I found a way to create proper vector brushes in AD1 and AD2

[tcarisland]

A few weeks ago I noticed that Affinity Designer 1 supports CPAL/COLR-fonts on Mac on newer versions of OS X, it still doesn't support SVG color fonts though, and I have to use Pixelmator for that. Since I can't see Serif releasing information about their color font support, I would wager that the support comes automatically from the Cocoa SDK and OS X UI libraries rather than something they've done themselves.

I'm a type designer who works mainly with Glyphs, and about a year ago I upgraded to the full version of Glyphs 2 that supports creating many different types of color fonts. Today I found out that I can use the curved text tool to write text along a curve, if I instead of letters draw repeatable shapes, I can use glyphs to create a "brush-font", and since they're color fonts that means I can create overlapping shapes (by that I mean I can create a white layer instead of just white being the negative space as it used to be with BW-fonts).

Since fonts are normally vector-based, a CPAL/COLR-font will provide a real vector brush that when converted to curves becomes a proper vector outline. The only major downside is that it can only support iterative/repeating brushes as it can't warp the letter to fit the curve or support any form of brush pressure.

I might consider making a brush font and releasing it as part of my font-portfolio, any suggestions for repeating shapes you want released as part of a color font?