Canva makes pro design tool Affinity “free, forever”
In a busy week for design software news, Affinity looks to take on Adobe, which has itself announced a raft of new AI tools.
Canva is making its professional design tool Affinity “free forever” in a bid to upend the design software market.
The company announced today it is relaunching the tool with “substantial changes” that make Affinity “truly a competitive product against the incumbents in this space.”
And by making it free for everyone, Canva is clearly parking its tanks on Adobe’s lawn.
“When Canva launched, it was consciously trying to change the world, in terms of how non-experts could design,” Canva’s Duncan Clark, head of EMEA, explains. “We see this as changing the world for how experts, and potential experts, can design.”
Nottinghamshire-based Serif released its first app, Affinity Designer, in 2014, before adding Photo and Publisher tools. They refreshed the whole suite in 2022. Canva bought the company last year, in a deal reported to be worth $380million.
Affinity currently has five million downloads, but has added 1.5 million of those in the 18 months since it was acquired.
Adobe currently has more than 30 million paying users for its creative apps, but Clark believes the new Affinity is well-placed to take on its rivals.
The new app brings all of Affinity’s tools into “one powerful product with one universal file type,” which means users will no longer need to switch between different applications for different types of design.
“That was a fragmented experience,” Clark says. “With Affinity Studio, if you move between Vector and Pixel, the tools change, but you’re still in the same canvas.
“This is a breakthrough in how professional design tools are structured, and an architectural change that we deeply believe in. It feels very weird that it was ever separate.”
There is also a focus on performance and immediacy, to create what Clark calls an experience that “feels like an extension of your brain.”
Affinity is also rolling out a new identity, created by the in-house Canva and Affinity teams, in collaboration withBarcelona-based Twist Studio. The visual and verbal rebrand is designed to reflect Affinity’s move from challenger brand to part of the design establishment.
Many designers are wary of Canva, feeling that its mission – “to empower the world to design” – undermines the value of professional design work, and even takes jobs away from the industry.
But Clark says the two are not mutually exclusive.
“There’s always a fear, when a new technology brings capability to more people, that it might undermine the experts,” he says. “We don’t believe that’s true.”
“The role of the professional designer is more important than ever.”
He draws a parallel with computing, where democratisation of home computers made more people tech-savvy, and so, Clark says, changed and enhanced the role of computer experts.
“The role of the professional designer is more important than ever – as the taste maker, the craft expert, the person who can provide the visual layer on top of what everyone else is doing,” Clark says.
“But also we think there’s an amazing opportunity for those professional designers to become the enablers of the rest of the organisation – to create something beautiful, and help everyone use it in the right way.”
He says the new Affinity has been built to address professional designers’ frustrations with existing tools, “which we heard are overpriced and insufficiently innovative.”
And Clark says that by making the tool free, it opens up professional design careers to people who might have previously been priced out of it.
“There’s no catch, no stripped-back version and no gotchas,” Affinity CEO Ash Hewson says. “The same precise, high-performance tools that professionals rely on every day are now open to all, because creative freedom shouldn’t come with a cost.”
Adobe doubles down on AI
Canva’s move comes in the same week as Adobe announced a raft of AI innovations at its Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles.
The new AI capabilities are designed to help creators, “work faster and take on more opportunities by expanding creative possibilities and removing time-consuming tasks and creative barriers.”
The announcements included a beefed-up version of its Adobe Firefly generative AI tools, with a particular focus on video. They are rolling out generative soundtracks and voiceovers, as well as improving Premiere Pro with an AI Object mask, and enhancing Photoshop’s Generative Fill.
Adobe is also giving users more choice to work with other companies’ generative models, like Google, OpenAI and Runway.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Adobe announced Project Moonlight, a cross-app AI agent designed to act as a creative partner and project manager, overseeing and connecting other AI assistants.
And not to be left out, Figma has also been making moves. It announced today it has acquired generative AI platform Weavy. As Figma Weave, it will, “build out image, video, animation, motion design, and VFX media generation and editing capability on the Figma platform.”
Figma also rolled out new releases at its Schema event this week.
“Quality and taste matter more than ever now that the boundaries between product, design, and engineering are blurring, and more people – and AI tools –contribute to the product development process,”Figma’s VP of product, Paige Costello wrote.
“Design systems have long been the key to driving consistency between design and production at scale. Now they have the potential to be not just a shared language for product builders, but also the translation AI needs to understand design and code. In this way, design systems are evolving from static standards into living systems that product teams can build on.”
The new innovations include extended collections, a more efficient way of managing multi-brand design systems, check designs, which smoothes the handover to developers, and make kits, which allow users to import asset libraries from Figma into Figma Make.
Together, the changes are designed to make it easier for teams to “scale their design systems across new paradigms,” Costello says.
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5 responses to “Canva makes pro design tool Affinity “free, forever””
I love what Affinity have done here. I would have given my right arm for something like this many years ago when I had left college and was looking for a job. I had to make do with MS Works and MS Paint!
Exciting times and Markzware helps you convert between all of these design ecosystems so that you can do what you love. Design!
What no one seems to mention about Affinity, and why Adobe should be listening, is that Affinity includes PANTONE — FREE.
For those designers who think that Canva and its push into design is taking away their jobs, think again. It’s just software, no more than a sophisticated pencil. The difference we offer clients is our problem-solving abilities and creative expertise that only we can generate. I’ve used Canva in conjunction with clients and Affinity apps from the beginning, alongside my Adobe tools. In many ways the Canva / Affinity free tools make client collaboration much easier, more streamlined and so much better than the MS route. My clients buy me and what I can do, not my software.
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