Canva buys Affinity [UPDATED]

UPDATED: On 27 March, Affinity/Canva announced that the Affinity products will be available without Canva with a perpetual license or rolled together with a subscription.

We awoke on 26 March to the news that a marvelously powerful and robust suite of design applications was purchased by Canva, most famous for its easy-to-use, AI and template-driven software.

I’ve been using Affinity tools a bit to determine how effectively it can replace Adobe Creative Cloud products. The answer: very effectively. It was also refreshing to purchase a perpetual license (rather affordably, too) rather than yet another subscription. I still hadn’t got my head fully around the shared file format and the ability to take a single project file from app to app: page layout to illustration to photo editing and back.

It’s clear that the Affinity engineers carefully study their Adobe competition. At only version 2.4, the Affinity products have many of the power features we rely on in the equivalent Adobe apps without as many annoyances, shortcomings, and bugs. Variable font support, blends, a width tool, auto object selection, multi-page spreads, ePub export are promised in the next year as part of the current version 2. Like in Adobe InDesign, an Affinity project can nominally inhabit one color model (RGB, CMYK, or even LAB) while its placed assets can be in other color modes. This is something that is painfully absent from Illustrator, for instance.

I was even starting to adapt our Adobe product curriculum to the Affinity products with the intent of offering classes. The only hesitation has been the lack of familiarity with these awesome apps. Folks don’t enroll in classes for software they’ve never heard of. That may change now that they’ll be under the much more familiar Canva umbrella.

But adoption may be hampered if Canva applies its subscription pricing model to these apps. We’ve already read in many social media posts comments like, “might as well stick to the Adobe apps” if there’s to be subscription pricing.

We’ll see what Canva does to justify its spending of hundreds of millions of British Pounds. Stay tuned!