For those unfamiliar with the product, Affinity Designer is a vector illustration app by Serif positioned as an affordable alternative to Adobe's Illustrator. It is available as an app for iPad as well as an app on the desktop. I use a Microsoft Surface so my experiences pertain to the desktop app on Windows. I understand the app / MacOS is the primary focus for Affinity, so certain things (like performance) may be expected to be better there than what I experience on Windows.
What is it Good For?
I mentioned Designer is a vector app, but in fact, it is a hybrid vector/raster app. Its interface is divided into "personas" which change up the workspace: vector, pixel, and export. In the pixel persona it functions somewhat like a pared-back Photoshop, with the ability to paint using brushes based on textures and perform the usual raster drawing functionality. Theoretically, this makes Designer a potential one-stop-shop for one's design and illustration purposes: one could use the pixel persona to make organic illustrations and combine them with design elements like typography and clean geometric details in the vector mode. In practice I find painting in pixel persona to be a little unwieldy and unresponsive for my purposes and I prefer to bring in raster illustrations done in another program where they are called for and then work with them inside of designer. To be fair, this may not be too dissimilar to how some use Photoshop, starting in a more intuitive painting app before bringing it in to be further worked on and adjusted with Photoshop's more robust feature set, or simply starting with a traditional illustration digitally scanned and then iterating on it digitally. However, when it comes to tweaking, Designer is a little (ok, a lot) underpowered compared to Photoshop, and the pixel mode generally feels more appropriate to me to add a little bit of texture to a vector illustration as opposed to extensively editing an existing raster drawing.
Because it is a vector drawing app, Designer is well-positioned for the creation of UI elements. Through the export persona one can set up "slices" of what to export from the design (such as artboards or individual icons), specify the export resolution (1X, 2X, etc.) and format and destination. Further, the export can be set up to be continuous so that as the design is updated the exported elements are updated as well. This means it is at least somewhat capable of handling the task of creating and exporting lots of UI elements: icons, menu items, etc. But while Designer is certainly broader in scope than Sketch or Figma, it lacks significant depth in comparison to those and just as Illustrator is a little ill-suited to UX/UI work in comparison to Sketch, Designer is similarly unwieldy. You won't find prototyping tools enabling you to run through mockups and lots of other UX/UI specific bells and whistles that have become must-haves over the years. However, like Illustrator it features more robust drawing tools, so it may be better suited to producing more detailed UI elements once the basics have been laid down in Sketch. However, trying to use Designer for multiple use-cases brings me to my first limitation: lack of workspaces.
A Desk Without Drawers
Designer offers a good amount of customization of the workspace: you can dock and undock toolbars, choose which toolbars to display and what is in each toolbar. This means you can start to emulate the setup of a program that you are more familiar with or just adjust things so that they better suit your workflow. For example, for UI design work there is little need for the brushes panel, which just becomes clutter, while the symbols panel, granting access to reusable elements, becomes essential. But this all comes with a significant drawback, or rather, a crippling feature-deficiency: no workspaces.
You cannot save your customizations as a separate workspace, so you can throw out the window any hopes of having a UI-design optimized workspace followed by one for illustration and another for publishing/print design. This actively encourages the use of separate apps for separate tasks, since one is loathe to discover the many uses of Designer when it involves remembering and implementing a new setup every time one switches tasks. Of course one has some ability to plan one's work so that separate tasks can be performed in sequential chunks, but as any practitioner knows, some unpredictability is unavoidable and having to squeeze in a few illustrations between an intensive UI project becomes burdensome without workspaces.
Workspaces are often seen as something not really needed by those just starting, but I would argue against that: new and inexperienced designers benefit immensely from having predefined workspaces tailored to specific design tasks, and online design tools with their emphasis on templates attest to this. For more experienced users, part of the promise of a fairly broad app like Designer is its ability to emulate and thereby replace multiple apps, but the lack of workspaces may mean this is a non-starter in terms of productivity.
As far as compatibility goes, Designer is capable of importing and exporting PSD (Adobe Photoshop) files, and while it can import AI (Adobe Illustrator) files, it cannot export them. It is here actually that my opinion of Designer as a 'vector' drawing app begins to sour a bit because as it turns out, there are several features that are quite welcome but unsupported as far as vector compatibility goes.
Just A Little Adjustment
Designer supports adjustment layers, similar to Photoshop. This means that you can apply a lens filter, colour balance adjustment or split toning (as well as quite a few other options) to a layer, set of layers or objects and have the results apply as they would in Photoshop. These adjustments aren't limited to pixel layers, they function on vector layers just the same. This kind of functionality is great and something that is missing from Illustrator (at least it was last I used it but something similar might have since been added), however, there is no way to readily apply these adjustments on a 'vector-level'. What do I mean? Allow me to explain.
Your design is just about ready, but after considering it, you realize that a little colour adjustment would help it pop. Rather than having to export the image and adjust in Photoshop, you can adjust right in Designer. But, if you then try to export that design as a PDF, SVG or other vector formats, the adjustment layers will be unsupported and in the case of a PDF your design will end up rasterized. Adjustment layers, therefore, become a welcome addition, but only as part of a workflow where the final output is a raster image. Despite their availability in the vector persona, they break vector compatibility and so cannot be widely adopted in a vector-specific workflow. While I've seen lots of praise for Designer's inclusion of adjustment layers, there is precious little about how they are only truly useful for a raster output.
Of course, this doesn't negate the value of adjustment layers, but they cannot be considered as integral to the workflow as Serif might want potential customers to believe. However, Designer's vector limitations continue.
(Not So) Smart Objects
Designer (and the more photo-specific sister app Affinity Photo) do not support Smart Objects per se. Rather, every layer is in a sense automatically a smart object. I mentioned adjustment layers, which enable one to alter layers non-destructively, and other tools such as transform can be similarly non-destructively applied. However, while Designer can import Photoshop files, Smart Objects are lost in the process and those layers become rasterized. This can make life particularly difficult for those who regularly work with product mockups, where a robust set of templates exist for Photoshop with which one can use to import one's design. In such templates, the design will generally reside on a Smart Object layer, so that the perspective transforms needed to fit the design onto the object are automatically performed. One might find Designer's lack of support for Adobe's proprietary format forgivable, but the truth is that the alternative provided is sorely lacking.
In Designer, one can apply basic transforms to an object (scaling, rotating, stretching and skewing) and this is done non-destructively. Effectively, one can make a mockup template in Designer that uses the Designer-specific workflow. However, Designer's transform tools are severely limited. First, Designer does not have a perspective transform tool or a mesh transform tool, so only the most simple adjustments are possible. To use mockups in a more practical sense, one has to switch over to Designer's sister app - Affinity Photo.
Within Photo there is the ability to do a perspective transform. This transform is generally destructive - that is, it rasterizes the layer - but it can be applied as a Live Filter adjustment which enables it to be applied non-destructively. This means that designs can be applied to flat surfaces in perspective, and when the design is updated, the mockup automatically is as well without having to redo the perspective transform. Suppose you have a curved surface, such as a beverage can or bottle. Then you have to use the mesh transform tool, which Photo also supports. However, this tool cannot be applied non-destructively; it rasterizes the layer. So just like that, all hopes of using Designer/Photo for all but the most basic of product mockups goes out the window.
By contrast, the free online tool Photopea can open and save PSD files and it does support smart objects, which makes the lack of support in Affinity seem all the more glaring.
Designer is inadequate for product mockups because it does not support Smart Objects or offer a robust enough alternative in the form of non-destructive mesh distort. Admittedly, this gets more into features expected of Affinity Photo rather than Designer, but here too Photo is lacking. For a whole host of distortion tools (liquify for one), Photo offers no non-destructive option, making it appear quite inadequate compared to Adobe's offering.
Back to Designer, the vector woes continue. Designer, of course, has a grid that can be made into an isometric grid with snapping, ideal for making isometric designs and illustrations, but its tools do not extend into the third dimension.
No Depth Perception
Illustrator offers a set of perspective tools whereby the user can specify and set up axes for a perspective grid. The major limitation I encountered in using this tool was the inability to set up multiple grids (as far as I could tell), as ideally, one would be able to set up independent perspective grids to be used on separate illustrations (say a different grid for different artboards). However, using the tool one can take a flat design and project it into perspective along one of the three faces or create a design directly in perspective. Use of perspective is not heavily associated with vector illustrations which are more closely associated with flat and isometric designs except for perhaps in the case of product mockups. However, the use of vector drawing for technical, perspectival illustration is a valid use-case, so it is encouraging to see Illustrator's support for it. Designer, on the other hand, does not.
Designer offers no perspective tools whatsoever. Considering its role as a hybrid vector/raster drawing app this omission is much more glaring than it would be in a more purely vector-focused app. Without perspective grids, one is discouraged from sketching out illustrations in Designer, rather one should bring in the perspective-correct sketch or outline from another app. One could argue that it is possible to create a perspective grid in Designer the old fashioned way by simply sketching out the grid, but I would argue from experience that this is actually more tedious than doing the same by hand on paper and it would be preferable to do so and scan in the rough to be worked on further in Designer.
So far, the limitations of Designer have been mostly directed against what might be expected of a fully-fledged raster drawing app, but there are certainly more, I promise.
A Pattern of Limitations
Designer does not support patterns. Or, more accurately, it does not support pattern fills. In Illustrator, one can define a tile of a pattern, save it and then apply it to shapes. So, suppose you wanted to fill a shape with a halftone pattern. Ignoring the fact that there are default halftone patterns in Illustrator, you could create a filled circle, save it as a pattern, and then apply it to a shape where it would repeat to the extents of the shape. The spacing and rotation of the pattern can also be adjusted separately from the specific pattern itself. No such functionality exists in Designer, meaning that to create a background pattern you have to manually repeat the tiling of the pattern and then place it inside of the shape. Changing the shape may then require you to adjust the background pattern and the whole process feels a little awkward and slapped together. The lack of pattern fills feels like a baffling omission.
But it isn't just the fills that are missing. I mentioned earlier that Designer supports symbols: user-created reusable elements. This means that you can define an object (e.g. a circle), create multiple instances of it as a symbol, then later update its attributes colour (e.g. colour, size, or shape) and have the changes instantly cascade to all of the instances. This is all very good, but unfortunately Designer does not support smart handling of the arrangement of instances. So if you want to arrange a series of circles in a circular pattern, each being an instance of the same symbol, you have to manually place each of the symbols. There is no smart control for a circular pattern that allows you to adjust the number of instances or their spacing. This kind of feature isn't just useful for making elaborate pattern illustrations as might be employed on some product design, it also is fairly essential for extensive UI work. Anyone familiar with Sketch or a similar app can attest to the usefulness of being able to arrange instances into a grid or pattern where their arrangement can then be controlled relative to one another.
There's another feature which Designer lacks in comparison to Illustrator, which is the Blend functionality. Using Blend, one can define two different objects (for simplicity let's say a large red circle and a small blue circle) and specify a blend between them. Illustrator then creates numerous intermediate objects enabling a transition from one object to the other (in our case circles of varying size and hue). The spacing of the objects and number of instances can then be adjusted, with no need to fiddle around with individual instances between. This can be used for a variety of effects and its absence in Designer is sorely missed.
A Lack of Texture
Nowadays, grain or texture in vector illustrations is simply an expected part of the toolkit. Designer responds to this challenge by navigating around it. You can use textured brushes in Designer to add some analogue feel to your illustrations, but these are overwhelming raster-based. This means that while you can adjust the brush paths after putting down the strokes, the strokes themselves are dpi-limited and must be rasterized upon export. Further, because Designer offers a pixel persona, most brushes are not even available in the vector-mode, which means that not only are they restricted to raster-output, but they cannot be adjusted after the fact, lacking in the inherent capability of designing using vectors.
Somewhat related to this is Designer's lack of a tracing functionality. Within Illustrator (and even Inkscape for that matter, although the less said about that program the better), there is functionality to take a raster image and trace it as a vector. I suppose this is seen by some as a tool for amateurs, but it is a quite powerful feature that can be useful for capturing gritty edge details and texture from the raster-world and placing them into a vector. A solid image trace functionality would probably encourage the creation of more pure-vector texture brushes.
In short, while texture effects can be replicated using Designer, this comes at the expense of breaking vector compatibility, and this is essentially a raster-specific feature that has been tacked on.
None of the Trimmings
Designer also lacks a proper trim tool (the scissors tool in Illustrator). This means that where two paths overlap there is no single command to cut them both to the point of intersection. One can achieve the same effect by breaking each path at the point of intersection and then deleting each of the unwanted paths. That this process is needlessly tedious should be apparent and it is only made more so by the finicky snap selection which often makes finding the precise point of intersection into its own cumbersome mini-game.
Lack of Meta-Game
For my last complaint, I will return to a more general limitation of Designer: a lack of macros. Designer does not have support for macros or scripted actions of any kind, severely limiting its potential for high productivity. There are lots of custom, project-specific repetitive tasks that one often finds themselves performing, and macros become an invaluable time-saver. Not so with Designer. It's not that Serif is totally averse to macros as Affinity Photo includes them.
In addition to not supporting macros, I am unaware of any support for plugins in Affinity Designer. Again, apparently, Affinity Photo does have some plugin support.
Wrapping Up
I've complained a lot about various limitations of Designer that I've encountered in my use of it, but the fact remains that Designer is still useable for me while being less than ideal. I suppose what writing this up has done is remind me of how much I miss Illustrator, but the truth is Designer is not a replacement for Illustrator nor could it be. Illustrator is a massive program with a huge legacy of work put into it, to expect another program to be able to cover most of its extensive functionality is simply unreasonable at this point. However, unlike a program like Sketch, which serves a more specific niche than Illustrator and does so quite handily, Designer has a seemingly similarly expansive scope as Illustrator. It aims to be more expansive by covering some of the functionality provided by Photoshop as well. Because of this, it may be difficult for some to see how exactly Designer would fit into their workflow. It seems to very clearly be a kind of off-brand Swiss Army Knife, and if you can afford the real thing, there isn't much to consider. For anyone thinking they might be able to switch to Designer and reduce the number of apps they need to use, I think they'll find it not to be the case.
As I said, Designer remains useable for me and I continue to use it. While I focused on the limitations of Designer, it isn't without annoyances as well. For me these include occasionally very awful performance and irritating finicky issues with the snapping tools, causing objects to snap 0.1 or 0.2 off from target. However, performance and bugs will vary between users, and I would not be surprised if the Mac version is more stable.
Looking Ahead
While there are lots of features I would like to see on the roadmap for Designer, I think it's more important to think about the overall direction that I'd like to see the program take. There's no real winning in trying to take Illustrator head-on in matching features since Adobe adds features at a prodigious pace. However, just as Sketch was able to carve out enough of a niche to create a space for itself (prompting Adobe to release XD as a competitor rather than trying to further extend and streamline its existing apps), I believe there are still plenty of opportunities for Designer to create more of a niche for itself as a valuable tool. I would like to see Designer adopt some ideas from 3D CAD programs, becoming more parametric. This would mean gaining support for patterns and arrangements, but also introducing variables that could be used to control things like corner radii and other shape parameters. Going further down this path would I believe open up possibilities for Designer as an extremely valuable design tool for large projects.
