for lettering comics, and it's been working out okay, but the there's slowdowns when it comes to the Art board. It wasn't designed (I guess and this is not a dig at the devs) at being able to lay out 32-64 page documents. So I've been waiting for Publisher like forever. And when the beta was released the first thing I did was to create a "template" document for comics (the print size, taking into account the size that ComiXology likes its comics to have) set it up with styles and master layers and an collection of "Comix" assets to allow for the layer requirements (Like for Sound Effect lettering that's above the art, The text for dialog or narration, the balloon/caption shape, a layer for the Balloon Pointer, A layer below the shape for the balloon/narration stroke), the sound effect layer that's  below all the text and finally the Art layer which contains a masking for placed art *whew*). There's just 2 master spreads, one for a single page and the other for a double-page spread.
Then I place the artwork and create a shape that will become a text frame. The comic script is opened in a window on my other monitor. I select the text for the balloon/caption, copy it and paste without style into the Text Frame. I change the style of the text to what it needs to be (dialog or narration or whatever). Then I finish with the Balloon Shape (which has NO stroke and then copied on the lower balloon layer WITH a stroke that 2x the width I want it to end up being. Sandwiched in-between is the Pointer shape, that has the width I want. This way I get a balloon that has a pointer that is adjustable independent of the balloon shape). Importing the Script using AutoFlow would be a horror-show apocolypse of additional work that would just eat up time. But looking at the script itself, I can make sure I'm on the correct page and panel and get the right character saying what they need to say; it would be bad for the hero to lapse into a villain's monologue!
So what I do is specialized -- so far the only dedicated comic lettering app is Comic Life, which is good -- but Affinity Publisher (even in beta) is better. And when it's possible to switch between Photo and Designer from Publisher, I foresee using all three to create comics from idea to printable pages.
And I have a storybook called "The Living  Room Warrior" that my wife wrote and I illustrated that, thanks to Affinity Publisher Beta, I'm inspired to revise my original illustrious and add many more illustrations, and do a 2nd edition using APub to create printing files, PDF and maybe ePubs in time. There's a comic for a client of mine, that I may redo in Publisher, and do additional work for them using APub.
Even though some functionality is duplicated between the Affinity Apps, we were told about (at least I remember reading it, but my chemotherapy "fog" may be giving me false positives...). But there's so much that Publisher does that Designer doesn't. Page numbers, master spreads, table of contents, actual pages instead of Artboards, and more that escapes me presently. So purchasing this app is a forgone conclusion for me. It's a wonderful addition to my software arsenal.
And that's what Affinity Publisher is good for -- in my case. 

@Wosven thank you that was by far the most detailed answer, I wish there was a way to tip forum users that go above and beyond  
Yes, I will learn the basics of ID - I love using Affinity Products over Adobe, perhaps in the future, I will just make my own mockups instead of purchasing them.  Graphic Design is so much fun, it opens up a new world 
  

It would be easier not to use inDesign if you don't know it. On the long run, it's better to use it and learn to use it
There's no reason to use Photoshop or AP for a magazine cover. It should be in the magazine's template, with all the other pages of the magazine. Or in a separate file if a different paper is used for the cover, but at least the 4 pages of the cover, since they'll be printed as a whole.
Usually all the pages of a magazine are in a same file. Some magazine are made of different files, but it's usually for different people to work on, or because some parts can be made and validated earlier, and this avoid possible errors or modifications.
 
If you're in a rush, you'd better use the easiest way for now, and work later to have a nice template for APub if that's the app you'll use later.
If you've got ID, you can use it to export the master pages as PDF to import them in APub. You can copy-paste text in Word or LibreOffice, export them as RTF or .DOC to import them in later in APub (you'll have to check and correct some differences or errors).
You can use those scripts to list and export all the inDesign paragraph/character styles of a document: Scripts_list_styles.zip

If you were able to import an IDML file (XML exported document from inDesign, it would be a full APub document with as much imported options as possible like Paragraph and Character Styles, Master Pages…). If you open a PDF, you'll only have the pages, and some text with the proprieties used in the original document, but you'll have to create the styles, organize them and their dependencies (if a style is based on another one for example).
You won't have the different master pages, and sometimes there are more master pages than the pages of the magazine, for different purposes, versions or options (pages with 1 picture or more, or variation with different text columns, different text frames depending of the content…). Usually, a template contains more than the visible pages, since different cases were thought ahead at the creation process.
NB. I don't buy templates, perhaps there's nothing more that what is on the pages…
It's like opening a flattened image: you can imagine it's made of different images (background, people, etc.) and different adjustement layers, but you can't be sure unless you're able to open the original file with all the layers.
 
If you only need few modifications before exporting the final result, it's handy and a good workaround if you can't modify the original file.
If you need it as a template for a new project and you'll use it for many issues, like a magazine, you'll have to create all the styles (paragraph and character), the global swatch (Pantone?) and apply them to the different parts that should use them...
Check text frames if they need to respect the column grid, and if there's flowing text, etc.
It's better than using a paper magazine as example and creating all the document from scratch in APub, but you'll have a good amount of work if you want to make it a good template.
 
This look like a PSD file with a smart object (those are rasterized when opened in AD or AP). Smart objects can be imported files, that'll be used as vector object in Photoshop, and keep the trasformations as special informations. Like in the imported AP/AD files (B) imported in another AD/AP file (A), you can edit them: it should open a new windows in your app with the original imported file (file B), and modifications applied to this document and saved will be visible in the other one (file A).
But PSD smart objects only work with Photoshop, the same way as the Affinity smart object only work in Affinity files.
For example, with this cover: you have a smart object of the cover in the file. If you open it in Photoshop and click on this smart object, it'll open a rectangular file that contains the cover without modification. You would be able to modify (i.e. using red instead of blue in the cover) of put another image in this file. Once the smart object saved, it would be visible on the template:

No Twain functionality in Affinity. I import into Serif PhotoPlus 8 and copy and paste into APho.

The essential answers to your questions are mostly YES and definitely YES.
While the feature sets of Affinity Photo and the Adobe products are rather different in scope, you will find all the usual essential tools for raw editing within Affinity Photo for iOS and desktop versions. The Adobe products have broader features for processing batches of photos, while Affinity Photo needs to approach them one file at a time.
One of the fantastic things about Photo for iOS and desktop is that they’re built upon the same code base. So their processing capabilities are almost exactly the same.

Affinity Photo has many of the things you mention but not all of them. See the tutorial videos about RAW editing to get a feel for some of it. 
 
On the other side of the coin, since you talk already about a blended workflow, your camera manufacturer very likely has a RAW management/editing tool specifically designed for the type of RAW you're generating. One workflow would be to use Affinity Photo for everything it can do and fall back to the manufacturer's tools (for example, Digital Photo Professional from Canon if you shoot that gear) for the times when Affinity Photo is insufficient.
 

The documentation team have made a comprehensive post about the available tutorials here, this is just a summary article.
All of the iPad Photo tutorials are presented on a dedicated (localized) page on the Affinity site here
https://affinity.serif.com/tutorials/photo/ipad They are sorted into categories
Category: Basic Operations Category: Advanced Operations     Category: Corrective & Retouching     Category: Creative Tools Category: Filters & Adjustments Category: Export Persona