hello today I would like to talk about a
feature that I honestly didn't know
existed
I have no clue for how long it's been
there and you can use it in the whole
suite:
Affinity designer, Publisher and Photo
okay so I have here my canvas ready and
I'm gonna come here to the
primitive shapes and if you toggle this
you're gonna find different shapes in
here well let's just choose
this one the cog tool and I'm going to
press and shift
put it there in my canvas if you are
already familiarised with Affinity
designer
you know that these little dots you see
here the orange dots
you see them there they allow you to
modify
your initial shape which is already very
cool
it's amazing no it's super nice see you
can do all sorts of
changes to it creating new shapes
I was always happy with this and I was
always storing
my assets if I wanted to reuse them etc
etc etc
until three days ago i was just messing
with
different shapes trying new things and I
spotted this little
cog in here
and I clicked on it and oh what is this
so we have this panel which is filled
out
with lots of different presets
if you see here this uh affinity
designer
old icon they didn't change it anyways
so these ones are the ones that Serif
included
for this particular shape
so if I now click in any of them let's
just say this one
bang! it changes it and it's that's
pretty cool already
but there's more now if I click on it
and come here i press on this top right
menu
you're gonna see here that you can
manage presets or create presets
obviously this is ghosted or grayed out
because I didn't make any change to this
one so there's no possibility but
let's just try pressing on a which will
reveal
all these little dots that allow for
changes let's just do something like
whatever just to to try new things
now I come back here to the panel and
again to the menu
and I can now create my own preset so
I'm going to
create it I'm going to name it "yahoo"
like that and I created bang
it's included in this category now you
can see that 
the ones that Serif created have this
little icon with the
Affinity designer logo but the one I
created
not only has the name in here in this
plane but also has like
a little user icon in there that means I
created it myself it's my own creation
now obviously if I now unclick this one
what I'm going to see in here is not
the related shapes to this one here but
all of those who are related to this one
selected in here but if I now go like
this
and select that one I'm gonna get the
category for
this one now there's more to it let's
just check here in the manage
presets and you can see
we have all of our presets
here now I created this category myself
when I was messing around with it we're
going to create a new category
just so you see what's going on here
let's call it
"test" we create it now it's added
down here it has no presets in it now if
I want to include a preset
what I have to do is either import it
this will take you to import something
from your
os but I can also
just let's say just take this one and I
can pass it here
you can see now it's in my "test category"
but not anymore in "my category"
now what if I want to store this one
in this category well I close here
first
having it selected I come here
right click export presets
put it somewhere there and then you can
see the extension
"affinity tool presents" just leave it there
and then you can
import it from the manage
presets area okay so that's the way you
would do it
you can see here import presets you can
see here import presets
so just clicking importing and
done. Now there's also this interesting
combo here
and if we toggle it you see it says "no
filter"
now we're going to try with for example
the first option
which is rectangle it's going to bring
here all the shapes related to
the rectangle in this combo here without
having to leave the
the manager let's just uh try again with
a
with a pie it's going to show us our pie
I've been here as you can see doing my
things
and so forth I mean this is quite uh
clear to understand what's going on
so you can just move through the whole
series without having to see the whole
thing
you know it's gonna be easier. Another
interesting thing about
this panel so let's just come here and
say well i have the star selected and
let's just
pick this kind of like coronavirus
little thing so
yeah i come here and I modify it and i'm
just doing some cool
daisy or whatever and I say like okay
yeah well
I can either go back like it was or
I can just come here and
check in there i click on it and it just
brings it
back to what it was that makes total
sense if you think that
even if i click on any of the other is
going to just
reflect on my shape
now one very important thing especially
for those of you who are not yet very
familiarized
with the primitive shapes in Affinity
Designer because i get this question a
lot
so you see I have my shape selected and
i don't get these little
red modifier little dots
so the thing is that uh you're not gonna
get them like that
you have to either press "A" while selecting
in your keyboard like so or
let's go back to the move tool which is
"V"
on your keyboard coming here and
selecting your
no tool you're not going to get them
right away you have to double click on
your shape
okay now one thing i was saying at the
very beginning is that
I find this very useful to have here my
little repository of
pre-made shapes of course I could use
my assets panel to you know create a
library of assets and stuff
but this is kind of like a different
concept you have all the possibilities
for each and every primitive
shape to be stored and modified and
used and reused time and again in just
one place
and yeah I mean for me it's a discovery
I hope it is for you too
now be sure to visit my website
you have it there where you're gonna
find more tutorials for free
freebies information and the usual "!!"
so I see you there ! Kisses
