My son’s bday is coming up in just under a month. I have been wanting to get back into my design tools a bit more. So why not take it upon myself to dip my toes into a real project and make up a birthday invite? That’s what I did this week (it was one of my goals after all) and it’s turning out ok so far!

First off, I used Affinity Designer to create this invite and if you don’t know what that is, it’s a design tool akin to (and competing with) Adobe Illustrator. They also make Affinity Photo. I really like the tools, they seem super well done, and I would recommend them, but I’m no expert. If you want to find out more, Google is your friend.

Second thing is that a lot has changed with design tools over the years but I learned the essentials (vectors vs bitmaps, layers, masks, etc) pretty well back in the day and all of that is still as applicable today as it was then. The best way to learn is to start trying to make things.

For helpful refreshers on making this, I’ve used blogs, YouTube, a Udemy course, and the help docs in the app a generous amount. You can find anything if you have the right search query.

Ok, so the goal of the project was to make a Minecraft Dungeons-themed invite because that is all my son Sam talks about and anything else would be lame, obviously.

To do this, I wanted the large text on the invite to match the logo, which I got close to by using an example of the logo for reference and a Minecraft font that was close enough.

I also wanted some imagery for the background which was easy enough to find online.

Finally, composing the overall layout and tweaking the individual elements was done from scratch using Affinity Designer and just spending time figuring it out.

This is a “quick and dirty” project. I didn’t use loads of features in Affinity Designer that I should probably use, like Artboards and the different Personas, etc, and I’d like the text to have a 3D block effect, but I’ll get there (maybe).

I’m happy with where I’ve gotten to for the time being. Now time to send them out!