Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existing version.
- Affinity team (if they are pressured to go beyond professional designers or change to subscription, go to cloud, web etc.)
- Canva. Professional/enterprise is a very different ball game than the consumer market that they were focussing on. Ex. their mobile app for consumer itself is kind of broken, whereas mobile first experience is very important for the demography that they are targeting.
Plus Canva doesn’t really have the concept of “local files” so they’re stuck until they evolve to include every feature of Google Drive, at minimum, including local file sync. Canva ignoring traditional apps is like Chrome pretending the OS doesn’t exist and then building ChromeOS. Some concepts are necessary complexity, particularly for power users. Canva is a bit too simple still, and thus frustrating.
And here's few Affinity forum threads about the topic:
- https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201405-que...
- https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201403-can...
https://cdm.link/2021/11/ableton-reportedly-refused-investme...
> We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future. If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it.
[1]: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/
As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select and copy.
I really hope you’re exaggerating
Using Canva for a design assignment is obviously a mis-step by the student, not a flaw of the tool itself
For short-term & quick usage, canva is a perfectly fine tool for editing/formatting stuff
How is Canva any different than this? Part of design is being able to recognize what good design is, and utilizing the tools available to you. If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
The only way I could see is if they didn't modify the slides and part of the assignment was to create a unique branded slide presentation and they just used an out of the box design. In which case, no design work was done.
Someone shouldn't be penalized for the outcome based on the tools utilized unless the spec specifically excludes it.
It's like telling a clothing e-commerce company that they shouldn't use Shopify. If the work is done, why waste your time building an e-commerce site from scratch if it meets the specified need?
Canva is a great tool, and saves my clients thousands of dollars, while I get to avoid doing the completely mind numbing process of working in PowerPoint or designing social media posts. It's a win/win.
how would you feel about a student presenting stock images in a photography class?
> I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
Working professionaly has a different objective than school assignments. I think the distinction is very clear on many levels. Also, students using blatant off-the-shelf templates is very different professionals using templates "as starting place".
> If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
Well, that's not the case here. OP has explained that the design students in question aren't even using their low-effort canva templates right and exporting them as flattened pdf. It's very unlikely those who are this sloppy and careless have put any attention to the assignment or polishing other areas.
The key point is you can't delegate the main task. To use your Shopify example, if you enrolled in a "Web development using nodejs" class, and presented a premade shopify website that you purchased in a couple of clicks, the instructor won't be impressed, less so when you tell them you did it in 5 minutes "why waste time". If that's the student goal, fine, but they are in the wrong classes.
The template driven nature on Canva also makes it really hard for them to learn multi page layouts and structured documentation.
The one thing in its favour is that it supports collaboration.
sorry $MEGACORP, but the employees never actually mattered to you. it's all money. every company wants money.
Being able to email the presentation and copy text from it are generally more important to communications impact and utility in the workplace than how it looks.
Being aware what your tool does to the presentation is part of the job you're learning in school.
Students are there to learn, no to cater to your preferences.
I teach Design. One of the key learning outcomes of most design courses is the ability to handle long documents through their structural styles: heading 1, heading 2, caption, block quote, lists etc. Most design apps offer this functionality, even Powerpoint. However, none do it as elegantly as InDesign. I'm no Adobe fanboy (I do most of my own work in the Affinity suite) but InDesign remains the leader of the pack in this regard.
One crucial strength of InDesign is that it that manages anti aliasing of text very effectively. Just compare the output of ID to MS Word and you will see. I guess you are familiar with pdfs from LaTex? Compare those with pdfs from MS word. Similar difference.
It also does not produce or allow fake bold/italic etc. If a font does not have a built in bold then it won't fake one up by thickening the characters. This is why the font and charter panels in InDesign seem so feature-poor compared to those of Photoshop or Illusustor which offer such fake variants.
One final reason... cloud based services are risky things to rely on, especially in a uni. This year one service many students and staff used closed its doors. Caused a lot of angst.
I'm surprised that other people here cannot separate their subjective opinions, whether they agree with your judgment, from fact, whether you're a good educator.
It would be more reasonable to say: A good educator would help students understand that PDF files should have a small file size, and if a student fails to notice that, you will have to downgrade them for lack of attention to important detail.
And, of course the acquisition is bad news. Americans are the only people I've encountered that seem to celebrate the dystopian monopolized unfree market that we're headed towards.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them, as other companies do.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them
Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
How is that off topic when there are literally people in this thread from Canva arguing the framing and not the main point he made? Everything you disagree with isn't off topic.
Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so.
I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer of transparent text on top.
If you know any design that produces PDF file where text becomes not selectable, that might be a bug, and it would be appreciated if you can provide more details so that we can investigate and possibly fix.
> "Hi, I'm a X from Y. Y already does Z. I did that last Tuesday."
Always my favourite genre of interactions on this site.
Thanks greatly for making contact. Only on Hacker News.
To be fair to your product, it is the only viable means by which a set of slides can be worked on collaborativly and online. You saw that InDesigns collaboration tools suck and stepped in.
This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously tick it to make it happen.
But it seems that our support team sometimes presents this feature as a way to solve user issues, so maybe that's the reason.
I suspect a year from now Canva will break at least one (if not all three) of these features and force me to leave Affinity by version 3.
It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense (well, I am happy to keep supporting Pixelmator, but… you get the idea).
I know successful agencies relying on OSS tools only (such as Gimp and Penpot) so I wouldn't mind that. I hope Gimp will have its Blender moment (I've been using Blender for years, but always kept coming back to Maya, this changed with the new UI)
- Paint.net
- Pixen
- Inkscape --- straight-forward vector editing
- Seashore --- this is Mac OS UI overlay for GIMP
- Krita --- vector editing with painting features
- Scribus --- page layout
- TeX/LaTeX --- batch/markup driven page layout which can do anything one can put together a TeX macro to achieve (I use it a lot and have written articles for TUGboat on it: https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf
- Blender -- 3D modeling
- GraviT --- another vector editor, this is likely the one most like to Affinity Designer (since they were both modeled on Freehand)
- FontForge
Fantastic for photo editing, digital art/paint and vector tools.
Not really a feature.
Also it has very little implemented right now. Kind of disappointing when I clicked through hoping to find a gimp alternative.
Adobe for example were charging me $15 per month for Lightroom forever and Lightroom had broken and deleted all my photos years before. I think there was a problem with their software because I did not have a subscription that I could see when I logged in to any of the accounts I had.
I just gave up at some point trying to cancel (I'd even talked with their chat for several hours). But recently logged in and managed to finally see the hidden subscription! It was still difficult to cancel but at least I could actually do it!
Hard to know what to do apart from take Adobe to the small claims court about this.
In fact, you don't "have to" have shareholders at all.
You can try for 7 days, then don't worry we'll charge for 12 months.
Ridiculous for solo devs, full stack, creatives with lots of apps etc.
I use several apps a bit here and there throughout the year but that's seemingly not a usecase for these companies, you're either "in" 365 or won't be able to use the app.
They can also look at the market and Adobe and go “yeah, they have no alternatives, everyone is a subscriber now”
https://affinity.serif.com/de/press/newsroom/canva-statement...
Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold?
There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase. Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were originally purchased – with plenty of free updates to V2 still to look forward to!
But let's not talk about V3...
Anything a business says about current business should have 'at this time' appended. They are simply being honest.
Until of course Apple changes some API, or Windows users want to jump to ARM or something, and then they're up shit creek.
Canva, if you're on HN, seeing how we're going to respond, please don't take away the stand-alone, non-subscription-based, affordable system that Affinity's products are. I love their products. I don't want to have to find alternatives.
Adobe software is just better.
Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed.
The reason why everyone hates them is that last non subscription version Adobe CS6 from more than 10 years ago is pretty much the same thing what you get now even though users have been screaming for features and bugfixes. Adobe can have their cake and eat it too.
I disagree with all your points.
I've been using Adobe for 20 years and Affinity Design and Photo since they released in 2013 or so.
Adobe apps are faster on Apple Silicon than Affinity.
I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe and I have experienced crashes with Affinity quite recently.
Adobe has complete integration between programs. Eg: You can use AE timelines into Premiere, import Photoshop files into AE, edit vector objects from Photoshop in Illustrator, etc.
Affinity innovation pace is just glacial. V2 introduced some new features but it Serif what... like 10 years? And personally I didn't see any value in the new features. Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
Haha wow. I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon). You ought to play the Lotto.
> Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
"A lot" is drastically overstating the case. And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
But it's all kinda moot - fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly.
Believe what you will.
Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard.
It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me.
> And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
In what ways?
Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphics software since Corel Draw 4 and Illustrator still seems the gold standard. Figma is great for UI design but it's useless for anything else.
I do think Photo is a lot more usable than Designer and I could see myself using that instead of Photoshop.
> fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly
Trust me, I too wish there was a good alternative to Adobe. I hope with Canva's money they will be able to improve Affinity's products.
Off the top of my head...
Look and feel is a big one. It feels more responsive, and far less bloated.
The Export Persona smokes Illustrator's slices or whatever.
It handles symbols far more smoothly, and I like the way masks work better.
It's better integrated into Publisher, compared to Illustrator/InDesign. Publisher is awesome, and basically has Designer built in.
Working with non-square grids is sooooo much easier.
There's no Creative Cloud malware fouling up my computer, soaking up CPU and memory and storage and spitting pop-ups in my face for no damn reason.
... There are things I miss - vector brushes, and the Transformation tools. But they can usually be worked around. The feeling of being respected by the company more than makes up for those deficits though.
...Which is probably about to change :(
I think its all inertia to learn new things. Adobe soft has so many wierd things that we got so used to that it gets hard to do it otherwise.
Before that I was on the Corel suite using Draw and PhotoPaint since the mid 90s.
I’m on Windows, for what it’s worth.
Really though, Photoshop and Illustrator both got buggy on me on a weekly/near daily basis. I used them all for decades. It feels like they were stable for a few years around like 1999-2001.
Integration in Affinity Publisher is called studiolink you can use all Photo, Designer tools directly inside it by fliping a switch. Google studiolink you will see Adobe never had anything close to this. When you create a book you can actualy edit placed photo inside the layout seeing all changes directly in context. All Adobe cooperation is linking files that you then have to manualy refresh. You cant even easily copy paste vectors into indesign so they are editable.
I get that Adobe works and has some features Affinity does. But Affinity has some killer fundamentaly better features.
Yes. I owned CS6, then switched to Affinity essentially right when it was released. Been using it ever since. Great software. But very much lacking compared to Adobe.
I won't be installing that invasive spyware suite to my system even if they pay me monthly to use the software. It's that bad.
This is slightly worrying news as Canva is the opposite of the Affinity suite: cloud-only and subscription-based. I could purchase brush sets on Affinity for a fixed price, and many were made available on the user messageboard for free.
can't access
https://www.glidermag.com/ <- this works.
Off topic, and if I may be so bold, check out Whitelands. They’re my friends band and they just toured with Slowdive, one to watch out for! (I am 100% biased though).
I feel like something slipped with Designer V2 - the features went a bit weird and broad, and the amount of bugs got irritating and eroded my love for it and it being my go-to recommendation.
That all said, it’s still good software today and I’m glad the Serif team gets some kind of payday. I think the drop in quality of V2 makes the whole thing a bit less bittersweet for me.
I wish Adobe had at least put all of Freehand's capabilities into InDesign --- I might still be using it if that were the case.
Also: since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup?
The acquisition was for “several hundred million pounds”, nowhere near tens of billions of dollars.
Step 2: Tell everyone, that the current pricing model will stay and no subscriptions will be offered. Everyone will cheer and recommend the products.
Step 3: Wait until the dust settles and switch to subscriptions. The community will say "told you that this will happen" and life goes on.
Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income.
While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maximize profits at all times.
It happened or happens in B2B, car sales, music, film, in games, and drawing apps... Everywhere you see, really. And it's so convenient if there is already a scapegoat like Adobe, which transitioned to subscriptions for the same reason.
And yes, I hate it. Even though it's easier to swallow 10 bucks a month, eventually you will spend more. They know it and we know it. All we can do as customers is to not support those companies, but this only goes so far. And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?
Support open source software
I can buy Affinity Designer for $50 and use it for 5 years. That’s less than a dollar a month. If they move to a subscription, I bet it’s going to be more than a dollar a month.
If it was really just about regular reoccurring revenue, we would see more $1 monthly subscriptions and fewer $5/month subscriptions.
I wish there was an option for this with e.g. Photoshop. I want to have PS because it's occasionally handy or fun for photoshopping my friends as a joke, but I don't need it for anything that makes me money so I can't justify paying. But if I had a slightly outdated version I could purchase once, I'd be find not getting all the latest updates.
And people complain about this also. If everyone is going to complain anyway, they might as well go to subscription which is best for the business.
Both beloved pieces of software.
I guess I can keep using the current versions for a while, until they stop the updates.
So this is a super worrying announcement. I really hope they don’t screw up Affinity - I really wonder how long they can hold off the temptation to let them do what they do without screwing it all up and killing the product line…
Such a strange statement in 2024, we all know almost no developers can afford to live off charging a fair price $20+ for software on there because people wont buy it, or charging the price people will actually pay on there which is $0.
Only way to make money on the App Store is to hammer in ads, sell data, exploit or trick people into subscriptions.
GP made a broad statement, I was replying in general following suit.
Otherwise Affinity would be the giant acquiring a much smaller Canva team.
That said, this is also further proof of why the standalone software license model died. If Affinity had a great business of their own, they wouldn’t need to sell.
Turns out if you want a software team to continue providing value to you, you should probably put them on salary (subscription).
They don't need to. They mentioned that in their FAQ:
> We have to say that selling Serif was not on our minds at all, but when Canva contacted us (only a couple of months ago!) there was something about it which just felt right.
...because it just "felt right."
that it maximises profits for HN posters?
that it maximises some abstract goodness for society?
that it provides good quality products at the lowest prices?
the fact businesses keep doing something doesn't provide any information on if that's good for anyone else.
Only the last one needs some clarification. If a business did not do things that benefit others, they wouldn't get paid. So, almost by definition, businesses do. You might argue that a bigger value could be provided in another way, but it definitely does provide value.
Think about it: why would Canva essentially destroy the reason why so many users (around 3 million according to the reporting) went to Affinity in the first place by going to a subscription model? I don't see that happening.
Canva is clear they want a foothold in the professional design market and buying Affinity and its team is the quickest way to get there.
I paid for V1 of the Affinity suite and happily paid for the universal V2 license upgrade which enabled me to run their apps on my iPad and my Mac and even Windows if I ever needed that. It was a bargain.
Ironically, I just removed the last remnants of Creative Cloud last week. I hadn't been using it, but it was there "just in case…".
Unlike when Adobe tried to buy Figma, I'm more optimistic than most that this going to turn out well for existing Affinity users.
I'd have no problem with being able to roundtrip designs between Affinity and Canva seamlessly. Someone could start on Canva and one a project progressed to a certain point, they could seamlessly transition to Affinity. Depending on what you're doing, you can quickly reach Canva's limits and it should be trivial to pickup where you left on in a future version of Affinity Designer or Photo.
Other than being able to configure DropBox, there's no cloud syncing support built-in to Affinity. Sure, you can glue it together with iCloud, OneBox, etc. but that's not what users should have to do in 2024.
I'm no stranger to bad outcomes from botched and user-hostile mergers and acquisitions of software. But this one has all of the potential to go the right way and I have no reason to think otherwise at this time.
please bookmark your own post and come back to it in five years so you can have a big a laugh.
Canva wants to be a player in image editing/design/etc. They have a big product that their investors love and has the ever-so-common monthly-tax funding model.
They have now bought a tiny, niche, desktop editing suite that makes approximately zero profit compared to Canva.
Do you think they did this because:
1. they thought it would be fun to own it and not interfere in any way, and to tell their investors to fuck off over and over when they suggest redeploying resources
1. they thought it would provide a good group of people and codebases to expand their existing editing software, and given that the software they currently sell makes essentially no money, at best they'll let it limp along with most staff working on integrating it into Canva-proper, at worst they'll kill it
They will move to subscriptions (there will be many more of these moves, see VMWare), which will kill their differenitation towards Adobe and kill the product. If subscription, I can use Illustrator (which has 10x more tutorials than Designer). Most companies screw up M&A.
If they switch to a subscription model I will definitely be looking for alternatives.
"[I] Realise there seems to be a distinct lack of faith flying around here, but we'll be revealing more about our plans in the coming days and yes I'm sure you will all be pleased with what we have to say." - Ash
So that's at least possibly a sign of better information to follow.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201413-aff...
But I wouldn't get my hopes up. "There are no changes to our current pricing model planned _at this time_" is already a very telling part of Serif's previous statement.
While they have earned a measure of trust, the problem is that they aren't the ones you need to trust anymore - if Canva wants to turn Affinity into a collection of bloodsucking subscription apps, then that's what's going to happen, short of a legally binding guarantee to the contrary.
they can't guarantee they won't move to a subscription service in the future - this entire discussion is about how Affinity management have sold out and no longer control the company.
Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.
They probably didn’t need to sell (but who knows) but an offer of a buyout at a 20x multiple (based on the Bloomberg report) when the core business faces competition from Adobe and Canva, not just for core features where depending on context, Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete (and AI is a big part of Canva and Adobe’s plans, whether certain vocal users like it or not), is compelling.
As a longtime user, this move makes me sad because I know I’ll lose some good tools to an inevitable subscription push (I also have Adobe CC and Canva subscriptions that I use for very different tasks so I’m not completely opposed to paying for a sub, but I certainly won’t pay Adobe prices for Affinity), but I can’t fault the company from wanting to exit, especially when the climate is what it is for the tools they sell.
Let’s put it this way, I can’t imagine them doing better than this.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. AI tools will become essential and if you haven't got the resources to compete in this area you're likely to fade into relative irrelevance.
And at a 20x multiple probably a steal for Canva too given what this deal will give them - even without raising prices / going to subscription model.
Photoshop’s new AI tools are an absolutely incredible timesaver. Jobs that would have taken 30+ minutes (and probably wouldn’t look great) can now take 30 seconds. It was kind of amazing watching the perception shift online in photography groups from “AI is evil!” to “Wow, this is really helpful.”
There’s no way they could keep competing, even if they tried to take something off the shelf like Stable Diffusion and integrating it. Without some sort of subscription they’d need to have people run it locally, and that’s really only feasible with high end Nvidia cards too. I suppose the initial plan might be to add tools like that, have a separate subscription for that, and boil the frog to a full subscription.
Canva already uses AI in really smart ways and if they can extend that approach into Affinity and have the two products compliment each other, that could def be a value-add for Canva users. But the more I think about it, the more I think this was the only thing Serif could do and although I sympathize with angry Affinity users as one myself, I think we have to acknowledge that Affinity’s chances of survival as a perpetually licensed product were basically over, acquisition or no acquisition, at least if you look out long-term.
I'm also preparing for a mysterious update that will make the V1 and V1 of the suite non-functional because of non-visible stuff like "security improvement" and "system stability".
I hope that I'm wrong.
Might save some non-Apple users some time.
I'm not necessarily against their inevitable subscription model, but may as well get the standalone while the getting is good. There are also often some good grandfather plan rates, if I decide later to go that path.
The only downside is that Affinity V2 has no option to save files in a V1-compatible manner. Which stinks for exchanging stuff with other Affinity users.
you're...declining to support a company you like that makes software you like, that is offering a massive discount to you, because at some point in the future they may not allow more activations of version 2, which would not affect your ability to use version 1 in any way?
this is a rather idiosyncratic position to take.
> The only downside is that Affinity V2 has no option to save files in a V1-compatible manner. Which stinks for exchanging stuff with other Affinity users.
as an affinity user, I am glad they didn't do that and instead did almost literally anything else with that engineering time.
They also got bought out by Canva, and I've watched the quality drop massively- any new content is almost entirely unusable, often only available on Canva itself, and chock full of design tropes and poorly SEO-optimized content. (Some of them are so bad as to be unintentionally hilarious.) It's a real mess, and it makes me less than optimistic about them buying out Affinity.
To be fair, their model was wildly different from a fully-featured editing suite, and certainly welcomed this kind of change, but they absolutely gutted that site: the only positive is that the original templates are still there, if you search for them. I'm not holding my breath, but I expect the same treatment now. An absolute shame- I don't use a photo editor enough to warrant an Adobe subscription, so I'll probably stay on Affinity V2 until it stops working.
Also, this. https://twitter.com/affinitybyserif/status/15707285663500206...
I think that many would be better off switching to Windows (or Linux if they can) but they still believe or are attached to how things use to be.
I use to really love macOS but it has become an annoyance on many front, removing plenty of what made it better all while making it more and more like iOS and generally more closed and inflexible system.
Personally I have lost faith and I think that even if they would start reinvesting right now, it would take 10 years of pain with ever more expensive hardware.
> We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.
> We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future.
> If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to.
Only way I can see logic for this acquisition is if they're wanting the talent/experience of Affinity's developers to build web based offerings of the feature sets of Photo, Designers, Publisher as part of a Canva web offering.
Instead of only the reasonably priced PS/LR bundle versus the too expensive "all the products we ever had" bundle.
They could basically wipe out Affinity. But yeah, won't happen I guess...
Second, for the lowend market that Affinity serves, Adobe Express (its Canva compete) and Photoshop Express ($35 a year) are going to be enough for most of the core users. And Canva has quickly taken on the role for the low cost design tool of choice for normies who want to collaborate. I don’t use it for anything fancy, but I am not going to lie and say it isn’t better/faster at making YouTube thumbnails than basically anything else. Canva is the competitor, not Affinity. And Canva is being smart by buying a tool/team with a lot of users that they have the opportunity to now integrate with Canva. Will that integration be any good? I don’t know. But the leading web tool now has a native app component.
But make no mistake, Adobe has zero incentive to lower its prices for its core products at this time (the web products are a different story). The challenge it faces is when users at scale opt for similarly priced alternatives (Figma over XD, Canva over Adobe Express), not the middling number of users (and I count myself as one of them, but I’m just being honest) that pay for Affinity because it is a nice low cost tool.
I cannot imagine anyone who has a real business need for Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign and has to collaborate with others (and that part is key; if you’re a solo designer who never has to share files with others, that’s great but we’re not the target audience for Adobe anyway and we probably haven’t been since the early 1990s) choosing anything other than Adobe. The $720 a year or whatever it has gone up to is just the price of doing business.
Where Adobe faces challenges is from the people who don’t need to use Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop for their work but have very strong web-based competition for specific tools. The UX teams that are standardized on Figma, even if they got XD as part of Creative Cloud, who don’t use Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, would rather pay the $45 or $75 a month to Figma. And the marketing teams that need to make graphics for social media or newsletters or whatever, would often rather pay $120 per seat for Canva than for Adobe Express (tho my recent experiments with Express show that it is getting very close to Canva in terms of capabilities and is better in some instances, Canva is prob better for that target audience, however). That’s the competition, not the offline design tools.
Even if Canva was out to milk Affinity for every dollar, the size of the market for the professional-level tools is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the market for Canva-level tools. I can't imagine it would move the needle. But what do I know...
They answered the question in their FAQ:
> Will my Affinity apps still get updates?
> Yes! We have many free updates planned for V2, with a continued focus on improvements and the features you ask for.
I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behind them. This acquisition gives them some good editors on desktop to use as a base to deploy some of this AI tech focusing on a more pro market.
They are also about to ipo so this acquisition probably gives the an additinal growth story to sell.
Started by some 30 yo Australian chick with no tech background too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep21f3ncvBk
To that end, despite her interesting story around her role in the business, Canva itself really appeals to the lowest common denominator, which probably explains why they have such gangbuster financials. It really isn't great for true creatives though, and I feel Canva is dragging the industry down, not pulling it up, in the name of profits.
Some WhatsApp group users in India use Canva to create posters for events and then post them on various WhatsApp groups.
Disclaimer: I used to work there.
Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.
GIMP's user experience in my opinion has been terrible for decades and every time I have given it a chance it's annoyed me into closing it. I can get things done, but it gets in my way.
As for Scribus I've never used it, but based on the previous two I'm not instilled with confidence.
It is actually possible to build an intuitive UI for filters while staying compliant with SVG. You just have to abstract away the low level SVG primitives ("feColorMatrix", "feComponentTransfer", etc.) with user-friendly presets such as "Sepia" or "Drop shadow". I actually created a mockup for such UI in Inkscape long time ago [1] and I eventually implemented it in Boxy SVG [2].
Advanced filter editing could be improved by switching from tree-based to node-based UI, in similar fashion to e.g. Jasc WebDraw [3].
[1] https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/SpecSimpleFiltersUi
Is suspicious that Affinity marketing was always highlighting the pay once license model and against subscription, and in the official announcement there is no mention of that.
A lesson is that with the good ol Inkscape that type of thing that endangered the tool it doesn't happen.
But the smart move would be to double the price (obviously not immediately, but eventually) while retaining the pay once model and really doubling down on the professional aspect of the Affinity products (even if, compared to Adobe, they're not super professional grade yet). The reason people bought Affinity stuff was the pay once deal. That's how you retain those customers while aggressively moving into a prosumer market for Canva.
Now, though, Affinity is just another gravestone on the path of insane tech rent-seeking, buy-extract-kill, and financialization.
Adobe is stupid expensive for someone who do not make money off it, but their software are quite good all things considered…
Actually I take it back, Acrobat is probably #1
Heck, I am frustrated that Canva didn’t have a layers panel, and now that they do, that it doesn’t behave the way I expect and I can’t pull it up easily… or that Canva makes it impossible to ensure assets match when searching for a matching sequence or set of templates. Or all the ways I can’t just do the thing I’m thinking of by right clicking or modifying layers or something. Canva itself is an exercise in frustration for power users. Affinity ain’t perfect either. Great matchup, really.
Text rendering algorithms are quite known quantity and lifted from LaTeX. Indesign has paragraph (multi-line) composer which in latex equivalent is microtype package. Affinity doesn't have that but paragraph composer is not really used that much in professional setting because when you do final manual fixes/adjustment of typography then with paragraph composer your changes could affect previous changes in paragraph (so people go by line by line). Paradoxically paragraph composer is pretty good for quickly getting OK enough results especially in more budget/non-pro setting.
Other than that i don't think the typography output (for print) is different I've seen some tests and it seems kinda exactly the same. Affinity might render type on screen a bit differently but the output is solid. I was more afraid of the quality of .pdf itself but even highend offset printers didn't see a difference/complained.
After Effects simplicity compared to the hellscape that can be node-based VG work. I mean, the programmer in me loves nodes, I even used MaxMSP frequently… and Origami. But the simplicity of After Effects is really nice and it has like every plugin in existence.
Don’t get me wrong, I use DaVinci with the quick editor and have considered buying other gear to make it work better, but… it’s really kinda a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-color-grading app. There’s a lot still to wish for.
Meaningfully competing with Photoshop & co involves breaking the lock-in (nearly impossible) and being much better use-case-wise. It's been done in certain niches where Photoshop is bad/mediocre/stagnates, like digital painting, but for general purpose suites like Affinity it means they have to be better at most things, which they just don't seem to be capable of.
If you are print designer than Publisher and Designer got to a point where they actually are better at many if not most fundamental things (speed, stability, ux of features, format support).
The main thing that has been keeping Affinity from adoption has been networking effects (adobe is in all companies and gets taught at schools).
Affinity is this close to turning this. Basically everyone has been waiting for them to allow third party plugins/scripting and the whole print industry would start to jump real fast.
I hope I’m wrong, but if I’m not it doesn’t fare well for Affinity’s future growth and popularity. People are likely to go back to Adobe because there’s no point giving up the compatibility, instructional material, etc that comes with Adobe stuff if they’re stuck with subscriptions either way.
Another good thing likely bites the dust.
It’s hard to sell an entire industry on replacing tools that “just work” with a new set of tools unless they actually work better. Consider what VS Code has had to do to try and get devs switch to it from other IDEs: they had to offer first-class support for pretty much every other IDE’s method of operating, e.g. plugins to take the keyboard shortcuts from other IDEs, plus offer better support for languages (e.g. LSPs, use of TextMate bundles), and on top of that offer new features not seen elsewhere (e.g. devcontainers, web-based IDEs, first-class GitHub integration…) and even then people will obviously still pick JetBrains products for Java or Python because you can’t actually copy every feature and win.
Likewise it only took me 5-10 minutes with Publisher before I started noticing missing features with text (Adobe has an excellent text rendering engine, go figure) and Designer in v1 was so frustrating that I haven’t used v2 much, though my use cases were pretty specific. I’ve actually found myself putting up with the bugs in OmniGraffle (oh so many bugs) because the infinite canvas there works so well when zooming around. When it works, that is.
Got a bit sidetracked in my answer, but Adobe has a lot going for it. Honestly this is probably great news for Figma, as they have an opportunity now to build better web-based photo and publishing apps before Canva can figure it out.
Publisher has pretty much same type tools as Indesign only the panels/features are positioned differently. Publisher doesnt have multi-line composer but that is paradoxically not used in professional setting anyway (its great for quick things though).
On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability,speed,connection between the software.
It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
I think others would argue on that last point that Adobe is more than halfway there since Creative Suite and has plans to finish the job with Adobe Express, though we’ll see if they come to fruition.
> It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
This I agree with, 100%. And now Affinity will have a third struggle in that they are poised to go subscription and lose the pricing model advantage too. Even if they don’t change the pricing model, eventually you’ll need a Canva account to use the apps, ongoing annual support fees, and so on.
I think that this is possible because under the hood the Affinity Suite uses the same core engine. In contrast, Adobe bought their suite from diverse sources, and interplay between them is clunky at best.
I agree that text preview in AP can be rough, but the output in pdf is as good as that in InDesign.
It has been requested plenty of times and there are multiple threads in their forum. This one is 10 years old:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-is...
Now it will be more subscriptions, polluted with embedded Canva shit, and perhaps phasing out the desktop apps altogether.
Otherwise, it's a "no true Scotsman" thing, only including the 10% of hardcore graphic designers deep into Photoshop and Illustrator and such, and not the 90% of web designers, app UI designers, content creators, artists, and others, who might or might not use Adobe, but that still often make more $ than belleguered "pro" graphic designers.
It's like how an exexutive using an MBP and making $500,000k/year is "not a pro" for some, but some guy using it to make $70k/year is, and somehow gets to define what is or isn't a "pro machine".
For what many (or most) people do in 2024, many alternatives, including Affinity, Canva, Figma, Sketch, and others, are fine for their professional (as in, charging customers, or earning money by work created using the software) use cases.
The problem is that most acquisitions go wrong and that larger companies generally care much less about their users. There are no good scenarios and no possible benefits there for Affinity users (like me). In a small company, management cares about users, because these users provide a direct lifeline for the company. In a large business, management cares about "shareholder value" as measured by their bonuses and this quarter's earnings. That does not map well onto customer satisfaction (see Adobe, Dropbox, or really just about any company that became large or got acquired).
That said, for big companies a Creative Cloud subscription (let alone a single app subscription) is only a drop in the bucket compared to employee salaries.
I think Affinity Suite is probably most popular among indie folks, people who need it less regularly, etc.
>"In Canva, we've found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. Their extra resources will mean we can deliver much more, much faster. Beyond that, we can forge new horizons for Affinity products, opening up a world of possibilities that would never previously have been achievable.
>Canva's revolutionary approach to design democratisation and commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with our core values and vision. This union is a testament to what can be achieved when two companies that share a common goal of making design accessible and enjoyable for everyone come together."
I can't speak for anyone else on HN but the whole thing (more resources! empowerment! design democratisation!) gives me some serious deja vu.
----
"We got bought by Canva because they want more independence/alternatives from Adobe. We can invest more in development. Expect more integrations with Canva. Currently there are no plans for changes to our business model"
But they didn't. Their statement was meaningless with zero information. Which means either they will absolutely enshitificate everything or they didn't care to ask or they didn't clarify it during negotiations.
All reasons to stay far away from now on. I was planning to buy their suit for a whole team next month. Time to look elsewhere.
They mentioned exactly that in the FAQ:
> Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold?
> There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase.
1. Acquire company
2. ???
3. Fire developers until profitable without doing actual work
4. Raise CEO Salary
I love Inkscape and GIMP but they desperately need domestic competition.
What I didn't manage to read was are they buying Serif or buying this from Serif?
I suspect Canva will attempt to integrate Affinity into their cloud offering without fully comprehending the specific use cases and features that made Affinity successful in the first place. Canva's target is the novice and social media influencer, Affinity is a different market.
Sad day...
Acquire figma next.
HN will really hate on any kind of acquisition, regardless of if the acquirer is a "big bad" like Adobe or not.