It was July 2015 when Serif Europe launched the amazing software that many designers and illustrators like me are using now as their main tool for professional work. ( This is a sponsored post.) If you are in the design world, chances are that you’ve already heard about Affinity Designer, a vector graphics editor for Apple’s macOS and Microsoft Windows. The author is not affiliated with the product in any way, and the article has been reviewed independently by Serif as well as SmashingMag’s editors. In this case, I added this as an Application Palette.While this tutorial was kindly sponsored by Serif, the creator of Affinity, we’d like to point out that it is written by an independent design professional who personally enjoys using the software and shares her lessons learned. Next, go to the Swatches Panel and choose to Create Palette From Document from the top-right small hamburger menu. As I wasn’t happy with the result, as the overall palette seemed too dull to my taste, I took the liberty to tweak these colors and make them more vibrant. Using Affinity’s Color Picker, I extracted the colors on the first row. You only need a small spot to focus your attention. I took a screenshot of the Google search and cropped out this particular part, which is the one that caught my attention.

Instead, the idea is that you work out your color palette, but with some help to not start from scratch. Just look for something that you like.Īvoid the obvious ‘ Color Palettes‘ search because that would be too boring and predictable. In this case, I searched for: ‘ Home Decor Pastel Mint.’ Of course, you could search for ‘ Happy tomatoes dancing at dusk‘ if that’s what you feel, and it would be alright too. Just Google some terms that contain the feel or the color scheme you’d like to give to your illustration. This is a helpful tip when you feel too lazy to come up with a simple color palette from scratch.

Affinity sketch