My biggest two qualms with Designer are about stroke variation

[Cartoonjosh]

As an illustrator, the toughest fights I've been having since I ditched Adobe for Affinity regard Stroke width control with Designer. I'm referring to the edit of strokes, not to the freehand drawing mode, which works very well. So, it's about what I can do after I've drawn a stroke, regardless of it being done with a Wacom or node-by-node with the Pen. Good line variation editing is essential in many illustration styles, and having a quick and "instinctive" approach to it equally is. Designer's "Pressure" Graph (in the Stroke panel) is exactly NOT that. It's a nice idea, on paper, but in practice it falls short of being either fast or a pleasure to use. The number of nodes in the stroke or shape don't match with the nodes in the graph; it's very hard to apply the necessary detailed expressivity to strokes. It's basically hit-and-miss, and I always end up with a frustrated "good enough" feeling. Strokes really need to be fine-tuned node by node on the actual drawn object, not by glancing at a chart on the side. I hope there is a release somewhere in the future with a true Width tool. Knowing the tremendously good work Affinity has been doing in every other respect, I'm pretty sure it would even be a BETTER tool than Ai's! 

The other, albeit lesser, problem with strokes, is not being able to hide or erase stroke segments between two (or more) nodes. Masking portions of the stroke with the Erase Brush by going back and forth between Pixel and Vector Personas works, but, again, as useful it is for other tasks, it's not ideal for hiding segments of a line.

Thanks for listening!  

[EricP]

Completely agree that a proper stroke width tool would be very useful and more practical than current pressure curve.

Regarding the other point, have you tried the new scissor/knife tool ? I find it very well implemented 

[Cartoonjosh]

3 hours ago, EricP said:

Completely agree that a proper stroke width tool would be very useful and more practical than current pressure curve.

Regarding the other point, have you tried the new scissor/knife tool ? I find it very well implemented 

Yes, the Knife tool has the Scissors option, which is nice and comes close to solving it... but not quite. Instead of hiding a section between two nodes of contour of a filled shape -  in such a way to get a simple gap in the contour -  Scissors actually cuts a new shape from the original shape. The severed segment of contour, or stroke, is actually a new independent shape, albeit it being open. In fact, if you move the nodes of the segment you'll get a colour fill where the geometry crosses. 

I'd find hiding segments of the contour line of a shape useful for situations in which I don't want contour where two shapes overlap. For example, the arm of a character must not have a contour where it overlaps with his torso. I tried to draw different positions of an arm over a torso and then tried to use the Scissor option of the Kinfe tool to eliminate the contour near the shoulder, and got mixed results. In some cases I could drag the portion of contour away and nicely got the gap I wanted, in other cases I got slices taken out of the entire shape because - I assume - Designer needs to recreate a coherent Geometry. 

Someone elsewhere in this forum brought the example of Moho, a 2D animation app, which has precisely this "hide (parts of) contour" function.  Adobe Animate, too, can very easily erase contour segments of a shape. I realise comparing apps, which are totally different coding worlds, is not a useful exercise,  but I just mean to get the idea across...  

The funny thing is that if I draw the shape as it should be from the beginning (which, of course, I usually do  ), by leaving an open gap, say, in the above example I'd draw the arm without closing the shape near the shoulder) and then use the Vector Fill tool to colour it, Designer will actually respect the drawing perfectly.  So the issue arises only when editing.