Affinity Designer is a vector graphics program, prepared especially for designers. The program handles opening Photoshop, Illustrator and PDF files for editing to some extent. The tools available in Affinity Designer do not differ significantly from what you will find in other vector graphics programs.

The tray contains a node selection tool, a classic pen and pencil, gradient fill, transparency settings, text input and text placement tools for curves, cropping, arc control tool, and guides. The tools are complemented by a collection of ready-made shapes on which you can perform Boolean operations. On the raster side, you'll find a brush and eraser, as well as selection tools (including lasso and selection painting), blurring, sharpening, blurring, burning and brightening.

A curiosity is the "Pixel Brush" tool, which can be painted in vector shapes, but without losing the possibility of further editing the paths. Another interesting tool, not found in other programs, is the vector brush, which uses curves to apply traces imitating natural painting tools, while leaving the possibility of modification. Affinity Designer is able to save and read files in many raster and vector formats, including some Photoshop and Illustrator files.

It can work in RGB, CMYK, LAB and grayscale with colour management using a depth of 16 bits per channel. When saving, you can export each layer to a separate file, and the files can be placed as objects in other files - in this case, changes made to the source materials will be updated on an ongoing basis in other projects. Affinity Designer is in the testing phase and may cause problems.