Build Your Own Design App Inside Affinity 🔥

There's a feature in Affinity that allows you to basically build your own version of the app. Your own panels, your own workflow, your own rules, I think. But no one's talking about it. For those of you that don't know, Affinity is a professional design software that is completely free. [music] And it's completely different as well, but in a good way. Here I've got some brand outlines templates that I'm working on. And what we would normally have to do within this is use another text editing or layout software. It might look quite familiar to you. We have different pages that we can scroll down. And normally, if we wanted to find an imagery and edit an image, like for instance, if I just bring in an image in here, create a little image frame, whoop, and I'll just drag in a random image. Let's just drag this in. And normally, if I wanted to edit this image and apply some effects, I would have to go into another app, a photo manipulation app to edit this. But in Affinity, you don't. You can literally just go to a different studio, which is up here. I can go to color grading, and my whole app, the panels all change. And from here, I can zoom in a bit if I wanted to. I can change on this image the brightness, the shadows. I can create sharpness, clarity. And not only that, I can apply some crazy effects. Like for instance, I can apply like a half tone effect if I wanted to to just that. And I can go monochromatic color. I can create some insanely looking effects. And not only that, if you look at the layers panel over here, where this picture frame is, we've got these icons. This is all the edits we've just made, all these effects. So, it's non-destructive. That's the power of Affinity. And I've been enjoying using it for my brand projects for the past, probably over a year now, probably coming up a year. So, what even is a studio? A studio is essentially a way of switching your workflows. You can go to vector. And with vector, we can create logotypes. We can do anything we would normally do in any vector program. And we have all the tools over here and everything over here. In pixels, this is your masking, your photo manipulation kind of side of design that would normally be another app that you would have to download, but in here, you just press vector and pixel and it changes your workspace. Layout, that's kind of your layout options. So, you can see here all my artboards are there. We can skip to the different artboards and whatnot. This is where you got all your typography over here, your different character styles. If you wanted to create a magazine or poster layout or anything like that. We have color grading, which is kind of your photo editing app, which is really nice. You can just add any sort of edit that you want over here and your quick adjustments. We have typography, which is all about type. Now, this is cool and everything because you have totally different apps, but Affinity goes a step further. Affinity allows you to create your own entire studio. If I click these three buttons over here, you can see all the different studios we've got. We've got like the Canva AI one, the compositing. I've even got one called Will's studio, which probably doesn't even look that different when I click on it. But, interestingly, we have our own button down here called create studio. What you can do is essentially create your own app with all the tools that you need at your fingertips. Let me show you how. Let's call this the best studio. And we're going to clone this studio from the vector one cuz I quite like that. We're going to change the color here and we're going to add an icon to this. I'm just going to choose this magic SVG button here. It's the quickest one I've got. So, let's say this is the magic studio. We can create our own icon and put it in. And we can add a description, the best studio in the world for Will Patterson. And I'm going to press create. And you'll notice over here, we have our studio, which is just listed there. What do we do now? Well, you'll notice that we have our studio over here on the top right and we can select through all these other studios. Now, what does this mean? Well, this means that we can go in and edit thing, but how? Well, down here on the toolbar, we can press these three dots and we get this custom tools box that pop up. Now, if you know that you love framing text box, I'm going to type in frame and we're going to go to picture frames and I want to bring this ellipse picture frame. I can just drag it into my toolbar like so. Maybe I just want to create a separator for my picture frame, so I'll separate them there. But maybe I also just want to bring these picture frames up here slightly as well. Let me just create this space, there we go. Maybe we have these color pickers. I don't really want picker, so I'm going to get rid of that so we just have the color picker there. The pencil tool, I don't really need this path brush tool, I'm going to get rid of that. I don't need, let's see, I don't need the contour tool, but maybe I want a data merge layout tool as well in there. Cool. There we go. We have actually got all our tools that we wanted in here exactly how we wanted it to be, which is really good. This is the power of studios. But we can even go further. Up here, we've got a toolbar going on. We've got a few things. We've got our vector to pixel preview, we've got alignments and things up here. If I right click up here, we can actually customize this toolbar as well. We can get rid of things and add things in if we want to as well, including these spaces. But I can get rid of all these spaces. I can even get rid of export SVG or just move this export SVG and I can even add in my own tools from here. I can add the arrange tools there. I can get rid of things that are on here already, so I can add the default toolbar in if I want to, but I can also bring in the advanced view mode if I like. So let's say I don't want this. Let's say I don't want any of these alignment things either. But I just want to have the distribute right up here in its own spot. I can bring that in. Assistant settings, let's bring that up over here as well as every single thing that you could possibly think of, including like just remove background. That's a really interesting function to have just up there. Maybe some whiteness. You've got every tool that you can think of that you can place absolutely anywhere that you want. Now, the beauty of the studio now is that if I go back to the vector studio, it remembers everything. It's there. If I go back to my best studio, it only gives me the tools that I want. Including if I wanted to bring out the swatches plugin here and I can medium or whatever, bring in a different brand kit. Maybe I don't want the brushes panel or maybe I want the brushes panel here to the left so I can add them and maybe my layers should be with my swatches to be fair. Close panel group, we don't need that. And for appearances, I'm going to bring that under the brush section. Now, this is great as well because we've got floating windows now. But, the power comes from being able to switch to a different studio. There's no more switching apps. I don't have to just edit an image on one app and bring it into another to do the layout. I don't have to work in an app like here. I don't have to work in a vector mode and then if I wanted to bring in an image, I would have to go into a different app to do that or to mock things up. It all happens within one app. So, I can always flick through to the studio that I want to go back to to get the workspace that I want, which essentially completely changes the game for the app. You only need one app to do all things. Here's one of my favorite things. You can actually share studios out. If I click up here on the top three buttons to get all my studios here, I can right click and export this if I want to, best studio to the desktop and boom. People can actually import them as well. So, you can go up here again, right click, import best studio, open, override, and we have a studio that is custom built for certain things. That studio is Affinity and I think that's one of the most underrated features that I've seen in any design app. No longer do we have to go to different apps. We just do one app that has many different studios. If you haven't already press subscribe and I'll see you in the next video. Cheers.