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Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#71

Post by redwasp »

Ugh. I've seen what happens with Canva's acquisitions once already, albeit at a much smaller scale: I used to use a free service for PowerPoint templates called SlidesCarnival[1]. Decent templates, very customizable, and generally significantly better than the PowerPoint defaults.

They also got bought out by Canva, and I've watched the quality drop massively- any new content is almost entirely unusable, often only available on Canva itself, and chock full of design tropes and poorly SEO-optimized content. (Some of them are so bad as to be unintentionally hilarious.) It's a real mess, and it makes me less than optimistic about them buying out Affinity.

To be fair, their model was wildly different from a fully-featured editing suite, and certainly welcomed this kind of change, but they absolutely gutted that site: the only positive is that the original templates are still there, if you search for them. I'm not holding my breath, but I expect the same treatment now. An absolute shame- I don't use a photo editor enough to warrant an Adobe subscription, so I'll probably stay on Affinity V2 until it stops working.

[1]: https://www.slidescarnival.com/

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#72

Post by sarreph »

There was something so special and powerful about Affinity Designer V1. It was just a supreme amount of value and such a robust application that it became the tool I learned to do graphic design on, and the tool I loved.

I feel like something slipped with Designer V2 - the features went a bit weird and broad, and the amount of bugs got irritating and eroded my love for it and it being my go-to recommendation.

That all said, it’s still good software today and I’m glad the Serif team gets some kind of payday. I think the drop in quality of V2 makes the whole thing a bit less bittersweet for me.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#73

Post by [deleted] »

zubspace wrote: post #27

Step 1: Announce the acquisition. Everyone will talk about the company and the fear of subscriptions. Step 2: Tell everyone, that the current pricing model will stay and no subscriptions will be offered. Everyone will cheer and recommend the products. Step 3: Wait until the dust settles and switch to subscriptions. The community will say "told you that this will happen" and life goes on.

[deleted]

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#74

Post by PetitPrince »

It's a sad state of affair when the first thing people think (myself included, and rightfully so) is "how will the product worsen" (in this case, with subscription) instead of the opposite.

I'm also preparing for a mysterious update that will make the V1 and V1 of the suite non-functional because of non-visible stuff like "security improvement" and "system stability".

I hope that I'm wrong.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#75

Post by omnimus »

orbital-decay wrote: post #22
phinnaeus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affinity can, though. I haven't touched Photoshop/Illustrator in years since I discovered Affinity.

You're probably not the target audience though. Adobe products might be old, dysfunctional, and janky under all that cruft, but they have vast amounts of domain knowledge put into them. Meaningfully competing with Photoshop & co involves breaking the lock-in (nearly impossible) and being much better use-case-wise. It's been done in certain niches where Photoshop is bad/mediocre/stagnates, like digital painting, but f…

Photoshop is the only software Adobe has bern giving atleast some attention.

If you are print designer than Publisher and Designer got to a point where they actually are better at many if not most fundamental things (speed, stability, ux of features, format support).

The main thing that has been keeping Affinity from adoption has been networking effects (adobe is in all companies and gets taught at schools).

Affinity is this close to turning this. Basically everyone has been waiting for them to allow third party plugins/scripting and the whole print industry would start to jump real fast.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#77

Post by omnimus »

phinnaeus wrote: post #15
nikolay wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe is not just Photoshop and Illustrator; Affinity is still subpar, and Adobe products are moving fast ahead.

Photoshop and Illustrator are surely a vast majority of Adobe product usage. What would be #3? Premiere? Lightroom? Actually I take it back, Acrobat is probably #1

Indesign is the main graphic software after Photoshop. Basically anything that gets printed uses Indesign. Photoshop is more well known because people love photography as a hobby but in professional print setting photos are just smaller component.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#78

Post by omnimus »

lstamour wrote: post #32
yaomtc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Davinci Resolve is on par with Premiere. Quark XPress is a great replacement for InDesign. No need to rely on one company for every type of multimedia software.

Have you actually used the products you’re recommending and the Adobe equivalents? I would say that InDesign easily won over then industry-standard Quark nearly two decades ago, and Resolve is okay but not great at most things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Resolve and its pricing, but like Affinity, it’s not quite on par with the features of Adobe’s products. I’m routinely frustrated by missing features. I have c…

Quark is trash but Affinity Publisher is pretty great imho if they added third party scripting/plugins pro market would start moving off Adobe.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#80

Post by adithyassekhar »

omnimus wrote: post #69
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. There is absolutely 0 reason to use Affinity of Adobe besides pricing model. They can play around with the numbers and try to have a cheaper subscription than Adobe, or maybe bundle it with the other software Canva offers, but ultimately I think switching to a subscription model will be the end of the Affinity software suite.

Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace. Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed. The reason why everyone hates th…

The only reason I don't use CS6 is because it doesn't work properly with hidpi displays. It doesn't scale well above 100%.
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