furtonb

Depends on what you do.
If you're like me, a person who has to deal with graphics and/or technical drawings brought to you by your customers and you have to edit those as per their requests, you will find out it's a vital, necessary feature.
If you're designing stuff from the start, or doing creative stuff with Designer, you might be happy without it (albeit even you would benefit from this very feature if you ever did something complex and you needed to edit it for whatever reason - selecting every single object and modifying its  properties is simply horrible with say 4000 objects per one document).
Edit: You should consider amount of people (potential Serif customers) who want to get rid of Adobe not because it's bad, but because they can't afford its subscription model anymore, it would be more than reasonable for Serif to add such a trivial, but again, vital feature that basically still stops them from switching over. And omission of this feature is simply a blocker for them, even with reasonable prices and licencing model Serif offers.
From marketing point of view, I just don't get Serif, to be honest.

95% or more of what I need it for is for editing of PDFs of CAD drawings. 
If you’ve ever done that you’ll know it is simply impossible to do without this feature. 

Yeah yeah. And I have every right to ask them whatever questions I want. And to think that it is really really rubbish that this simple feature request has gone unresolved for so long.
You may notice that I’ve never said Serif haven’t got every right to plan and develop their software however they wish. That is blindly effing obvious but thank you for making it. It doesn’t negate any of the points I and many others have been making.
The only point you’ve made that I think is interesting is why I didn’t apply for a refund. I think the answer is probably twofold:
1- I always assumed / believed that supporting this suite was a two way thing. Showing support for it was and is important in the understanding that it is work in progress. No one expected it would be a complete feature parity replacement for Illustrator on day one. With that commitment was a hope that user feedback would be treated with respect and prioritised accordingly. 
2- I think I honestly thought that the feature must be there and I just hadn’t found it before it was almost certainly too late to get a refund. I’m not a person that uses vector design apps every day so it would be quite easy for a few weeks to pass by. 
 
Ultimately, this is a basic feature but one that was understandable wasn’t delivered on day one. Prioritisation of certain features and actually shipping a product inevitably results in some features not making the cut. 5 years later do I think that’s the case? No. Something else is going on and that is concerning.
Either that or those making the decisions about which features to prioritise, don’t actually work with complex files. Ever. 
I don’t know which is more concerning. What is clear is that it is really bad. 

Yeah, right, since we are paying customers.
 *looks at thread life* - Sure ok, I guess we can take your word for it
Is this feature being discussed next, Yes or No?

It's simple features like this that would help make Designer a true alternative to Illustrator. Selection tools are so basic, and universal, no matter how simple or complex the file is, I am baffled why this wasn't in the day 1 release, or at least in one of the many updates over the years considering the interest in this thread. My use cases vary anywhere from simple illustrations to manipulating GIS/CAD data. Limited selection tools make these jobs anywhere between inconvenient and impossible. Still use it, still love it, but Designer could be so much better. 

This has been requested for almost 5 years. Countless 'flashy' features have been added, presumably the focus over the merely essential.

As a on/off freelancer who picks up all kinds of odd jobs - this is the ideal, but a rare occasion for me. A lot of the time, I'm the guy they call who'll do the jobs no-one else wants, and I've been supplied all kinds of nightmarish files. Are those legitimate use cases for Affinity Designer? It's tough to say in every case, but all I know is that this feature would be invaluable in making broad attribute changes to existing creative, or reverse engineering complex vector files for lack of more suitable means. So I guess Affinity can aim to be robust enough to deal with those curveballs, or deny them as legitimate/worthwhile use cases and those users will just have to find another way to get the job done.
@robinp I realise we both support this feature being added, I just quoted to add context to my own experience.
I get this - but it doesn't really hold up as a reason not to add a feature for those that would use it. For those that don't use it there's no change, no degradation of experience. For those that do use it, it's a huge time saver.

I agree that people should charge for their time but this proposal is flawed in this case. Take the following situation:
Two designers (of equal skill) quote for a job requiring manipulation of a vector file. One uses Affinity Designer, the other Adobe Illustrator. Who do you think quotes for fewer hours?
It's absurd to suggest that you charge the client more money because you choose to use under-cooked software. That's not the client's fault! Any sane client would call you out and go elsewhere, somewhere—that likely uses Illustrator—making trivial work of an existing vector file.

Maybe that's an option for some, but not for us or, I imagine, many others. It would be crazy when quoting a fee for designing a building to pull out specific caveats about working with certain file formats. The client generally doesn't care what files we work with as long as we get the job done. Anything that slows us down costs time (and therefore money).

Surely the issue here is that while the guys at Affinity have done a wonderful piece of work, in today's world footnotes are an essential and basic feature in the DTP environment, especially for anyone producing academic publications. It is therefore no good looking back and saying how long it took Adobe or Quark to implement such features. The benefit of hindsight might have been better used by the Affinity team to have included this feature from the outset.

This is literally the last feature that is needed for my team to be able to switch to Affinity Photo. We work in a very high pressure environment, with each staff member doing their own photoshop of the rendering that they just completed. Sometimes a change needs to be made very urgently and currently, with the RAW as a filter in Photoshop, it takes moments to make the change. In the case that we do a small render, so there is a small section of the overall image that needs to change, the use of Develop from Photo is counter productive. Even saving out and loading the adjustment is a waste of time and needs to be avoided. The goal would be to have a "filter" or "Object" which holds the image embedded and can be opened to be added to.
I really hope this feature gets an ETA, as that ETA is when I move over to Affinity Photo. With the release of Publisher and the ability to switch from program to program without any "transition" I really want to move over to Affinity.
 
Any kind of response on when this might be out would be awesome!
Thank you very much for your good work, the program is exceptional and very impressive and the collaboration of the suite is fantastic.
Best Regards, Jackson

I'm just getting acquainted with my new Affinity software, I'm still using Illustrator/Corel for production, but I'm coming up against a lot of "where is such-and-such"  issues and searching this forum for answers. Selecting by colour is pretty important, as are all sorts of other selection criteria. I wanted to add a colour to a palette and make it "global" so I can adjust colour schemes, but adding a colour swatch from an existing document means it's only linked to the source object. Hence, to make it truly "global" it needs to be linked to all objects with the same RGB/CMYK/Whatever values so that changes to the swatch are relected in the design. Without being able to select objects by their fill/stroke colour as colour values this means having to individually select all the critters....which can get out of hand. I do understand this is a great app for the price, but maybe I need to keep paying more?

Responding to JGD above, did you even get a response from Serif?
I just don't see how they expect AD to be a successful product, unless they are willing to address some (most) of these shortcomings. Unless it's a Ponzi-like scheme, where they continuously try to impress and attract new users, naive to the app's lack of full functionality (I'm looking at me...) and just never get around to the things that are important in a production environment.
Now, that would be a big disappointment.
Thanks, JGD, for being so articulate and persistent. 

Crikey, what a story.
I'm in the same boat as you; I desperately want Serif to take a chunk of Adobe's pie but without a core features like this I cannot in good faith recommend Designer nor is it fit for my purpose. That's a shame because it has a lot going for it and has potential to be massive. Instead, in its current state it's gathering dust in my Applications folder.
Anyway, we digress and should keep it on topic.

I thought I was going nuts when I couldn't figure out how to select similar colors in Affinity Designer. This is a BASIC tool for the professional. No one has time to hand select each item they want to color change.

If I had known AD lacked a core feature like this (and then it be ignored for 5 years) I wouldn't have bought it; AD is virtually unusable to me in this state. To be completely fair though, that's on me, I shouldn't have assumed what appeared to be a "serious Illustrator contender" would have a staple feature like this. It's like if your favourite code editor didn't have a Find & Replace feature. Sure, you can use it but inevitably you're in for a world of pain that just isn't worth suffering through for the other good features.

Jesus Christ, this has evolved one of the most commented topics in the "Suggestions for Affinity Designer on Desktop" subforum.
This has been 4,5 years since the initial post, this is kind of infuriating: I don't know about the compound of your user base, but I hardly can imagine, that all of them would be solely graphic designers. I myself is an architect, which is very related to drawing stuff, but Affinity Designer is not my main tool, but I have it to complement my workflow, to make competition drawings fancier, to clean things up, etc. But I cannot do this, because after importing such PDFs/SVGs (ehm, DWG support?), it takes an insane amount of time to order things to a managable manner: in Illustrator, we had the "select same" options. I will go further: this is the "standard" of the selection process to me, this is a screenshot of ARCHICAD. I'm not going to expect this to happen, because this software is over 30 years old now and costs a few magnitude more than any of your products:

 
But to confuse the need for such things with global colours show, that not even the user base has the proper idea why this is important. Yes, if I create documents from scratch, I can use them, but lets say I have a masterplan with tens of thousands of lines, where colour, linetype, thickness can be the differentiating thing, please don't expect me to manually select all the "dashed red hairlines" in my file, because that's just not cutting it. Speaking of cutting: I guess some other out there is dealing with laser cutting from time to time, where the intensity and the speed can be controlled with colours with many machines. If I have a file (again, created in an external source), I would like to recolour everything to the necessary colours. The use cases of this feature would not be  "in-the-application" workflow, rather "to-the-application" workflow, when you don't have an illustration set up in Designer's terms. Right now, it is painstakingly manual. 
To sum it up, there is a plenty of people out there willing to support this company, because Adobe is not feasible for them. Many of these are supposedly not graphic designers. If you are not going to implement features, that are important for them, it is completely fine with me, but the lack of meaningful feedback makes people fed up. It seems to me, that there is a tendency for me to find features that are not "artistic" and has no love on the development side. I understand that you are developing a fairly new set of products, which has unforeseen delays and complications, but what I miss is the feedback. Right now there are no input from the development here, if someone would explain the situation why its not yet done, why it won't be done, what are the more important things, focus areas for you, then it is fine. But that is by far not the case!
 

I will chime in here, as new to Designer, and, I am hopeful, a recovering Illustrator user.
Until I had to search for - and fail to find - the "Select same <attribute>" function, I was fully committed to making Designer my only vector drawing tool - purchased the full edition, bought the book, thought I was in heaven. But now, seeing that this often-requested and >necessary< function has been on the wish list for going on five years, the bloom is off the rose. That it's not even on the time line is a deal-breaker.
Devs: please consider that there is a wide variety of use cases for Designer, and each user has unique needs, but the basics >must< be included for this to be a viable product.
/rant

As someone who creates generative designs with 1000s of objects, it's nice to know that this feature will finally make an appearance at some stage, as without it I'm simply unable to use AD.

Hi MEB,
Thanks for the feedback. The global colours were mixed into this discussion by others in the previous replies. I don't expect anything at this point regarding this feature – this thread has been going on for multiple years without any concrete promises, which renders it clear to me, that I'm not in your primary audience, which is acceptable to me, as I do my drawings elsewhere primarily. I had similar feelings with this thread as I had with the ones prior to Affinity Publisher's release – there was no clear communication to the release dates, those being pushed over and over, nor is it clear to me, that anything will happen soon: yes, it could be certain, that Designer 21.3 will have some feature that makes it possible to do something similar than the "select same". That's something I expect to hear from our politicians. Jokes aside, sorry.
I think there had been mentions about the way the Corona development is happening: they have a very clear Trello timeline about the expected deadlines and features to be implemented: https://trello.com/b/dgI8vjDb/corona-road-map-cinema-4d
I know it is a different field with a different scope, but to answer your question, I would expect something like this. Right now you offer insight in the form of this thread: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/842-affinity-designer-feature-roadmap/
I understand that you have other priorities, and I am in no position to expect you to change this. I am working in a completely different field, where the promised scope and the expected deadline come hand in hand, not in the form of "it's done when it's done", even if it comes to maintaining support.
Another perspective of mine on this: if someone would be in the need of cleaning up externally created drawings, he/she would instantly see the desperate need for this feature, where this could save ridiculous amounts of work. I work with a lot of software on a daily basis, for a ~seamless workflow I am using some kind of built-in selection tools, Designer being left outside the circle for this reason. Anything else basically has a workaround, or Designer is more than capable of doing, making other files workable is not doable with the time constraints I usually have. But we are talking almost half a decade gone since the initial wish. With this in mind, I flip your question: I don't know what else do you expect from your users in this thread.
 
edit: grammar

Order. Order! [Slamming my gavel on the block]
Based upon these recent findings and the overwhelming evidence presented by eyewitnesses, it is the opinion of this court that a similar ID book feature must be added to Affinity Publisher and that evidence thereof must be shown no later than the first update after the official release date. Failure to do so will result in a penalty of expulsion from the Association for Cool Software Companies. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Affinity? Council, please ensure that your client complies with these orders lest we be seeing him back here facing a far harsher sentence in the near future.
(long way around to saying: "+1")

The InDesign feature I use most—weirdly—is the INDB book feature, where InDesign creates a container file of sorts to hold a pile of individual InD files that make up an entire book, as well as manage their page numbers. Being able to manage chapters individually is vastly easier than working on a 300+ page single file. Would love to see this implemented—or something like it. 

Apologies, I think I may have caused the global colour confusion by suggesting it in a previous comment.
I did stress that this only satisfies the single use case of changing the colour of multiple objects (fill/stroke) without having to selecting them - something that if you weren't aware of might save you some time.
In hindsight perhaps I shouldn't have muddied the thread topic. My bad.

So you start off with more than one of each colour and have to remember to use the same swatch each time, not too hard in theory but bet you make a mistake. Then you make it worse by, say, redefining a blue to green and having some original green and some new green. And then what if you just wanted to swap blue strokes to green and leave fills alone? I'll let you do it that way but that's not my idea of fun. Plus, like I said, there's more to it than just colour changes. I use it for selections, opacity and stroke widths more than colour swaps, and that's why I count it as a fundamental tool.

Some great points there, @furtonb, I agree with much of what you said, particulary your last sentence.
For me, Affinity Designer is a Lamborghini without wheels: It's incredibly capable and sexy but due to lacking something so integral it stays parked in the garage gathering dust.