V. Affinity Designer

As an alternative to Inkscape I’ve tried the commercial software Affinity Designer
I’ve heard about, that the Affinity Products are a very good alternative to Adobe.
They offering a 30-day trial license. It’s enough to play around with it.
The price for Affinity Designer is round about 55 Euro ONCE. There is no other subscription needed.

So let’s start with

drawing a square

First we have to start creating a new document

In the document settings, it’s possible to change the units, if needed.

Then we can create a square

changing Fill and Stroke colors

In the top right, there is a color wheel. To making laser cut designs, it’s seems to be (more or less) unusable, but there’s a way to change the wheel, to other color pickers.

Just click on the little hamburger-menu on the right side…

There are many options, to change the color picker style. I prefer the sliders. This looks similar to Inkscape and it’s possible to directly enter the color code.
Inside the sliders window, we can choose, how the color-code has to be displayed. I prefer to leave it at RGB.

With the two circles, we can choose, which color we would like to change.

So, we want no infill, we have to “activate” the infill color circle and then we press the little circle with the red stripe.

changing size and position

For changing the size and / or the position, there is a “Transform-box” on the bottom right side.

Here we change the (W)idth and the (H)eight to 50 mm each.

draw, change color and resize a circle

Now we start drawing a circle inside the square.

The circle will be automatically put in a new Layer.

The stroke is deactivated by default. It’s a bit annoying, because the circle disappears, when it’s not selected.
So we have to activate the stroke line in the tab beside the color..

In the transform section, we change now the Width and the Height to 25mm each.
If needed, we can deactivate the background color. It was automatically deactivated in my case.

arranging

For arranging we have to select the circle and the square, first. In the top bar, are icons for arranging.

group objects

We can group this objects by selecting both

and pressing “group” in the top bar

move and scale

Now we can move the grouped object by just drag and drop
To scale the object, just mark it and click and drop one of the point, around the object. The changes will be proportional now, because of the grouping.

The Affinity Designer Testcube can be downloaded here
and the exported svg file can be downloaded here