affinity publisher How I got into Affinity Suite use.

[AlanPickup]

Posting this to encourage those who do work for community groups and charities, we have some good forum members who post their works, but hope this will encourage more to submit their work and learn from the group by the many good suggestions or improvement of a design that has been submitted

I started my career in Printing in the 60's in a small jobbing print shop, at that time there where at least 5 other print shops in a town of about 140K population.  I saw the writing on the wall for the smaller printers. Fortunately I had done costing / estimating plus bookkeeping so was able to find another career, eventually ending up in senior management in health care. I never lost my passion for design and did the odd newsletter / poster in MS Publisher.

On retirement I got involved with Charity work and offered to do newsletters using Serif Page+ this grew with more charities asking me to do leaflets and I have done at least 2500 Publisher designs since the launch of Affinity suite, all for free to the charities I support, plus some NHS initiatives where I am on the steering panel. 

I put many on a flipbook website, and I have added the links below if you want to look at the publications, these are all in the public domain so are available on websites.  I use Freepik for designs, but hope with the Canva link there will be a way to use Canva's asset library direct in Affinity as some stage.

https://heyzine.com/flip-book/4cd9d1931a.html

https://heyzine.com/flip-book/4cd9d1931a.html

https://heyzine.com/flip-book/c0355e582f.html

As said previously I am open to suggestions for improvements as some of forum members give some very useful advice.

[GarryP]

Nice.

I have some minor comments from the first linked document.

Pages 3 & 4:
The ‘photo circles’ don’t have the same alignment with the rectangle. Maybe make them both overlap the change in colour a little bit more than on page 3 to add an interesting little ‘flourish’.

Page 4:
The “FINANCE” word isn’t very clear.
And there doesn’t seem to be a shadow on the lower ‘graph’ but that’s maybe not of your making.

Page 7: 
“Training, Workshops & Events” could be in a slightly smaller font size to make it fit better.
Or you could increase the height of all of the rounded rectangles slightly to accept 3 lines of text each.

Page 12: 
I’m not sure if the ‘table’ in section 8 would look better if the equals signs and numbers were aligned differently.
Could the circles in section 9 be slightly different sizes and overlap slightly differently to make it a bit more ‘visually interesting’?

Page 13: 
The values in section 11 could be right-aligned to better show the different magnitudes of the values.

Page 14: 
Would the “District” and “Gender” tables be better as two separate tables?
Also, I don’t know if the “Internal Work” table would look better if the values were either centre-aligned or right-aligned.

Page 15: 
Quite a few (most?) of the alignments in the ‘coloured grid’, or the area directly below that, don’t look right to me.
Also, the “BLACKBURN” text goes off the edge of the area on the map.
Also, I’m wondering if the categories in the “Carers reason for caring” graph could be ordered differently to demonstrate something important (or maybe they already do and I just can’t see it).
Are the colours in that graph important? (I don’t see how they match up with anything else, on the spread or anywhere else.)

Pages 18 & 19:
The ‘title boxes’ don’t seem to be ‘consistent’ (font, spacing, etc.), but maybe that’s deliberate.

General:
Some of the images have small white borders around them and some don’t. Is this deliberate or accidental?

I realise that’s a lot of text but I don’t think there’s anything there that can’t be easily changed, if indeed you want to at all since it’s your stuff and I won’t take any offence if you completely ignore what I’ve said.

All that said though, good stuff.

[AlanPickup]

Hi Gary

thanks for the info and will look at the suggestions later, with Charities it is a bit like the saying a Camel is a horse designed by a committee. I get 3 pages of A4 text and they say this is for page one, plus can you add some photos, I end up doing about 5 versions of that one before  getting it down to the required number of pages and meeting the deadline for getting them printed. I continually keep altering to fit the info and more images which they forgot to send in before the deadline for the AGM. I have tried giving them a template to restrict the amount of wording they send, but to no avail. That might be because there is no cost for revisions, but \I like a challenge. 

[GarryP]

17 hours ago, AlanPickup said:

I have tried giving them a template to restrict the amount of wording they send, but to no avail.

When I said “I realise that’s a lot of text” I was referring to my long post (a lot of words describing minor changes), rather than the contents of your publications where the amount of text looks fine to me.

When I was making charity newsletters a while ago I had the opposite problem where people often didn’t send me anything except maybe some pictures every now and again, so I had to start filling up the pages with my own ‘semi-relevant-ramblings’ just so there was something for people to read.

[AlanPickup]

19 hours ago, GarryP said:

Nice.

I have some minor comments from the first linked document.

Pages 3 & 4:
The ‘photo circles’ don’t have the same alignment with the rectangle. Maybe make them both overlap the change in colour a little bit more than on page 3 to add an interesting little ‘flourish’.

Page 4:
The “FINANCE” word isn’t very clear.
And there doesn’t seem to be a shadow on the lower ‘graph’ but that’s maybe not of your making.

Page 7: 
“Training, Workshops & Events” could be in a slightly smaller font size to make it fit better.
Or you could increase the height of all of the rounded rectangles slightly to accept 3 lines of text each.

Page 12: 
I’m not sure if the ‘table’ in section 8 would look better if the equals signs and numbers were aligned differently.
Could the circles in section 9 be slightly different sizes and overlap slightly differently to make it a bit more ‘visually interesting’?

Page 13: 
The values in section 11 could be right-aligned to better show the different magnitudes of the values.

Page 14: 
Would the “District” and “Gender” tables be better as two separate tables?
Also, I don’t know if the “Internal Work” table would look better if the values were either centre-aligned or right-aligned.

Page 15: 
Quite a few (most?) of the alignments in the ‘coloured grid’, or the area directly below that, don’t look right to me.
Also, the “BLACKBURN” text goes off the edge of the area on the map.
Also, I’m wondering if the categories in the “Carers reason for caring” graph could be ordered differently to demonstrate something important (or maybe they already do and I just can’t see it).
Are the colours in that graph important? (I don’t see how they match up with anything else, on the spread or anywhere else.)

Pages 18 & 19:
The ‘title boxes’ don’t seem to be ‘consistent’ (font, spacing, etc.), but maybe that’s deliberate.

General:
Some of the images have small white borders around them and some don’t. Is this deliberate or accidental?

I realise that’s a lot of text but I don’t think there’s anything there that can’t be easily changed, if indeed you want to at all since it’s your stuff and I won’t take any offence if you completely ignore what I’ve said.

All that said though, good stuff.

Hi Gary

All good suggestions, a lot I may have picked up without the time constraints, but good to hear them, sharpens the mind for picking up the tweaks

[AlanPickup]

1 minute ago, GarryP said:

When I said “I realise that’s a lot of text” I was referring to my long post (a lot of words describing minor changes), rather than the contents of your publications where the amount of text looks fine to me.

When I was making charity newsletters a while ago I had the opposite problem where people often didn’t send me anything except maybe some pictures every now and again, so I had to start filling up the pages with my own ‘semi-relevant-ramblings’ just so there was something for people to read.

It is definitely famine or feast with the info, not too bad with the health work as I tend to write most of that myself anyway.

[GarryP]

It will be interesting to see the next publication.

It’s always nice to see what people are making, under real conditions, for actual use by other people, rather than just experiments and test projects (like most of the stuff I post here).

[RaoulLB]

Just wanted to say: I liked the fresh open design and layout. Having worked for charities and indeed, "public" organisations, I can empathise with your experiences. Design often goes out the window as expectations, text, complications and last minute changes happen - usually right on deadline day. 

More importantly, it was interesting to read about the carers, and the work they do. Simply wonderful. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

[AlanPickup]

Thanks Garry Raoul and others. The latest offering was a newsletter for my GP Practice where I am secretary of the Patient Participation Group and manage their website. Again another pushing for information right up to the wire and combining content from many sources.

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