Affinity Publisher Workbook English

Firstly, in terms of physical quality, this is very very good. It's very well produced on quite thick glossy paper and feels like it will last a long time and survive frequent consultation. There are what appear to be very sturdy pull-outs, although it seems a shame to mar such a lovely object by actually pulling them out.Secondly, the book shows you how to prepare various types of documents through a series of guided exercises, rather than simply listing all the commands and describing what they do. For those of us not familiar with DTP, this is a very helpful way to present the concepts involved. My only slight quibble is, because of the guided exercise format, it can be tricky if you're just looking for a means to carry out a specific task such as uploading text from an MS Word file (my particular bugbear).Overall it seems a very comprehensive introduction to using Publisher which I feel will leave most, if not all, of the independently produced guides on offer looking a little wanting.Affinity also has a comprehensive guide to all of their products (not just Publisher) available online, although these do assume a fair bit of prior knowledge. They are however worth bookmarking as references.If you want to use Publisher effectively, this is a very good guide, verging on an essential purchase. The cost may seem a little off-putting but the book is worth the money.

Affinity Publisher Workbook is not cheap, but the publication has pages of quality paper and pages which show its value. More than this, the Workbook was produced with Affinity Publisher which shows what it can do. It is also put together by a team of professionals from designer to photographers.The Workbook is well written and structured. It starts with the Interface so you know your way around. Then shows what is available in Studio Panels holding tools for different tasks like colour or fonts.It has three Personas which are interfaces with tool sets for different tasks: Publisher persona for page, brochure, booklet and book creation then Designer persona for graphic design and illustration and finally Photo persona for photo adjustment and effects. Unless you have the other Affinity products installed only Publisher persona is available and really you need them all as you will always want to work - for example - on logos or photos in publications.A great advantage that Affinity has is that it has integrated all three apps with a common file format. If you use any stand alone program you can open a file created with any other app. So if you are working on a photo and within it you may have layers or colour schemes you can access your work in progress. Without this you would import the photo and not be able to work on it with all the edits.The Workbook goes through Core Skills which professionals see as key. It has a very useful chapter on design principles. But most of the book applies these to projects and you work along side the professionals to produce a top quality brochure or book or company publication stationery. You learn much more here than how to use the app.A book might explain how to use the tools but in practice we need an experienced view on why we choose a particular font, colour scheme, page format and particular design. Here you gain many insights not found elsewhere.

I bought Affinity Publisher, Photo and Designer. They were half price, and cost less than the workbook so I got cheaper guides for Affinity photo and designer, but invested £39 in this tome. It is exceedingly well laid out. Clear guide to the interface followed by chapters describing tasks such as choosing and using typeface, using master pages, layout etc. However it doesn't simply describe how to do it using Affinity Publisher, rather the book explains the conceptual and creative rationale why you would do something one way rather than another, e.g. advice to have no more than 3 typefaces for a document, or how to use whitespace to draw attention to elements.Supporting all the instructions are lots of sample files that you can download from the website and then use as you follow the workbook. This wealth of resource and the high quality of the hardback and glossy pages easily justifies the cost of the book.Chapters 3 to 6 contain lots of useful projects to work though. You are guided through creating documents using the resources you have downloaded (images etc). The instructions are good in that they do not say "click this button to do x or y" but rather they tell you what to do e.g. "Place the image xxxx.jpg in the frame". This assumes you have read the section on placing images in your document. It forces you to use the techniques you learned in previous chapters and this reinforces the learning. If you don't remember, you can go back to the detailed chapters and this will reinforce what you learned as well.I was reluctant to buy such an expensive workbook but I am so impressed with it, I shall probably get the matching Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer workbooks as well.