"Affinity-the British company Canva bought in 2024-is out with a new app that aims to sink Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with a simple proposal: If you are a professional designer, here's an integrated photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout studio seamlessly integrated into a single application, with a feature set comparable to Adobe's apps and a fully customizable UI. For free."
"When Canva bought Affinity, it kept British company independent and injected the capital needed to revamp the Affinity suit of apps into a bona fide Adobe competitor. As Adams tells me, the move was born from a radical rethinking of the entire creative world. "We're really viewing the entire design ecosystem as one big entity," he says. "It's not about separation anymore. It's not about professionals on one side, nonprofessionals on the other. It's really about your entire team working together.""
Canva acquired Affinity in 2024 and funded a major overhaul to create a single, integrated creative studio combining photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout. The application promises a feature set comparable to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign while offering a fully customizable user interface. The company is marketing the suite as free forever, positioning it directly against Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription pricing. The strategy reflects a vision of the design ecosystem as a unified entity, aiming to collapse the divide between professionals and nonprofessionals and enable entire teams to collaborate. Community frustration over pricing, transparency, and sluggish innovation informed the initiative.
Read at Fast Company
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