Affinity Publisher editable object styles workaround

Unlike e.g. InDesign, Affinity Publisher doesn't have full object styles. You can create 'styles' as, essentially, presets, but you can't update or edit them and have the effect propagated to the contents of your project, in the way that you can with paragraph or character styles.

Suppose you want to apply, say, a coloured stroke to some subset of the objects in your project to make some cut-out art pop or to distinguish frames. You know that you might later need to tweak the colour, or the width, or the opacity, for all those objects.

An Affinity Publisher 'style' doesn't let you do that.

So here are two easy hacks to capture some of the basic functionality of proper object styles.

1. Names-as-styles

When you apply a style to an object, rename the object to the style name. Then when you need to change the look of objects with that style, use Select Same → Name from the right click or the Select menu.

This works for things like repeated placed images and copy-pasted frames: cases where all the instances will have the same name by default, so you don't need to do anything as you go.

2. Tags-as-styles

But suppose your project requires certain naming conventions. Or you're creating elements in such a way that objects in the same style won't have a uniquely shared name. Then you can get the same results but using layer tags.

Assign a specific unique tag to objects which are meant to have the same style, from the bottom of the right click menu. Then you can later use Select Same → Tag Color to adjust the look of all those layers at once.

Just be careful with nested and grouped layers, where tags get inherited by default.