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There's no shortage of "actually good free software" that is FOSS, so idk what you're on about
Blender comes to mind...
Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
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Re: Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
#32Re: Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
#33I think their real bet (good or not) is that AI isn’t going to need to use Afinity Studio.
Re: Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
#34[flagged]
Affinity, DaVinci Resolve are not free software.
Actually good free software (Blender, Krita, Musescore, Audacity...) shows the FOSS community has been improving software for decades decades.
Re: Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
#35I've been a paying Affinity customer for a while. I did not like the Adobe subscription model, even though pricewise it more or less the same as what I paid for software upgrades to Adobe products, ~$600/yr. So I looked for alternatives and Affinity was "good enough", and over time got significantly better.
This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my email address. I will be interested to see if this means that offline work is difficult or impossible. If Canva can just manage to not go insane, this should work out well for them. A $200/yr Pro license is extremely reasonable. Even though I steadfastly refuse to use generative AI in doing design, I would consider the Pro if it turns out to have some tooling that would be advantageous.
Re: Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
People whined about CMYK until it became irrelevant (print died). I'd argue that GIMP was forward-looking by being digital-first. The reality is all those GIMP haters can either get over it or enjoy paying increasingly high subscription fees for their increasingly enshittified creative suite subscription.
So because I need professional print features, I’m a GIMP hater? It’s fine if you don’t want GIMP to change to meet the needs of a different group (after all these years I suppose the GIMP team agrees). But to people who want to be paid for their product, this is valuable feedback.
Is Adobe responsive to their customers? Maybe at one point a long time ago. But this just shows the folly of tying your professional life to proprietary tool chains. Adobe's business now is to suck any blood left in their customers's veins while trying to obsolete them through AI intellectual property theft.
Re: Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
#37I've been using and loving the Affinity v2 suite for the last 3 years or so, and will continue to use v2 of the suite for the time being. I know how it works, I know it won't change drastically, and it already does all the things I need it to. I know new users won't have the luxury of staying behind on the old version, but it seems wise to give them a year or two to get some legs and see if they'll stand behind this "base product free" strategy, or if they'll start locking more features behind a paywall if it doesn't make money quickly enough.
Re: Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
GIMP is a perfect example of how the plot has been lost. Go to the download page: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ - A mac user has FOUR equal priority download buttons to decide between, depending on chips and whether you want direct or torrent downloads. That is an absurd decision to put in front of 99% of computer users. For power users, no problem. But if the objective was ever to be mainstream, this is among the…
Sounds like an apple issue, there's only three for windows, one being the MS store and most people are used to the idea of app stores thanks to phones. (I agree it's probably best to deemphasise the bittorrent button though)
It's a website UX issue. If it were an apple issue, every website for apple software would have this problem, and they don't.
Anyway, three equal priority options for Windows is also very bad, from a UX standpoint. Two is bad! The point is that there should be a recommendation. Unless it's fine to send many users away confused, in which case no problem!
Re: Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
#39I’m guessing that pros are just going to pay the adobe subscription rate, since a thousand bucks a year isn’t much when it’s a tool for your work.
Non-pro users are much more likely to seek out another tool.
Honestly, the reason I don’t use adobe products is their 2 user limit. If it were 5 users like microsoft, I would probably pay, but I have vm’s and multiple computers and I’m not paying for two subscriptions for acrobat.
PDF expert is good enough.
Re: Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
#40This is analysis is spot on.
I made the same argument about Figma (that what made Figma successful is that design software had started to be used more like office suite software) in my overview of the historical transitions in creative software https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...:
> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.
Regarding this, I'm curious how big this market is really. E.g., for me, working on software, I almost never see design work from folks that aren't professional designers (and if I do, they use Figma already, not the Creative Suite). But I'd be curious to hear other folks impressions, even just anecdotally:
> To explain what I mean: Let’s say you’re a company that subscribes to Adobe Creative Cloud. You might buy it for one department—like your video team, or your web team, or your print team. But there are a lot of other people in your office, and they need design too. They need to build social posts and presentations and email signatures and graphical work that your $150,000-per-year senior designer doesn’t have the time for.