The workspace is designed to make drawing easy, with all of the tools you need at your finger tips. If you've worked with graphic design applications before, you'll find that many of the commands and options will be familiar to you.
Within Affinity Designer, each active Persona has its own workspace layout, tools and panels. These are visible when the Persona is selected. However, the fundamental concept of the workspace is common to all Personas.
The document view, shown by default, shows the page that you are working on. If you are using artboards, the document view will display your artboards surrounded by a pasteboard.
The Menu bar organizes commands in menus and shows the commands appropriate to the Persona that you are currently working in. Shortcut menus provide a short cut to commands that are also found in the standard menus.
Hosts the current Personas available in Affinity Designer. The active Persona's icon appears with saturated colours.
The Toolbar hosts some of the most commonly used commands and functions for the active Persona. Like menus, it's also fully customisable.
The Context toolbar contains the commands and options that are specific to the active tool.
The Tools panel contains the tools that you will need when working on your projects. The tools contained inside the panel change according to the Persona that you are currently working in.
These panels contain settings that support your document design and active tool. Some panels may change to reflect the Persona that you are currently working in. Panels can either be docked or free-floating depending on your preference. Their layout can be customised.
The status bar at the bottom of the active document view provides useful information such as hints and shortcuts for the current tool or operation.