Affinity Publisher Essentials

Course Overview

This one-day hands-on course introduces participants to Affinity Publisher, Serif’s powerful desktop publishing tool. Ideal for those creating professional layouts for print or digital use, the course covers everything from document setup and working with text and images, through to advanced formatting, creative design elements, and preparing documents for export.

Participants will gain practical experience designing multi-page layouts with consistent formatting, placing and manipulating images, applying styles, using master pages and templates, and exporting to various formats.

This course is designed for marketing professionals, content creators, in-house designers, admin teams producing reports or newsletters, and anyone involved in creating visual documents for print or digital distribution.

Prerequisites

• • Good general computer literacy
    Not essential, but basic familiarity with design or publishing tools (e.g. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Canva, or similar) would help.
    

Course Content

• Introduction to Affinity Publisher

  Setting up a document
  Margins, bleeds and colour settings
  Affinity Publisher workspace and toolbars

• Working with Text

  Placing text on a document
  Adjusting typography settings
  Creating and saving Paragraph and Character styles

• Adding Pictures

  Place images using frames
  Scale, crop and make other adjustments
  Understanding minimum dpi requirements to ensure image quality
  Insert multiple images at the same time
  Working with linked files

• Creating columns

  Separating text into columns
  Creating columns

• Designing interesting text layouts

  Wrapping text around images and objects
  Flow text between different frames

• Adding and formatting tables

  Creating a table
  Adding data to tables
  Formatting a table
  Saving formats to reuse
  

• Setting up templates and complex layouts

  Creating Master Pages
  Creating custom guides
  Adding page numbers
  Aligning text and objects with the Alignment tools
  Using Baseline grids

• Colour and Shapes in Affinity Publisher

  Using the Colour Picker
  Saving Swatches and Palettes
  Importing existing Colour Palettes
  Creating Palettes from an image or document
  Inserting and adjusting basic shapes
  Adjusting special shapes with smart controls
  Using the Style Picker to quickly change the style of text and images

• Working with creative effects

  Using Gradients
  Using the Transparency tool
  Adding a Drop Shadow, 3D effects and more
  

• Checking a document

  Using Preflight to check for spelling mistakes
  Using Preflight to check for common problems
  How to correct common problems

• Exporting documents

  PDF settings for print
  PDF settings for digital, and small file sizes
  Exporting to JPG or PNG