learn-create-design

Class Description

Hello everyone welcome to my latest class! I’m Jen Lezan and I’ll be your teacher for this course. This month, I am coming back with another Affinity Publisher focused class that revolves around physical planning and productivity related printables.

As I am sure you can tell already,  I really enjoy planning! Planning lets me take my need for organization and allows me to combine it with my graphic design background and creativity to come up with some fantastic productivity printables that I sell on Etsy and Creative Market, but that I also use in my daily life for both work and family related organizing. 

If you like planning - make sure you check out some of previous classes on how to design physical planner stickers and my digital planning courses like how to create your own digital stickers for digital planning and how to make a digital planner in Affinity Publisher and Affinity Designer. 

This month, I wanted to take you through my process of how I design bullet journal style digital printables that can be used for paper planning. I personally sell these products online, but this can also just be a personal project that you utilize for yourself. I find that I enjoy the concept of bullet journaling, but it can take quite a bit of time to draw all of the beautiful layouts that are out there by hand. So, my solution for that is to design them in Affinity Publisher. 

I wanted to share some tips, my knowledge and process to help you build a productivity printable that you can customize to your needs. Using Affinity Publisher makes things a little less cumbersome as you don’t have to erase as you would if you were designing these spreads by hand and instead you can just undo! I also love the fact that this is a great asset that can be used as giveaways for email sign ups or that you can sell them as downloads on digital market places like Creative Market. You only have to make it once and you can reuse it time and time again or you can sell it over and over again. 

What the class is about

In this class, I wanted to take things a step further - rather than just walking you through the process of designing a composition and how to use Affinity Publisher, I also wanted to share some of the theories behind what is considered “good” composition. At the very beginning of this class, we will go through some basics and tips for good composition and layout. Ideas that as you create printables more and more, will start to come more naturally. These design principles allow you to communicate ideas in visual format more effectively. Then, we will jump into the basics of Affinity Publisher.

A few of the skills students will learn

You will learn the basics of how to use the Affinity Publisher tools and interface to design a bullet journal style planner printable. Keeping in mind the basics of design and composition, we will design a printable that you can then customize to your own liking or in order to use it for sale in your own shop. 

I like using affinity publisher for creating printables because it is so easy to create precise shapes, space them evenly, align elements and design using multiple spreads and master spreads. This course is a fantastic class to also really hone in on your layout design skill and get more comfortable with Affinity Publisher - as you are going through the basic process of creating in the program by designing the class project.

As I said before, We will start with the basics of understanding design principles as they relate to composition and layout. Then we will jump into the basics of Affinity Designer. We will go over the tool bars and functions in the Affinity Publisher workspace, then we will start to build out our bullet journal style planner printable.  You will learn how to design basic layouts, create pages, get an understanding of the layers function in the program/ We will also go over how to use the shape tools, the line tool and how to use the the move and align functions. Then, we will get your file exported so you can test it on your home printer.  Finally, we will go over some tips to keep in mind for setting up your file for use on digital marketplaces like Creative Market and Etsy. Remember, in order to sell your final printable - you do need to make some changes to the final layout so it is your own. 

To make things easier, I will be including the class project affinity publisher template that you can edit and get acquainted with before you start your own. I will also include a PDF  and JPEG of the file that you can print out for personal use. If you want to check out some of my other planner printable products for inspiration - make sure you check out my shop on Etsy: Bella + Sophia Creative or visit me on Creative Market. You can also check out the pinterest board link I created with tons of bullet journal style printable inspiration: 

All you need to take this class is a computer with Affinity Publisher installed. And I would also suggest having access to some paper and a printer so you can test print your final design.

Who the class is geared toward

This class is geared towards beginners. You don’t need any prior experience  in graphic design or in using the Affinity Publisher software. I will be going over the basics to help you get comfortable using the software as well as understanding the design principals and elements.

Don’t forget to submit your final project deliverables to the class project gallery. Remember to load a jpeg of your final printable and if you feel inclined to, definitely share a link to the hi resolution version for download! I would love to see what you made!