How to Make Concentric Circles in Affinity Designer

If you need to make concentric circles (otherwise known as interpolated circles) in Affinity Designer, I’m sorry to say this is not possible with even spacing between each circle (as of now.)  An example of what I mean is that you may want a series of circles that resembles a bullseye but that has many circles-maybe 20 or 50 or so. 

In Affinity Designer we would try to do this by making a circle then using the CTRL+J buttons (at the same time) to make a duplicate (those are the “power duplicate” buttons and then we would use Shift+CTRL and drag out that duplicate with the mouse while keeping the left mouse button pressed-with the spacing we’d like in between- then we’d press CTRL+J again and as you can see in the result below-you’ll see that that is not going to make circles that are evenly spaced. 

Even though this is a feature that has been requested by numerous people for years from Serif it has yet to be implemented.  I searched everywhere online and tried to come up with a workaround that would keep me in Affinity Designer-which is important when I’m focused and feeling like I’m in a flow mode.  The problem is that if you’re looking to make 50 steps of incrementally larger circles with even space between each, it’s not something that is easily done and will take a lot of manual work and time in Affinity Designer.

I’ve come up with a workaround that I recommend because it really will save you a lot of time.  Please read this through before you decide, because It’s a lot easier than it will seem at first. My workaround is to download Inkscape-it will literally take you four minutes- I timed it and downloaded it just a minute ago.  (And that was with a slow Wi-Fi internet connection far from our router.) It’s just four minutes from the moment of going to inkscape.org to downloading it and having an open canvas to work in.

Another time saver is that you won’t have to save the completed concentric circles file or export it from Inkscape or import it into Affinity Designer.  You’ll just be able to literally copy and paste from Inkscape into Affinity Designer– and this is what’s going to save you a lot of time because all you’ll need to do is open this up, do what you can’t do in Affinity designer, copy and paste it right over and that will be it-it will just take you a minute to do once you get a little more used to the interface.

 If you don’t know what Inkscape is, it’s an open-source program, it’s free, it’s very safe to download, and it’s been around for years and years. This is the program that I used when I started out with vectors.  It’s comparable to Illustrator and to Affinity Designer.   This program has a lot of features that are not available in neither Affinity Designer nor Illustrator, so it’s got a lot of power.  One other example in Inkscape’s powerful abilities, besides interpolation, is that it can make instant calendars, taking the work out of figuring out calendar dates and creating all the numbers in calendar format for you.  It can even make an entire yearly calendar, like the ones you see on photo print sites. 

So back to our circles.  I know the interface is very similar but even the little differences could be enough to frustrate you while you’re in the middle of a design in Affinity Designer so I’m just going to walk you through the steps to make your circles.

First, we’re going to make a small circle-this will be the center circle. You might get a red circle to start with, it seems to be Inkscape’s default fill when you first open up Inkscape.  You can open the menu from the right by dragging it out to the left.

Change your fill by choosing the fill/stroke tab- specifically the fill tab that you’ll see at the top of the menu- and choose to either remove the fill,

or choose a different fill from one of the color menus right below the stroke and fill menu options. 

You can change the stroke in the stroke tab and the size of the stroke by choosing the Stroke Style Tab also at the top to the right of the fill tab. 

Now you might notice the scaling is a bit different in Inkscape (the stroke width might look like and be a different size than what you are using in Affinity Designer) this is because Inkscape is pure vector/.svg meaning you’re not going to be choosing dpi or ppi  when you open Inkscape.  Everything you do in Inkscape, even things like a blur will be .svg – it’s not going to throw a raster on top of a bitmap and make a weird combined .svg/vector and bitmap mishmash file, like other programs do (such as Illustrator and Affinity Designer.) Just choose a size that looks good for now, (or maybe copy and paste it into Affinity Designer to check it against your current ppi set up in there) as you can change it later in Affinity designer.

Next, choose your small circle with the select/transform tool (the arrow at the top of the left toolbox menu), then press ctrl+ D to duplicate the circle directly on top of the original then press CTRL+Shift while dragging out (with the mouse and its left button pressed down) the copy to where you want all your concentric circles to end.  You’ll notice Inkscape’s default mode is to scale the stroke up while you make it bigger, so you’ll have to go back over to the stroke style menu and change the width to match the original circle’s stroke width. 

The next step is to choose both circles and go to the top menu and choose “Path,” then choose “Objects to Path” from the drop-down menu and then go to “Extensions” in the top menu, then “Generate From Path,” from that drop down menu, then choose “Interpolate.” from that menu. 

A small window will come up in which you can choose to see a live preview,

choose how many circle steps you’d like to interpolate or create.  If you want the spacing between the circles to be even, make sure that “Exponent” is set to 0.  If you want the spacing to increase or decrease from the center, you can play with a small number such as .4 or -.4 to do so to start and then try larger numbers from there.  Choosing “Interpolation Method” 1 or 2 doesn’t seem to make any difference so either should be fine. Make sure the “Duplicate End Paths” box is chosen.  I have left the other two, “Interpolate style” and “Use Z-order” unchecked.  The live preview is great if you want to play around with all these settings.  When you are happy with what you see, you can click on the “Apply” button and then close the dialog box/window. 

At this point we can use the mouse to drag the new creation to the side (just make sure the Select and Move tool (the arrow at the top of the left toolbox menu) and you will see that the original end and start point has been left behind as new ones have been created and implemented into the newly created concentric circles.

From here go to the top menu and from the top menu choose the “Object” tab and from the Object drop down menu choose “Ungroup.”  While you still have everything chosen press the CTRL+C buttons to copy, switch over to your already open (hopefully) Affinity Designer canvas and use the CTRLl+V buttons to paste the circles into your canvas there.  From here you can do what you want with them!