graphicxtras.com > tutorials > Affinity Designer

Updated : 2021

How to use symbols in Affinity Designer and how to modify them and color them and more. Symbols in Affinity Designer are a powerful tool for re-use of designs.

You can use Affinity Designer symbols to store images for common elements in artworks. You can find the symbols panel in Affinity Designer via the view menu and studio and symbols command.

Once you start using the vector symbols, any changes to the symbols are reflected in the Affinity designer symbol instances. You can add new symbols in Affinity Designer by selecting a shape and then clicking the create button in the symbol panel in Designer. You can add instances to the document and also delete them from the document. You can edit symbols. You can add paths and remove paths from the symbols in Affinity Designer.

In order to create a Symbol within your design, first, you need to go to View Studio Symbols to ensure the Symbols Studio is visible. Now simply select the object you would like to convert to a Symbol, for example, a logo or an icon using the Move Tool or via the Layers Studio, and then click Create in the Symbols Studio. To make sure all of your Symbols update at the same time, you’ll also need to have. Affinity Designer is a professional-level graphics software tool that’s made by Serif, which includes a growing portfolio of design tools. Affinity Designer is fast and light and works on desktops and iPads, as well as in Mac and Windows environments. The best part about this tool is that you can use it to create vector or raster files, and switch between workspaces with just a click. The application can also import data from some Adobe FreeHand files.Affinity Designer's core functions include vector pen and shape-drawing tools, support for custom vector and raster brushes (including the ability to import Adobe Photoshop (ABR) brushes) dynamic symbols, stroke stabilization, text style management, and vector / pixel export. Optimized for the latest tech on Mac, Windows and iPad, Affinity Designer is setting the new industry standard in the world of design. Best in class for creating concept art, print projects, logos, icons, UI designs, mock-ups and more, it’s already the top choice of thousands of professional illustrators, web designers, game developers.

The Affinity Designer symbols are only connected to the document and are not universal to all the other documents. This tutorial shows you how you can quickly use symbols to create common elements and re-use and how you can create symbols from paths and groups of paths and edit them and add paths and change paths and more. Affinity Designer allows for a whole range of operations to create a wonderful library of artworks in your projects. Symbols in Affinity Designer can be used as a great way to store images for re-use. It is also a great way to create common elements in Affinity Designer. Any changes to the symbols are reflected in any copy / instance.

1. Open Affinity Designer

2. View menu

3. Studio

4. Symbols

The symbols panel has three buttons, create and detach and sync.

Basics of symbols / To add a new symbol to the panel in Affinity Designer

1. Select a path / shape / type

2. View menu

3. Studio and symbols

4. Click the create button in the symbols panel in Affinity Designer

If you have one path then the create button will add that single path to the panel. If you have multiple shapes selected then you will add multiple symbols. See the groups section to get around this (you may want multiple symbols from multiple paths)

Grouping paths for a single symbol

If you want the paths to be all added together then you must first use the layer menu and group command. Click create after grouping the paths.

1. select multiple paths

2. layer menu

3. group command

4. symbols panel

5. create

To add an instance or copy to the document in Affinity Designer

1. drag symbol from the symbols panel Firefox firebug for mac.

2. repeat for the number of symbol copies you wish to create

3. Move symbols around document

4. Resize etc

It is super easy to add them to the document and once added, they can be duplicated and then edited etc as required

To detach an instance

1. select an instance of a symbol

2. click the detach button

3. edit the paths as normal

If you wish to add it as a symbol, click the create button

Edit the symbols - you can edit the symbol instance in numerous ways

1. select a symbol instance / copy

2. go to the layer panel

3. expand the layer panel

You will see a single path or multiple paths. To change one of those paths (and the symbol)

1. click the path you wish to change

2. apply layer effects or change the color

3. change the color to a gradient etc

4. shift or scale the path or rotate the path

You can also repeat the same with other paths in the symbol group of paths. Any change to the paths will be reflected in a change to all the copies and the symbol in the panel.

If you select the entire symbol and change the color or add layer effects (such as blurs), all the paths in the symbol will be changed. If you rotate or scale a copy, there will be no change to the other symbol copies or symbol. If you scale or rotate the paths, the changes are reflected throughout the copies and symbol in the panel.

Add new paths to symbols in Affinity Designer

Work with one of the symbol copies in Affinity Designer.

To make things simple, edit the name of the symbol copy you wish to edit. Use a symbol copy that has not been transformed or rotated (relative to the other symbol copies). Remember which symbol copy you are using as all paths you add etc will be relative to that and not any of the other displayed copies.

1. De-select the symbol copy (make certain that no symbol copies are selected)

2. add a new path to the document near the symbol to edit and place the path as required relative to the other paths. You will see the path appear in the layer panel at the top.

3. select the path in the layers panel (outside of the existing symbol)

4. drag into the symbol set (you can position it relative to the symbol's existing paths)

You will now see all the copies change (of the symbol) and this is reflected in all the layer entries for the symbol. The symbol in the symbols panel will also then be updated as well

Remove paths from symbols

1. Go to one of the symbol instances in the layers panel

2. Rename the symbol to 'main' or something unique (just makes it easier to always edit and add and remove from a single instance - it is easy to confuse paths and symbols)

3. Expand that symbol instance in the layers panel

4. Go to the path you want to remove

5. Press delete

You should now see all the other instances update and the symbol in the symbols panel also

Symbols in document

You should note that the symbols are not permanent, they are only for the document. There appears to be no way with the current version to save them for permanent use in other symbols such as with Illustrator symbols AI files (hopefully this will happen in Affinity Designer 1.7 or 1.8 perhaps ?)

If you’re an app developer, you may be familiar with Apple’s SF Symbols—a huge array of vector iconography that can be easily implemented into your app’s user interface design. It’s compatible with iOS 13, watchOS 6 and tvOS 13 or later. The icons are designed to integrate with Apple’s San Francisco system font, which ensures optical alignment with neighbouring text and allows you to use line weight variations for each icon.

For more general information on SF Symbols, see Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines article.

Designing your own symbols

This is where things get interesting—you also have the ability to design and import your own symbol designs, using Apple’s SF Symbols template layout as a starting point. This template can be imported directly into Affinity Designer and used to create your own symbols, then brought into Xcode as a resource, allowing you to use it within your app design.

Exporting an existing symbol template

For starters, you will need to download the SF Symbols app directly from Apple’s Developer website. Once it’s installed, you can begin exploring the symbol categories within the app.

It’s a good idea to pick a symbol that roughly resembles the design you have planned for your own symbol. In this example, Matt Searston (our resident Affinity Designer Product Expert) has elected to design a cassette icon, so we might look for an existing symbol that is rectangular in shape, and so has a similar aspect ratio.

Once we’ve found a similar design, we can export a template to adapt our design to—go to File>Export Custom Symbol Template, then navigate to a suitable directory and click Export. This will create an .SVG file which we can then load into Affinity Designer.

Creating your symbol design

With the SVG loaded into Affinity Designer, you can begin creating your own design. Here are a few pointers regarding layer structure and layout: Macclean360 4.5 serials list for mac.

It’s important to retain the layer structure that you see when importing the template SVG file. All of the symbol designs are located in a parent layer called Symbols.

Each line weight and size variant of the symbol is stored as a separate group with a logical naming convention. You have the line weight, then a hyphen followed by the size, for example:

• Ultralight-S for ultra light line weight in small.
• Regular-M for regular line weight in medium.
• Heavy-L for heavy line weight in large.

All vector layer content must converted to outlined curves with no line width. To achieve this, you can select the layers in question and from the top menu go to Layer>Expand Stroke.

Note that you don’t actually have to store each symbol variation as a group like in the original templates: for our cassette design, we simply flattened the layers using the Add boolean operation and outlined them, then named them correctly according to the convention. These imported into Xcode without any issues.

Using groups will however allow you to have multiple child layers for each symbol rather than flattening them all into one layer. You may prefer this approach for flexibility.

Underneath the parent Symbols layer, you will find the Guides and Notes layers. You should generally leave the layers in Guides alone, as they will help you ensure that your new design has correct optical alignment when neighboured with text. There are two layers named left-margin and right-margin which allow you to define leading and trailing margins—you can select the Move Tool V and drag the left or right nodes on the bounding box to change the horizontal scaling of these.

You don’t have to alter these if you don’t need to, however. To keep things simple, we recommend creating your new symbol design without repositioning the two margins, then only rescaling them horizontally if you require more padding between the symbol and text either side.

Whilst getting to grips with the template layout and designing his own cassette symbol, Matt developed an approach that may help when it comes to producing line weight variants for your design. He started by creating the Regular line weight in Medium size, which is recommended as that’s where the two margin guides are located.

He then duplicated the layers in his symbol design and created a Black line weight in Large size variant—this is the thickest line weight and largest font size. He then did the same for an Ultralight and Small variant. By creating variants of the design at each extreme, this will quickly highlight if any of your design choices are going to be problematic when the line weight is scaled. Lots of shapes or curves next to each other may result in a design becoming less distinguishable or more cluttered, for example. By tackling these visual issues early on, you can save yourself a lot of time, then go on to produce the variants in-between these extremes.

Affinity Designer Symbol Library

Here are some general design pointers when creating your custom symbols:

• Only use vector content: curve paths with the Pen Tool P and shapes are fine. Bitmap images and text are not.
• Grouping content or flattening: you don’t have to flatten your design using a boolean operation, but you must outline any content using Expand Stroke. You can either have a flattened layer with the variant name (e.g. Ultralight-S), or you can name a group which contains multiple vector layers.
• It’s not a steadfast requirement to provide all 27 variants of your design, but it’s a good idea to include as many as possible for accessibility features.

Affinity Designer Examples

Exporting your symbol

Exporting your symbol design is nice and straightforward: once you have checked that your layer structure adheres to that of the original template, go to File>Export, then on the export dialog choose SVG as the export format. Leave the export preset as its default of SVG (for export), then click Export and choose a suitable resources directory (e.g. one set up within your Xcode project).

Once you have your exported SVG file, you can verify it within the SF Symbols app before importing it into Xcode in case there are any issues with layer structure or alignment. To do this, launch the SF Symbols app, then go to File>Validate Custom Symbols and locate your SVG file.

Affinity Designer Tutorials

Finally, you’ll need to bring your symbol into your app’s .xcassets resources as an Image Symbol Set. To do this within Xcode, select your .xcassets resource (a default Assets.xcassets is provided by default whenever you create a new project), then from the top menu choose Editor>Add Assets>New Symbol Image Set.

Affinity Designer Update

This will switch the active window pane to a drag-drop area where you can drag your SVG file in. If everything is present and correct, your symbol variants will appear—you can now go ahead and use these in your user interface design!

Affinity Designer Patterns

Footnotes

For more information, you may like to refer to these Apple Developer articles which will help you further when it comes to adding custom symbols to your user interface design:

They contain good guidelines to adhere to and will also cover adding symbols into your UI design programmatically.