Getting started with Affinity: essential tools and workflows
Brand designer and educator James Martin (Made By James) has created a new tutorial to help you get started with Affinity, showing how he uses the app as an all-in-one creative space in his day-to-day practice.
For anyone new to Affinity and looking to understand how it works, this walkthrough is a practical place to start.
What you’ll learn in this Affinity tutorial
In the video, James walks through how he uses Affinity, sharing the parts of his process that help him move from idea to finished work without breaking flow. Along the way, he shows:
- How he customizes his studio setup and chooses tools based on the task at hand
- Moving fluidly between Vector, Pixel, and Layout studios as the work evolves
- Building graphic elements with artboards, Boolean operations, and the Pen and Text tools
- Turning hand-drawn sketches into clean vector artwork using Image Trace
- Creating simple t-shirt mock-ups using the integrated Canva AI Studio
If you’re learning how to use Affinity for the first time, this gives you a clear sense of what working inside the app really feels like. You see how vector design, layout, and illustration connect to support the way designers think and build, and how flexible the workflow becomes when everything lives in one place.
About James Martin
James Martin is a brand designer and educator with nearly 20 years of experience. He has worked on branding projects for more than 1,000 companies and is a partner at Lincoln Design Co, where he supports teams with storytelling, education, and brand thinking.
He is also a member of Canva’s Designer Advisory Board and works closely with the Affinity team, bringing a working designer’s perspective into how the tools evolve.
Ready to start using Affinity?
Watching James work shows how the tools and workflows come together in real creative projects, but things really start to click once you spend time inside the app.
Download Affinity and experiment with sketches, vectors, and layouts at your own pace. It’s a practical way to see how a single, unified creative space supports the way you already think and work, from early ideas to finished results.
