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I just saw that RetroSupply has released their Grave Etcher brushes for Affinity Designer (previously they were only available for Illustrator). Artifex Forge has also been converting some of his brush sets to work in Affinity Designer.

Similar to gdenby's post, I would say just poke around and try everything out. Make a bunch of throwaway little experiments instead of trying to work on a real project. At some point, go through the Help system for each app, item by item, even if you only skim some of the entries because of prior understanding. And as you go through those, you might find yourself also trying a few things out and experimenting. Eventually you will learn how to analyze a concept and synthesize a method to achieve it using Affinity's tools. If you have some particular task in mind, you can always Google for tutorials, e.g., "affinity designer mandala" -- and some of those tutorials will give you insights into how the tools can interact to achieve a result. Best wishes for your studies!

Yes, that would be great! However, I wonder if the AI brushes use a proprietary format that would require Serif to pay Adobe a license fee to allow importing into Affinity Designer. If so, I wonder if that license fee could be offset by selling an AI-brush-import plugin or optional feature as a separate product from Serif. On the other hand, I can imagine Adobe saying no to the whole idea, as it might reduce the number of Illustrator subscribers. All that aside -- yes, it would still be great if we could import Illustrator AI-format brushes. I keep seeing these great brush packs on Creative Market, but unfortunately must think, "nope, can't use those unless I pay $240 a year for Illustrator, and also use Illustrator instead of Affinity Designer." In summary, this is another vote for that feature.

Thanks, @reglico ! I couldn't figure out how to add the bottom text without using a second path.

Is there a way to save custom document settings? This would be handy for saving templates for recurring project types. Thanks!

Since the forum says "& Feedback" I thought I would post here just to say how much I appreciate all the little helpful features and design choices that I am finding in Designer and Photo for desktop (on Windows 10). So, thank you! BTW, just 3 weeks after getting licenses for Designer and Photo I have set up a Redbubble store and have a few designs up already -- just mentioning this as an indicator of how inspiring these apps have been for me.

On the fonts tangent, DaFont is my favorite for free fonts as a hobbyist, but for commercial fonts I like Fontspring's site, which is easy to sort and search, without a lot of distracting graphics. I really like creativemarket.com for fonts plus vectors and other graphics. In fact, I have found some of the same fonts as offered on Fontspring at lower prices on CM (but usually because of a more restricted license or from having fewer of the fonts included in the pack). Back to the Adobe rebellion, recently I saw some Illustrator-specific brush sets (AI format) that had me considering subbing to Illustrator (at $20/month!) -- but after a few days I came to my senses and realized I could learn to make similar brushes for Affinity Designer. P.S. to @SrPx -- someday I will spend a little time skimming through your posts to see what I might learn, so please don't trim too many of them!

The AI brushes cannot be imported into Affinity Designer (AD). However, if you have ABR brushes in the set, those can be imported. A shortcut if you have AD open is to drag the ABR file(s) onto AD's interface. That saves some clicking and browsing if you already have the brushes folder open. I'm not familiar with Illustrator's brushes and how many options or engines are available for their creation, but if you have a PDF sample sheet of all the AI brushstrokes (or if you also have Illustrator and can create your own sample sheet), a workaround for some of them might be to open the sample sheet in Affinity Designer and recreate the brushes using the tools available in AD (setting the head and tail and other options). (Learning how to create or devise my own brushes is on my to-do list as a student/developing artist.) Hoping this helps!

@firstdefence -- You are right. I should have specified "in Affinity Designer". Thanks, @αℓƒяє∂ -- You did understand my point and expressed it more clearly than I did.

Good to know -- thanks, R C-R !

Do I understand correctly that if I fill a shape with a tiled and/or scaled bitmap, then move on to another operation, the pixels of the fill are kind of snapshotted into the shape, so that any later scaling or stretching of the shape will scale or stretch the existing pixels, instead of revealing more of the tiled pattern? If that is so, no problem, as I know a workaround would be to fill a larger second shape with the tiled pattern, and clip that shape within the primary shape. Or leave the bitmap-filling until later. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a keyboard shortcut or toolbar option. Thanks!

Hi, Tobiosen I think most photo apps do not support RAW from the X-T100 yet, because it was released just a month or so ago. [Adobe Camera Raw has just added support (it's included with the Lightroom/Photoshop and CC subscriptions), but I understand that many people here have decided not to have an Adobe subscription.] One option for now is to use Iridient's X-Transformer (about $30 usd) to convert those RAW files into the DNG format, which most current photo apps (including Affinity Photo) should be able to open. Edit: I'm not an expert -- I was recently researching this myself because I have also just bought an X-T100. It's my first pro-level camera, and I'm excited!

Hi, MrSkills You are right -- most of the graphics tablets discussed above do not include a display. I just did a quick check of Amazon UK and it looks like a minimum price of £400 for a graphics tablet monitor, such as the ones by Ugee and Huion, which are analogous to Wacom's Cintiq line. Something to know about graphics tablet monitors is that because of the glass, there is a little gap between the physical pen tip and its digital location in the image, about 1 or 2 mm, which some people call parallax -- so they are also not quite the same as drawing directly on paper.

Luminar looks like a good one to me. Too bad I don't actually take photos of my own very often. I don't know if it does the image management, though. Edit: No, Luminar doesn't do Digital Asset Management yet, but it's on their roadmap.

Thanks for the font and vector site recommendations above! @ 1664 kronenbourg and αℓƒяє∂ (not to derail the thread, especially as I am now a traitor or recidivist ;o) )