Rondo

Brilliant as usual.. Nice to see you are animating UK roads

I've completed designing, 3d modeling, surfacing/texturing and rigging a 3D City Bus for my upcoming Animation Short Film. Completely ready to animate, including rigs for the doors and to drive and steer the bus. Affinity Designer was used for all logo and texture designs. Here's a demo video 
 
 

Covering many tools in this tutorial, and all broken down into easy manageable chapters. 
https://youtu.be/IKSNeoU_iAI

This reply from Patrick is really funny…
Why shouldn’t the head of Flourish have nothing than positive things to say about Canva?
He’s not neutral, he’s part of this konglomerat Canva International (soon to be bought by Adobe Inc.)…

I hope you are aware that double-clicking on a panel's name will minimise that panel.

Really appreciate you hopping into the firestorm here and clarifying these items @Ash. I for one will take it at face value and until proven wrong. I look forward to what the future can bring!
*****
I know this isn't the most popular opinion but I just want to say I am willing to give the team at Serif an opportunity to prove themselves. Every one of us on this forum is living a unique life with decisions that need made. We make those decisions using the best information we have at the time, even though they might not make sense to anyone else. It really bothers me to see this barrage of attacks against the leadership at Serif and insinuating that they are only money hungry scrouges looking to make a pile of money. Who is to say each of us wouldn't have made the same decision? 
I do understand too that purchases like the one discussed here have often screwed over the customers. But it isn't necessarily the rule. As someone else pointed out, DaVinci Resolve, was purchased by BMD and the changes that came were great. There is a chance that this merger can have the same results. (If I am wrong in 2 years, I will be disappointed, but then again, there is nothing I could do about it anyway)
Not that I will change anyone's mind for sure, just thought I'd toss my voice into the void to help nudge this forum towards a little more positivity. 😄
Cheers and wishing each person who may read this the very best!

@Ash 
I may be wrong but reading through your recent statement, is there a hint that in order to keep everybody sweet and on board (which is impossible), your either serve one master or the other, you can’t do both, that AffinintyCanva are going to create some sort of weird ‘class system’ with regards to your future products, that will be used to force people (if they’re desperate enough) into accepting a subscription plan if they want the best out of your future product releases, as in :

(a) AffinintyCanva, licensed ‘Pinocchio’ version - (broken ass, cost-of-living crisis, Working Class Pleps addition) of Photo, Designer and Publisher: It wants to be a real graphics application but it’s not, won’t be any better or faster than you're current instalment. Will have a few additional features added, that you won’t really need, nor use, adding no real value or benefit to your workflow but comes with free ‘Marvel stickers pack’ an 'LGBT lollypop', and a fee bowl of porridge at your local Greg’s shop.

(b) AffinintyCanva, subscription ‘knight rider’ version - (rich people ONLY) of Photo, Designer and Publisher: ultra-streamlined, super-fast, a.i feature rich, lots of stock libraries, (even includes an Image Trace tool) comes with free air miles, a bottle of Cristal champagne

Ha I'll hold you to that!

As is your display name 😂

To address some of what is being said on this thread...
Firstly to be clear I'm not a founder, but have been with the company for 25 years. I'm officially appointed as Managing Director of the company, but also use CEO as my title as that is my role in terms of how other countries would view it.
Both Canva and us have made 100% clear we are committing to perpetual licences always being available. That will include V3 or any other future major upgrade of our apps which are released. What's more I will say with Canva's backing we are not under the same financial pressure we would have been to release a V3 anytime soon, meaning those of you using V2 will actually benefit from more features as free updates which may previously have been held back for a V3 if that makes sense. This is of great benefit from an engineering standpoint too as we are far better testing and releasing features in smaller chunks than saving them up to package up as a sellable upgrade. 
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24113423/affinity-canva-acquisition-pledge-license-price-subscription
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/affinity-and-canva-pledge/
As we have made clear there will at some point be a subscription option also which people can take if they choose to. I'm sure there will be additional benefits to that subscription in the future such as asset and document sync, sharing and collaboration and other things which naturally require a subscription as they are features which incur ongoing cost. It may also include other things which can be leveraged with a Canva subscription such as greater stock libraries of images, graphics and fonts. Hopefully that would just be considered reasonable and understandable. There will certainly not be any cynical cutting down of features or limitation of ongoing support in our existing apps just to force a subscription play.
I understand examples of previous acquisitions can make some of you fearful, but they are just historic examples - it has no bearing on what will happen in this case and we are genuinely doing something here which is very different and special. Everything I said on Tuesday, and what both Canva and us pledged yesterday, is 100% true and we are going to stand by it. That includes keeping our entire team here with no layoffs, and continuing to be based in Nottingham. 
If you want to believe this or not is up to you, I'm not sure what more we can say at this point to convince those who doubt it. We'll deliver on this over the coming months and years so whatever is being said right now I know it's going to be all good and assuming you are still using Affinity apps you will be happy with how they have developed and that we have continued to be fair and inclusive with our pricing.
Also to follow on from Patricks point - I can take some of the personal attacks on me, but I have to say some of the conduct on this thread with some of you being very quick to attack other community members just because they hold different opinions is really disheartening to see. You can absolutely give your opinion on this deal for sure, and we are happy to leave this as an open forum within reason, but that does mean being courteous to other forum members and not just repeating the same points over and over.
Thanks,
Ash
 

Good luck everyone! I'm presuming that, despite shock all round, this is good news for the business, customers, and importantly, employees. And please don't forget the volunteers, like many of the people on this forum. Personally, I've created over 900 videos on YouTube in my InAffinity channel and learned a huge amount about photo editing in the process. Affinity Photo (and I presume the other apps) is a brilliant product and I am in awe of how you have created this.
Well done also on the four commitments. Wisely thought out and should help calm nerves all round.
I can empathise significantly. I was a sofware engineer in small and large companies, UK and global. I moved to marketing and general business and eventually managing mergers and acquisitions in Agilent Technologies (the $10B spin-off from HP of its original businesses), where I was the Workplace Services (facilities, security, H&S, etc) global M&A manager. The most critical element of this, amidst all the IT, HR, Finance, WPS, etc, was cultural integration. One thing we found was that when acquired, people in a company will go along with many changes for the first 100 day, but will want to settle down soon after that.
Canva sounds like a good fit with Serif but there will be differences and how these are handled is so important. Australian and UK cultures have a lot of overlap, but they are not the same. Key will be leadership, which is often misunderstood. The first layer of understanding for this is followership. Without followers, you may be a manager but you are not a leader. Leaders also need to understand psychology, a subject I studied while writing the many pages on the changingminds.org website.
I could ramble further, but you've probably had enough by now and I have a photo competition to judge and potatoes to plant.
Best wishes to all the wonderful Serif, Affinity and Canva people
.. Dave ..
 

If Canva actually implements its 4-point plan as announced, the acquisition could be a win-win for everyone.
I am thinking here of the users who would like to use the Affinity programs on Linux or on an Android tablet. And those who would like to work in a team on the same project. All this and much more could be realized through the merger.
Canva may not have the best reputation, but they can ensure that their popularity increases with a smart approach. A smart approach would include offering stand-alone apps at a fair price so that people on low incomes can afford them too.
Time will tell what will become of the award-winning software. Until then, it's a case of wait and see.

 
 

Though, I'm nervous about the future (I'm a worrier, in general), I reckon we should give Serif/Affinity/Canva a chance to make good on the Four Pledges they emailed out this morning.

Maybe we should worry more about WWIII spurting out of Ukraine and incoming nukes more than whether or not we get saddled with a subscription. 🤪

How anyone can read my post and think I’m a Canva fan is beyond me. You are trolling at this point. Changing your username like a 6 year old.
I have signed up to the forum today to share my views as an Affinity customer. I’ve attached my purchases for the last 5 years.
Please kindly share your purchase history with the group.

Now you cling like shipwrecked people to an airy pledge, the thinnest hope you could possibly cling to. And why did it suddenly appear the day after? It's pure damage control you're uncritically swallowing. Let's see what happens. It's a "promise" - not a guarantee. Non-binding, uncertain. One of the easiest places to cut, and it's been done a thousand times before.

Ash and the folks at Affinity have always done right by me in the past and I take him at his word. They brought us this far and I believe they will bring us more in the future. I don’t like the fact that some people are belittling the honesty and integrity of anyone based on absolutely nothing other than a crazy personal view. Let things work out and then make a decision that suits you. 

To followup on some of my comments yesterday, we are today enshrining our commitment to the Affinity community in 4 pledges made by the Affinity and Canva teams.
You can read about them here.

We do truly believe the coming together of Affinity and Canva is only going to be a good thing for our customers, staff and the development of our apps. We very much hope you will all continue to be with us on this journey.
All the best,
Ash

Canva is definitely going to turn Affinity into a subscription service. And when that happens...

Sad news ----- I wonder how many users will stick with affinity when it requires a subscription? A lot of us have been here before, I remember eagerly awaiting CS7 and getting a kick in the nads, although I still do occasionally use CS5 so I suppose Affinity 2 is gonna be the end of my journey, maybe we'll get another year before the canva subscription becomes the only way forward. Now the search goes on for a replacement = NO SUBSCRIPTION

As far as vector I did try my best with inkscape but it was a fairly horrible experience, to be fair it's only been going for 20+ years, so early days lol. But there's not a whole lot of choice even with perpetual license commercial vector apps and of that there are none that I'd choose to use. Perhaps I'll do something different like try one of the natural media apps which at the moment none of which are subscription. Or for you enjoying open source that would be krita but I think that has the usual horrible UX too.

Ah, that is why I have been having so much trouble figuring this out.
Serif you have to fix the poor contrast issue. You have to. It is making has made your software far more difficult to use. 

Hello designers, In this video i start from scratch using a pencil and pen, then take a photo of it and import it into affinity designer so we can make a vector version. You will learn how to trace an image with the pen tool and then create a background from all of the outlines and much much more.
https://youtu.be/EYsoWbceM4w
 
 
 

If only the pictures of our family came out looking as nice as that we’d have something to frame on the wall.
As it is, we just put them on the fireplace to them to keep the kids away from the fire.

Made in Affinity Photo v2 on iPad Pro: Dickens figures looking at the future……..