How to Use Assets in Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer comes packed with loads of tools to make your life as a designer much easier. When it comes to repeating elements on a canvas you don't want to have to recreate those elements each and every time. Affinity Designer's Assets panel is here to help you with that problem. Check out the video to get a quick idea on how to use Assets in Affinity Designer and why they are so powerful.

Using Assets

The assets panel is used to make repeatable UI elements easier and faster to get onto a canvas. You can use the default iOS10 UI kit that ships with Affinity Designer 1.5 or create your very own Asset Categories to use inside your projects.

Inside an Asset Category, you can create an unlimited amount of subcategories each with their own intended purpose. It's up to you to dictate what goes where but essentially it's a place to keep readily available assets for quick use by simply dragging and dropping them onto your artboard/canvas.

Key Benefits

• Dry approach toward design (Don't Repeat Yourself)
• If you do any type of prototyping Assets are your friend. (i.e. Wireframes, Storyboarding, etc..)
• Creating a design style guide can make putting together many screens a sinch with the use of assets. All of your UI elements are already defined giving you freedom to focus on UX.
• Import and Export assets to different computers/systems. This allows the ability to share them amongst a team a breeze. The only issue is maintaining the Asset library since it's a non-versioned type of setup.