Welcome everyone to another Affinity Designer tutorial, an 80s poster design idea for your own
projects, up next! So inside Affinity Designer with a new Document, I have an 80s text layer
since we are creating a project idea as such. Now I did spend a bit of time searching for a relevant
font so in this case I went for the Hauser font family and it's a free font to use. All right, so
the first thing I'm going to do is go inside the Edit menu and I will duplicate this text layer,
just in case I need to go back to the original, and then I will tap inside the Text Studio and
inside the Positioning, I'm just going to increase the Tracking so I create a bit of breathing space
between those letters. And then of course I will go ahead and center this into the canvas
and I'm ready now to go back to the Edit menu and in this case, we're going to convert all of these,
this text layer to Curves, once I do that, looking inside the Layers Studio we can see that we have a
group so back on the Edit menu I'll go ahead and Ungroup all these. And now I can focus on these
individual curves so in this case what I will do is, I'm going to create a custom
gradient. So for that, I will tap on the Fill tool and I will go ahead and tap and drag to create a
gradient with two (2) stops and at the bottom of the Context toolbar we have all these options,
for example, we can choose the Type, in this case, I'm going to go for a Linear gradient,
great! So let's go ahead and actually create some additional color stops and also give colors
to that as well. So I will tap on this first gradient stop and inside the Color Studio,
I have already created my own Swatches so I will give this color for this color stop,
and for this color stop I will give the same color, and then I will add two (2) additional
color stops. I will give them also this color and then right in between here I'm going to add
two (2) additional color stops. So for this one, I will give this color but for that one here
I will give it a white color, all right? So, I'm going to be using something along,
all right, and basically, I'll play around with the falloff of these two colors, and by the way,
you can see that we have this midpoint. This midpoint here basically adjusts the spread of
the colors, in this case, I'm very happy with the way it is just going to keep it as is. OK,
so I have got that, let's go to the Color Studio, I will go ahead and give a specific
color for the Stroke but in this case, we need to have a Stroke so I'm going to up this
to 10 points there we go. And this is what I like, this is the gradient that I like,
so feel free to play around and create your own gradients.
So we created our own custom gradient, the question is, how are we going to apply this
custom gradient to the rest of these curves? So in this case, I will go ahead and tap on the fx
icon right here and now we are inside the Layer FX Studio and at the very bottom I am going to tap on
the Styles, these are the styles that Affinity Designer provides for us. In this case, since we
are creating our own custom gradient we're also going to create our own custom Category. So for
that, I will tap on the Panel Preferences and then create my own Category here(Add Category). Now by
default, we get this generic name which is, Unnamed, so tap back on the Panel Preferences
to Rename the Category and I will go ahead and rename this to, My Styles hit Enter/Return,
and then with the Move tool, I will tap to select this curve here and then inside
the Panel Preferences I will Add Style from Selection. And here it is, so all I have to do is
inside the Layers Studio, I will select those three (3) additional curves here and then
back on the Layer FX Studio and inside my own custom Category, Styles category, I'm just going
to tap on that and right now we have also the same style applied to the rest of these curves,
great! So what am I going to do next? Well I will select this curve as well and I will tap
on the Edit menu to Duplicate those then I will tap on the under, on these curves that sit
under the 80s text, these are identical but in this case, first of all, I will remove any kind
of Stroke here and for the Fill color I will go ahead and use just a solid black color and the
reason I'm doing this is because I want to have like a Drop Shadow. So I'm going to offset that
and I am going to do this inside the Transform Studio and I will change the position on the X
and on the Y, all right, and see what works for me, something along those lines.
So for this next step what I am going to do is, I will toggle off the visibility of all these curves
here inside the Layers Studio and I will grab the Rectangular tool and I will create a rectangle
all across like so, and then inside the Layers Studio I will tap and hold and bring this at the
bottom of the Layer stack, and inside the Layers Options I will rename this to BG for background,
and in this case, I will just give a solid color for this specific rectangle, all right, Great!
So we've got that, I will go ahead and inside the edit menu I am going to Duplicate this and I am
just going to basically kind of cut it in half because I want this second rectangle to have
a gradient applied to it. So for that again I will grab the Fill tool and I will tap and drag
to create a gradient here, just make sure again at the bottom of the Context toolbar
choose the Linear gradient. For the first Color stop, I will use this color and for the second
color stop I will go ahead and use this color, all right, and all I am going to do is, I am going to
adjust the spread of the colors by basically moving this color stop a little higher up
and perhaps move the Midpoint, all right, so I'm going after this for now. So I've got that, let's
see how it looks all together with the rest of these text layers, great, everything looks great!
So what's next? Well, next one what I am going to do is, I will create,
I will grab the Ellipse tool and I will create a circle which I'm going to move this in the center,
there we go. Again let me go ahead and toggle off the visibility of these
layers so I don't get distracted but what I'm going to do now. So
this is one thing, it doesn't matter what color, right now I'm just going to use this color,
that will change, OK, and I'm saying this because we're going to create
two, some additional things here. So I will grab the Rectangle tool and I will create
some rectangular shapes here, just going to use this color,
again the color doesn't matter right now, what matters is that we'll create some of these,
OK? So I'm going to create duplicates, another duplicate, another duplicate....all
right, so I have all these straight segments, rectangles, I will select them inside
the Layers Studio right and then inside the Transform studio and inside the Alignment Options,
I will go ahead and space those vertically, great! So let me just adjust them a little bit
then inside the Layers Studio I will also select the ellipse and then inside the Edit menu I will
go ahead and use one of the Boolean operations, under the Geometry and that will be the Subtract
Boolean operation, there we go, see that, this is what I was going for. Now, in this case,
I will grab again the Fill tool and I will create again another Gradient,
I'll make sure that this is a Linear gradient and for this color stop, I am just going to use
this yellow color which probably I'm going to bring this a little lower. OK, let's also look
at the rest of these curves here...and I will tap and hold or bring this under all of these numbers,
all right? Let's see how this looks, that looks pretty good, right, and perhaps for
this color stop, let me double-check my work, I can actually use this color,
I think I like this better, all right? All right, that looks good...so
we're going to go to the last step and add some additional shapes.
So for this last step of the Affinity Designer tutorial,
I will go ahead and introduce some additional straight segments, so for that, I will tap on
this circle, I am going to bring this up a bit so I can have a bit of breathing space at the bottom.
I will tap to deselect everything then I will grab the Pen tool and then I will create a straight
segment across as such. Then I will switch to the Node tool, I just want to make sure this is a
straight segment and it is, and for this straight segment, let's see, let's go ahead and give
a specific color here. The Stroke width remains to be 10 points, I am very OK with that but what
is important here is that inside the Stroke Studio and looking at the Pressure Input box,
I will create a Custom Pressure Profile. And to form that I will drag either end nodes downwards,
this is the one node and this is the other node, of course, the line right now disappears and then
I will add an additional Node, right here in the center which I will drag upwards to taper the
Stroke, right, according to the curvature of the graph, and this is what I was going for. What I am
going to change here is, instead of just having a fill color I will grab the Fill tool here and
I will also apply a gradient to the stroke so for that I will tap on this icon here
and I will use for the Type, Linear gradient, I will tap to create an additional color stop
and give it this color. Let's deselect everything let's look at the result
and this is what I was going for. Now I am going to bring this up just a bit,
just make sure it sits in the middle and I will create a few duplicates here,
all right? So grab this one, just bring this in a little bit,
grab this one and bring this also this one a little bit inside,
inwards and this one as well. And this is the look and feel that I was going for,
for an 80s type of poster. I would like to thank each one of you for visiting my channel,
watching the inspiring lectures and project tutorials,
do not forget to subscribe and share the knowledge! Elias Sarantopoulos