SOFTWARE MASTERCLASS
In the second of our series on Affinity Publisher, Rod Law ton shows you how you can adapt the business card design we created first time around into a whole range of stationery items
In the first instalment of this series on Affinity Publisher, we created a basic but effective business card design, explaining along the way how to add graphics and text frames to your Publisher documents and how to resize and export your work for use at a print bureau.But business cards are only one kind of business stationery, of course. There are other items you might need like letterheads and compliments slips. And, if you have a website, you’ll need a custom graphic for your website banner too.
Almost all website designs, themes and templates use a horizontal header at the top, so can you adapt your paper-based branding for this too?
Indeed you can. The obvious difference is that here you will be working with pixels not points, but Affinity Publisher is perfectly happy with either.
The key to all this is the File>Document Setup panel, where you can change the size and orientation of your documents and also make the swap from printed documents to pixel-based graphics for on-screen use.
Does all this mean a whole lot of extra design work? Not necessarily! We’ve started by opening up the business card design we made last time, and we can re-use the contents in all our new stationery.
This is one of the first rules of publishing – never do the same work twice! But re-using graphics and text frames doesn’t just save time – it also ensures consistency. And that’s the second rule of publishing – be consistent in your graphics, your fonts, your design elements and your colour palettes. It’s all part of your brand and it’s how people will recognise you.
For more, see bit.ly/serifpubap
Top tip
Guides are a very handy feature of Affinity Publisher. Use the View>Show Rulers menu command to make sure you can see rulers above and to the left of your document. Next, drag the origin point from the top left corner where these rulers meet and drag it to the top left corner of your document – it should snap into position. This makes sure that the rulers are at zero at the top left corner of the document. Now you can drag guides off the vertical and horizontal rulers to position them over your document. They appear as a pale blue line and their precise position is shown in numbers as you drag. This enables you to divide up sheets very precisely, it gives you a visual layout guide and guides also ‘snap’ objects precisely into alignment.
Starting from the basic business card design we made in part 1, we can create a whole range of business stationery and graphics
STEP BY STEP IN AFFINIT Y PUBLISHER
We can use the File>Save As command to
