Creating Flat Icons in Affinity Designer

Not too long ago, Serif released the second installment of their Affinity line of design software for Mac: Affinity Photo. In the few short weeks since its launch, critics have described Affinity Photo and its sister program, Affinity Designer, as serious competitors to Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator. Always wanting to be on the cutting edge when it comes to Mac Store apps, I figured I’d buy both apps. Before you ask, I’ll tell you right now that both are absolutely fantastic and well worth the money ($50 per app). That said, I found it surprisingly difficult to find decent tutorials for either program online, especially when it comes to flat design. As a result, I’m going to show you how to create a flat, long-shadow-esque vector icon in Affinity Designer. I figured it would go well with my tutorial on how to do the same thing in Synium’s Logoist 2. Here it goes.

To begin, fire up Affinity Designer, open up a canvas of any reasonable size (I used 1920 x 1080), and drag an off-white filled rectangle to cover the canvas. This will be our background. Next, drag a colored rounded rectangle onto the canvas and ensure that it is square (I designed a Facebook logo, so I used Facebook’s official brand color). I also used a border radius of 15%, but you can use whatever you like. Your canvas will start to look like the following:

Now add your main content. For me this was a lowercase ‘f’. Your content should either be another vector image a letter (we will need to use vector curves later on, so this is important). Once you have added and styled the vector, move it underneath the colored rectangle we created. This will clip it at the border so there is no overflow.

Next, duplicate the vector/text layer by press Command+J. Select the duplicate layer and convert it to curves (Command+Return or by going to Layer / Convert to Curves). Switch to the node select tool (the white cursor icon in the toolbar). Select the nodes on the side in which you wish your shadow to appear. Be sure not to select the topmost nodes, as they will distort the appearance of the long shadow. For the Facebook icon, this turned out to be the following nodes:

Holding down Shift, use the arrow keys to move these nodes into the far corner of the screen.

Now we can move this layer beneath the initial vector/text layer and give it a black fill.

Next, we must move the leftmost nodes on the right side to match the angle of the shadow we have just created. In this icon, these nodes exist in the arch of the ‘f’ and right below the line running through it. Moving these nodes down, we get the following:

Finally, we can give this layer a low transparency (I used 15 to 25%), to create a long shadow effect. The final result will look like this:

Additionally, we can also add a black filled rectangle to the screen, convert it to curves as well, and use the same node tool as before to add a long shadow to the icon as a whole.

We could also add a gradient fill to the rectangle and use the fill tool (color wheel icon on the toolbar) to angle it to match the angle of the inner shadow. The final result would look something like this:

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a line in the comments.