Canva Acquires Design Platform Affinity

[Digital Nigel]

Ashley Hewson CEO of Serif announced today that Affinity is becoming part of the Canva family:

Curious as to what are the advantages to doing this ?

The were possibly going broke and needed a cash bailout.

Exactly the opposite: Serif was embarrassingly profitable (profits were 53% of gross revenue) and growing well. It had very healthy amounts of cash in the bank.

Then whoever owned the company was looking for a huge amount of cash that would allow them to retire rich and live the good life.

The two majority shareholders rescued the then struggling company in 2001, paying less than £1m for it. They turned it round very successfully, and in recent years have taken monthly dividends of more than they originally paid for the company.

Serif wasn't for sale, and the Canva offer came out of the blue. But after 23 patient years, the majority owners were probably delighted to exit with a very handsome profit. I don't think they were still involved with running the company day-to-day, and immediately resigned their directorships on the day the deal closed. They are presumably out of the picture now.

There's certainly some good signs:

• There's no overlap between the companies, so no products from either company need to be 'rationalised' or force-fitted together.
• Nobody is being laid off, so cost-saving isn't the objective.
• This isn't a company rescue: both companies were doing very well, so there's no pressing need to change things.
• Canva has a huge customer base, so there may be good cross-selling opportunities for the Affinity products.
• Ease-of-use isn't Affinity's greatest strength. Canva may be able to help the Affinity team to simplify the complex UI, hopefully without losing functionality.
• Affinity has been very slow to include any form of AI, either local or cloud-based. Canva should be able to help there.

 

[IanYorke]

From a brief look at Canva it looks like a good match. Canva seem to focus on AI aided design for non technical people while Affinity is a direct competitor to Adobe in the technical design space.

Ian

It would indeed be nice if the two entities would remain separate and allowed to independently develop, but I'm afraid what it means is Affinity will just be dumbed down rather than enhanced (the usual end result), further opening the gap between it and Adobe.

If a subscription ever becomes (practically) necessary, I can't imagine any reason to stay with Affinity Photo. As it is now, Photo is a large enough percentage of Photoshop's capabilities, that when combined with its reasonably-priced permanent license it precludes any compelling reason to go to Adobe. But if a Photo subscription becomes necessary that advantage instantly evaporates. It doesn't make Photo weaker, but there's no logical reason to forego Photoshop's additional strengths if they're both a subscription.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

 

[number_5]

Hopefully I'm wrong but I doubt it will be a one time lifetime purchase. Topaz said that too at one time but they turned it into an upgrade cycle.

Topaz still has perpetual licences, not subscriptions.

Well, kind of. You get the 1 year "perpetual" upgrades, and after, you are on your own, even the minor version.

AI-based software are mostly data driven. The whole Topaz suite is AI-based and the software does not smarter without the annual upgrade.

 

[Zeee]

Hopefully I'm wrong but I doubt it will be a one time lifetime purchase. Topaz said that too at one time but they turned it into an upgrade cycle.

Topaz still has perpetual licences, not subscriptions.

Well, kind of. You get the 1 year "perpetual" upgrades, and after, you are on your own, even the minor version.

AI-based software are mostly data driven. The whole Topaz suite is AI-based and the software does not smarter without the annual upgrade.

Yes. Topaz at one time offered lifetime updates. There were quite few upset members when they stopped that.

 

[Digital Nigel]

Hopefully I'm wrong but I doubt it will be a one time lifetime purchase. Topaz said that too at one time but they turned it into an upgrade cycle.

Topaz still has perpetual licences, not subscriptions.

Well, kind of.

No, absolutely and unambiguously.

You get the 1 year "perpetual" upgrades, and after, you are on your own, even the minor version.

Just like all perpetual licences. At least Topaz gives you another year of updates when you pay for an upgrade.

AI-based software are mostly data driven. The whole Topaz suite is AI-based and the software does not smarter without the annual upgrade.

It's still a perpetual licence. You can go long periods without updates without losing much.

Indeed, plenty of people think the frozen DeNoise and Sharpen are at least as good as the latest Photo AI. If all you need is AI sharpening, the frozen version of Sharpen AI remains among the best solutions. That's the benefit of perpetual licences.

 

[graybalanced]

Yes, I'm struggling to spot the synergies between the two companies. It's not about cost saving, so presumably they can each borrow the other's technology to enhance the two product lines. Perhaps they also see cross-selling opportunities?

The synergies can be very hard to spot for any of us silo'ed into photography. But they are blindingly obvious to those watching the big picture of app usage.

Photoshop ruled print, but ads and marketing all go through social media now. But I don't know if you noticed, but Photoshop is a pain to use for social media prep. There was once a time when Photoshop and the other Adobe mega-apps were the only game in town for any halfway decent graphic design, but they ran into problems. First, as I said they are too tied to the old print paradigm and badly suited for social media output requirements. Second, they are expensive. Third, they are hard to learn.

Canva walked in with the right tools at the right time. Their tool is perfectly focused on social media output so that if you run a small business or a contractor, it's so much easier and faster to whip up a campaign in Canva than in Photoshop etc. SO MUCH EASIER. Plus it was cheaper, and I think they have a free tier. Also cloud-based, which I know we all hate here on DPReview but being productive with the same campaign from a phone, tablet, or laptop at any moment is a serious, serious advantage for a small business owner running the company out of their phone all day long.

After a while Adobe realized Canva was drawing away customers at the low end. If those users never saw a need to use Adobe, that is a long term mortal threat to Adobe dominance. So Adobe started competing there. They started Adobe Express, which is a very obvious anti-Canva strategic move. You need to know this background to see where this was going.

Adobe was also threatened by Figma on the web design end, which is the same problem: Adobe apps were too desktop-bound, too high a learning curve, not modernized. Figma is a totally focused on modern web design needs, especially total design systems. And people LOVE Figma. Adobe had nothing to go up against it (Dreamweaver is a dinosaur from the 1990s HTML age and cannot compete here), so they created Xd. But Xd failed against Figma, so Adobe tried to buy Figma for $20 billion. But this merger was blocked by EU regulators who were wary of the monopoly potential.

Meanwhile, Canva is realizing exactly what Adobe realized, but from the opposite end: Canva has the low end, but not the high end. Affinity has a suite that can compete with Adobe. So Canva acquires Affinity.

You have to know all that background to understand how this latest acquisition restores some balance to the universe in their eyes:

Adobe has great desktop apps but no good cloud social media campaign generator, so they had to balance out their portfolio by creating Adobe Express.

Canva has a great cloud-based social media campaign generator but no desktop apps, so they had to balance out their portfolio by acquiring Affinity, and now they have a way to compete with Adobe better.

Now Adobe will continue to fight Canva with Adobe Express, while Canva is now able to deploy the Affinity Suite to fight Photoshop and its siblings. It is a leveling of the playing field.

 

[Len Philpot]

Don't you think Canva management knows and understands this? The major competitive advantage Affinity apps Photo/Publisher/Desinger have over the equivalent Adobe apps is price and licensing. They do not win for total functionality.
People who run companies in a competitve environment are keenly aware of the market they are in.

I've seen far too often where people who run companies are in it for their own short term gain. They usually have financial experience only, rarely anything related to the core competencies of who they buy. They buy and cash out. Hopefully that's not true with Canva.

I'm not referring to Ash nor Serif, but rather to behavior I've seen all too often before. Again, I hope I'm wrong and I hope that's not the case with Canva. But it happens much too often not to expect it by default.

 

[Digital Nigel]

Yes, I'm struggling to spot the synergies between the two companies. It's not about cost saving, so presumably they can each borrow the other's technology to enhance the two product lines. Perhaps they also see cross-selling opportunities?

The synergies can be very hard to spot for any of us silo'ed into photography. But they are blindingly obvious to those watching the big picture of app usage.

Photoshop ruled print, but ads and marketing all go through social media now. But I don't know if you noticed, but Photoshop is a pain to use for social media prep. There was once a time when Photoshop and the other Adobe mega-apps were the only game in town for any halfway decent graphic design, but they ran into problems. First, as I said they are too tied to the old print paradigm and badly suited for social media output requirements. Second, they are expensive. Third, they are hard to learn.

Canva walked in with the right tools at the right time. Their tool is perfectly focused on social media output so that if you run a small business or a contractor, it's so much easier and faster to whip up a campaign in Canva than in Photoshop etc. SO MUCH EASIER. Plus it was cheaper, and I think they have a free tier. Also cloud-based, which I know we all hate here on DPReview but being productive with the same campaign from a phone, tablet, or laptop at any moment is a serious, serious advantage for a small business owner running the company out of their phone all day long.

After a while Adobe realized Canva was drawing away customers at the low end. If those users never saw a need to use Adobe, that is a long term mortal threat to Adobe dominance. So Adobe started competing there. They started Adobe Express, which is a very obvious anti-Canva strategic move. You need to know this background to see where this was going.

Adobe was also threatened by Figma on the web design end, which is the same problem: Adobe apps were too desktop-bound, too high a learning curve, not modernized. Figma is a totally focused on modern web design needs, especially total design systems. And people LOVE Figma. Adobe had nothing to go up against it (Dreamweaver is a dinosaur from the 1990s HTML age and cannot compete here), so they created Xd. But Xd failed against Figma, so Adobe tried to buy Figma for $20 billion. But this merger was blocked by EU regulators who were wary of the monopoly potential.

Meanwhile, Canva is realizing exactly what Adobe realized, but from the opposite end: Canva has the low end, but not the high end. Affinity has a suite that can compete with Adobe. So Canva acquires Affinity.

You have to know all that background to understand how this latest acquisition restores some balance to the universe in their eyes:

Adobe has great desktop apps but no good cloud social media campaign generator, so they had to balance out their portfolio by creating Adobe Express.

Canva has a great cloud-based social media campaign generator but no desktop apps, so they had to balance out their portfolio by acquiring Affinity, and now they have a way to compete with Adobe better.

Now Adobe will continue to fight Canva with Adobe Express, while Canva is now able to deploy the Affinity Suite to fight Photoshop and its siblings. It is a leveling of the playing field.

Thanks; I knew nothing of Canva before this news.

 

[Breakfastographer]

From

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/serif-sale-gives-owners-100m-windfall-86fplbtxd

Two Nottingham-based entrepreneurs have banked more than £100 million after they sold their graphic design software company to Canva, of Australia, in a deal worth “several hundred million pounds”.

Gary Bates, 54, and Jim Bryce, 59, owned about two thirds of Serif, which is known for its Affinity range of software for professional designers.

They acquired the lossmaking business for less than £1 million in 2001 as part of a management buyout from a now-defunct American company [Allegra/Vizacom]. Bates could see they had bagged a bargain, telling The Nottingham Evening Post in August that year: “Although the business posted losses last year, there was an underlying profitability about the company.”

Ashley Hewson, the chief executive of Serif, said the deal had “come out of the blue”

The pair subsequently acquired all the remaining shares in a second buyout in 2004, helped by funding from Bank of Scotland, before selling a 10 per cent stake to Ashley Hewson, the present chief executive, and other employees in 2008. Hewson, 46, had joined the company in 1998 in telesales, after dropping out of university.

More than three million professional designers use Affinity, which helped Serif to achieve pre-tax profits of £16 million in 2022, on sales of £31 million. Those bumper profits enabled its shareholders to receive £43.4 million in dividends between 2022 and April 2023.

Hewson said the deal with Canva, which was said in January to be valued at $26 billion, had come “out of the blue”. Bates and Bryce are leaving the business completely, while he and Serif’s 93-strong team are joining Canva.

The move is a departure for Canva, which provides easy-to-use design templates and tools for untrained designers, with 175 million people using its software each month. It was co-founded in 2013 by Melanie Perkins, 36, its chief executive, her husband Cliff Obrecht, 38, and Cameron Adams, 44, a former Google engineer.

Obrecht said in an interview with Bloomberg that the deal for Serif had been funded with a mix of cash and stock and that it valued Serif at “several hundred million pounds”. Obrecht and Perkins own about 30 per cent of Canva. The profitable company reported annual recurring revenues of more than $2 billion in December.

Thank you for clearing this up because even the thing they sent out to users seemed to have gotten it wrong.

For those that remember, Serif had products (and worthy ones at that) prior to the Affinity suite, such as PagePlus, PhotoPlus and and DrawPlus (released in this order); these were Windows-only but exactly foreshadow the later Affinity Publisher, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer (not released in this order).

The Affinity suite in its macOS incarnation (still called "OS X" when the first product, Affinity Designer, was launched) relied on proprietary OS X libraries such as Core Image to accelerate development. I suspect it is partly for this reason that they won an Apple Design Award in 2015.

However, Serif apparently had the ambition to run Affinity on Wndows. In order to do this, they had to implement the parts of macOS "Core" libraries that they relied on, for the Windows version. I don't know of any other company that has trodden this path - I suspect it's ambitious if the goal is to get similar levels of performance.

Why is Serif being sold now? The following might be the reason, using the words of Wikipedia:

"Support for the legacy product range ended in July 2022."

--
39 raw converters tested:

39 RAW converters compared

Note: This article has continued to receive updates. For technical reasons, it will continue to say Nov ’18 at the top, but includes software that was released after that date. So here’…

breakfastographer.wordpress.com

 

[Breakfastographer]

I’ve just had a look at Canva and my initial view is that it’s a lightweight do it all visual presentation tool, geared I would think to small business who don’t want to use costlier, more knowledge intensive products such as Adobe and Microsoft.

As a consultant who creates presentations for senior execs in large businesses it is not a tool I would even consider due to lack of compatibility with the corporate players, for example, like it or not, your presentation will be in MS PowerPoint if you want to share them. It’s the way it is.

We may have to talk about New Work. In New Work, you do the work on a third-party server like Microsoft365, Google Docs, Prezi, Canva, etc., and you send around links, not documents. User administration is often done at the level of the team, and the responsibility of security is out-sourced to the company running the server-based services.

You have a point in that there is usually demand for an archival format like PDF or even PPT(X), but that notwithstanding, SME have been switching to this online, work-in-the-browser kind of model - increasingly so with COVID lock-downs!

Has the free option which I had a play with, and a £100 annual subscription, might have been in USD, can’t remember.

i can see that affinity knowledge could bolster their offering, but integrating desktop apps with a in the main cloud cased eco system will be a significant challenge I would have thought. Desktop and mobile versions exist, but these seem to mirror the web experience from what little I’ve seen.

I guess my biggest concern here would be Canva pushing for the Affinity developers to enable the Affinity suite into the Canva tech stack, potentially diluting development in Affinity, it being a small company, moving to a subscription model and dilution of the Affinity brand

Could be good, equally could kill off Affinity, depends on what the new owners want. I guess we will see.

It's not my impression that Affinity is a major factor in stopping adoption of Canva. More likely, they will try to establish compatibility between the products so that advanced members of a team can run Affinity and upload their content into Canva.

They will also typically gradually integrate technologies from Affinity into Canva, and possibly vice-versa, to an extent.

If Ashley Hewson moves on quickly that will be bad for Affinity and a good indicator for where things are going

In my expectation, the kind of ambitious development that happens at Affinity is not dependent on one person. If I had to pick an IT company to work at in the UK, Serif (or whatever it shall be called now) would be in the top 2. The other company does something rather different.

 

[AndyGordon]

I’ve just had a look at Canva and my initial view is that it’s a lightweight do it all visual presentation tool, geared I would think to small business who don’t want to use costlier, more knowledge intensive products such as Adobe and Microsoft.

As a consultant who creates presentations for senior execs in large businesses it is not a tool I would even consider due to lack of compatibility with the corporate players, for example, like it or not, your presentation will be in MS PowerPoint if you want to share them. It’s the way it is.

We may have to talk about New Work. In New Work, you do the work on a third-party server like Microsoft365, Google Docs, Prezi, Canva, etc., and you send around links, not documents. User administration is often done at the level of the team, and the responsibility of security is out-sourced to the company running the server-based services.

New Work, if I’m getting you right is collaborative working and yes this is indeed the model used through a lot, but definitely not all, of the corporate world, and yes through links to the document.

My point was more that Canva is not a product I have ever come across in the world I work in. Like it or not it’s Microsoft in the main for documents. That may change, but for corporates the integration provided across the entire Microsoft stack from Azure , Sharepoint, Dynamics, office suite etc, along with shared working put Canva in a different market more the SME where it does have a place

You have a point in that there is usually demand for an archival format like PDF or even PPT(X), but that notwithstanding, SME have been switching to this online, work-in-the-browser kind of model - increasingly so with COVID lock-downs!

Indeed, I’ve been working remotely using mix of browser and desktop based software since before Covid was a thing

Has the free option which I had a play with, and a £100 annual subscription, might have been in USD, can’t remember.

i can see that affinity knowledge could bolster their offering, but integrating desktop apps with a in the main cloud cased eco system will be a significant challenge I would have thought. Desktop and mobile versions exist, but these seem to mirror the web experience from what little I’ve seen.

I guess my biggest concern here would be Canva pushing for the Affinity developers to enable the Affinity suite into the Canva tech stack, potentially diluting development in Affinity, it being a small company, moving to a subscription model and dilution of the Affinity brand

Could be good, equally could kill off Affinity, depends on what the new owners want. I guess we will see.

It's not my impression that Affinity is a major factor in stopping adoption of Canva. More likely, they will try to establish compatibility between the products so that advanced members of a team can run Affinity and upload their content into Canva.

They will also typically gradually integrate technologies from Affinity into Canva, and possibly vice-versa, to an extent.

Indeed and that will be the thing, how this all pans out for both products

If Ashley Hewson moves on quickly that will be bad for Affinity and a good indicator for where things are going

In my expectation, the kind of ambitious development that happens at Affinity is not dependent on one person. If I had to pick an IT company to work at in the UK, Serif (or whatever it shall be called now) would be in the top 2. The other company does something rather different.

I agree re Affinity being an interesting company and one I’ll be watching given I’ve been a user of their software since about v1.5

 

[Digital Nigel]

Why is Serif being sold now? The following might be the reason, using the words of Wikipedia:

"Support for the legacy product range ended in July 2022."

I wonder why that would be of any relevance? Remember that Serif is being bought, not sold.

I can't see that Canva's interest in the company would have been in any way influenced by whether or not it was still providing some minimal level of support for a long-dead former product line that was of no interest to Canva. Supporting the Plus range in the later years would have generated minimal revenue for minimal cost.

I presume that Serif would have offered the modern products to the few remaining Plus users at minimal or no cost when support ceased.

 

[Breakfastographer]

Why is Serif being sold now? The following might be the reason, using the words of Wikipedia:

"Support for the legacy product range ended in July 2022."

I wonder why that would be of any relevance? Remember that Serif is being bought, not sold.

Because the prospect of having to continue to support a legacy product can be offputting to investors.

I can't see that Canva's interest in the company would have been in any way influenced by whether or not it was still providing some minimal level of support for a long-dead former product line that was of no interest to Canva. Supporting the Plus range in the later years would have generated minimal revenue for minimal cost.

Generated revenue how, exactly?

I presume that Serif would have offered the modern products to the few remaining Plus users at minimal or no cost when support ceased.

Yes, allowing an upgrade path to retain those customers would be a smart move.

 

[Digital Nigel]

Why is Serif being sold now? The following might be the reason, using the words of Wikipedia:

"Support for the legacy product range ended in July 2022."

I wonder why that would be of any relevance? Remember that Serif is being bought, not sold.

Because the prospect of having to continue to support a legacy product can be offputting to investors.

There would have been no legal obligation to continue supporting the legacy products. After all, they'd not been on sale after 2018, and no new versions were released after 2016. They weren't even available for download. After the final release, there was basically just a user forum for the last remaining customers to help each other. That wouldn't have cost much to run.

Information about the Legacy Plus Range

The Following FAQ posts are the only support Serif now give on the Legacy range. These forums are provided for Affinity customers to ask questions about Affinity software. Please do not create forum accounts here to ask Legacy Software questions. Any threads created here on the Affinity Forums re...

forum.affinity.serif.com

I can't see that Canva's interest in the company would have been in any way influenced by whether or not it was still providing some minimal level of support for a long-dead former product line that was of no interest to Canva. Supporting the Plus range in the later years would have generated minimal revenue for minimal cost.

Generated revenue how, exactly?

Serif would not have provided free support forever. No software company does.

Customers still using the old products would have had to pay for updated, bug-fixed versions, but those stopped after 2016. The final legacy versions were sold until 2018, but all active promotion stopped long before that, once the all-new Affinity range was released.

I presume that Serif would have offered the modern products to the few remaining Plus users at minimal or no cost when support ceased.

Yes, allowing an upgrade path to retain those customers would be a smart move.

 

[Breakfastographer]

Why is Serif being sold now? The following might be the reason, using the words of Wikipedia:

"Support for the legacy product range ended in July 2022."

I wonder why that would be of any relevance? Remember that Serif is being bought, not sold.

Because the prospect of having to continue to support a legacy product can be offputting to investors.

There would have been no legal obligation to continue supporting the legacy products. After all, they'd not been on sale after 2018, and no new versions were released after 2016.

Legal? When did you last see a software company give a sh*t about legal?

It's PR that matters. Canva was in hot waters with its customers over its handling of a data breach in 2019. Offering an easy to use product, you have highly mobile customers. You're not looking to add further bad PR by killing a potentially popular product after buying a company. You never 100% know what's going to happen. So you tell the company you're about to buy to finish up its business and then you'll talk. Not saying this is exactly what happened in this case, but look at what companies do when they know they need to lay off staff. It's bad PR. So you hire an external to tell you that you need to lay off staff. So now you have an "expert" that told you this is the only way to survive. Crisis averted. Same thing here - no legacy, no risk.

They weren't even available for download. After the final release, there was basically just a user forum for the last remaining customers to help each other. That wouldn't have cost much to run.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/164377-information-about-the-legacy-plus-range/

You either have insider knowledge or you're making assumptions. There may very well have been email communication in addition to the forum. Also, people assume that running a forum is just server costs and occasional software upgrades. People forget that content moderation is a necessary part and consumes staff hours one way or another, even with volunteers helping out.

I can't see that Canva's interest in the company would have been in any way influenced by whether or not it was still providing some minimal level of support for a long-dead former product line that was of no interest to Canva. Supporting the Plus range in the later years would have generated minimal revenue for minimal cost.

Generated revenue how, exactly?

Serif would not have provided free support forever. No software company does.

These were budget products competing with bigger players to start with. Doubtful in my mind that those sorts of customers will suddenly start to pay support fees. (That's not to say they might not be passionate and vocal about the product.) So, better for the acquisition target to tie up the bow on those customers before the take-over bid - certainly from the point of the investor!

Seeing that this whole discussion is starting to drag on a bit, I'll suggest that if we can't agree, we'll just chalk it up to being very different people with uniquely different perspectives.

Customers still using the old products would have had to pay for updated, bug-fixed versions, but those stopped after 2016. The final legacy versions were sold until 2018, but all active promotion stopped long before that, once the all-new Affinity range was released.

I presume that Serif would have offered the modern products to the few remaining Plus users at minimal or no cost when support ceased.

Yes, allowing an upgrade path to retain those customers would be a smart move.

 

[Digital Nigel]

Why is Serif being sold now? The following might be the reason, using the words of Wikipedia:

"Support for the legacy product range ended in July 2022."

I wonder why that would be of any relevance? Remember that Serif is being bought, not sold.

Because the prospect of having to continue to support a legacy product can be offputting to investors.

There would have been no legal obligation to continue supporting the legacy products. After all, they'd not been on sale after 2018, and no new versions were released after 2016.

Legal? When did you last see a software company give a sh*t about legal?

It's PR that matters. Canva was in hot waters with its customers over its handling of a data breach in 2019. Offering an easy to use product, you have highly mobile customers. You're not looking to add further bad PR by killing a potentially popular product after buying a company. You never 100% know what's going to happen. So you tell the company you're about to buy to finish up its business and then you'll talk. Not saying this is exactly what happened in this case,

It's obviously not what happened in this case. Canva only contacted Serif two months before the deal was completed. Private companies can move fast.

Obviously the price was attractive to the two majority Serif shareholders, and the technical fit was good enough to proceed.

but look at what companies do when they know they need to lay off staff. It's bad PR. So you hire an external to tell you that you need to lay off staff. So now you have an "expert" that told you this is the only way to survive. Crisis averted. Same thing here - no legacy, no risk.

The legacy products had been dropped years before this deal was even thought of.

They weren't even available for download. After the final release, there was basically just a user forum for the last remaining customers to help each other. That wouldn't have cost much to run.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/164377-information-about-the-legacy-plus-range/

You either have insider knowledge or you're making assumptions. There may very well have been email communication in addition to the forum. Also, people assume that running a forum is just server costs and occasional software upgrades. People forget that content moderation is a necessary part and consumes staff hours one way or another, even with volunteers helping out.

Which is why they had shut it down in 2022.

 

[Len Philpot]

The Affinity suite in its macOS incarnation (still called "OS X" when the first product, Affinity Designer, was launched) relied on proprietary OS X libraries such as Core Image to accelerate development. I suspect it is partly for this reason that they won an Apple Design Award in 2015.

However, Serif apparently had the ambition to run Affinity on Wndows. In order to do this, they had to implement the parts of macOS "Core" libraries that they relied on, for the Windows version. I don't know of any other company that has trodden this path - I suspect it's ambitious if the goal is to get similar levels of performance.

Oh, there's absolutely no doubt it was ported from somewhere. The UI isn't standard* and it feels like Mac software. Kinda. In some ways it feels neither fish nor fowl from a UI viewpoint.

*if that even is a thing anymore, so much for standardization

 

[Len Philpot]

• Ease-of-use isn't Affinity's greatest strength. Canva may be able to help the Affinity team to simplify the complex UI, hopefully without losing functionality.

What's inappropriately "complex" about it? The tasks it (and every other comparable product) need to do require a certain level of complexity -- that's the way it is. Pros, and those operating at that level, deal with it all the time. I'll take complex power EVERY DAY over a dumbed-down product / UI. That's exactly why EMACs and vi are better than Notepad, for instance.

 

[Digital Nigel]

• Ease-of-use isn't Affinity's greatest strength. Canva may be able to help the Affinity team to simplify the complex UI, hopefully without losing functionality.

What's inappropriately "complex" about it? The tasks it (and every other comparable product) need to do require a certain level of complexity -- that's the way it is. Pros, and those operating at that level, deal with it all the time. I'll take complex power EVERY DAY over a dumbed-down product / UI. That's exactly why EMACs and vi are better than Notepad, for instance.

The problem is that Affinity's low price and perpetual licence means that most of its users are amateurs. Most graphics professionals are locked into the Adobe world.

 

[Len Philpot]

• Ease-of-use isn't Affinity's greatest strength. Canva may be able to help the Affinity team to simplify the complex UI, hopefully without losing functionality.

What's inappropriately "complex" about it? The tasks it (and every other comparable product) need to do require a certain level of complexity -- that's the way it is. Pros, and those operating at that level, deal with it all the time. I'll take complex power EVERY DAY over a dumbed-down product / UI. That's exactly why EMACs and vi are better than Notepad, for instance.

The problem is that Affinity's low price and perpetual licence means that most of its users are amateurs. Most graphics professionals are locked into the Adobe world.

No argument there, but they'll never fix it by dumbing Affinity down -- That will just make it worse. Affinity needs to concentrate on the professional level market. All the scrapbookers and meme creators are well covered (by PSP and others).