Poster: Earth VS the Flying Saucers

(Image was updated after getting some feedback)

 
Another in my sci-fi series of posters done with affinity designer and publisher. I watched it the other night and thought it would be a quick and simple project and it was. The saucers are pretty basic and the alien didn't have much detail. 

Poster project: War of the Worlds (1953) (finished)

 

I decided on a look I thought fit the film and it's style. The stars are a photo I took in Colorado years ago with my brother and the earth is a 3D render I made in Cinema 4D years ago. I had the planet mars and the martian probe ready for the poster but that was way too crowded and counter to my ideas on what I wanted it to look like. The title is remade from the original poster and I used Paramount logo from the 50s. 

Poster project: War of the Worlds (1953)

 

Another poster project caught my interest. I love the martian designs in this movie and the film is really good despite it's departures from the book, maybe because of some of them. The Martian probe and war machine are pretty slick looking. I remade the original poster logo and I would like to draw the arm and three fingered hand of a martian. Not sure how I will fit it all into a poster. My plan is to draw elements I find cool basically and then see what i come up with.  All drawn with Affinity Designer like the last poster. So far anyway. 

UPDATE: Martian arm

Cirru book series for children

Over the last 6 months or more I have been working with authors Danny and Melissa on a series of children's books featuring Cirru the travelling cloud. The books teach young children about colours, shapes and how to count to ten. I not only designed the books but did all the illustrations.

The books are available to buy on Amazon, so buy them and leave a good review, especially for the illustrations! 

Click the title to go to the Amazon page! 

Cirru Counts to Ten

Learning Shapes with Cirru

Learning Colors with Cirru

Poster: Human Evolution

Worked about 10 hours setting this up today alone. I was not as prepared as I hoped but it worked out. There was no skull for one image but there was a recent discovery of a jaw so I drew that. I used a dark background to bring out the drawings more and the connections are done in a modern way that doesn't stick out too much. It will be printed at 12x18" and sent to my brother for his new place. 

UPDATED: after some scientific feedback I arranged the connections differently and added a new skull to the chart. 

Software desires for 2023

 I don’t actually expect much of this list to really happen anytime soon. But it’s good to make lists of things you need and see what happens over time, isn’t it? 

MAC OS

Bugs: Fix the really annoying I cloud terms and conditions bug! It keeps popping up at a warning 100 times a day and agreeing to the terms does nothing to stop that. 

The window to update the stuff on my iPod touch keeps popping up at random times during the day.

Both of these bugs stop my work to a halt when they happen and break my concentration and workflow. 

Bring back: Scheduling! And make it more robust! Let me schedule on a real calendar timetable not just open and close at certain times. Week days, vacations, interruptions and I have to reset the schedule… well when I could schedule! 

Podcasts: Why on planet earth is there no way to make a playlist yet? I use my iPod touch everyday and especially in summer when biking, walking long distances but I can’t make a play list. I have to stop after each podcast and pick another or it randomly picks one I already listened to or isn’t "Online" even though I only keep episodes I have downloaded and haven’t listened to on the device. It’s easy making a playlist for songs so what is going on? Why does the device say something is downloaded but when I get a certain distance from my house it suddenly not available because there is no internet connection? There shouldn’t need to be one! 

iPad IOS

Handle fonts like they are handled on the desktop! Now we can do page layout and professional design on an iPad, we need access to all the fonts we can for making decisions about projects. Allow plugins! Being able to use the NIK or Topaz plugins on Affinity Photo would be a game changer. 

Affinity products:

I haven’t had the crashes and issues I’ve read about online and many of those seem Windows related for now. That doesn’t mean I hope some improvements are not on the way.

Overall: When I hide a program and unhide it, the program opens but no windows do, I have select one from a list and then they all open. This should be automatic and is a known bug, I think. 

Publisher on iPad: I hope it gets all the features the desktop does soon. The Book function is of interest to me but the power duplication and grid feature would be nice as well. 

Designer: The long sought after vector trace feature. A spiral drawing tool would be cool.

Photo: I would love better compatibility with Topaz plugins - mainly to resize images. This is possible on photoshop and the programming in Photo restricts it. Better integration with NIK and DXO plugins would be nice as well. Overall they work great together but I would like the Viewport app/plugin to work in Photo and be able to send a series of bracketed photos directly to HDR Efex Pro. 

Affinity iPad Apps: being able to save export preferences for difference situations. I need different, specialized setups for different printers as an example and I to set them all from scratch when using the iPad. 

A "DAM" from Affinity: This is another long proposed app I would love to see implemented. Most other DAM (digital asset managers) do not show Affinity previews or allow for any actions to be taken like selecting series of bracketed photos and opening them as an HDR in Photo.

Topaz Labs 

An iPad version of Topaz photo AI! It would really make it more possible to do ALL the work on the iPad not have to go to the desktop to finish up when returning from a trip. 

review: Affinity Photo, designer, Publisher V2

 

The Affinity Suite of graphic design products just went for a long awaited V1 to V2 update. The last year had been quiet and missing the frequent updates and improvements of the last few years so many speculated something was up. The bizarre speculation of the company closing, or being sold to to Adobe was not founded in any reality but it was all over the place. To me, it seems there has been some obvious trolling going on to downplay this release and some people were left to speculate far too long on what was to come. A one minute teaser 5 days before the release that told you basically nothing except a new version was coming out but generated a lot of unwarranted expectations and wild theories.

What was released:

V2 of all the apps and a new, looooong awaited,  iPad version of Publisher. What happened was many of the missing features people have wanted were implemented in all three apps. Not all of them, of course, and it is 100% normal to wait a long time only to find that something you need for your work wasn't in the update very disappointing. Designer and Publisher got the most love but the whole suite got a nicer interface that bled over to the iPad. Many of the key features like the style eyedropper were added to all the apps and Photo got non destructive RAW editing and new versions of some features that were somewhat poorly done in the previous versions. All of the apps were elevated to much higher professional level. The "big surprise" was not a D.A.M. but a universal licence that let you install all three on windows, Mac and iPad under the same license and a ridiculously low price considering improvement and updates will be free until V3 comes out which will likely be 2-5 years away. 

The good stuff:

Designer's vector warp tools, a criminal omission in V1 were implemented. Also they added a shape builder function and knife tool. Photo got some nice masking improvements and new features and the before mentioned non destructive RAW processing. Publisher, the newest app needed the most work and got it. A book function that lets you organize separate external files into one project, style dropper, automatic page generation when importing a long text file or many images. Publisher on iPad has the same studio link function as the desktop, which lets you simply turn Publisher into Photo or Designer with a simple button to work on graphics and never have to leave the app. We can now realistically work from an iPad for everything most graphic designers need with the exception of epub and web design which Affinity has shied away from, at least for now.

The disappointments:

Digital Asset Management is really the missing piece in the suite and some of the new Publisher features do not work on iPad. iPad also has a terrible font system for publishing. I have to add one font at a time with a 3rd party program that takes a couple minutes for each one - if it works. Many graphic designers need over 600-800 fonts on a desktop system to pick from. This is something Apple will have to address. Designer would profit greatly from a bitmap to vector tracing function as many artists use that in their workflow, a vector eraser and the ability to warp a shape inside another shape (like a word or words inside a heart for example) would fill out it's feature set nicely. I wish there was some way for plugins to work on the ipad and be better implemented on the desktop. 

Overall this was an AMAZING release that added many of the features users have been asking about for years. This is not the last update, something I think many don't take into account, and Serif has been responsive to customer needs more than most companies - even if it takes them longer to realize those needs it has been worth the wait. 

August updates? Affinity, Procreate and Krita

 While no official dates are announced, it seems a few software companies have some updates happening  most likely in August. 

Affinity Suite:

Designer was just demonstrated with some pretty powerful speed updates, all software based so every computer should benefit. In the demo, 600 000 (!) layer objects were panned and zoomed with no redrawing to be seen. I don't anyone who uses that many objects but the point is to get the suite ready for some new features. Affinity is reasoning, rightly, that it's better to get the bugs out and really have sold base before introducing some calculation heavy features. Photo and Publisher will benefit form this speed enhancement and I have my fingers crossed that there will be an update in August that includes Publisher for iPad. 

Krita:

Krita is about to go to version 5 and there are a ton of updates planned. For me the new animations features will be really helpful. I liked drawing in Krita but the animation functions were buggy, slow and lacking. They seem to be addressing all that and updating the interface. I would love to be able to use it for drawing and animating since the drawing the tools are so amazing.

Procreate:

Procreate teased us with some video of the upcoming new features which included 3D objects you can paint and add to real world images and maybe video?. I can see a use for say making a some stuff in Blender and then sending the object file to procreate to make detailed backgrounds or as the base for a drawing but I'm not sure about anything else. Photoshop added 3D many years ago and I never used it for anything. They already tweaked it for the M1 chips in the iPad pro so I have a ton more layers to work with and Apple seems to have heard the frustration about the 5 gig max for apps that Procreate brought attention to and iPad OS 15 will address that. 

Blender:

Blender is close to a 3.O release and the new Cycles render engine loose amazing and makes me feel the need to switch much more acutely as I don't think I'll be updating my computer anytime soon and really could use a boost in render speed! 

recent updates: Affinity Photo, Designer, Publisher and Krita and Sparkle Web Designer

 

There have been a nice amount of updates recently. Some things update more than others and I would say free software like Krita and Blender are pretty fast and furious with updates while some commercial software seems to be slowing down. Maybe it is the pandemic. Free software people might have more time as their normal jobs are on hold while commercial software might be the opposite because it's those companies who might have put jobs on hold. This is just a quick take on my latest updates and not an  in-depth review of any of the software.

The Affinity Suite

I won't lie, I was really hoping for an iPad version of Publisher to get released as it was sort of scheduled for last year. That aside the 3 desktop and iPad apps got nice improvements and Serif as a company seems to really listening to its users. 

Photo has a great new blend mode, Divide that is wonderful for taking a colour tint from photos. I tried it with a night shot from Budapest which had a very strong yellow tint because of the lighting and it was impressive as you can see.

Designer has a nice contour tool that is hard to describe as it have a few uses that really give you more options for designing and vector drawings. 

Publisher had PDF passthrough now which makes adding them to existing documents super easy. There were problems still with adding them. I have a project which uses a 300 page PDF and it works like a charm... at first. Reopening the file was a nightmare and I had to split the PDF up into sections and export each section as jpg pages. Smaller Pdfs were better but slow to open. It's edging closer and closer to having all the features I want form Indesign so - progress. For the next big update, 2.0 which will be paid most likely, I would love to be able to group pages in the page window so you can drag them around higher or lower in the hierarchy. This would make book with chapters that get moved around much easier to accomplish. Right now there is some limit to how many pages you can select and move and it's not easy to drop them in the right place. 

Krita

This has been moving along nicely and is more and more my choice for drawing on the computer. The blending brushes and the natural look to the painting, drawing etc brushes is really amazing. It's a little buggy now and then but this new update has been bug free for me so far. It needs better text handling if only for adding my name, title and date to a finished piece easier. 

Sparkle Web Designer

This software is always fixing bugs and improving. This time is had a blog feature I would love to use as some point. If I continue to have almost no one reading this one it might be easier to just switch the blog to Sparkle and integrate with my home/portfolio page. 

2001 poster series fixes

As mentioned before, the 2001 models I had found were lacking in some ways. Some had issues with the texture maps which was where most the of the details were and other just lacked details. While I am still not trying to be super faithful to every details, it did bother me that a couple of the images were just too simple and slapping on a bump map did not really get the images t where I wanted them. So I kept some elements and made over from scratch others. On the Discovery it was mostly changing the textures and making the main control sphere and the reactor and engines myself. With he Moonbus, it was a matter of adding a ton of details that were lacking. I watched the film again and it then could not just let my fun project stay as it was.

The top image you can see I added a ton to the rear of the sip, there was almost nothing there before which was why I opted to show only the front. For the front - here is a before and after, I think it's improved. It could probably still use some details from inside the cockpit but I think the blue light is better than the yellow.



The Moonbus had many more details than I remembered and so I added a lot more into the existing model. Not sure anyone would notice but me but since these were for me, that was enough to get motivated to do the extra work.

   

*Star Wars got a little love as well.

Affinity suite 1.81 (photo/designer/publisher)

While at first glance, this update does not seem like more than a small update and that is true concerning the Photo and Designer apps. Both did get some nice new interface updates and a couple new features but Publisher got its first real update since its release in the summer and the additions to that are amazing.

I started using Publisher in my professional work a few months back after consulting with the print houses my clients use and doing a couple test projects. While it wasn't flush with features I found that I stopped using Indesign right away and haven't touched it much since. This update really makes the idea of going back seem even less likely.

Affinity listened to what people were after and did a good job fulfilling their desires in this release. The big addition is .idml import of Indesign project files, something many designers  found crucial before switching as access to old projects is key for keeping some clients. Quark Xpress added this function not too long ago but that was about the only good thing I could say about that application.  The new open dialog which allows you to save projects as templates that can be used across the suite  and saved to the cloud for easy access if you are caught out of the studio and need to create something before you can get back. I plan to use use templates quite a bit for my regular clients. There is also anew ability to merge documents into one which combines the master pages and table of contents which will be great for complicated projects like magazines which could now be worked on in sections, then combined to a final version later.

Photoshop smart objects are now imported and translated to Affinity Photo pretty seamlessly making cross application work much easier and crosses off another big Photoshop feature the Affinity was lacking.

There really isn't much reason to not switch to Affinity if you have been waiting to do that and I suspect when the iPad version of Publisher is released, having the suite will be essential for  graphic artists.

Professional work with Affinity Publisher

I stopped using Photoshop and Illustrator a few years ago and with the release this summer of Affinity Publisher, it is time to start replacing Indesign in my workflow as well.

I started slow, replacing some poster work which is always given to the printer as a PDF file and that went pretty easily. Next was transitioning the monthly invitations I do for a client to the 4 colour press we use. Normally I would package the Indesign project and send it out to them so moving to Publisher meant having to discuss options with them. It went much easier than I anticipated. I don't send them Publisher documents, they don't have the software... yet. We had to work together to figure out the best configuration for the PDF files. I should say that at first they were horrified, thinking I meant Microsoft Publisher which is NOT professional layout material, but after I sent them a link to the Serif software website, they were relieved I hadn't lost my mind and I had found something of professional quality.

Aside from exiting the aggravation and controversy of the Adobe subscription cloud fiasco, are there advantages to doing this? Yup, plenty. Even though Publisher is, in effect, a version 1.0 release in many ways - working with it has been very productive. There are features I would love to have implemented and many will, I'm sure, eventually - but missing features or not - my work is getting done much easier and faster. One huge advantage is the workspace, it's always in what Indesign would call full resolution mode. There isn't another mode and there doesn't need to be, Scrolling and zooming is fast and effortless and being able to see everything clearing and as it will look in the final print version. I like how fonts and text are handled much better, though it takes some getting used to after a couple decades of Indesign use. One of the biggest changes and improvements from my old workflow is how editing of exterior files works. Indesign lets you open Photoshop or Illustrator, make changes, then update the files in your document. Affinity Publisher has an all in one approach - you literally just press a button and you are in the photo or vector app, no need to reload and update or have another program taking up screen space. It's a very fluid way of working. Importing images is different as well, and now that I have a grasp on the basics, it's so simple and fast I can't imagine going back to the old ways.

Some of the problems I saw on the horizon have been resolved. Blurb, the online book publisher has a plugin directly for Indesign but not Publisher, making it harder to design and send a project to them. Today, however I discovered they have a PDF calculator and set up page so if you are not using the Adobe product, you can still prepare your work confidently. It is not as easy, but it is workable. I will be experimenting with that soon. Speaking of PDFs, one thing I did not think about was that by sending in only a finalized PDF, I can work 100% on Affinity format with images and illustrations, meaning I don't have to format them as TIF or EPS files for the printing process, making it super easy to make changes and saving more steps than I realized it would. *This would work with Indesign too if  I wasn't sending in a packaged project.

My just published book, Indifference, was trial an error making Kindle and print versions but formatting mistakes I made at first were quickly corrected and I am very happy with the results.

I guess the best part of this has been I was able to do it and my clients never even noticed the change. I look forward to the iPad version next year for those times I am away without use my laptop since the entire, fully functional Affinity suite will be on iPad and for now I can use Photo or Designer to edit multi page documents to a large extent already.

All and all I would say I made the right choice to switch both financially and artistically.

Affinity Publisher official release / Designer & Photo updates

The official release of Affinity Publisher has arrived and it is bringing with it updates to Serif's 2 other applications, Photo and Designer.

While I have been using publisher for smaller, PDF export only projects in beta form for 9 months, the actual release still showed some noticeable improvements.  For one thing it's much faster (more so on Mac thanks to unprecedented Metal integration) and more stable. Files open rapidly and working on it is so easy and fast it blows Indesign out of the water in that regard. While still a version 1.0 and lacking features many will need before switching from other programs, I would say it's already better than the latest version of Quark and for less complex projects it gives Indesign a run for it's money in many ways. There were a few release only improvements but the most interesting one was the link between Publisher and their other apps. 

Affinity has links it's apps in a way other companies have not done, even though it seems an obvious way to go about it. Because all three programs use the same format, if you are working on project in Publisher and want to rework a photo, for example, you just press the Photo icon on the top left of the screen and you are working with Photo in Publisher, the switch is so fast you can't even see it happening. It hasn't opened Photo as a separate app, it has opened as part of the app you are already in... seamlessly. It doesn't end there. Publisher for iPad is ways off still but while you are waiting, you can now open multi-page publisher docs in either of their iPad apps and edit them there.  That is IMPRESSIVE! 

This is not to say everyone can just dump Indesign and switch. It's missing some important functions for now. I imagine most of those shortcomings will be addressed sooner than later. The ability to open and export .idml files for easy transitioning from Indesign and for printers who won't take PDF files will be crucial to take a bite from the Adobe apple but it's definitely coming. A couple things I would like to see added sooner than later would be more robust find and replace tools, being able to organize a book into chapters and a dedicated persona for making e-books. 

Photo and Designer have also been updated with new features and dramatically increased speed. The HSL improvements were something I didn't know I needed so much and addition of arrows to lines is a long overdue addition. There are new filters and improvements to so many things it's impossible to list them all. Brushes have been made even more customisable, now allowing you to add brushes to other brushes with the new sub brush function. Indesign has gained from node and drawing features that sets it even more ahead of Illustrator and makes it even more of a joy to use. 

While the new additions are welcome, I think this update brings home Serif's commitment to improving the code, even going back and rewriting it over instead of just patching it is what makes their software stand out. 

Preview: Affinity Publisher (beta)

I received my copy of the Affinity Publisher beta today and had to time look at all the tutorials that came with it and go over many of it's functions to see where this might all be going.

To be 100% clear: this is a the first beta of a new software, it's not even close to ready for production use.

Overall, the interface and functions are the same or similar to the other Affinity apps, bravo on a job well done with a consistent interface throughout. In this first beta, most of the the most basic functions are there and not much more. I tried to set up a typical document from my steady design client and it fell short on a few things that would be deal breakers if this was a finished product. O the other hand, the potential is truly there and is easy to see. While they are not activated, this will have design and photo personas, meaning native Affinity Designer and Photo files imported into a layout can be edited within Publisher itself. A big time saver.

Text manipulation and functionality is already good enough for real life usage, at least in most of my work. I did come across a big problem for me, the find and replace is something I use to reformat numbers across a project of document from one font to another, since I have clients who use one font for text and a another for numbers. As of this version I could not find a way to do that that worked.

I really like the table features over Indesign's tables, they are just easier to access and use much in the same way Designer makes accessing nodes a no brainer while Illustrator is always slightly torturous. There is an image box feature I never would have thought of, basically the box will resize the image automatically to best fit the size of the box. its neat and in many cases I imagine it will save  time and make the workflow more intuitive.

So far so good. A HUGE problem Affinity will have with Publisher is that many people like Indesign quite a bit as it's one of Adobe's best apps and rightfully took over the industry shortly after it's release. It will be an uphill battle to get this as fully featured and accepted by printers. One way would be to integrate really amazing digital publishing into it, something Indesign does, but in a very clumsy manner. I would hope they would reach out to some companies like Blurb, Modern Postcard , Vistaprint etc and have built in templates come with the final program. Blurb has an Indesign plugin that works really nicely and they should take that idea to as many online print services as they can so you can send directly from Publisher to the printer. Many Adobe users have been frustrated with Photoshop and Illustrator for many years so switching to a new, better designed app wasn't a hardship. Indesign is already in a place where it's used and liked.

A good start for a highly anticipated application. I would say they are a good 6 months away from a real release at this point providing they can get everything working with their current suite seamlessly. If I buy t and use it on release will depend on far they get with parity of features with Indesign. I will say they have a well deserved reputation so far to rising to this sort of challenge so I'm betting on this being another success for them.