deeds

Firstly, thanks for responding, Dave.
 
Secondly, it's not just about me.
 
Most (I think) using vector design software, make artistic text first (CorelDraw term!) for all the little bits they need, and to try fonts out for each thing they're attempting to make, and then, at some point, they'll need to write paragraph text, so they just convert one to paragraph text and off they go.
 
But it's often little instance of text from this to that. And back again, if and when it doesn't work.
 
Whilst it took Adobe forever to include this functionality in Illustrator, much of the rest of the world had this ability to go between "lay out text" and "logo text" since at or near their inception.

@deedsNails it.
In an effort to refresh both design and software skills (dormant since art school over a decade ago), I purchased the suite. I've been fiddling, running through tutorials on Skillshare, seeing what still works in my artistic brain. Sadly, AD is technologically incapable of allowing users to complete a frustrating majority of elementary design projects. I think this is generally where @deedsfinds the pillar of his argument that AD is much more for illustration than design. There's too much that it cannot do that anyone who expects to work seriously will need it to do.
AD is a 20th century solution to 21st century design problems. Until it grows up, the only aspect of all-things Adobe where an argument can be made for it is through the pricing model, which seems wonderful, until tripping over the inability to execute a specific, relatively fundamental design technique leads to the asphyxiation and stymieing of the creative mind.
The "roadmap" that a prospective buyer might peruse before deciding to make a purchase is a well-manicured cul-de-sac.
 

I'm afraid these are all indicative of the exact opposite of your desires. 
The "rush" on arrowheads was over multiple years. Yet it feels tacky, wacky and hacky. And is just that. So are dashes. And these are the most simplistic of line endings and line features. To me, these are yet another indication that the product design constraints and compromises favoured illustration, not design. As a result, it's years between requests for primitive design features and their implementation, for things (like blends) that are integral to iterative, creative and exploratory digital design, but of almost no use to illustrators.
The features you're talking about in Adobe Blends, that are useful for iterative and explorative design, came about as a byproduct of the desire to provide complex gradient creation and editing - via blends - something blend shapes are only tangentially suitable for. It was Adobe's way of saving time by repurposing focus on heavy blends gradients rather than creating a good set of gradient tools. I remember when this was first brokered to the world of designers. Adobe already owned the design media, so got them to parrot their beliefs, despite how clunky it was/is.
 
So I completely agree, looking at Adobe blends for inspiration should only be done from the perspective of their integration... for blend mechanics of operation, other means and methods are far superior. And there are big issues to solve, like unwinding direction and origin, interpolation when vertex counts are different, rate of change curves, etc. But to do that kind of discernment requires a designers eye and experience, just as knowing integration well requires utilising it, and learning to lean on that integration for creative empowerment, deadline targeting, deliverables and differentiation. I don't think anyone at Affinity does this kind of product feature testing and consideration, let alone being capable of separation wheat from chaff.
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the prism of vector based illustrative endeavour, an improved version looks like Affinity Designer. 
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the tunnel of programmer art creation requirements and thinking, you get Sketch, from Bohemian Coding.
When viewing Adobe Illustrator through the prism of creative design requirements, it looks abhorrent. Because it is. Freehand, Xara and CorelDraw were better for general design, Fireworks was in a class of its own for UI design, and Flash was an innovative set of odd ideas that sort of worked.
We are now at an odd spot. 3D design programs have superior 2D design features than those apps pretending to appeal to 2D designers, yet those 3D design apps have the 2D features as a byproduct of providing ways to prep for 3D.
 
Affinity Designer has somewhat gotten the effects right, but the rendering is bad, particularly in things like gradients and glows, shadows and blendings between them. And the lack of ability to reorder and add extras is beginning to look as it is: antiquated. Then there's the two different ways of interacting with them, neither of which is good. A fair indication that the features were checkpoints rather than considered and internally desired.
 
Affinity Designer vector node editing remains its strongest point (please excuse the pun), as a byproduct of the fascination with illustration, not as an end and goal in and of itself. This is borne out by the fact that the points aren't anything like capable of the elastic adjustment possible in CorelDraw or soft selection in 3D apps both of which date back to the early days of digital creation wherein vertices are considered parts of meshes that make up shapes.
I'm using less than 10% of Affinity Designer because I don't have a Wacom device, is how I view this. For anything complex in design, I turn to a PC and Corel and 3ds Max.

I'm afraid these are all indicative of the exact opposite of your desires. 
The "rush" on arrowheads was over multiple years. Yet it feels tacky, wacky and hacky. And is just that. So are dashes. And these are the most simplistic of line endings and line features. To me, these are yet another indication that the product design constraints and compromises favoured illustration, not design. As a result, it's years between requests for primitive design features and their implementation, for things (like blends) that are integral to iterative, creative and exploratory digital design, but of almost no use to illustrators.
The features you're talking about in Adobe Blends, that are useful for iterative and explorative design, came about as a byproduct of the desire to provide complex gradient creation and editing - via blends - something blend shapes are only tangentially suitable for. It was Adobe's way of saving time by repurposing focus on heavy blends gradients rather than creating a good set of gradient tools. I remember when this was first brokered to the world of designers. Adobe already owned the design media, so got them to parrot their beliefs, despite how clunky it was/is.
 
So I completely agree, looking at Adobe blends for inspiration should only be done from the perspective of their integration... for blend mechanics of operation, other means and methods are far superior. And there are big issues to solve, like unwinding direction and origin, interpolation when vertex counts are different, rate of change curves, etc. But to do that kind of discernment requires a designers eye and experience, just as knowing integration well requires utilising it, and learning to lean on that integration for creative empowerment, deadline targeting, deliverables and differentiation. I don't think anyone at Affinity does this kind of product feature testing and consideration, let alone being capable of separation wheat from chaff.
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the prism of vector based illustrative endeavour, an improved version looks like Affinity Designer. 
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the tunnel of programmer art creation requirements and thinking, you get Sketch, from Bohemian Coding.
When viewing Adobe Illustrator through the prism of creative design requirements, it looks abhorrent. Because it is. Freehand, Xara and CorelDraw were better for general design, Fireworks was in a class of its own for UI design, and Flash was an innovative set of odd ideas that sort of worked.
We are now at an odd spot. 3D design programs have superior 2D design features than those apps pretending to appeal to 2D designers, yet those 3D design apps have the 2D features as a byproduct of providing ways to prep for 3D.
 
Affinity Designer has somewhat gotten the effects right, but the rendering is bad, particularly in things like gradients and glows, shadows and blendings between them. And the lack of ability to reorder and add extras is beginning to look as it is: antiquated. Then there's the two different ways of interacting with them, neither of which is good. A fair indication that the features were checkpoints rather than considered and internally desired.
 
Affinity Designer vector node editing remains its strongest point (please excuse the pun), as a byproduct of the fascination with illustration, not as an end and goal in and of itself. This is borne out by the fact that the points aren't anything like capable of the elastic adjustment possible in CorelDraw or soft selection in 3D apps both of which date back to the early days of digital creation wherein vertices are considered parts of meshes that make up shapes.
I'm using less than 10% of Affinity Designer because I don't have a Wacom device, is how I view this. For anything complex in design, I turn to a PC and Corel and 3ds Max.

Unfortunately it was never like this. I would have thought that a drawing application, or design program, especially when starting from a blank slate, would have learnt from the massive rise in parametric, procedural and stack based creativity software, and made it this way. But Affinity didn't. 
 
This is much sadder because the corner tool is actually pretty good, and their non-destructive booleans show they certainly understand why non-destructive editing is so creatively empowering.
 
 

Yeah, to be able to blend shapes – at least with those options Adobe Illustrator has been offering for ages – seems like a must-have for Affinity Designer for me, too.
I really don't want or expect Affinity Designer to become a fullgrown Illustrator replica or clone, as it has a fresh and original approach which I really do like.  But on the other hand there are certain features or tools which are such useful and versatile timesavers for designers doing vector graphics that you just miss them dearly when they're not there and you really feel the program not offering them is lacking something vital. It makes it hard to love AD as much as I actually want to. Come on: even FreeHand had a tool like that and that's ages ago...
So please, please incorporate that feature in a (not all too distant) future release of AD. Or maybe in due time offer some kind of API to enable third party developers to come up with supplements/plugins for AD that maybe not everybody using AD needs or wants, but a sufficient number of users will be glad to add (and yes: for a moderate fee, if it's worth it).

Sometime during the 1.6 cycle, performance starting taking a hit, and then the energy used increasing. Now it's such that in 1.7.x the backgrounded Affinity Designer is causing other apps to run slower, MacBook to run hotter and the energy information to be showing that it's a significant user of energy, whilst in the background. 
 
When in the foreground, zooming and panning is less than the stellar best that I saw in the versions prior to 1.6. And CPU and GPU are getting flogged.
 
2018 MacBook Pro with the 560X.
 
 

These problems seem to go back to the renderer itself, as png files have problems, too. Especially if alpha is involved. To get good glows and other gradients to look their best, from AD, I have to export at 4x or 8x the size, take into Photoshop, and then export at the correct size.

that has already been done. Try to keep up.

From a sample size of two. You and me. Genius.

Not doing that. In the case of you, it's not an act.
My main issue, with folks like you, is the needless injection of yourself into something that has nothing to do with you, your choice of operating system or workflow.
Yet you still presume to know I'm wrong.

Yes, this feature needed. Miss this most from Illustrator and CorelDraw. It is the heart of geometric repetition and evolvement. 

Thanks god, I'm not the only one.
This.
First I think this behavior is a bug in Publisher, not a feature. It makes no sense at all.

This would be miles better if the Gradient tool recognised that the user was in stroke editing mode and editing a stroke rather than always defaulting to Fill and needing to be changed to stroke in order to edit the stroke's gradient. Perhaps renaming the tool to just "gradient" rather than fill gradient would help discoverability, too.

This would be miles better if the Gradient tool recognised that the user was in stroke editing mode and editing a stroke rather than always defaulting to Fill and needing to be changed to stroke in order to edit the stroke's gradient. Perhaps renaming the tool to just "gradient" rather than fill gradient would help discoverability, too.

Sadly, there is no easy way to jump to the conflicting shortcut. You simply have to trawl through the list(s) until you find it.
I hope that Affinity can add a search to the keyboard shortcut dialog, that works in both directions - for menu actions and keypresses. 
Plus, a double click (say) on the conflict warning triangle should jump to the conflicting shortcut. 
 

[M] key for Rectangle, Ellipse, Rounded Rectangle cycling is ridiculous. What does it stand for "Make"?
 
And it's nowhere near where the left hand hovers on a keyboard, meaning the eyes must go down to the keyboard to find it for the left hand, or eyes off screen AND the right hand must come off the mouse/trackpad/tablet to operate the M key.
 
And it needs cycling to get to anything other than rectangle.
 
So, here's a suggestion:
 
E = Ellipse
R = Rectangle
RR = Rounded Rectangle
S = Shapes, Triangle actually, but more on this in a moment
 
S also pops up a list of shapes directly adjacent the mouse for easy, rapid selection, no need to race over to the side menu and click, scroll down, click again.
 
Otherwise, these sequential keys enable a full pick of the shapes, via follow up presses, like so:
 
SD = Diamond
ST = Trapezoid
SG = polyGon   // starts at 6 sided. SGGG = 8 sided. [s, Shift + GG = 4 sided] etc.
SS = Star
SSS = Double SStar
SSQ = Star sQuared
SA = Arrow
SD = Donut // SDDD = 3 ringed Donut
SDS = Donut Sliced // Which the 'Pie' Tool actually is because it's got an inner radius
SES = Ellipse Segment // Come on... That's what it is. Segment is an ugly word
SEC = Ellipse Cresent // kind of like the obscuring they do.
SF = Fluffy cloud  // Fluffiness starts at 12. SFFF = 15 Fluffs. Any use of [shift+F] reduces fluffiness
SRT = Rectangle Callout
SRRT = Rectangle Rounded Callout
SET = Ellipse Callout
STD = Tear Drop // You and I both know they cause tears.
SH = Heart
 
Now, I know you want more:
 
So, for speed of use, and consistency, I suggest.
 
SC = Circle
SQ = sQuare
SQR = sQuare Rounded
SR = Rectangle
SRR = Rectangle Rounded
SW = Wave // Sine Wave, The more presses of WWWWW the more wave cycles in the line.
SAW = sAW // Again, more WWWWs = more cycles of the wave

Because there has to be a name label for each slider somewhere. In the Color Studio panel, part of that space already is used for that, so why not use more of it for the tabs?

What do you think about not hiding it at all, at least in the Color Studio panel, maybe something like this?

Also, in the large Color Chooser window (the one that appears when you double-click on a color well), there is a lot of unused space on the right, above the Close button. That could be used for a pair of Opacity & Noise sliders, with the % field next to the names above the sliders so it all fits in the width of that space nicely.

In an era in which words are buttons, it is absolutely insane that the words "Noise" and "Opacity", when clicked on, are not buttons, but the little circle of colour that looks like a part of the slider is a button for the state of the slider, not a value of the slider... surely someone is having a lark.

Matt, if you could make iterative snapshots, you might well revolutionise how people do iterative, illustrative design. Imagine having 30 versions of a logo design in a "timeline" of snapshots, for example. 
 
So, please, yes, consider it. Especially given the fantastic nature of your vector tools for shaping logo style art.

@Dan C Haven't yet tested at other resolutions. But can tell you both computers I'm experiencing this on are different MacBook Pros. The first of the retinas and the most current model. Both are running at their native resolution of 2880x1800, not the scaled native, the actual native, high resolution, pixel perfect version of this resolution, via SetResX on one, and SwitchResX on the other.
 
So this might be the problem...
 
EDIT: Checked at normal, default scaled "native" resolutions. All works fine. 

Just add shape/layer binding, then we can use our own symbols and shapes as arrow heads, or ANYTHING else at the end, or vertices and their midpoints.
Much simpler, much more powerful.
Let the binding have constraint rules, such as rotation and anchor. Then call it a day, send programmers out for lunch.

I applaud your use of  "line end effects" rather than "arrowheads."
It is so 1980s to think in terms of just arrowheads. As with other still-missing features, I very much hope that the reason for the delay is that the Affinity team has something far better in mind than the prevalent conventional wisdom.
Those who also follow Gravit Designer's (rapid, but sometimes too rapid) development know that it has been under a similar "must have" outcry for "arrowheads," and that it was just recently added. I have high regard for Gravit's  nobel effort to restore what has been for too long abandoned in vector drawing programs: interface elegance. But its obviously rushed-out-the-door arrowheads treatment is possibly the poorest I've ever seen. I sure don't want to see Affinity go that way due to unrelenting user pressure.
Paths have strokes and paths have ends. Nowadays, everyone expects (and rightly so) vector-based path stroke features to be far more elaborate than just the archaic basic color, weight, and end caps settings. Sadly, Illustrator's Pattern, Art, and Scatter Brushes (despite their needlessly overblown interface and lack of integration with other features) leads that functionality and is one of the really very few true advantages of that program.
All the while expecting more sophistication for path strokes, there seems to be a prevalent fixation on the archaic single-purpose use of "arrowheads" as path ends. Yes, arrowheads are a common need. But they are just a pointy-shaped vector graphic positioned at the end of a path and rotated to maintain tangency with the path's stroke. Thinking of "arrowheads" as a distinct feature needing its own interface is as archaic as thinking of dashes as something worthy of a standalone interface entirely distinct from other path strokes.
Even the conventional treatment of "brushes" misses the elegance mark. It's an example of how the typically-strained "natural media" metaphor breaks down. Like Illustrator, most programs have come to treat "Brushes" as an attribute. But in the physical media metaphor, a brush is not an attribute; it's a tool. A brush applies strokes, just as a pen or a pencil applies strokes.
Paths have strokes and paths have ends. Path ends should be every bit as versatile as path strokes (including so-called brushes). Both represent opportunity to exceed the functionality and disconnected non-integration with the rest of Illustrator's cumbersome, scattered, and grab-bag-like interface. Powerful as they can be when used with a little ingenuity, Illustrator's brushes are hamstrung by their stand-alone nature:
You can't simply use a Symbol as the "end tile" of a Pattern Brush. Why? You can set an option on or off to "Scale Strokes and Effects" for any ordinary object(s) in the document, but you can't set that for Symbols, strokes contained in Art Brushes, or strokes contained in Tiles of Pattern Brushes. Why? You can't simply assign a Symbol as a path end. Illustrator has its archaic separate Arrowheads setting. You can create custom Arrowheads, but to do so, you have to open a separate Arrowheads file, draw your custom "Arrowhead", and store it in that separate document as--wait for it--yes, a Symbol! You then quit the program, re-launch the program, re-open your document and now your "Custom Arrowhead" is available in the stupid separate Arrowheads popups of the Attributes panel. Arguably (albeit a stretch), Adobe may have somewhat of an excuse for this convoluted nonsense in that it is a very, very old program, so certain archaic aspects have to be perpetuated for the users' old files. But Affinity is new; it should be free of such backward constraints. I'll say it again: Market share be hanged. Adobe Illustrator IS NOT the program for anyone to emulate in creating a far better drawing program.
Nowadays, most programs provide a symbols feature. Path ends should be integrated with symbols. Any symbol should be able to be applied as a path ending. The interface for applying a symbol as a path end should include these options:
Setting the rotation angle of the symbol, and whether that angle is relative to the page or to the path. Setting the scale of the symbol (relative to how it is stored) and whether changing the path's stroke weight correspondingly affects the scale of its ends. Setting for whether or not strokes contained within the symbol's artwork are scaled. Most programs treat paths as having two primary attributes: stroke and fill. But they really have three: stroke, fill, and ends. It's way past time for someone to provide a modern, powerful, and elegantly integrated treatment of path ends.
JET

Done in Affinity Designer. 
 
iPad sized loading screen. 
 
Deliberately retro. Text objects are a single item with a lot of effects. Plus glows. Wheel benefited greatly from using the symbols and spinning.
 
Please fix the bug in the anchor positioning of groups and copies, it's infuriating when repeatedly selecting, copying and rotating things.