10.5 Assets Panel

Hey welcome back to the fifth and last bonus lesson in Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna go through how you can use the Asset Management panel that Affinity Designer built into version 1.5. Now this functionality is really cool because what it lets you do is build up a big library of all the different assets that you create over time. Any time you make something you want to keep, you can put it in your Asset Library. And then if you want, you can also export that library and share it with other people and the reverse is also true. Other people can share their Asset Libraries with you. So, this is a really powerful and really useful feature. All right, so, let's go through, and have a look at how it works. So, the way to access the Assets panel, is to go to View > Studio, and then open up Assets here. By default you're gonna see that there's already a bunch of assets in here that you can use. This is just a UI kit that comes with the Affinity Designer by default, and it lets you have a look at how the Assets Management panel works. So we've got a bunch of different categories here. And inside each of these categories we have a ton of different assets that you can drag and drop into your designs. So for example, we'll grab this little toggle. We can just drag and drop. And these assets can be regular objects, or they can be symbols. We can see here it says Symbols, so we know that what we've just dragged in is a symbol. And if what you have is a symbol, then you have access to all the same type of things that we went through before, like being able to change the color of everything on the fly. And all the different aspects of your symbols, and have them synchronize throughout your design. So let's have a look at how you can create your own collections of assets and how you can add to them. So the way that these assets are organized is into categories and subcategories. So right here we have iOS 10. This is a category of assets. These little sections here are each subcategories. So if you wanna make your own collection, you wanna head up here to the top right button on the Assets panel and click Create New Category. By default this is gonna be called Assets. So then, you want to rename the category from the same menu. We'll just call it test category, just to give us something to work with. Now to add something into your asset collection, all you have to do is select the object in question, then choose the subcategory that you wanna have it added into. Hit the little menu on the right of it, and then choose Add from Selection. So then they can see a little modified switch turns to green is in our test category. Now if you wanna start organizing your collection into subcategories as well, then it's back up to this menu on the top right. And then click Create New. So I create subcategory. And then to rename it, click the menu to the end of the subcategory in question, hit Rename and then give it whatever you want. So now if we wanted to add something into our new category. Let's say we have a new shape. Now we can just select from this one. And now that object is going into the new subcategory. And you can actually also reorder the assets that are inside your subcategories. So we just got a couple in here so we can demonstrate. And if you decide you want to have this little object here over first in the line here, all you have to do is hold down ALT. Then you can drag and you can drop the assets into whatever order you need them to be. So it's fairly straightforward to add assets into a collection and organize it with the subcategories in the order that you want. So now let's say that you've built up a really great collection of assets here. And you have a colleague that you wanna share them with or you wanna sell a set of assets online, for example. You can actually take all of these and have them exported into an Affinity Designer specific asset collection file. To do that, all you've got to do is click this little menu up on the top right of the assets panel here, and just click Export Assets. There's a specific Affinity Assets file extension, so you just give it whatever file name you want. Hit Save and then any other Affinity Designer user will be able to import that file. And it will open up in this panel in the same way that you saw it when you saved it out. So let's have a look at that in action. I'm gonna import the Grade UI asset collection that I got as part of my purchase of this software, so you might have access to this UI kit as well. So what I'm gonna do is back up to this menu again. I'm gonna hit Import Assets. And this is the grade UI asset kit. So I'll just select it and open it. And now here is this entire collection of assets, so tons and tons of stuff to use. And all of this stuff can get dragged and dropped straight into your document. And these are normal Affinity Designer objects fully editable, just like anything that you might create from scratch in Affinity yourself. When your assets start getting bigger, it can get more difficult to try to find your way around them and find the things that you're looking for. So there's also a little search field down here. For example, we can search for check to find all the check boxes in this collection. Or we can search for input. And that gives us a bunch of input fields to choose from. And now, there's just one more thing that you wanna be aware of when you're working with asset collections. And that is, that what whatever shows up in this list here, is specific to the computer that you're working on at the time. So just because I've imported Grade UI here, if I go and work on another computer, it doesn't mean that that Grade UI kit is gonna be available there. I would have to import it over again. Or if I'm working on a collection of my own and that's helping me with the project, unless we take advantage of this function here, which is Embed in Current Document. So if I embed this category of assets into this document, it won't matter which computer I'm working on. All of those assets are gonna continue to be there and available for me. All right so that's it, short and sweet. That's how the Asset Management panel works. That's how you can add your own assets into your own collections, how you can import collections that are being created by other people. How you can organize those collections, search those collection,s and embed them into your own documents. And that wraps up our five bonus lessons. And it shows you some of the really awesome features that have been added into Affinity Designer since we first created this Quick Start course. So I hope you really enjoyed the new features and the new lessons. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you soon.