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Affinity Designer: Turn a Simple Border Into a Decorative Border


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I'm trying to find out if there's any methods for creating decorative borders quickly & easily. I'm looking for something that's quicker than duplicating individual elements and moving them around. Although I can decorate a border by manually organizing graphic elements, I wish there was a more automatic & less tedious way to do it, so that I can create something faster.

Take a look at the image I have attached. The decorative border I created is just simple repeating semi-circles. I created it by duplicating the semi-circle many times. But I wonder if there are any faster, easier & more effective ways to create decorative borders. The border that I created using this method isn't perfect, since some of semi-circles didn't fully fit inside the border and some ended up overlapping one another. Also, even though this is a decorative border, it's not a very complicated one, and the process would be even more tedious if I decided to go with a more complex border.

Also, take a look at this video.

While this video is showing how to use Illustrator brushes to create ornamental frames in Illustrator, maybe this process can also be applied to Affinity Designer too, but I'm not sure. Can this be done with Affinity Designer brushes? If yes, are there any tutorials you would recommend on this?

Please let me know if there's any techniques you would suggest for creating decorative borders.

(I'm using the Mac OS version of Affinity Designer btw.)

Thank you.

Turn Simple Border Into Decorative Border.png

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Of course you can do so with Affinity too via brushes, though there are also other ways.

  1. Download and import some decorative brushes. For a plain rectangle like shown above, select the rectangle and change the contour line style to a brush, then select one of the decorative brushes you've imported & installed before from the brushes panel.
  2. Make some wider sized line style frame, or use the shape tool to make a wider outer frame. Then select the frame and apply some decorative Style to it!

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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On 7/31/2022 at 4:04 PM, v_kyr said:

Of course you can do so with Affinity too via brushes, though there are also other ways.

  1. Download and import some decorative brushes. For a plain rectangle like shown above, select the rectangle and change the contour line style to a brush, then select one of the decorative brushes you've imported & installed before from the brushes panel.
  2. Make some wider sized line style frame, or use the shape tool to make a wider outer frame. Then select the frame and apply some decorative Style to it!

 

 

Thank you for sharing! This video gave me some ideas on things I can try.

I will see how I can either download or create my own decorative brushes.

One thing I'm a little confused about when applying decorative brushes to shapes in Affinity Designer is that the brush doesn't fully close the shape. For example, you used the Cloud shape, but the brush effect isn't applied to the entire the shape, so the ends look tapered. I want to find a way to avoid this with my shapes because I need the brush stroke to be uniform throughout the shape, and I want my shape to be closed.

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1 hour ago, andren said:

One thing I'm a little confused about when applying decorative brushes to shapes in Affinity Designer is that the brush doesn't fully close the shape. For example, you used the Cloud shape, but the brush effect isn't applied to the entire the shape, so the ends look tapered. I want to find a way to avoid this with my shapes because I need the brush stroke to be uniform throughout the shape, and I want my shape to be closed.

Did you tried it out with some more suitable/usable decorative brush motives? I didn't had any such brushes installed, thus my used brush example above shown, might not be a very good one for such purposes here.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Did you tried it out with some more suitable/usable decorative brush motives?

If you have the Pencils category available, try the Classic Pencil 2B (for closed curves) or Classic Pencil HB (for closed curves) brush.

If you double-click on either one in the Brushes pane so it can be edited, note that at the two ends the stroke pattern at the beginning & ending offsets are exactly the same.

There are also a couple of 'scruff' brushes in the Shizzle Brushes brushes pack that work well for closed shapes.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Another way to do this would be to use a font that allows you to create decorative borders, for example Baroque Borders, National Currency, and there are many others. This is not the quickest solution as there is sometimes a bit of work in the settings to get the corners to match perfectly.

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Here's another way to create frames (borders) using Affinity Photo. You can use Designer also.

 

Affinity Photo 2.4..; Affinity Designer 2.4..; Affinity Publisher 2.4..; Affinity2 Beta versions. Affinity Photo,Designer 1.10.6.1605 Win10 Home Version:21H2, Build: 19044.1766: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s);32GB Ram, Nvidia GTX 3070, 3-Internal HDD (1 Crucial MX5000 1TB, 1-Crucial MX5000 500GB, 1-WD 1 TB), 4 External HDD

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On 8/5/2022 at 5:10 PM, v_kyr said:

Did you tried it out with some more suitable/usable decorative brush motives? I didn't had any such brushes installed, thus my used brush example above shown, might not be a very good one for such purposes here.

I haven't downloaded any other brushes, outside of the default brushes in Affinity Designer. I will see if I can find some decorative brushes that can create a closed shape.

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On 8/5/2022 at 6:32 PM, R C-R said:

If you have the Pencils category available, try the Classic Pencil 2B (for closed curves) or Classic Pencil HB (for closed curves) brush.

If you double-click on either one in the Brushes pane so it can be edited, note that at the two ends the stroke pattern at the beginning & ending offsets are exactly the same.

There are also a couple of 'scruff' brushes in the Shizzle Brushes brushes pack that work well for closed shapes.

Thank you! I will take a look at these settings and see how I can modify them to create a closed shape for the decorative border.

Also, the texture brush pack that you shared looks like a really great one. I will check it out.

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On 8/6/2022 at 6:05 AM, G13RL said:

Another way to do this would be to use a font that allows you to create decorative borders, for example Baroque Borders, National Currency, and there are many others. This is not the quickest solution as there is sometimes a bit of work in the settings to get the corners to match perfectly.

That's interesting. I never heard of using a font to do this.

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On 8/6/2022 at 6:34 AM, Ron P. said:

Here's another way to create frames (borders) using Affinity Photo. You can use Designer also.

 

Thank you for sharing! My focus right now is more on creating lineart borders, but I like the techniques shown in this video. I will try them out when creating frames for photos :)

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