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Hello experts!

Does anyone have any recommendations &/or resources that I could consult for designing in Affinity Designer for printed artwork? I have asked over in the Facebook group, but only got one piece of advice ("Rasterize gradients, transparency, and complex shapes and you should be fine. Leave text and logos.") but would like to ensure this advice is factually accurate and find out more detail. If I should be avoiding specific tools (eg. Gaussian Blur) and doing things like rasterizing, I would think these should be specified somewhere.

Many thanks

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Hi,

if you create documents intended to be printed on inkjet or laser printers, or lab output on photo paper, i cannot imagine any restrictions. These devices use bitmap / raster, and Affinity can create that as export.
 

If you documents are intended for laser cutting or a device using vectors, or (do they still exists?) flatbed plotters with pens, you must stick to pure vector / curve layers and avoid anything leading to rasterization.

Your print shop will tell you what formats will be accepted.

There are multiple hurdles in which features are supported for every file format, dealing with transparency, required DPI settings, color space, unsupported functions etc. You will find out by testing. 
 

Another level of complexity is dealing with spot colors, or multi 1-bit channels (rarely used, and not supported by Affinity).

Again, talk with the people who will be printing your files. 

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Thank you - NotMyFault. I sell printable products online, so I have no way of knowing where or how they will be printed. It may be on a crappy home computer, uploaded to an online printing co or taken to a specialised printer. Any of my work that is in colour, I choose CMYK colours and create both an RGB version exported as a JPG and a CMYK version exported as a PDF (for Print selected at export).

I do also have SVGs in my shop, but these are always 100% vector with no effects.

Thank you - I'm reassured :)

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