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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

#331

Post by Daub »

lstamour wrote: post #40
Daub wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could they do better? I am interested.

Let’s see… they’re so far behind they only recently added pathfinder tools to their illustrator app with v2… initially claimed it wasn’t necessary https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/68819-bett... but then gave in and basically shipped it https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=... It’s hard to sell an entire industry on replacing tools that “just work” with a new set of tools unless…

Maybe it is your particular needs, but so far I have been very impressed by the Affinity suite. I render from Blender in open exr, place in an AP document which I then place in a AP document. When I update the render, the whole pipeline is updated. This preservation of high dynamic range info would be impossible in the Adobe Suite.

I think that this is possible because under the hood the Affinity Suite uses the same core engine. In contrast, Adobe bought their suite from diverse sources, and interplay between them is clunky at best.

I agree that text preview in AP can be rough, but the output in pdf is as good as that in InDesign.

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

#332

Post by _xivi »

chrisoconnell wrote: post #268
GlacierFox wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes.

Explain why it's cheating? I'm a designer. I have been for over a decade. I don't use Canva, but I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places. How is Canva any different than this? Part of design is being able to recognize what good design is, and utilizing the tools available to you. If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modifie…

> Explain why it's cheating?

how would you feel about a student presenting stock images in a photography class?

> I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.

Working professionaly has a different objective than school assignments. I think the distinction is very clear on many levels. Also, students using blatant off-the-shelf templates is very different professionals using templates "as starting place".

> If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?

Well, that's not the case here. OP has explained that the design students in question aren't even using their low-effort canva templates right and exporting them as flattened pdf. It's very unlikely those who are this sloppy and careless have put any attention to the assignment or polishing other areas.

The key point is you can't delegate the main task. To use your Shopify example, if you enrolled in a "Web development using nodejs" class, and presented a premade shopify website that you purchased in a couple of clicks, the instructor won't be impressed, less so when you tell them you did it in 5 minutes "why waste time". If that's the student goal, fine, but they are in the wrong classes.

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

#333

Post by spaceman_2020 »

gedy wrote: post #236
goralph wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t sound like a good educator. Perhaps withhold your personal and subjective gripes for the sake of your students

Almost agree, but submitting research information as an image, and not selectable/copyable text is kind of unacceptable these days.

Except he's wrong and Canva's PDFs have selectable text.

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

#334

Post by candiodari »

pembrook wrote: post #297
upsuper wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Affinity had a great business of their own, they wouldn’t need to sell. They don't need to. They mentioned that in their FAQ: > We have to say that selling Serif was not on our minds at all, but when Canva contacted us (only a couple of months ago!) there was something about it which just felt right.

Riiight. They had a fantastically enjoyable and profitable business going for themselves...but they decided they'd rather give up all control and sell their baby to a much larger corporate entity, give up the future upside from any growth, and play office politics instead of control their own destiny. ...because it just "felt right."

Not really. They did so because people pay MUCH more for much less functionality in Canva, and so accepting the offer gives them a payday they couldn't hope to accumulate themselves.

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

#336

Post by freedomben »

mandmandam wrote: post #311
Auracle wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a photographer until late last year and there were many weeks I spent 40 hours+ in Photoshop and I don’t remember a single crash. I’m on Windows, for what it’s worth.

Perhaps Adobe only crashes when it can smell fear... Like printers. Really though, Photoshop and Illustrator both got buggy on me on a weekly/near daily basis. I used them all for decades. It feels like they were stable for a few years around like 1999-2001.

Somewhat off topic, but your comment made me literally laugh out loud in real life. I am working on a receipt printer right now, and it can absolutely smell fear. Its favorite thing to do right now is to use its incredible power of speed to print half my roll of receipt tape with random gibberish in the several seconds it takes me to pull the power cable. I haven't yet let it run to completion to see if it will eat the entire roll of tape, but I suspect it would.

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

#337

Post by goralph »

rchaud wrote: post #246
jonathanstrange wrote: post #191

These kind of acquisitions always astonish me. How does a web company that essentially sells toys get the money to purchase a company that sells professional desktop products?

It's 'valued' at $40bn, so if you can figure out the particulars of their VC rain dance, I imagine there's plenty of capital available for acquisitions.

They’re at a 13x multiple which is fairly conservative for a SaaS with their growth rates, and have been profitable since 2017.

Disclaimer: I used to work there.

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

#338

Post by bananapub »

graypegg wrote: post #265

From the forum, on the topic of the buyout: "[I] Realise there seems to be a distinct lack of faith flying around here, but we'll be revealing more about our plans in the coming days and yes I'm sure you will all be pleased with what we have to say." - Ash So that's at least possibly a sign of better information to follow. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201413-aff...

what could they possibly say?

they can't guarantee they won't move to a subscription service in the future - this entire discussion is about how Affinity management have sold out and no longer control the company.

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

#339

Post by bananapub »

candiodari wrote: post #335
rchaud wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the "recurring revenue" SaaS cult.

It's not a cult if it works ...

what does "work" mean?

that it maximises profits for HN posters?

that it maximises some abstract goodness for society?

that it provides good quality products at the lowest prices?

the fact businesses keep doing something doesn't provide any information on if that's good for anyone else.

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

#340

Post by gushie »

upsuper wrote: post #328
Daub wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I confess I have never used Canva myself. However, every pdf that students send our way from Canva is basically just series of flattened images. This also applies to the many Canva derived pdfs which I see from job applicants. So... What is going wrong? I will look into it and message you if I find anything new. Thanks greatly for making contact. Only on Hacker News. To be fair to your product, it is the only viable…

I realized that we provide an option called "Flatten PDF" [1] which does exactly what you described: flatten everything including text into a big image per page. It makes all text unselectable and also produces a very large file. This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously…

I had assumed 'Flatten PDF' was to make the PDF smaller so just used it without thinking or comparing!
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