The Trick to Making Designs Look Less Digital

Getting the analog look in your poster designs or any designs can be quite tricky because we're working on computers these days. However, there is some ways that we can get this really nice looking analog feel here. So, we can go from this really sharp digital looking design that we've got here and quickly make it really textured and make it look like it's not made in any design program. Here's an example here where I'm using a bunch of textures and you can see the text. Even though this is live text inside of Affinity, you can change this text all the way. It seems to be following the paper behind it and it has an amazing texture on top of it and it has chromatic aberration. Today I'm going to show you how to get this text effect for completely free inside of Affinity. Okay, so I have a poster just here with a few elements. I've got this sort of text that I've created as part of a font. And I've just made this really quickly to kind of show you what I can do with texture. The first thing to know about the analog look is when we look at actual analog pieces of work, it will never be vector look. It will never be really clean. So the first thing we need to do is get rid of the cleanliness throughout the whole image. And the way that I do that is by using a couple of filters. The first one is gorge blur. I want to apply a slight one pixel or two pixel gorge and blur. And what that does is it instantly softens the image a little bit. If it's too much, you can just go back in and make it maybe one pixel. I'm going to 1.5. Let's do 1.5. I think that's the great middle ground here. We're going to do something weird. We're going to apply a sharpness filter on top of this. So go to unshar mask and we're just going to play around with this a little bit until I get the desired effect that I'm wanting. I'm just going to zoom in. You can see here on the radius, we're getting this really nice analog film look here. Maybe the factor, just increase that slightly. I've zoomed in because I really want to get that halo effect that you see. That halo effect is what where the analog film comes through. I'm going to change that gorge blur to let's say one. So, what's happening here is that the gorian filter is blurring it. Then the sharpness filter is unblurring it. And it creates this little halo on the outside that you can see. Zoom right in. You can see it there. But this is only the first part. What else can we do here? Well, there's an amazing website that I like to use called Texture Labs where you can get a bunch of paper textures. And I love paper texture. You can even get grid paper texture. So, we just take grid paper and you go ahead and download this in the largest form and it's free for commercial use. What I want to do is apply this to the background of my actual artboard. So, I'm going to go here and I'm going to go to my frame tool here, which you can find in layout, but I have my frame here. Going to create a frame like so. And I'm going to find one of these textures that I really like. Apply this. We're going to bring this picture frame right to the back just here. And I'm going to probably change the uh the blend mode quite a bit. You can just go overlay a lot of the time with these blend modes and change the opacity if needed. That adds a subtle texture to the background now. But what about all the other work that we've got? Well, the work in the middle needs some work doing to it. I'm going to group all the elements here. All of this here, which is this part in the middle. And I'm going to select this. Then I'm going to drag in a new texture. I'm going to drag in like a half tone texture here. Nice. Here we've got the half te texture. It's looking good, but I want to make sure it's masked to this main work. So, I'm going to commandclick on this, press the mask button, and boom. And because this is 50% gray, all you need to know is you can go into the overlay section and just press overlay. And we'll have this really nice half tone looking effect here. You can see it's working all the way throughout. Now, you can make this look even more better if we only did this separately with this N here. So, if I did it with the N and then we go ahead and do this, it will look even better cuz it's only affecting the N and it's got this lovely half tone looking effect going on. This video is sponsored by Fresh Books. Are you constantly chasing late payments, wrestling with clunky spreadsheets, and trying to figure out which invoices have actually been paid? Well, there's a way to simplify your finances faster than you can say past due invoice. That's where Fresh Books comes in. It's the small business software that makes the hard parts of running your business easy. Whether you're a freelancer or a small business with employees or contractors, FreshBooks gives you all the tools you need to manage your finances in one place. 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Press overlay and I can even if I wanted to go into this little blend options here, which you'll see, and I can make some edits if I need to, as well, just to get that blending just right. Okay, so there's the main thing. It's looking pretty good. We've got a nice amount of texture. It's looking more analog than it ever has done, which is really nice. What about text, though? I'm going to create a new artboard and I'm going to essentially just steal the text I did before. I'm going to bring in some graph paper here. I'm going to copy the film look. I'm going to put it on top of here. I'm going to copy this texture text. Bring it in. Get it behind that film look. So, we've got this sort of a halo effect happening there, which is really nice. But the text doesn't look very good yet. So, what do we do? Well, Affinity has got a really cool feature called live displays. What we want to do is make this text wrap around some of this texture in the background. And we can do this through the live filters. Some of it is being cut off with my screen recording, but you should see displace in here. There you go. Displace. Now, what this does is it displaces the image or the vector based on the thing behind it or from a file that you load. But the cool thing is we can just press from behind and it will take the layer that's from behind and it'll create, as you saw there, a texture from behind and it roughens this texture up really nicely. You see all these little intricate parts here? That's what we're looking for. But what about the actual texture on the inside? Well, if you don't want to bring in a texture from outside. Then I'm going to simply click this and we're going to go to the live halftonone texture. And it'll look a bit strange at first, but don't worry. Just go straight to the blend mode and we can choose one of these blend modes that work. And we can change the cell size, the contrast, and I'm even going to change the blend mode again to get what I want. There's plenty of them. That's one way of doing it. Or we can simply bring in another texture, which I want to do. Now, we're going to bring in this texture over the top. And we're going to just drag it into the texture part here and change the opacity to overlay again. And we can even change more of this to change it up. Now, this looks great, but there's one thing that's missing that is very subtle a lot of the time when it's digital media, which is chromatic aberration. And Affinity does this really well. All we're going to do is select the entire artboard, and we're going to go to live filters again, and we're going to go down to glitch. And glitch is a really cool effect because we've got aberration distortion that we can apply. I'm going to zoom in because we want a very subtle. You can see when I increase that, it creates what's known as aberration. We want this to be like 2%, maybe three. There we go. Three looks good. And it creates this subtle shift here on the right hand side that you can see where it goes a bit yellow, blue, and it shifts the colors. Now, the great thing about this is I can duplicate this text and I can just change it, move it. It's non-destructive. Everything is in here. I've got everything that I need uh to actually design and do stuff. I can even like create a shape like so. And we can apply the same effects to this as well by just dragging it in. So, I can drag this in, place inside. There we go. Even add the texture into this if we wanted to. So, it doesn't have to be a half tone. We can just add another paper texture. Change that to overlay. And you can see here the displacement is working really nicely. When I change the position of this rectangle, it's going to change everything around it. And it goes a bit pixelated cuz it's doing a lot of heavy work for a live filter. So, that's how you get the analog look infinity. Even when you're zooming right in, you can see it looks like it's printed. Nothing's ever perfect when it comes to texture, but especially in a digital environment, but this is one solid way of doing it. If you enjoyed this tutorial, subscribe and I'll catch you in the next