Canva

[OldSubSailor]

We need a tiny orange Hugh Grant to step in about now. 

[jweitzel]

We are already at over 200 posts, and I can assume that hardly anyone reads my contribution. It's called: tl;dr

When I read this info mail, I was not only completely shocked, but I also felt physically sick. I had thought that I had found a new, stable software "home" with the Serif suite, which I also supported to the best of my ability.

And now this. In - as other participants have already said - this unspeakable "marketing-speak" that we older people know inside out: How great the company is now set up, that all employees benefit from it, what tremendous synergies lie in the background. Unspeakable. And the fact that the head of Serif did not question his own diction at this point does indeed give cause for concern.

What do his own employees have to say about this? If only we could find out! I have spent my entire professional life in an owner-managed company. At the beginning we had almost 500 employees, but after 35 years we only had just over 100. The managing directors and external consultants have been coming and going over the decades, and together with the owner, they have always been praised for how well we are set up and prepared for the future.

In any case, Mr. Hewson "failed" at this point in communication, and the most loyal and conspiratorial supporters to date were shaken to an unimaginable extent. And in the end, it is simply money that corrupts every idealism, every departure and every "start-up" (a term I can no longer hear). Because there is nothing better with a lot of money than even more money.

Let's see what the future brings.

Oh, before I forget! In future, before every harmless update, check the forums to see what the consequences of the update will be!!! I can only advise you to do so! The popular weather app "WheaterPro" has just been "stabilized" in its functions - but afterwards the community had to realize that it had been glued to the heaviest and is now hanging on the hook like a fish: without a subscription you can only look into the oven hatch. Over and out.

Ver, very sad,
Johannes

 

 

 

 

[random]

Add me to the OMG PLEASE NO list! 
Like so many others, I switched to Affinity Photo to get away from Adobe's overpriced subscription model.
And I've been an Affinity evangelist converting dozens of people to it since it first came out!
Daymn, double the price would have been fine and better... anyway, do NOT go subscription or most of us will find other options!
Good luck with your clipart mothership!

[stuck]

36 minutes ago, Chills said:

DxO is good

Hate to be picky but I think what you actually mean there is that DxO products, like PhotoLab are good.  DxO the company is not that good.

[Gary9450]

Heads-up, Serif: Affinity no longer belongs to you. Canva owns it. And in time you'll realize just how much in control of ownership they are.

[cTHULHU]

[OldSubSailor]

7 minutes ago, stuck said:

DxO the company is not that good.

Oh, those crazy French guys!

[Bit Disappointed]

40 minutes ago, Thomas Bohn said:

I think the biggest question is, why does Canva need to compete with Adobe?

That's not what Canva wants. It would also be a significant risk for Canva. Canva does not live off Adobe's customers or people with Adobe's level of expertise. Canva has zero percent knowledge of this segment. For Canva, it's about making money from 'creativity for all,' which is a bit like 'restaurant visits for everyone,' a concept that has enriched the food scene with McDonald's.

I repeat, tired of the justified but derailing debate and primal fear of subscription, which was inevitable anyway, that I need to get an idea of where the programs are heading after v2.x.

• Will the code and programs be converted to web solutions, away from applications for desktop and iPad?
• Will the programs even continue after v3?
• Will the programs become 'creativity for all' solutions for people without skills but with immediate needs?

Serif has once before completely left customers of previous products alone at the station, and I have no illusions that it won't happen again. I use Designer quite specifically for what the program does uniquely and incredibly quickly, and I really have no alternative. That doesn't mean I'll switch to Canva or the terrible alternatives you mention. It means I might consider shelving this style; I also have the latest version of Illustrator, but it's not suitable for the style or complexity.

I just need more information about what happens with the programs, not the price, when the acquisition has real consequences after the last v2 update. I don't use abandonware; it's always just one OS update away from being useless.

The fundamental and dominant thought in my mind is that Serif protected their own interests, and now I must protect mine. I cannot live with this unexpected gigantic uncertainty in my work with Designer as a graphic tool, and I am beginning to quietly plan an alternative course with alternative professional products.

I'm not buying the sterile bullshit about a revolution and other predictable recycled rhetoric; I don't know who out there gobbles up such pathetic spin raw, it's an insult on all conceivable levels, but what's worse, a business risk imposed on me that I cannot live with.

[nickbatz]

Two things frighten TF out of me:

1. Any time I see the word "democratize" (let alone "democratization") - with a z or an s;

2. Company employees all wearing the same t-shirt  - "WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!"

 

Please continue to keep up the fantastic work. I owe my surprise new career to Affinity Photo.

[kaffeeundsalz]

15 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

I think, GIMP 3.0 will come soon.

If there's one thing I've come to learn from 20+ years with GIMP, it's that their release cycles are entirely unpredictable 😂

16 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

But will it have CMYK-support?

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.

22 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

And as far as I know, Krita once was a spinoff of GIMP

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.

25 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

If you ask for CMYK in GIMP or Inkscape forums, they suggest to convert your images to CMYK in Scribus. And that is really unprofessional bullshit. Not Scribus itselves, but this workflow.

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.

[000]

I know it's not of much use, but why don't we all change our profile picture to the "angry cat" emoji to show how we feel?

[TonyO]

I've spent some time reading the posts on this thread, and I simply can't agree with the majority of posts that are only worried about a change in pricing structure. 

Tools cost money, I use Designer on iPad as my main illustration app and my side hustle is quite lucrative. I'm willing and able to pay to help along development of a tool that i use this much. I work to get paid, and so do developers.

What has me spooked about this acquisition the potential loss of the community that has contributed to the shape of the suite as it is today. I've been on these forums for a decade at this point, many of my own suggestions have been implemented as features into the apps as well as many bugs and not-so-good changes to the apps being fixed, the Affinity suite has grown WITH us.

Giant companies like Adobe simply do not listen to user input. Their user forums are full of bots or "employees" who simply copy paste answers from the website. Problems are never solved, bugs persist for months if they ever get fixed at all. 

Canva isn't publicly traded, so I'm not scared of the age old killer of good companies (investors), but I'm definitely afraid of these forums becoming empty hallways where the input of your loyalest of fans falls on deaf ears. Large corporations often lose touch of what made them great at the start.

Change is fine, but please don't outgrow us. 

 

[dcgefrenc]

Waking up, new mail notification, Affinity and the subject reads… An exciting announcement …

Web design apps added to the family? Linux development program? Video editing app? So many exciting possibilities…

But no, the usual thing in business, the big fish had eaten the smaller fish.

Obviously V3 will be rental. But the main concern I have is; since Affinity is web server based license. Canva could reject to honor any “perpetual” or “one payment” license in the future.

That happened to me when eon-software was purchased by… oh sorry… when eon-software joined the Bentley family. The Bentley guys took down the license servers and asked users to pay 4 times the original price of the software to “update” the license. I don’t like it, but I went Monkey D. Luffy with that one.

Well, It was fun while it lasted.

[j3rry]

2 minutes ago, Jens Krebs said:

I know it's not of much use, but why don't we all change our profile picture to the "angry cat" emoji to show how we feel?

 

Done, good idea.

[000]

2 minutes ago, TonyO said:

I've spent some time reading the posts on this thread, and I simply can't agree with the majority of posts that are only worried about a change in pricing structure. 

Tools cost money, I use Designer on iPad as my main illustration app and my side hustle is quite lucrative. I'm willing and able to pay to help along development of a tool that i use this much. I work to get paid, and so do developers.

What has me spooked about this acquisition the potential loss of the community that has contributed to the shape of the suite as it is today. I've been on these forums for a decade at this point, many of my own suggestions have been implemented as features into the apps as well as many bugs and not-so-good changes to the apps being fixed, the Affinity suite has grown WITH us.

Giant companies like Adobe simply do not listen to user input. Their user forums are full of bots or "employees" who simply copy paste answers from the website. Problems are never solved, bugs persist for months if they ever get fixed at all. 

Canva isn't publicly traded, so I'm not scared of the age old killer of good companies (investors), but I'm definitely afraid of these forums becoming empty hallways where the input of your loyalest of fans falls on deaf ears. Large corporations often lose touch of what made them great at the start.

Change is fine, but please don't outgrow us. 

 

Canva is aiming to go public soon. And no, for me personally it is not about the price and the subscription, it's about the "soul" of the software that I use every day and the fact that it was (currently still is) to chat with the developers directly.

[iconoclast]

4 minutes ago, kaffeeundsalz said:

...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.

...

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.

I remember that there was a plugin (called "Seperate+" or so?) for CMYK-seperation. But that was a pain in the ass. Not much better than the Scribus-workflow, if you ask me. I really love GIMP. It is one of the apps I used most during the last twenty years and I don't want to miss it. But in my opinion there are still some things that keep it from being useful for professionals or even a substitute for apps like Photoshop or AfPhoto. And I still don't see that this will change some day.

[Thomas Bohn]

6 minutes ago, Jens Krebs said:

I know it's not of much use, but why don't we all change our profile picture to the "angry cat" emoji to show how we feel?

 

But at least it is cute and I needed that.

[nickbatz]

And it's all AI filth. The idea is to kill the soul of humanity.

This is not good.

[Teddy Ursadorable]

28 minutes ago, cTHULHU said:

Ahh.. the good old days before Adobe bought Macromedia and killed off every competing product except for Flash and Dreamweaver.

That was the day my intense hatred for Adobe began.  If you can't compete, you buy out your competition and destroy them.

[bici]

I'll try and stay positive and hope that the Affinity suite will remain as is in terms of licensing and software purchases.  As for Canva, which I know little of, let me say that I refuse any cloud solution! It is either on my desktop and offline or forget it.  

Best wishes to the Affinity team. 

[phps]

Yet another excellent product from a small company, bought to be destroyed.

[Arun Sarkar]

38 minutes ago, Bit Disappointed said:

Serif has once before completely left customers of previous products alone at the station, and I have no illusions that it won't happen again.

That same thing will happen again what we got with Plus Range. Unfortunately.

[OzNate]

I feel like I've been here before. Adobe bought Macromedia, who made my favourite software. It didn't end well. That was before subscriptions, which is worse and why I'm here.

I'll still be a user for now because you're still the best option but I will be keeping an eye solidly on open source and other alternatives.

I think it's fair to say many of us feel no enthusiasm at all whatsoever about this.

[SKent]

My conjecture but, from the heel turn in Adobes marketing into pleading mini tutorials on YouTube. They are absolutely _terrified_ at canvas changing of the first app people use when they are getting into graphic design. If canva can present a viable next step into an actual tool, it would be a the first viable competitor to Adobe. If you add in more aggressive feature parity in terms of compatibility and reliability then we might see some actual competition. 

[VectorVonDoom]

2 hours ago, Boldlinedesign said:

The massive update just came out of beta officially a couple weeks ago. Sounds like you were using the older version. Might be better to try the updated program and not rely on experiences with the older version when assessing the program. Really impressive update a year in the making

I'll have another play with it sometime but like the majority I don't normally try apps every couple of months in the hope that they have improved enough unless perhaps there's some big announcement about how wonderful and non-buggy it is now.