Canva is making its pro-design tool Affinity \u201cfree forever\u201d in a bid to upend the design software market.<\/p>\n
The company announced today it is relaunching the tool with \u201csubstantial changes\u201d that make Affinity \u201ctruly a competitive product against the incumbents in this space.\u201d<\/p>\n
And by making it free for everyone, Canva is clearly parking its tanks on Adobe\u2019s lawn.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Canva launched, it was consciously trying to change the world, in terms of how non-experts could design,\u201d Canva\u2019s Duncan Clark, head of EMEA, explains. \u201cWe see this as changing the world for how experts, and potential experts, can design.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Nottinghamshire-based Serif released its first app, Affinity Designer, in 2014, before adding Photo and Publisher tools. They refreshed the whole suite in 2022. Canva bought the company last year, in a deal reported to be worth $380million.<\/p>\n
Affinity currently has five million downloads, but has added 1.5 million of those in the 18 months since it was acquired.<\/p>\n
Adobe currently has more than 30 million paying users for its creative apps, but Clark believes the new Affinity is well-placed to take on its rivals.<\/p>\n
The new app brings all of Affinity\u2019s tools into \u201cone powerful product with one universal file type,\u201d which means users will no longer need to switch between different applications for different types of design.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was a fragmented experience,\u201d Clark says. \u201cWith Affinity Studio, if you move between Vector and Pixel, the tools change, but you\u2019re still in the same canvas.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a breakthrough in how professional design tools are structured, and an architectural change that we deeply believe in. It feels very weird that it was ever separate.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is also a focus on performance and immediacy, to create what Clark calls an experience that \u201cfeels like an extension of your brain.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new Affinity website<\/p>\n
Affinity is also rolling out a new identity, created by the in-house Canva and Affinity teams, in collaboration with Barcelona-based Twist Studio<\/a>. The visual and verbal rebrand is designed to reflect Affinity\u2019s move from challenger brand to part of the design establishment.<\/p>\n Many designers are wary of Canva, feeling that its mission \u2013 \u201cto empower the world to design\u201d \u2013 undermines the value of professional design work, and even takes jobs away from the industry.<\/p>\n But Clark says the two are not mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s always a fear, when a new technology brings capability to more people, that it might undermine the experts,\u201d he says. \u201cWe don\u2019t believe that\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe role of the professional designer is more important than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n He draws a parallel with computing, where democratisation of home computers made more people tech-savvy, and so, Clark says, changed and enhanced the role of computer experts.<\/p>\n \u201cThe role of the professional designer is more important than ever \u2013 as the taste maker, the craft expert, the person who can provide the visual layer on top of what everyone else is doing,\u201d Clark says.<\/p>\n \u201cBut also we think there\u2019s an amazing opportunity for those professional designers to become the enablers of the rest of the organisation \u2013 to create something beautiful, and help everyone use it in the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n He says the new Affinity has been built to address professional designers\u2019 frustrations with existing tools, \u201cwhich we heard are overpriced and insufficiently innovative.\u201d<\/p>\n And Clark says that by making the tool free, it opens up professional design careers to people who might have previously been priced out of it.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no catch, no stripped-back version and no gotchas,\u201d Affinity CEO Ash Hewson says. \u201cThe same precise, high-performance tools that professionals rely on every day are now open to all, because creative freedom shouldn\u2019t come with a cost.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Canva\u2019s move comes in the same week as Adobe announced a raft of AI innovations at its Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n The new AI capabilities are designed to help creators, \u201cwork faster and take on more opportunities by expanding creative possibilities and removing time-consuming tasks and creative barriers.\u201d<\/p>\n The announcements included a beefed-up version of its Adobe Firefly generative AI tools, with a particular focus on video. They are rolling out generative soundtracks and voiceovers, as well as improving Premiere Pro with an AI Object mask, and enhancing Photoshop\u2019s Generative Fill.<\/p>\n Adobe is also giving users more choice to work with other companies\u2019 generative models, like Google, OpenAI and Runway.<\/p>\n Perhaps most intriguingly, Adobe announced Project Moonlight, a cross-app AI agent designed to act as a creative partner and project manager, overseeing and connecting other AI assistants.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n And not to be left out, Figma has also been making moves. It announced today it has acquired generative AI platform Weavy<\/a>. As Figma Weave, it will, \u201cbuild out image, video, animation, motion design, and VFX media generation and editing capability on the Figma platform.\u201d<\/p>\n Figma also rolled out new releases at its Schema event this week.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cQuality and taste matter more than ever now that the boundaries between product, design, and engineering are blurring, and more people \u2013 and AI tools \u2013contribute to the product development process,\u201d Figma\u2019s VP of product, Paige Costello wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cDesign systems have long been the key to driving consistency between design and production at scale. Now they have the potential to be not just a shared language for product builders, but also the translation AI needs to understand design and code. In this way, design systems are evolving from static standards into living systems that product teams can build on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The new innovations include extended collections, a more efficient way of managing multi-brand design systems, check designs, which smoothes the handover to developers, and make kits, which allow users to import asset libraries from Figma into Figma Make.<\/p>\n Together, the changes are designed to make it easier for teams to \u201cscale their design systems across new paradigms,\u201d Costello says.<\/p>\nAdobe doubles down on AI<\/h5>\n