Hi, I had the designer 1 and sold it last year as it really is quite dated. That said it sewed and embroidered beautifully.
There are lots of designs on the Internet that can be downloaded either free or you pay for them. All designs will need to be either Hus files or I think you can now also use VIP (each machine reads its own special files and won't sew out any other. Brother machines will only read Pes)
So you have the machine, then you will need a reader/writer for the floppy discs and some special software to get the design to be read by your machine.This will be the 3D or 4D software. Without this you are unlikely to be able to get the machine to sewing machine to read the floppy disc.
I am not sure if you can by pass the last by using Embird software to write directly to the machine.
There is a yahoo Husqvarna D1 group that might be able to answer that question.
In my honest opinion think really hard what you want to do with the embroidery side of things. If you don't want to embroider bigger than 8 x 6 there are some good brother embroidery only machine around that are faster, like the 750e it uses USB s to transfer designs but you will still need software and that can be pricey.
Hope this helps.....