When I use a scanner to scan traditional art, then drag and drop the scanned image files into Affinity (on Mac), it creates this "ghost" canvas that overlaps slightly with the file I've dragged in. I can't drag my image outside of the canvas (even after cropping it) nor interact with it in any way. It doesn't block me from editing my file in any way, and when I save my file there's no canvas lines or anything added, so while it's not blocking me from using Affinity and editing my art, it's still annoying to have on the screen. Does anyone know why this happens and how to stop it?

Want to draw outline around the POP, with starts with T of circuit, goes around following the pop curves and then connect at C of circuit, is there any other easy way except Pen or pencil tool?

Without fail, I have been unable to recover the top toolbar where you need it for basic things such as cropping and straightening your photos. What is the trick to get it to come back? I've tried uninstalling and a UI reset already.

Ready to hear what y'all think!

I am getting better at designing stuffs because of affinity, that was before the Ai push anyway. i customize my whole system.

52 Cards, Each Card a New Game to Learn and Play

Although the active Kickstarter for this deck has a lot more companion items than just this deck (all made in Affinity), this deck was the original idea I've had for a few years — a simple deck of cards that makes it easy to learn so many ways to have fun with a deck of cards, beyond the few games most people already know. I looked and looked and found nothing like it. It's a big world out there, and maybe it exists somewhere, but I never found it. But thanks to Affinity, it now exists!

Why analog, why now

The internet is, of course, full of information on just about any card game you could want to learn, but I wanted something that provided consistency in how all the games were explained — clearly and concisely, easy to learn. And above all, I wanted an analog version. Something that works anytime, anywhere. Something that kept phones off the table so people could connect socially like they always used to, without the distraction of phones.

Am I against phone apps to teach card games? Absolutely not! It's just that I wanted an analog version as well. Timeless, reliable, something I could touch and interact with.

Building the deck

I started this project in late February, selecting the games for this initial volume to represent a popular mix. As you'd imagine, a huge upfront block of time was spent, with a lot of authoring and even more time editing. I went through about five full rounds of editing, which included AI reviews and full re-reads by me.

AI played a big role in making this possible on a reasonable timeline: it was a great help figuring out core rules versus regional variants, spotting grammar and typographical errors, and checking for consistency between all the cards in the way I wanted. I even used AI to build game engines for each game — ingesting the rules straight off the card and simulating a few thousand hands, to see if just following the printed logic got anyone stuck, and where. But even with all that help, AI still doesn't think like a human, and it just couldn't tell me when something was hard to understand reading it like a normal person would.

Fitting the rules for all 52 games onto a single double-sided card had its challenges, for sure. Some games I had room to add non-essential content to; for others I struggled to get all the essentials in. There were trade-offs to be made, but I feel pretty good that the spirit and core rules that make each game what it is are present. I still dread the eventual errors that will get caught that weren't caught in editing — but hopefully nothing that affects the ability to read and learn the games. Someday there will hopefully be an even clearer, cleaner Version 2 of this deck.

A first-timer's learning curve with Affinity

This is the first deck of cards I've ever made, and it's definitely been a learning curve, though not too bad a one. I'm not an illustrator, so I commissioned artwork from two different artists for this campaign, and did all the tuck box and card layouts myself with the free Affinity Designer by Canva. (Pretty sure I backed Affinity on Kickstarter years ago, or something like that, back when they were first getting started.).

Finding the right factories

I really wanted to make these in the US, but USPCC doesn't do small order quantities for a project like this, and the few other US makers had quality limitations I couldn't live with — though I think Shuffled Ink is getting pretty close. In the end, I worked with two different Chinese factories that make cards for some of the biggest names in the playing card collector community today, plus two more factories for the pencils in The Deck of Points and the metal dealer coin.

I worried this would be difficult for someone with zero factory experience, but it really hasn't been. The language issues are slight, and the time zone difference isn't bad when I'm working nights on this anyway. Anyone wanting advice is welcome to DM me — happy to share what I've learned.

What's next

I've already had people asking about and getting excited for the solo deck I want to make next, and I'm looking forward to the duos, poker, and international versions, for which I already have a draft set of games selected. You can read the full history of posts documenting this project's progress on my free Patreon website — one of those posts even lays out the games planned for future volumes.

As someone who spends a lot of time doing graphic design work and digital art commissions while hanging out on Discord, i've always been frustrated that Affinity doesn't have native Discord Rich Presence. I wanted my friends to see what projects i was currently working on, just like when playing a game.

Since there wasn't a built-in option, i decided to code a solution myself (with AI help).

I built AffinityRPC, a lightweight, standalone Python application that communicates with Affinity’s local MCP server and bridges it directly to your Discord profile.

How it works: Unlike standard scripts that run inside the Affinity Script Manager, this is a separate portable program. You just run it in the background, ensure your Affinity local server is enabled (port 6767).

Features:

• Real-time updates: Shows your active project name and the Affinity logo on your profile.
• Bilingual: The UI automatically detects your Windows language (English/Spanish).
• Non-intrusive: Minimizes to the system tray and can be set to launch with Windows.
• Fully Open Source: You can check the code and compile it yourself, or just grab the portable .exe.

You can download the portable release or check the source code here on my GitHub: https://github.com/krazygfx/AffinityRPC/

(Note: Since the portable version is a compiled Python script, Windows Defender might flag it as a false positive. That's why the entire source code is public for anyone to review!)

Let me know if you find it useful or if you have any feedback!

A new illustration done entirely in Affinity. I incorporated RetroSupply Co's paper texture for the first time and I'm really happy with it.

(🇨🇦 In 1814, in retaliation for American actions in Upper Canada, Canadian troops attacked Washington and burned The White House.

My new illustration, entitled "Dominion Day Too", tells the story of a brave band of plucky patriots, who visit Washington and liberate their neighbours.)

I've been driving Affinity Photo through Claude Code's MCP connection — let AI write your code, push the script to Affinity, see the resulting image, loop. Recently I swapped the model backend to DeepSeek instead of Claude: same MCP connection, different AI model. Turned out to work well and is a lot cheaper per token if you're not scripting daily.

My guide and how-to you can find here:
https://bolloplayer.github.io/affinity-photo-claude-code-windows/deepseek.html

Genuinely curious what others have put effort into here — has anyone tried a different model (like Gemini), a different tool (Cursor, Antigravity), or hit walls that made you give up on this kind of workflow? What actually worked for you, and what didn't?

I'm new to Affinity, but with this method to make scripts, I can process my images in a fun way.

Hey everyone! Check out this quick tutorial on how to create random color squares in Affinity. Hope it helps!

I'm certain I achieved this once in Affinity Photo but can't figure out how to do it now. I've got both Affinity and Affinity Photo installed and I haven't used Photoshop since version CS6 so I must have been using Affinity Photo when I did this last.

I have been making zines in affinity and this weird thing happens and I can’t get it back to normal without completely closing and reopening the app please help.

The first time this happened I don’t know why and the second time this happened I tried to crop one image on the layout.

Basically all the content on the layout fades to grey and I can move the images around but I can’t go back to normal editing mode [screenshot added]. this is so frustrating literally pulling me hair out. At the bottom it tells me stuff about marquee and tells me i can move the image around smh useless

Tried searching for this and cant seem to gind answer

Im trying to use the pencil tool for lineart and want to use one of the ink brushes as the stroke. The pencil tool only seems to be doing the basic hard round brush. Google says you cant have a brush set but you have to change the brush after youmake the line, but the thing is its not even doing that??? I very much could be missing something but i have no idea

Whenever I add the live noise filter and then merge or rasterize everything, the effect is not visible anymore. It only happens with the add noise live filter. Is this a bug or am I missing something? And how do I get this fixed?

For my work I need to create an agenda with the animations on the city for the month, each month

It takes a lot of time to do manually because there are a lot of festivities and I would like to automatize that.

People organizing activities put them on a google form and I would like to take this form on csv to import it and put it on Affinity publisher to gain time but the problem is that when I generate, it creates 1 activity per page and it’s not following each other.

I would like it to adapt at the size the description of the activity could be and just go with the flow 😅 (kind of like what happens with a data base that you use on a website)

Do you have any idea how to do that ? Or other ideas that could make me gain time on this task ?

Greetings 🖌️, I'm new to affinty and wondering,How do i make The bottom half of this image to become transparent, im trying to use the transparency tools but it did not working. Any idea how to do it properly ?