About layers

Layers let you organise the contents of your design into a logical tiered structure for better creative composition and object management.

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 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:

Types of layer

There are several types of layers that can be created. Each type is identified on the Layers panel with a unique icon, shown at the beginning of the layer entry.

Panel icon Description
Master page layer iconMaster page—a layer for the assigned master page and its objects.
Vector layer iconVector—used for placing vector objects into.
Shape layer iconShape—for geometric shapes created with shape tools.
Curve layer iconCurve—for open curves and closed shapes drawn with Pen Tool or Pencil Tool.
Artistic text layer iconArtistic Text—for scalable text.
Frame text layer iconFrame Text—for story text contained within a frame.
Path text layer iconPath Text—for text that follows an open curve or a shape's outline.
Shape text layer iconShape Text—for text contained within a shape.
Table layer iconTable—for presenting data in tabular form.
Empty group layer iconEmpty group—an empty group container for containing multiple objects as a single object.
Mask layer iconMask—defines what content is hidden to reveal layers beneath.
Image layer iconImage—self-contained placed images that retain the original image data including the colour profile.
Picture frame layer iconPicture frame—a picture frame that could be a placeholder or populated with a placed image or document.
Document layer iconLinked/Embedded document—placed non-native documents (such as PDF, PSD, SVG, EPS) and native Affinity documents (afphoto, afdesign and afpub) files.
Adjustment layer iconAdjustment—used to correct or enhance a specific object, group, layer or the whole layer stack non-destructively.

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