My Canva Request

[ThirtyFiveThousand]

Like many Affinity users, I am really worried about my favorite software getting covered in Canva template-based easy-to-use barnacles that slow down the ship as a whole. Many of the users I’ve communicated with expect Canva to gut and part out the tools of Affinity, to then shove them into an all-in-one Canva-stein’s Monster that will cater to non-professionals and leave the professional graphics crowd high and dry. I have no idea if that’s the plan going forward, but in any situation where a fish is acquired by bigger fish, you can guess which of the two will wind up in pieces.

My request is this: rather than melt Affinity into Canva and vice versa, do the Studio Link thing: keep Canva as a standalone app, and make Canva tools and services accessible within Publisher. Canva can remain its own thing (with a few UI upgrades from the award wining Affinity side of the partnership) and can be used by its core audience the way they’re used to using it; no scary new Designer Nodes or Photo Live Filters to get in the way of their good time. Meanwhile, all the collaboration stuff, cloud storage, and everything else the Canva app brings to the table can be integrated and accessed only by the Affinity users who want to get involved in the Canva workflow going forward. No new menus to clutter the right side of the screen, and no new online connectivity requests fighting for attention every time you want to simply boot up Affinity Photo and adjust some Noise.

Canva as a separate Studio Link situation would even allow for the pricing structures to remain separate. The get-off-my-lawn crowd can have their one-time Universal License fee and not have to hear about anything else. Meanwhile, the cutting edge AI tech fans can keep a subscription for access to the newest whatever for making the latest whatever for whatever whatever.

As Canva keeps playing Bigger Fish and acquiring more companies into its belly, they too can be brought into the fold Studio Link style, keeping a consistent brand interface and functionality that keeps everything uniform and organized while giving all the users just enough of what they want with the stepping on of toes kept to a minimum. 
 

I don’t own any Australian graphics companies, so I have no idea how the business side of all of this works. I’m just an iPad Pro user that doesn’t want to see their favorite software on their favorite platform go away. Hopefully the bug I’m attempting to plant in the company ear will contribute something toward keeping touch-based computing the superior method for doing things that Affinity helps make possible. Thanks. 

[mb6391]

A very constructive and well thought out post - thank you. There is, as you are aware, a great deal of speculation about what the future holds for current Affinity users. Understandably many are threatening to walk away from the program although that is easier said than done. Nonetheless if folks are reluctant for whatever reason to 'invest' more time into a product that they do not have confidence in, then maybe their time will be better spent getting up to speed with another product.

Personally, I'm fairly chilled out about the whole thing. The only way that Canva will make this deal worthwhile is to get into the design schools that are embedded well and truly with Adobe who effectively gift their software to them. The subscription software model doesn't bother the large design companies one bit. All they want is highly polished end product for their own customers. So the result being that whatever Canva do, they must be superior to Adobe and it's not going to be an overnight task. More a medium to long term trudge. In accelerating Affinity to being a better product could well be a huge benefit to the existing user base. It took Adobe at least until v4 of InDesign to start moving the ground away from Quark and that was whilst Quark was asleep at the wheel so to speak.

The fly in the ointment in my opinion is the make up of the existing investors. They seem to be a majority of VC's who are historically not in it for the long term but looking for a profitable exit. So whilst the points you make are valid, it's all going to be driven by the bottom line.

Just my tuppence worth.

[Pšenda]

19 hours ago, mb6391 said:

So the result being that whatever Canva do, they must be superior to Adobe and it's not going to be an overnight task. More a medium to long term trudge.

I've seen a lot of "oracles" here like - Canva/Affinity won't keep their promise, and in a year/two/five we have a subscription! Personally, I'm rather worried - what will the graphic industry as such look like in this time horizon? The point is that the rocket rise of AI (its quality), which will still to continue, may completely shatter the existing principles and needs of designers and quality/professional tools.

[ThirtyFiveThousand]

On 3/29/2024 at 6:00 AM, Pšenda said:

I've seen a lot of "oracles" here like - Canva/Affinity won't keep their promise, and in a year/two/five we have a subscription! Personally, I'm rather worried - what will the graphic industry as such look like in this time horizon? The point is that the rocket rise of AI (its quality), which will still to continue, may completely shatter the existing principles and needs of designers and quality/professional tools.

This ‘partnership’ slams together two audiences that, in many cases, can’t stand each other. The Affinity side sees their new sibling-in-law as a bunch of lazy app filter fanatics looking to score free baubles for their Cricut machines. The Canva side sees their opposite as a bunch of elitist snobs who overcomplicate things and look down on anyone without an unnecessary 30 years of experience or a fancy college degree. Canva subscribers want it all for free, and usable by pushing no more than 3 buttons per document. Affinity customers want to have things exactly like they want them, pay for what they want once, and not have to hear about anything new unless it does what they remember Adobe software doing 10 years ago. The clash will come when the one side pulls financial rank on the other and says that, based on sales figures, the features of the other side will be dissolved to cut costs and give the people what they want to pay for.  

The Graphics Industry will look like it always looks. A bunch of money people looking to spend as little as possible will hire designers who are looking to live the George Jetson push-button life and get paid by lifting only the finger(s) they want to lift and get companies that employ people from smaller economies wearing SuperBowl t-shirts that didn’t come true to produce the final product for pennies on the dollar. The Industry doesn’t care what comes out of the vending machine. All it cares about is how little it had to put in the machine, and if the vended product will make them billions per financial quarter. If AI can give them what they’re after with a minimal amount of whining about office hours and healthcare, so be it. The designers lucky enough to nest themselves in the warmth of the Industry during cold nights will use whatever they can horde, baring their teeth and puffing out their fur to intimidate anything they perceive as an immediate threat. 

[KC Honie]

I wore many hats in my past and one of those was M&A professional (investment banker).  As I like to say "any trained monkey can do a transaction the real magic is in the integration of the two businesses to achieve the synergies that were used to make the financials work to justify the transaction".

I would love to see the pitch deck to see how they justified creating value with two wildly different customer bases.  Maybe Canva acquired Serif at such a discount that the justification is trivial.

I suspect that there are a lot of bullet points saying something similar to:

• Sharing of code
• Sharing of AI
• Reduce the number of coders
• Reduce admin staff
• Both platforms will benefit from shared customers
• Affinity V3 will transition to subscription (seeing how well it worked for Adobe)
• [I hope we see] Rapid release of Lightroom clone and DAM
  • Importation of LR and Capture one Catalogs
  • Migration of LR and Capture One Catalogs
• Partner with camera manufactures
• Add Fast Raw Viewer to the portfolio 
• Add CYME to the portfolio

I suspect however that we are going to see two separate software portfolios languish and neither get the attention that they deserve and more customers move back to Adobe (I did months ago).  I still have Affinity loaded because I still have some assets that were created in one of the Affinity apps (and Capture One Pro), but moving forward it is Adobe only...