houseofdeadleg

Many thanks for providing that for me and my apologies for the delayed response here as I have been out of the office for a few days!
I can confirm that I'm seeing the same error/warning message when opening this file in either AFD V1.10, V2.0.4 or V2.1 and therefore I am logging this with our development team now for further investigation.
Although I can't provide an exact reason for this, inspecting the file within a HEX editor, I can see that there is missing/corrupted data in the file, which is likely the cause of this error shown when attempting to load your file - 

As mentioned above, our team recommend saving/loading Affinity documents locally, then creating a copy of any files for uploading to cloud services such as Dropbox for backup purposes in order to avoid such corruption.
I'd recommend continuing to work with the previous version of this file for the time being as the investigation process can take some time, but we'll be sure to be back in contact with our findings.

So over the years I periodically do a search to see if Designer has added the blob brush tool yet. Just saw this back and forth and thought I should add my two cents as honestly the lack of a Blob Brush and matching Eraser is literally the only reason I haven't switched over to using Designer. I am still using Illustrator CS6 hamfisted into working on a newer OSX and Adobe Draw on the ipad (which is basically just the Blob Brush as an app).
I primarily do tshirt designs that I sketch out on paper, scan in, and then draw over with the Blob Brush. Gives me a very fast artist based drawing workflow that is resolution independent for re purposing the designs to other products etc. The blob brush is absolutely great for this, feels natural and is very quick to use and would love it if something similar were to be introduced for Designer.
I appreciate the pure idea of the pen sort of tool and for many uses it is the right choice, but for quick freehand artistic drawing, nothing I've tried beats the blob brush. Yes it creates lots of unnecessary points, but in terms of the end result of the artwork and the speed I get to create it, extra points really don't matter to me, it's the final image that counts and the ease getting there.
I liken it to back in the day when I used to 3d model in Maya, individually moving vertices around on polygonal meshes. I used to be all about exact, efficient models. And that's still great for certain applications, but compared to the free form sculpting packages that are around now, for pure artistic freedom and speed, I default to sculpting packages every time.

@JET_Affinity
Plotting points is tedious and more in line with an engineering mindset. Some tasks are suited to careful, surgical point plotting, but for digital illustration which assumes an artists mindset, there should be direct intuitive drawing and painting tools. Natural, direct, efficient, intuitive.
As for your complaint about excessive points, that's a software engineer's problem, not an argument against a painting tool that creates freeform vector shapes. Consider the problem Serif had with excessive points for expanded strokes.

A couple of things I've noticed when using the appearance panel, these might have been noted before –
I have a collection of styles I use to add textures, but if I have a object with multiple strokes/fills etc, it's not possible to add the style to a new fill layer without it removing all the other fills/strokes. So if i want to add the texture style I need to duplicate the object and apply the style to the topmost one. Is there a better way to do this, eg. can you save the pattern fill as a swatch? It doesn't seem to be possible to add new strokes to grouped objects. In illustrator for example, objects can have their own fill/stroke, and then be grouped and have new fills/strokes applied on the group level, all of which can be edited separately.

I'm really hoping Affinity updates to allow true 100% vector brushes to be more editable and relevant in future releases. What are currently labeled "vector brushes" are not 100% vector and cannot be expanded as vectors. They have their uses and I appreciate them - but in my line of work, I need to be able to export 100% vector - no raster in the final output.
Right now we can only modify the 100% vector brush to a simple taper on each end - As I have attached to this post, there are many other types of tapers and such I'd love to be able to do with a 100% vector brush.
Going a little further - I'm hoping for a blob-tool that can allow for any shape to be made and used -

Sorry to bump an old thread, but any idea if this will be introduced at some point? Applying a raster stroke to follow a vector path (but on a seperate layer) is something you can do easily in Photoshop, seems strange that it can't be done in AP.

Downloaded the 1.7 update last night and had a quick play, really liking the new feature additions. Some of them might've been handy for this project I've been working on recently, ah well:)
 

Downloaded the 1.7 update last night and had a quick play, really liking the new feature additions. Some of them might've been handy for this project I've been working on recently, ah well:)
 

Downloaded the 1.7 update last night and had a quick play, really liking the new feature additions. Some of them might've been handy for this project I've been working on recently, ah well:)
 

Downloaded the 1.7 update last night and had a quick play, really liking the new feature additions. Some of them might've been handy for this project I've been working on recently, ah well:)
 

Downloaded the 1.7 update last night and had a quick play, really liking the new feature additions. Some of them might've been handy for this project I've been working on recently, ah well:)
 

It does this already, unless I'm misunderstanding something - select the "Show selection in layers palette" in the User Interface section of the preferences.

I haven't posted much here recently but thought I'd show a few things I've done in AD over the last couple o' months.

I haven't posted much here recently but thought I'd show a few things I've done in AD over the last couple o' months.

I haven't posted much here recently but thought I'd show a few things I've done in AD over the last couple o' months.

I haven't posted much here recently but thought I'd show a few things I've done in AD over the last couple o' months.

I haven't posted much here recently but thought I'd show a few things I've done in AD over the last couple o' months.

I haven't posted much here recently but thought I'd show a few things I've done in AD over the last couple o' months.

I haven't posted much here recently but thought I'd show a few things I've done in AD over the last couple o' months.

I'm torn. On the one hand, the updates look absolutely great from the quick play I've just had. On the other, none of my work got picked to be on the welcome screen, so… grrrrr

Something I've been working on recently - http://houseofdeadleg.co.uk/portfolio/the-kings-hat/
 

I did most of it on the fly, directly to AD. The only thing that existing prior to that was the crown, which I doodled to test out some pens a couple of years ago. I was stuck for something to draw, so I thought I'd do a better version in AD, then of course a crown needs someone to wear it, and so on and so forth.
 
Number two of what could turn into a bit of series is attached.

Something I've been working on recently - http://houseofdeadleg.co.uk/portfolio/the-kings-hat/
 

Something I've been working on recently - http://houseofdeadleg.co.uk/portfolio/the-kings-hat/
 

Something I've been working on recently - http://houseofdeadleg.co.uk/portfolio/the-kings-hat/