The Affinity Designer Manual – Version 2: A Step-by-Step Beginner’s Guide

This book is exactly what I needed. It is explicit and beneficial, especially for someone like me who is transitioning from Adobe.

As someone who has relied on Adobe Fireworks in the past and has had to reluctantly move with the times I recentley purchased Affinity Designer 2 as the closest alternative I could find on the Mac. While there were similarities I needed a kick start and that is exactly what this book gave me. It’s not exhaustive (as you’d expect from a beginner’s guide) but there are some great ideas in here and the book covers a wide range of ideas.

Speziell gefallen mir die Zusammenfassungen in den einzelnen Kapiteln.

Seller is very responsive if you need additional help which is a plus! The book is very easy to follow, informative, lots of examples. Files are needed to download that go along with assignments. I’m looking forward to learning a lot with Affinity designer. Thanks.

Good book if you want to start working with Affinity designer v2.
I used to work with Adobe suite and this book, in addition of the excellent help you can find online, help me to switch from Illustrator to Designer.
A step by step program, easy to read and understand.
Lot of pictures to help you finding the menus, tools, bars…
You can read it online on your PC, on your tablet or smartphone with the free kindle cloud reader app.
I recommand

I purchased the Kindle version of the book as I find it easier to have the software and the Kindle app open simultaneously while going through the exercises. Rather than just use dry text descriptions when describing the various elements of the software, this book is hands-on with immersive exercises that really help to give you solid training that you will remember. One other aspect of this book that differs from most software guides that I have used before is the very solid customer service. I had the project files in my email moments after I requested them, and the authors are open to post-sale questions and problem-solving. The price is very fair, as well. Highly recommended!

Oddly enough, the official Affinity/Serif Workbook (for version 1) are much more of a manual than this Manual (for version 2), which is much more of a workbook.

Whereas the Serif book explains what each piece/tool of the software does and why you would use it, this book is more of a here’s-some-small-projects-that-you-can-perform-with-the-software presentation. So if you’re looking for short, workable things to do to play around with Designer and a little explanation sprinkled here and there, this looks to be a very good option. If, however, you’re like me and wanted more explanation and less “Next, do this,” go with Serif’s version (and then, if you’re looking for more ideas, consider coming back for this one).

To summarize, I feel like the Serif book is the textbook for a class on how to operate Affinity Designer, and this book is a supplementary textbook for a class on graphic design–if you’ve ever taken a college science class, the former is the book for class instruction, and the latter is the book for lab sessions.

This book is definitely designed for beginners… but I found it spending too much time on some basics (opening/saving/exporting documents) and not enough time on other basics (the pen tool). There’s also probably 12-15 pages in the book solely devoted to color theory, which goes toward my view as this being less of a textbook and more of a lab manual. The book is also obsessed with the shape tool and the color panel; almost every project relies on the former–which may be a good thing (as someone that didn’t study or train for graphic design, I honestly don’t know) for beginners, but it also comes across as overly reliant on a single technique for creating art.

There are a couple of “quizzes” with answers sprinkled around, but they’re of the passive “Did you actually read the assignment” type rather than the active “Create a ____ with ____ and then look at our solution” variety.

But the primary reason that I returned the book was the tone of the wording, which just rubbed me the wrong way. Like writing “Finished. This ends the lesson.” or similar at the end of every section. I prefer the more ‘official’-sounding wording used in school textbooks. And for learning material, I need proper grammar and punctuation, nearly flawless editing, and great writing as written by a native English speaker. I’ve returned several books on Swift, Mathematica, and other software because they weren’t written well. This book isn’t as bad as some of them–it definitely seems to be written by a native user of English–but there are enough hiccups for it to throw me off so much that I can’t concentrate.

Also, the book makes a valiant attempt to use italic (actions) and bold (objectives) font to indicate key words and phrases, but it ends up being a bit excessive because “action” and “objective” basically ends up meaning every verb and every key noun. As most of the actions are for interacting with the software (click, type) and most of the objectives are tool and panel names, the wiser option would have been to use the different typefaces for those verbs and nouns only.

In summary…
1. It’s not an instruction manual for Affinity Designer.
2. It’s not nearly as comprehensive as Serif’s own book.
3. If there are version 2-specific functions/operations used here, I couldn’t find them.
but…
4. It has an excellent assortment of activities for common things that beginning users of graphic-design software would want to know how to do (see the list of lessons presented in the write-up; you’ll likely see multiple topics where you go, “Oh, yeah, I’ve tried to learn how to do that using YouTube videos.”)
5. It has a section devoted to color theory.
6. There are lots of color images everywhere, so the paperback book looks really attractive. (I’m not sure about the Kindle version, as eBooks are notorious bad with image sizing and placement.)