kaffeeundsalz

Why don't you apply the gradient to the stroke, too?

The mistrust stems fromt the fact that your post made an argument in favor of Serif along with your forum account being just a day old. The hidden accusation is that you are a fake member created by Serif to counter the negative comments. Which I personally think is a fairly bold thesis.

In what way is this different from the situation before? Serif as well could have encountered turbulence, letting them reshape their business model. It is perfectly legitimate for you to distrust company promises phrased this way. But I don't see what this has to do with the acquisition.

If there's one thing I've come to learn from 20+ years with GIMP, it's that their release cycles are entirely unpredictable 😂 Probably not the kind of CMYK support that you're hoping for. From everything I know, true end-to-end CMYK is something the codebase of GIMP is now capable of, but will not be available straight from 3.0 onwards. That's only true for the very earliest versions, showcasing a Qt based UI for GIMP in KDE. Krita was developed from scratch soon after. What you want is full end-to-end CMYK support in GIMP. As long as that's not available, notice that CMYK support did improve significantly in GIMP over the last years. We got CMYK color proofing and even CMYK export features (so for many formats, the workflow you mentioned above is not necessary anymore). It's still a long way to go though.

As of GIMP 2.99.18, that's not true anymore. Granted, it's a developer preview, but non-destructive adjustments are already fully implemented.

The question is: Why would they? For any company, it would be incredible stupid to rule out anything forever.

Well, we'll see how all of this turns out in the long run, especially for the users. I wish Serif all the best for being part of Canva. Let's give them a chance to prove that the well-known narrative of the evil giant swallowing up small software companies doesn't apply in this case. I am looking forward to the features that are yet to come for the 2.x versions, really hope that the planned Q&A session will shine some light on future plans and will follow the development of v3 with great interest.

I'm not an offender of subscription models in general. If they are fairly priced (which I know is a highly subjective manner), I'm happy to give them a try. With Serif, I don't know. What I'd like them to be is a healthy competitor for Adobe because I think that benefits the creative market, and one-time purchases are one area where the two companies differ. That said, I'm also a happy Affinity user, so anything becoming more expensive for me would of course be disadvantegous. On the other hand, subscriptions don't necessarily mean an increase in pricing. There are countless examples where this was the case, but it's not set in stone and also depends on how the user handles updates, upgrades etc. The more important point for me is the integration thing because I don't like user interfaces that try to cross-sell other products and services. I do accept Studio Link in Affinity Publisher because I really see the benefit of that level of integration (it's a dream to use) and after all, that's why there's a universal license that lets me purchase the entire suite for a fair price in case I want it. Also, everyone who decides to buy Publisher as a standalone application can very easily customize the main tool bar and get rid of the persona buttons. The same was true for the old Welcome screen: It did advertise addons, but you could choose to turn it off and never see it again. This is how it's done: Don't constantly give users the subliminal feeling that they are missing out on something or have just bought a lite version of your software. Don't let buttons triggering addon services that I'm not subscribed to eat up precious screen real estate. Let me hide every upselling attempt quickly and effectively because I really know best what I need and don't need to get the job done. In other words: If Serif were to integrate big buttons with Canva logos on them that I can't hide, I'd be upset.

The title pretty much says it all. Serif has been acquired by Cava: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/ Now I wonder mainly about two things: 1. Will the Affinity suite give up on its one-time purchase philosophy (given that Canva is a subscription service)? 2. Will we see integration of Canva services in the Affinity applications and if so, will users be able to hide it in case they don't need them? I know that it might be a little early for definitive answers, but since we only have the Canva press release so far and no official statement from Serif yet, I was hoping that staff might be able to comment on this.

Maybe Serif can do something about it.

Shift+Command+K is hardly the industry standard for creating a symbol (at least to my knowledge), it's just the keyboard shortcut that Serif chose to assign to this function. Since it triggers a menu command (Layer > Create Symbol), it's configurable! Just choose whatever key combination seems appropriate to you.

Affinity Designer has had symbols since version 1.5 which came out in 2016. I fail to see the difficulty of Shift+Command+K.

A somewhat related question in this context is why Apple wouldn't include native Affinity files on their Design Resources page. Is there any way to work towards this?

This. While the solutions posted here are all technically correct, they're not visually convincing. It just doesn't make sense that the mountains on the right have shadows while the one on left doesn't, especially since the direction and distribution of light in the scene strongly suggests that there should be at least some parts of the large mountain that are completely in the dark.

Another method is to use the Style Picker Tool from the toolbar. Select the text frame you want to change with the Move Tool, switch to the Style Picker and click on a text frame with the desired style. You can change which attributes are copied by using the checkboxes in the Context Toolbar. Because you said that you use certain text frame designs regularly, best practice is indeed to create a Style for each of them as @GarryP already mentioned. You can select objects and quickly apply a saved style to all of them by just clicking on it – and you can drag styles from the Style Panel to any object (not just the selected ones, which I find quite handy).