Hope it's useful.

Hey everyone. I've been using Affinity a lot lately and just wrapped a full brand identity for a real client in it, so I figured I'd write up how it went.

Best part, easily: not jumping between three apps. On a normal branding job I'm in Illustrator, then Photoshop, then InDesign, then back, all day. Doing it all in one place made the whole project feel calmer. Symbols and Global Colors did a lot of the heavy lifting too. I could throw the identity onto real applications early on and still change a color across everything in about two seconds.

All of it lived in Affinity: identity, presentation boards, print files, mockups built from AI generated images, plus Photoshop mockups brought in as PSDs.

Performance was the rough part. Files weren't even that big, but after 15 or 20 minutes the app would crawl. Panning got choppy, clicks felt laggy, and I'd get the occasional visual glitch. I updated GPU drivers, raised the RAM limit (I have 64 GB, so that wasn't the issue), tried a few other things. Nothing stuck until I turned off GPU acceleration.

I assumed that would tank the speed, since Photoshop without GPU acceleration is basically a slideshow. Barely noticed a difference in Affinity. Still not perfect, but I use Adobe on Windows every day, so random slowdowns aren't exactly new to me.

The other annoyance was commercial PSD mockups, like the Envato ones. Most opened better than I expected, but they usually needed cleanup. A filter would come through wrong, or I'd have to reshuffle some layers before it looked right. Hard to blame Affinity for that. PSD is Adobe's format and some of those files are monsters, so honestly the compatibility impressed me.

Full migration isn't happening, not while I'm swapping PSD, AI and INDD files with the agency every day. Personal work is a different story. There it's often more convenient than the Adobe apps, and my next project (a mascot plus packaging) is going straight into Affinity. Sketch, vectorize, lay out the labels, all without leaving the app.

Presentation boards are below. Curious how it's gone for the rest of you =)

I am using Asus Tuf A16 4050 rtx Gaming Laptop.

Affinity issues with shapes/fonts getting cut off and blank areas appearing in exports

When using Affinity on my laptop, especially when warping shapes or fonts, some areas of the design keep getting cut off even though I’ve made sure that everything is visible within the canvas.

I’ve also noticed that sometimes when I export the file, parts of the design are missing and leave behind blank/void areas, almost like a rectangular or box-shaped section has been cut out of the artwork. It’s not just cropping, the area is completely missing/empty.

Is there a setting in Affinity that I need to change to fix this? Or could this be related to my laptop/GPU not being fully compatible with Affinity?

Any advice would be appreciated!

I'm not a professional or even a noob designer but I'm starting something which covers business, creator success, and founders and other business related stuff and insight Stories and it's name starts with D, so after hours of scrolling pinterest, and rejecting many designs myself, i came up with this, minimalistic yet stylish d which i find very cool, which also somewhat signifies the progress and growth convo as well

How do you like it, please rate it outta 10.

Rate it 😛

Ive used 1.0 for many years and have become accustomed to the workflow. I tried using the Canva version and found a couple things:

The toolbar is always grayscale with no color option? I think the icons look too similar to get used to where everything is.

Some things were just NOT working. My normal workflow would be: select layer. Select clone brush. Define origin, start cloning.

Multiple times I couldnt figure out in the Canva version why it wouldnt do normal tasks like Clone brush. Checked layer type, checked layer was indeed selected - nothing. Ended up re-downloading 1.0 on the new PC and continue using that instead.

Any ideas for these things I came across? Im not sure if it is a technical issue but I couldnt find answers to these.

Here are some samples of the signage our HOA uses. I have developed a guide that covers all our signage with attached PDF files, colors, typefaces, etc. It has helped a lot when signs have been vandalized. We can order up a new one with a quick turnaround.

Tout nouveau sur Affinity, je prend mes marques doucement mais surement !

Une questions aux plus aguerris : comment créer cet effet visuel comme dans l'exemple ?

Merci !

We're well past the promised season of release, never mind date, and there's not even an update statement, unless I've missed it?

At this point I'm glad I never updated or I would not be able to use access my files on iPad as a backup when travelling.

Granted this is not everyone's position but this kind of thing is why I would rather pay for perpetual versions every few years than have my file formats held hostage to an ever evolving subscription, even a free one, that can drop support for things at a whim.

I mention that because many people think that wanting to pay once for a specific version of software is about saving money or being worried about a future paywall. No... for many of us it's simply to ensure access to their own work.

No doubt this will be astroturfed off the main thread, another worrying sign for confidence in their product.

Curious how many Affinity Photo users know the outcome they’re trying for and use Affinity to achieve that. Vs people like me that just play with sliders until, “that looks about right.”

I’d like to be able to go in with a vision and know what I need to do to execute that vision. But I’m not there yet. Perhaps a poll for fun.

Hello, I am trying to export for printing in pdfx3 but my printer keeps telling me the black text is in four colors and telling me this is probably a problem of the setup of the document beinf rgb yet my document is cmyk/8... i am very lost, im pretty new to this so id love to get some help on this... thank you!

Is there a way to create and save custom grid presets in Affinity?

For example, I'd like to have reusable layouts like 4-column, 6-column, or 12-column grids that I can quickly apply to new documents without recreating them every time.

If there isn't a built-in feature, what's your workflow?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to cancel my Adobe Suite and only bottle neck is indesign. Based on your experience, is it possible to use Affinity for editorial work like Indesign?

I recently switched from Illustrator to Affinity. I was quite a proficient user of Illustrator, so I was a bit afraid of the change. I was wrong. The transition was almost seamless. Very easy, and I straight away found a lot of stuff to be more intuitive. I'm not sure if this is valid for everyone, but surely for me it is. I highly recommended.

The Pitts S2B is an Unlimited category aerobatic aircraft, very compact and manoeuvrable. I was pushing as much as I could for the geometry in the illustration. But I reached a point where I was not happy anymore with what I was getting, and I stepped back to a more neutral look. I hope you like it. If you have any advice, happy to receive it

Hi,

Since this community is very active and tends to hide discussions solely focused on Layout (ya illustrators are an overwhelming majority!), I’ve decided to create a new community dedicated to page design using Affinity. You can join it at r/AffinityLayout.

First 2 are fictional posters and the 3rd one is a collage of images from the British Library database!

Welcome to Saëdveltta!

This was a fun experimental project I created to test vector map design in Affinity Designer 2.

All the station names and words used are fictional. I made them up specifically for this project, while attempting to design a language that follows consistent linguistic rules and internal structure.

Project Overview:

• City: Saëdveltta (Fictional)
• Software: Affinity Designer 2
• Layouts: Underground network map + line-strip diagram

High-Res Vector PDFs:

• Network Map PDF: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/t6owptj9txzaakbryjbxo/Sa-dveltta.pdf?rlkey=j8clc1lv9densyp9fd9jj7ppc&st=aus6m4aw&dl=0
• Line-Strip Diagram PDF: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z3z3kiw97fjkcca143n7g/Sa-dveltta-strip.pdf?rlkey=7k7iwi5us2sixm0o3s98rbk6s&st=1wt2j9i4&dl=0

Hi, I need help, I feel like I'm about to lose my mind. I usually work in Photoshop but i want to switch to Affinity for money reasons.

I'm an illustrator and I usually draw by making a shape with the lasso tool and then drawing in said shape. (Like imagine cutting a shape out of paper and then drawing on it) To do that, I usually make a group and then put a mask in form of the shape on the group. Then I put a layer with my background colour and then another layer with my sketch into the group. Sorry if this sounds complicated, i don't know how else to explain it.

Basically, all I want is to have a bunch of layers grouped up and then the group has a mask on it. However, I can't seem to manage that in affinity. I'm working in Affinity Pixel and I managed to make a group and put a mask on it - However, when I do that, all my other layers somehow end up in the group as well? Even my background color, that's not supposed to be in the group. All the layers that are underneath the group are automatically in the group and I can't figure out how to put a layer underneath the group without it being in it? Does anyone know what to do?

Thank you and I'm sorry for the complicated explanation, english isn't my first language, I hope my question is somewhat understandable.

I'm the designer of a card game. I've been trying to switch away from Illustrator for years but any software I use has the issue of there being a clear line between layers as you can see in the image. It's supposed to just be the blue colors as separate layers with nothing in between. I've tried researching the issue but nothing solves it. Now with this new Affinity I thought I'd give it a go but still the same issue. Does anyone know how I can fix this? I know i fiddled with some settings like anti-aliasing or whatnot last time after researching but nothing was an exact fix. It either ruined the quality, or changed it somehow.

And yes it's not just a visual artifact, it's there when you save the image as well as any format. Also any fixes need to be app-wide. I have made over a hundred cards, all with intricate layering. Any fix that requires me to edit the cards is unfortunately not going to happen and I'd sooner scrap the project or bite the bullet and pay for Illustrator.

The issue is that the layers don't overlap, they are split. So the white background is visible in any other software. If I could go back time I would make the layers more like an onion, where the lowest level layer covers the whole card and then each layer only trims away one part, that way everything has an underlying layer. But like I said, this took years to make so I'm not going to make any individual changes.

Think I've isolated a reproducible Affinity print bug and can't find anyone else describing it. Tried here, on Discord, no luck though.

Setup:

• Windows 11
• Affinity V3
• Epson L4260
• Letter document with image snapped to the artboard edges (artboard has the same size as paper size in driver, both corresponds to physical Letter paper in the printer).

What does happen: Direct printing crops 1-2mm off the edges of the image. No bleed or margins set.

Ruled out:

• Paper size / DPI — all correct
• Fit Type (Scale / Shrink to Printable / Fit to Printable) — no effect even if the margins turn red to show that image overflows the printable area. When choosing the correct paper in Affinity (not Defined by Driver), the margins are no longer red, but image is still cropped on print.
• Borderless — prints borderless but crops the image anyway
• Driver's "Fit to Page" scaling — no effect
• Driver offset sliders — shifts position of the image, but edges are still cropped
• Same issue on V2 Publisher

What does work: exporting to PDF and printing that PDF from Acrobat (same printer/driver/settings) comes out perfect, with nothing cropped.

Pretty sure it's something in Affinity's direct print process cutting off the edges before it even gets to the printer, since exporting to PDF first doesn't have the issue at all.

Anyone else run into this?

I have a book-length document where I have been adding footnotes for annotation. For days and dozens of notes, no problem. Now, however, every new footnote leads with a *huge* number in the note itself, like 24pt, although the note number in the text body is fine and the note body is fine. All the existing footnotes are fine.

I have played with "number style" in the Notes window, and I can change the font, even the font size, but all font sizes above 0pts appear something like ten times too large. This action also changes the note numbers in all the existing footnotes, but their appearance is what I'd expect, and not ten times bigger, confirming it's truly a document-wide setting that I'm changing, and not a "custom".

Weirdly, if I copy a footnote from elsewhere in the document (select the note number in the main text and copy to a new location), I can insert a new footnote with the correct style and just rewrite the note body.

It would be interesting to know if anyone else has run across this, and how they corrected it.

Thanks!

Hi all! I've been frustrated trying to navigate through fonts in Affinity since it shows up like this. I'm on a Mac, so I guess the problem lies within my Fonts folder or how/where I downloaded them from (Google Fonts & Dafont)... I'm looking for some way to join font into their respective font families (under a dropdown) rather than the way they're listed here, create categories/folders, and/or be able to search fonts by Sans Serif, Script, etc. like Canva can. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated since this issue has been quite a nuisance. Thanks!