Canva aquires Affinity

[jthompson]

https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/

 

We’re thrilled to announce our acquisition of creative software platform Affinity as we accelerate our mission of empowering the world to design...

 

We share Affinity's belief that professional design software should be intuitive, affordable, fast, and smooth. With Affinity, professional designers have access to everything they need at an affordable price and without the complexity of traditional design tools...

 

Available across Windows, Mac and iPad, Affinity’s creative suite includes:

 

Affinity Designer: The top choice for thousands of illustrators, designers, and game developers, Designer is Affinity’s vector-based graphics software for everything from creating digital illustrations to concept art, unique graphics, logos, brand designs, web mock-ups, and more.

 

Affinity Photo: The only fully-loaded photo editor available across MacOS, Windows, and iPad. Perfect for everything from basic editing to advanced retouching and creating multilayer photo compositions, Affinity Photo is quickly becoming the industry standard for image editing.

 

Affinity Publisher: The next generation of professional page layout software, this smooth, intuitive app lets you combine images, graphics, and text to make beautiful layouts ready for publication, from books, magazines, and marketing materials to social media templates, website mock-ups, and more.

 

Canva has followed up with a pledge to honour Affinity perpetual licensing.

 

https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/

 

We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future.

 

If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it.

 

-- EDIT --

 

Oh, and are also pledging to include Affinity as a free option for schools:

 

3. We will provide Affinity free for schools and nonprofits.

 

Canva, which has pledged 30% of its value as a company towards doing good in the world through its Two-Step Plan(opens in a new tab or window), offers premium plans at no cost to schools and nonprofits all over the world. More than 60 million students and teachers, plus 600,000 charities and registered nonprofits, benefit from this each month.

 

We’re excited to extend this programme to include free access for schools and nonprofits to Designer, Photo and Publisher. These professional-grade tools will add enormous value to this free offering, helping millions of students to master the craft of design, and empowering mission-driven organisations to amplify their voices and maximise their impact.

 

We’ll share more details on this in the coming months, including what it means for our education and nonprofit customers who already use Affinity.

Edited March 28, 2024 by jthompson

[chazzy2501]

this is going to suck. Affinity used to be Serif, I've always like the tech support and product.. This is an adobe acquires corel draw all over again.

[Pottsey]

this is going to suck. Affinity used to be Serif, I've always like the tech support and product.. This is an adobe acquires corel draw all over again.

This feels positive to me. Better for Education sites. I was always a fan of Affinity and now I can use it across all sites for everyone rather then just myself. If they honor what they are saying which I have no reason to doubt them at this stage. I am not seeing any downsides.

 

I am also hopeful this merger will put them in a better position for AI support which is the only element missing from Affinity that I would like to see. Canva has the cloud background to build on this.

Edited March 28, 2024 by Pottsey

[Jaan]

I can confirm that we are now getting Affinity free here after our previous licensing expired.

[jthompson]

Received an email from Canva this morning announcing that Affinity is now "free for all verified Canva for Education schools".

 

That links to this article - https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/affinity-canva-free-for-schools/ - which includes some instructions. When launching the apps, users are presented with a sign in splash screen, on which they'd need to choose the Sign in with Canva option in the small print.

 

This page gives instructions for obtaining MSI installers - https://support.serif.com/hc/en-us/articles/10397292284687-Creating-an-MSI-for-deployment-for-use-with-Canva-Education-and-Nonprofit-accounts. Download the "MSI/EXE" Windows installer and then run the command on that page to generate an MSI.

[gaz350b]

The workflow for getting students signed in is pants. There are just sooooo many steps.

 

Home or 1 to 1 fine but a lab environment is going to be pretty frustrating experience.

[mrbios]

The workflow for getting students signed in is pants. There are just sooooo many steps.

 

Home or 1 to 1 fine but a lab environment is going to be pretty frustrating experience.

 

I agree. We're going to get SO many requests involving "i can't login" when in actual fact they'll have clicked on "Sign in with affinity ID" rather than the "Sign in with canva" link below, which is very small. The login screen should just have two buttons side by side or one above the other.

 

Then their login methods is irritating......we instruct kids that "If there is a "sign in with microsoft" option, use it. It's our go-to SSO option for EVERYTHING. Yet this one is hidden under "Continue another way..." which is a bit ridiculous...... We do have Google setup to use Microsoft for SAML, and as such i have enabled the google sign in button, but it feels very counterintuitive for this one app to tell everyone to click on "Sign in with google" >_<