# Learn & Master The Affinity Suite: Photo, Designer & Publisher - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/learn-and-master-the-affinity-suite-photo-designer-and-publisher/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Graphic Design · Solid intro · Rated 6 /10 # Learn & Master The Affinity Suite: Photo, Designer & Publisher Updated August 2026 Lindsay Marsh · Over 500,000 Design Students & Counting! Beginner · 357 min A two-instructor grab-bag covering Designer, Publisher and a linked-out Photo class, strongest when it slows down for real projects. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Flearn-and-master-the-affinity-suite-photo-designer-and-publisher%2F2086027775) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. This course promises the whole Affinity suite and delivers most of it, but the packaging undercuts the promise from lesson one. Affinity Photo, despite being named in the title, is not actually part of this course. It is a separate class on a different teacher's page, linked out through course notes. Anyone paying for "the entire suite" in a single purchase should know upfront they are getting two-thirds of it plus a pointer to the rest. ## What the Designer section actually teaches The Designer portion opens with a genuinely useful teaching device: a downloadable four-page tracing worksheet that has students recreate a page of shapes rather than sit through isolated tool demos. Circles, rounded rectangles, cogs, and stars each become an excuse to practice a specific skill, node editing, stroke-to-fill toggling, corner rounding, Boolean operations like Intersect and Subtract, before those same shapes get repurposed into an actual logo design. The logo project is where the course finds its footing: building a two-word wordmark with deliberate weight contrast (a bold sans paired with a script face), then bending that type along a hand-drawn Pen tool path since Affinity Designer has no built-in text-warp feature. That single workaround, drawing a stroke and threading text onto it, is the most transferable trick in the entire course. From there the arc moves into layout with a two-sided business card (bleed, art boards, grid snapping) and a type-driven poster, before a bonus illustration section led by a second instructor builds a sci-fi scene using the Pixel Persona: airbrushed planets, painted highlights and shadows, glow effects, blend modes like Color Dodge, and custom flare brushes. It is a fun, ambitious detour, but it moves fast and leans on "just try this and see" narration rather than explaining why a given blend mode or brush setting works, which will frustrate anyone who wants underlying principles rather than a sequence to copy. ## Publisher and the practical gaps The Publisher section is the most workmanlike stretch of the course. Building a cookbook cover and interior spreads walks through master pages, character styles, image frames, and text wrapping around a circular photo frame, and it closes with a useful comparison of Publisher's export quirks against InDesign, including the mildly annoying lack of a one-click single-page PDF export option. A closing tools roundup covers tables, cell merging, crop tools, and linked text frames for overflow copy, material that never made it into the main project but is worth knowing regardless. The course is honest about being beginner-level, and it earns that label: pacing is patient, sections are declared independent so learners can skip freely, and the instructor repeatedly draws parallels to Adobe Illustrator and InDesign for switchers. But the projects stay firmly at "recreate what I did" rather than teaching underlying design judgment, and production values are inconsistent between the two instructors. For someone new to Affinity who wants their hands on the tools quickly, this is a reasonable on-ramp. For anyone expecting a unified, one-purchase suite course with the depth the marketing implies, adjust expectations before enrolling. The standout The type-on-path workaround for the logo project, drawing a Pen tool stroke and bending text along it since Affinity Designer has no native text-warp tool, is the one technique worth the price of admission on its own. ## What you will learn - · Build vector shapes and icons using the Pen tool, Node tool, and Boolean operations like Intersect - · Construct a logo with contrasting typography, curved type-on-path workarounds, and custom gradients - · Design a print-ready business card and layout using bleed, art boards, grids, and snapping - · Paint raster textures, glows, and blend modes with the Pixel Persona to build a sci-fi illustration - · Lay out a multi-page cookbook in Affinity Publisher using master pages, text frames, tables, and text wrap - · Prepare and export files for both digital and print output, including single-page PDF exports Best for: Adobe users or design beginners who want a guided, project-based introduction to Affinity Designer and Publisher without reading a manual. Skip it if: Anyone who bought this specifically for Affinity Photo, since that entire section lives outside this course on a different instructor's page. Clarity of Instruction Helpful Examples Organization of Lessons Engaging Teacher [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Flearn-and-master-the-affinity-suite-photo-designer-and-publisher%2F2086027775)