Stephen_H

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.
 
 

I think the point is that most of the 334 posts in this discussion, is that we want Affinity Designer to be that option. We don't want to turn to other apps. We should be turning from Inkscape to Aff Designer, not the other way around.
What if all Aff Designer users downloaded the free, opensource Inkscape just to trace their scans, and then discover that Inkscape is a better app? Simple rule of business: Never send your clients to your opposition, because they might not come back...

Ah-hah!
 
That is a nice feature. I often struggle with the bounding box handle colour – it's too similar to sky so changing the colour is very useful.
 
Putting that colour indication under the layer isn't obvious or intuitive because it doesn't look like an attribute of the layer above it, but rather the way the top layer interacts with the layer below.
 
A thin line at the end of the layer would've made more sense and be more obvious.
 
Like this screenshot:

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.
 
 

Agreed. JPEG export preview is essential. At the very least, it's logical.
The cutting edge features I vaguely refer to are things like live vector brush strokes, advanced slice exporting, scalable objects, live shapes, live corners... things like this. Nice to have, good to brag about, but not essential.
The problem is this... we buy the app for these features that stand out in a comparesson chart against Illustrator, but then we find out that Designer only plays lip service to the basics. eg: Affinity's apps are part of a very small groups of designer apps that support a CMYK work flow which is essential to print designers. Working in RGB with the option to export as a CMYK PDF is not the same (see Pixelmator for this issue). However, when you actually start working in Designer, you quickly learn that while its color management/workflow is is genuine, it's not mature and robust.
Affinity apps remain on my computer more as novelties than my primary work tools because of this. I support Affinity because I'm hopeful of a future, but right now, I just can't let Adobe go.
 

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.
 
 

+ Blend tool/command
Dave Dennis is right. The concept (hence the code) for a blend tool is 30 years old.
It's even in open source software. Here it is in the open source app, Inkscape:

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.
 
 

I really don't understand the problem here.
We have a feature roadmap for version 1. All updates for these features will be free. What ever version you have purchased will receive all the feature promised.
Version 2 has not even been discussed so we have no clue what version 2 is going to look like or what features it will have. When it rolls around and we get it presented to us, I'm sure it will be worth every cent. If it isn't, continue using the version you currently have (which you own for ever).

I would argue that we don't actually have a Layers Panel at all. It should be called the Objects Panel. The closest we have to layers are the way groups are displayed. I miss being able to lock and hide layers, and limit an object's position (Move to back, is limited to the bottom of the layer, not the whole document)
Unfortunately, pages are also treated as objects. More specifically, pages are like permanent groups, so it would be nice to have a proper Pages Panel as well. Or even just a pop up pages window like tabs are managed.
We need the Layers Panel to be re-thought and get it on the right path before we start throwing more features at it.
I suggest we have a very simple Layers Panel that just shows the layers and not the objects within it (like InDesign or Quark Xpress). Then we rename the Layers Panel to Objects Panel. The objects displayed in this panel are limited to the layer you have selected. The Objects Panel won't get out of control and we have proper layers for object management. If you don't like/need layers, then just have one layer and keep using the objects Panel as you are currently. No great change to the current work flow and we now have real layer management.
 

I forgot to add another problem with swatches not carrying over to another document via copy-n-paste... if your swatch is a SPOT color, the SPOT swatch is left behind. Try and re-make that swatch from your pasted object and you'll only create a CMYK swatch. Your SPOT color is gone for good.
This is a blinding oversight that should be treated as a bug fix rather than a missing feature.

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.
 
 

Power Duplicate is a poor substitute because it's not live, hence not editable. If you don't get it right first time, you have to do it again and and again and again and again and and again and again and again and and again and again and again and and again and again and again and and again and again and again and and again and again and again and and again and again and again, until it's right.
Fran, we all feel your pain and have been wondering where the blend/interpolate feature is since it's been aound for about 30 years in discontinued applications and even in modern day open source applications. You'd think the developers could just copy-n-paste the code from the open source stuff.
Apparently not...

+ Blend tool/command
Dave Dennis is right. The concept (hence the code) for a blend tool is 30 years old.
It's even in open source software. Here it is in the open source app, Inkscape:

I also want this feature. (Though can this not be [mostly] achieved with the perspective tool? Free transform/Distort is nothing more than just adding 1 and 2 point perspective)
As for the second point raised in this discussion... we should make better use of tags when we open a discussion. This will group associated post topics together and make future searches easier and more relevant.

As a quick solution, what I'd advise to Affinity is to not try and integrate all features into their current apps. They should make them standalone utilities.
A standalone tracing app using opensource code from Inkscape, just with an Affinity "skin" applied to it that exports Affinity native files, would get the job done fine. Affinity could even charge $5 for it rather than adding it as a feature for free which will frustrate everyone with its slow delivery and impact on earnings. If you think it's important, I'm sure you'd happily pay a measly $5 for it. Instead we wait patiently for its turn to come around in the features roadmap where a developer is going to lovingly integrate it into Designer and probably spends months troubleshooting it because it's conflicting with something in Publisher due to the shared file formats.
I think Adobe has already done this:  "Save for web", "Filter gallery", "Liquify mode" and "Raw photo developer"... all of which feel like standalone apps with their own interfaces. They feel like they were purchased from third parties and shoe-horned into Photoshop. Years later, they still sit on the fringes and no-one seems to have noticed, or even seems to care. Coel Draw definitely did this. It was called Corel Trace and was an app, not a feature in Draw.
I think a range of "Pro level utilities" would be a great money-spinner for Affinity while we wait for v2 of everything to be released.
I'd be willing to pay $50 just for an app that will allow me to proof a repro-ready PDF. Just give me the ability to view each colour channel individually to confirm over printing, knockout, spot colours, colour mode. Add listing image resolution, profiles, dimensions, PDF versions etc and I'd trust ALL repro files coming out of Affinities apps. This wouldn't be something all users would need or want, so make it an optional extra.

Oh dear. Don't hold your breath here. Arrow heads was a feature that we called for right from the start, and it took many, many, many years for them to finally appear. And now you go and ask for "custom" arrow heads? Tsk, tsk. What are we going to do with you a cowboy like you? 🤠
 
 

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.
 
 

Ah, thanks for the insight. The comment about their own legacy software having features that are missing caught me by surprise. I have watched their roadmap, but I now take it bit a bit of salt because features on it have taken incredibly long to implement (The "arrow heads" saga comes to mind)
I think they should take a break from adding new features, correct and refine what they have and then launch version 2. It should also carry a cost to upgrade. I'm worried that Affinity's rate of development is slowing because of financial constraints. My copy of Designer and Photo were both purchased in 2014 when they were launched. I still get the benefit of the upgrades, but Affinity has received no financial compensation from me since. While I can expect to own my software for ever, I can't expect new features and free updates for life.

This is very important - Both for the excellent points outlined above by Stephen and for the structure of selection outputs. Being able to see you have all the required parts of a logo being lifted from a layout to a format like SVG or PNG, without having to keep opening the file to check.
I know I say this a lot on this forum but, This was very good in the Serif Suite. Affinity's own legacy software.

I personally thought exactly the same thing - I would love to see a release where NO new features are added, but LOTS of little things are improved. Kind of a "major maintenance release". I'm guessing this would make a lot of existing customers very happy.
I still love Affinity Photo and Designer, but still can't get my head around why new features are continually added, whilst some basic glaring omissions are passed by..

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.
 
 

Ah... use the Control key instead of Alt key... fantastic. Thanks for that tip. It just feels unintuitive because I come from an Apple background where Alt is always duplicate. I think of Control as a command key to be used with another key, not with a curser action.
Thanks for this. It makes a BIG difference.

I forgot to add another problem with swatches not carrying over to another document via copy-n-paste... if your swatch is a SPOT color, the SPOT swatch is left behind. Try and re-make that swatch from your pasted object and you'll only create a CMYK swatch. Your SPOT color is gone for good.
This is a blinding oversight that should be treated as a bug fix rather than a missing feature.

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.