After being acquired by Canva in March of 2024, Affinity’s future was the hot topic of discussion in design circles. Would Canva stay hands-off and allow Affinity to be Affinity? Would they lose their one-time purchase pricing and turn to subscription? Would Canva destroy all the goodwill that Affinity had worked tirelessly to earn?
When Affinity took down their online store and announced they would be showing the future of their design software, we assumed we would get answers to the above questions, or at least some of them.
On October 30th, Affinity announced their new software, and I don’t know that anybody feels any different than they did in March of 2024.
Let’s start there - the software. The suite is gone, replaced by a new “super app” that switches between photo, vector, and layout modes. I’ve never been a fan of that kind of setup in the past. I’ve always preferred letting each tool be great at what it does and do one thing. Not to say this is wrong or that this type of app can’t be better than individual apps. It’s just that in my experience, these apps end up doing everything worse.
The app is called Affinity by Canva. You must create or sign in with a Canva account to use the software. From what I have read, this is required to use the software, and it will not function until it can phone home the first time and register you. Users appear to have successfully disabled their internet on subsequent launches and still been able to use Affinity.
There doesn’t seem to be a ton of new features, but there are a few that different groups have really been asking for. First off, Affinity has a raster image tracer. It can try to take your raster image and turn it into a nice, clean vector. I haven’t seen any of the results of this process yet, so I can’t comment on how well it does. The second is a unified format. The new Affinity app uses a .af file that appears to be a combination of all the previous file formats. Speaking of files, Affinity appears to support a more robust import system, including better support and even more file formats.
The interface mostly looks the same. Icons appear to be more flat and white, taking away the depth and color that Affinity 2.0 icons showed. I have heard people say that having some tools that stay in the same place across photo, vector, and layout becomes a tremendous advantage once you adapt to it. Despite what I stated earlier regarding my preferences, that does make a ton of sense. There are some controls that all three apps or modes use frequently. Standardizing those palettes would be a huge time saver.
Finally, there is an AI component. You have to subscribe to one of Canva’s paid plans to access it, but there are multiple AI tools that can help with background removal, super resolution, and more.
So the software is an improvement, but possibly more of a lateral move than a leap forward. What about the cost? That is a more complex question. Canva is making Affinity a free app, which is essentially being supported as a means to sell Canva plans and lead designers into the larger Canva ecosystem.
I think my feelings on this may be strange, but I believe many designers feel the same way. This is supposed to be professional-level software. Charge me for it. I don’t want it to be free. I want to know that I’ve paid for something, and that encourages bug fixes and new features. I want to know I have some amount of support. Now, progress will inevitably be beholden to Canva’s paid plan features. That’s literally the only thing funding the future development. But we all knew that Canva integration would be here in some way or another after the acquisition. I also think this also makes a lot of people skittish about what new features are more likely to be locked behind a subscription wall going forward. Will Affinity slowly grow into Creative Cloud Jr. ? I think that is the design community’s biggest fear. Or Canva using people’s work to train their AIs. I believe they stated this week that you will be able to opt out of the AI being trained on your work, but I could not find the source. That’s a very hot topic for design right now and something Canva absolutely must get right if they want to seriously take on Adobe.
Affinity was originally supposed to be the anti-Adobe, and to see your best hope of a real alternative start turning into what you’re trying to get away from is disheartening. But realistically, Canva/Affinity haven’t really shown us enough to know how this is going to go. They have to essentially earn all that trust back from scratch.
We’re going to have to see releases over time and observe how often bugs get fixed. Is there a constant stream of Canva’s paid plan features? We are going to have to see Affinity get better at a similar pace to before the acquisition without everything being a subscription driver.
If anything, I have even more questions now than I did in March 2024.
Tagged with serifcanvaaffinityadobedesigncreativecloudcreativity
