There are several ways of choosing colours for your design.
About selecting colours
An essential requirement for efficient design is the ability to access colours easily and intuitively. Users may have a preferred method for colour selection, so Affinity apps provides a choice:
Colour panel—for selection from colour wheel or sliders using different colour models. Opacity and noise are further colour attributes which can be applied. A Swatches section in the panel lets you select swatches from different preset or custom categories, including PANTONE® Colours.
Colour Picker Tool—for sampling colours anywhere on your screen; great for complementary colour work.
Context toolbar—for selection of curve or brush colour when using various drawing and painting tools.
Gradient Tool—apply or edit a colour gradient across your object. Choose a gradient type from the tool's context toolbar.
To select a stroke/fill colour (using default HSL Colour Wheel):
Tap the Stroke or Fill colour selector from the top left of the Colour panel.
Tap-drag for a hue colour on the outer ring.
Tap-drag in the inner triangle to set the combined Saturation and Lightness.
(Optional) Set Opacity and Noise values using the lower sliders.
The active colour selector updates to the selected colour.
To switch colours between the swatch selectors:
Tap the Stroke or Fill colour selector to make it active—the frontmost swatch is considered to be active.
To use a different colour model:
Tap the navigation buttons above the panel's Colour Wheel to use RGB, CMYK, HSL, LAB or Grey sliders instead.
Using swatches
The Swatches section of the Colour panel provides colour swatch presets that are selectable from various palettes (Colours, Gradients, PANTONE® colours) including a custom document palette.
To create a document palette:
Open the Colour panel's Swatches section.
From the Panel Preferences, select Add Document Palette.
To save a colour to a palette:
From the Colour panel, choose a colour using the panel's sliders.
Open the Swatches section, and select a palette (e.g. your created Document palette) from the Swatches category pop-up menu (or use left/right navigation buttons).
From the Panel Preferences, select Add Current Fill to Palette. The swatch is added to the palette.
To use a colour swatch:
Choose a palette category from the Swatches category pop-up menu.
Do one of the following:
Tap a colour swatch in the palette.
Tap a swatch from the Quick Colours or Recent Colours swatches.
Tap the No fill swatch from the Quick Colours swatches to remove the stroke or fill colour completely.
Accessing PANTONE® Colours
A wide selection of PANTONE® colours are available in Affinity Designer. You can choose from Goe, GoeBridge and Color Bridge palettes as both coated and uncoated.
To access PANTONE® Colours:
From the Swatches section of the Colour panel, navigate the category list (or double-tap), and select your preferred PANTONE palette.
To create a document palette: