About layers

What are layers?

You can think of each layer as being like an individual drawer in a clothes chest of drawers. Within that drawer you place shirts or blouses that are stacked on top of each other. In layer management, these clothes items are our individual vector objects, sometimes overlapped, sometimes not. Using our analogy, if your chest of drawers was see-through and you looked directly down from above it, you would see the topmost drawer contents in the foreground, the bottom contents in the background, and all other contents ordered in between.

All layer management is carried out from the Layers panel.

Here are some important points regarding layers:

• The order of your layers is important. A layer at the top of the panel is shown in the foreground of your document view, with the lowest layer in the background.
• Any selected layer(s) are highlighted, so that you can always see what layer you are working on.
• You can create child layers, which are nested under a parent layer. Child layers are perfect for use as an extra level of object organisation in more complex documents.
• Any layer can be hidden, to exclude its layer objects from displaying in your design.

Layer types

There are several types of layers that can be created; these are identified in the Layers panel with a unique icon, shown at the beginning of the layer entry.

Panel icon	Description
	Artboard—discrete design areas that can be sized to different page or mobile device sizes.
	Vector—used for placing vector objects into.
	Pixel—used for pixel-based editing (Pixel Persona).
	Shape—for geometric shapes created with shape tools.
	Compound—for non-destructive compound shapes created by Boolean operations.
	Curve—for open curves and closed shapes drawn with Pen Tool or Pencil Tool.
	Artistic Text—for scalable text.
	Frame Text—for story text contained within a frame.
	Path Text—for text that follows an open curve or a shape's outline.
	Shape Text—for text contained within a shape.
	Empty group—an empty group container for containing multiple objects as a single object.
	Mask—defines what content is hidden to reveal layers beneath.
	Image—self-contained placed images that retain the original image data including the colour profile.
	Linked/Embedded document—placed non-native documents (such as PDF, PSD, SVG, EPS) and native Affinity documents (afphoto, afdesign and afpub) files.
	Adjustment—used to correct or enhance a specific object, group, layer or the whole layer stack non-destructively.
	Symbol—the symbolised object shares its properties with other symbolised objects so edits across objects are simultaneous.