now they just need to train generative AI models by opting in all of their users to allow training in on their data and forcing them to opt-out if they want otherwise. To compete with adobe that is.
I know nothing about Canva. As someone who has been a big fan of Affinity, their products and their pricing model, do I start freaking out now or can I just wait until the acquisition closes?
Yeah, as someone that's been very happy with the Affinity Suite and am scared of any major changes to them, this is pretty scary to me, as well. Reminds me of when Jasc was bought by Corel waaaay back in the day.
Canva, if you're on HN, seeing how we're going to respond, please don't take away the stand-alone, non-subscription-based, affordable system that Affinity's products are. I love their products. I don't want to have to find alternatives.
Hate to say it, but a subscription model is coming. Canva is making money hands over fist by doing that, and I can't imagine they are going to part from what has been so lucrative
I switched to Capture One years ago, but recently switched back to Lightroom. It’s much much faster now and they also recently launched advanced color editing, AI masks, and true HDR support which pushed me over the edge.
100% this. There is absolutely 0 reason to use Affinity of Adobe besides pricing model. They can play around with the numbers and try to have a cheaper subscription than Adobe, or maybe bundle it with the other software Canva offers, but ultimately I think switching to a subscription model will be the end of the Affinity software suite.
Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.
Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed.
The reason why everyone hates them is that last non subscription version Adobe CS6 from more than 10 years ago is pretty much the same thing what you get now even though users have been screaming for features and bugfixes. Adobe can have their cake and eat it too.
Affinity (Photo) still doesn't support tablets properly. You can play around with parameters affected by pressure and tilt, but here Adobe (and Krita) are ahead.
> The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.
I disagree with all your points.
I've been using Adobe for 20 years and Affinity Design and Photo since they released in 2013 or so.
Adobe apps are faster on Apple Silicon than Affinity.
I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe and I have experienced crashes with Affinity quite recently.
Adobe has complete integration between programs. Eg: You can use AE timelines into Premiere, import Photoshop files into AE, edit vector objects from Photoshop in Illustrator, etc.
Affinity innovation pace is just glacial. V2 introduced some new features but it Serif what... like 10 years? And personally I didn't see any value in the new features. Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
> * I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon).*
Believe what you will.
Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard.
It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me.
> And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
In what ways?
Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphics software since Corel Draw 4 and Illustrator still seems the gold standard. Figma is great for UI design but it's useless for anything else.
I do think Photo is a lot more usable than Designer and I could see myself using that instead of Photoshop.
> fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly
Trust me, I too wish there was a good alternative to Adobe. I hope with Canva's money they will be able to improve Affinity's products.
Look and feel is a big one. It feels more responsive, and far less bloated.
The Export Persona smokes Illustrator's slices or whatever.
It handles symbols far more smoothly, and I like the way masks work better.
It's better integrated into Publisher, compared to Illustrator/InDesign. Publisher is awesome, and basically has Designer built in.
Working with non-square grids is sooooo much easier.
There's no Creative Cloud malware fouling up my computer, soaking up CPU and memory and storage and spitting pop-ups in my face for no damn reason.
... There are things I miss - vector brushes, and the Transformation tools. But they can usually be worked around. The feeling of being respected by the company more than makes up for those deficits though.
I suspect you are very experienced Illustrator and used to its ways and not that experienced Photoshop user. Because Photoshop people around in coments say that Photo is trash but Designer is good.
I think its all inertia to learn new things. Adobe soft has so many wierd things that we got so used to that it gets hard to do it otherwise.
Perhaps Adobe only crashes when it can smell fear... Like printers.
Really though, Photoshop and Illustrator both got buggy on me on a weekly/near daily basis. I used them all for decades. It feels like they were stable for a few years around like 1999-2001.
Somewhat off topic, but your comment made me literally laugh out loud in real life. I am working on a receipt printer right now, and it can absolutely smell fear. Its favorite thing to do right now is to use its incredible power of speed to print half my roll of receipt tape with random gibberish in the several seconds it takes me to pull the power cable. I haven't yet let it run to completion to see if it will eat the entire roll of tape, but I suspect it would.
Integration in Affinity Publisher is called studiolink you can use all Photo, Designer tools directly inside it by fliping a switch. Google studiolink you will see Adobe never had anything close to this. When you create a book you can actualy edit placed photo inside the layout seeing all changes directly in context. All Adobe cooperation is linking files that you then have to manualy refresh. You cant even easily copy paste vectors into indesign so they are editable.
I get that Adobe works and has some features Affinity does. But Affinity has some killer fundamentaly better features.
Yes. I owned CS6, then switched to Affinity essentially right when it was released. Been using it ever since. Great software. But very much lacking compared to Adobe.
I paid $lot for the entire Affinity suite and DxO Photolab instead of going with the (quite good) Adobe offerings just to avoid the insanity that is the Adobe Creative Cloud launcher. I deeply hate apps that install, auto-run and auto-update other apps. Affinity and DxO give you a DMG.
I keep Adobe products only on iPad or iPhone, where the app seems sandboxed. In Mac/Windows, Adobe CC (or any product line FWIW) spawns files and folders like cancer in /Library or /System. It's just hallmark bad software engineering.
Exactly. Creative Cloud launcher digs its greedy fingers deep in your system, running hundreds of processes and constantly phoning home. It’s the model I point to when people say they want alternate app stores. I would much rather download apps individually from the App Store, or at worst a dmg.
It would be fantastic for an OS to mandate a particular type of installation (oh how I miss dragging app packages from a .dmg into my Application directory & being done with it) while preventing anything else.
A lot of desktop software devs are averse to anything but old style full access to everything all the time, but yes I agree. Most software has no good reason to put files anywhere outside of its own application bundle and ~/Library/Application Support/<Program Name>/.
I enjoy Serif products but have always wondered how it would survive. Pixelmator stayed a family-run bootstrapped operation while Serif scaled a company in the EU around the Affinity Suite.
I don't know, products rarely get better with these acquisitions. I like my native app Affinity Designer, with a reasonable one time license very much as is.
Indesign is the main graphic software after Photoshop. Basically anything that gets printed uses Indesign. Photoshop is more well known because people love photography as a hobby but in professional print setting photos are just smaller component.
Affinity has an InDesign competitor, so this would seem to be a point in favor of the argument for Affinity being able to compete with Adobe if InDesign is in the top 3 Adobe products.
Davinci Resolve is on par with Premiere. Quark XPress is a great replacement for InDesign. No need to rely on one company for every type of multimedia software.
Have you actually used the products you’re recommending and the Adobe equivalents? I would say that InDesign easily won over then industry-standard Quark nearly two decades ago, and Resolve is okay but not great at most things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Resolve and its pricing, but like Affinity, it’s not quite on par with the features of Adobe’s products. I’m routinely frustrated by missing features. I have complaints for Adobe products too, but usually missing features aren’t one of them. (Except if your product is named Captivate or was recently changed from a legacy app to a modern Electron app (or something), then I have a lot of missing features to suggest.)
Heck, I am frustrated that Canva didn’t have a layers panel, and now that they do, that it doesn’t behave the way I expect and I can’t pull it up easily… or that Canva makes it impossible to ensure assets match when searching for a matching sequence or set of templates. Or all the ways I can’t just do the thing I’m thinking of by right clicking or modifying layers or something. Canva itself is an exercise in frustration for power users. Affinity ain’t perfect either. Great matchup, really.
I’m less convinced. The text features and even how frames resize images were either annoying or lacking when I last used Publisher. Yes, I used it, and yes, it worked. But it’s no contest that in the details, InDesign has more features that are (in some cases) better thought out or for text rendering, just really good. At the moment the two best ways I know of to render text are (1) any Adobe product with their text engine and (2) LaTeX via something like XeTeX, but Adobe’s still wins for ease of use. Maybe third place would go to the Safari web browser if you use the right CSS and presumably export to PDF, though using it to export PDFs isn’t as user-friendly as iOS Share panel, Chrome or Prince - for PDF export, at least. Note that these statements are subjective on my part, I’d welcome evidence to the contrary as a sign of progress away from the Adobe hegemony. ;-)
Are you sure this is not just learning inertia? Because frames in Affinity work more like css object-fit and are "live". In Indesign you have to "recalculate" fit/fill every time with action. I would argue if you didn't know Indesign way the Affinity way is superior.
Text rendering algorithms are quite known quantity and lifted from LaTeX. Indesign has paragraph (multi-line) composer which in latex equivalent is microtype package. Affinity doesn't have that but paragraph composer is not really used that much in professional setting because when you do final manual fixes/adjustment of typography then with paragraph composer your changes could affect previous changes in paragraph (so people go by line by line). Paradoxically paragraph composer is pretty good for quickly getting OK enough results especially in more budget/non-pro setting.
Other than that i don't think the typography output (for print) is different I've seen some tests and it seems kinda exactly the same. Affinity might render type on screen a bit differently but the output is solid. I was more afraid of the quality of .pdf itself but even highend offset printers didn't see a difference/complained.
FCP X’s simple timeline which chains clips together making edits easy, though some would call this an anti-feature.
After Effects simplicity compared to the hellscape that can be node-based VG work. I mean, the programmer in me loves nodes, I even used MaxMSP frequently… and Origami. But the simplicity of After Effects is really nice and it has like every plugin in existence.
Don’t get me wrong, I use DaVinci with the quick editor and have considered buying other gear to make it work better, but… it’s really kinda a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-color-grading app. There’s a lot still to wish for.
Good point. And I should clarify, I’m not a filmmaker and mostly edit screen recordings and home movies. For that, I find that Resolve and Final Cut Pro work equally well and equally poorly. There’s a lot of room in video editing for further innovation, particularly if A.I. or automation can help simplify repetitive tasks. Premiere isn’t the best example of Adobe’s video tools - that title probably belongs to After Effects, an app inexplicably unique in its ease of editing and producing motion video graphics. No need to deal with translating your ideas into Nodes to get it working in Resolve. No need to try to fit within the limitations of titles and effects in FCP, etc. After Effects is Premiere’s killer app.
You're probably not the target audience though. Adobe products might be old, dysfunctional, and janky under all that cruft, but they have vast amounts of domain knowledge put into them.
Meaningfully competing with Photoshop & co involves breaking the lock-in (nearly impossible) and being much better use-case-wise. It's been done in certain niches where Photoshop is bad/mediocre/stagnates, like digital painting, but for general purpose suites like Affinity it means they have to be better at most things, which they just don't seem to be capable of.
Photoshop is the only software Adobe has bern giving atleast some attention.
If you are print designer than Publisher and Designer got to a point where they actually are better at many if not most fundamental things (speed, stability, ux of features, format support).
The main thing that has been keeping Affinity from adoption has been networking effects (adobe is in all companies and gets taught at schools).
Affinity is this close to turning this. Basically everyone has been waiting for them to allow third party plugins/scripting and the whole print industry would start to jump real fast.
The link should probably be changed to official announcement.[1]
That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existing version.
- Affinity team (if they are pressured to go beyond professional designers or change to subscription, go to cloud, web etc.)
- Canva. Professional/enterprise is a very different ball game than the consumer market that they were focussing on. Ex. their mobile app for consumer itself is kind of broken, whereas mobile first experience is very important for the demography that they are targeting.
Canva slowly built out enterprise features, but it’s not fully there yet. They seem to be aiming for what Sketch was aiming for before Figma overtook it - the ability for teams to publish and use design systems and templates in Canva. Which is a cool niche to start with, but isn’t flexible enough.
Plus Canva doesn’t really have the concept of “local files” so they’re stuck until they evolve to include every feature of Google Drive, at minimum, including local file sync. Canva ignoring traditional apps is like Chrome pretending the OS doesn’t exist and then building ChromeOS. Some concepts are necessary complexity, particularly for power users. Canva is a bit too simple still, and thus frustrating.
Primarily? Yes. But there are even companies that rather lose money than compromise on some product or other principles. Mind you, those are privately owned. Boards and shareholders fuck everything they touch.
“Compete with Adobe” presumably means they will enshitten Affinity software even worse than Adobe did theirs. Looking forward to subscription-based ad-infested nagware.
Canva and Affinity just released another news [1] which makes the pledge that
> 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.
Maybe I'm naive but I'm not so sure Affinity will automatically end up as a subscription-based app like Canva Pro and Creative Cloud. Subscription makes sense for Canva Pro where a lot of the value add is in additional elements and templates and there's not a versioned app you can buy with a certain set of features. For a tool where you release discrete versions with new features it's a lot easier to just sell it as one-off purchases.
Even if Canva was out to milk Affinity for every dollar, the size of the market for the professional-level tools is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the market for Canva-level tools. I can't imagine it would move the needle. But what do I know...
Same. I upgraded last year and the software is fantastic and priced exceptionally well. I used to have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but it got way too expensive and the frequency I used it didn't justify the price. Glad I found Affinity. I have Designer V2, Photo V2, and Publisher V2. I use all of them occasionally when I have time to work on my side projects. Subscriptions suck.
I wonder if it will work that long without need for patches/updates with the current pace of deprecations in macOS. Using Affinity Photo myself, wondering if I’d better off switching to Windows at this point.
To be honest, that’s only one of the many reason to leave the Apple ecosystem in the near future.
I think that many would be better off switching to Windows (or Linux if they can) but they still believe or are attached to how things use to be.
I use to really love macOS but it has become an annoyance on many front, removing plenty of what made it better all while making it more and more like iOS and generally more closed and inflexible system.
Personally I have lost faith and I think that even if they would start reinvesting right now, it would take 10 years of pain with ever more expensive hardware.
I’m increasingly tempted to buy a second hand license for one of the old single-purchase Creative Suites and just run that in a VM or with period-accurate hardware forever. For me practically all of the value in current graphic editors is compatibility with modern operating systems… CS1-CS3 are basically feature complete as far as I’m concerned.
Honestly there's still things from CS3 that are missing in Designer V2! Being able to auto-trace sketches is still something that Designer can't do. There isn't really much that I'm doing now in a vector editor, that I wasn't doing 15 years ago. "feature complete" is a good way to put it.
(Customer from the very beginning for Designer&Photo, made a book with Publisher)
They will move to subscriptions (there will be many more of these moves, see VMWare), which will kill their differenitation towards Adobe and kill the product. If subscription, I can use Illustrator (which has 10x more tutorials than Designer). Most companies screw up M&A.
As a happy Affinity customer and relatively casual user I prefer them because of their reasonable fixed prices and because and I don't have to run the abomination that is the Adobe Cloud client on my machine.
If they switch to a subscription model I will definitely be looking for alternatives.
It's clearly enough for many people. That's the only reason I use Affinity, although I do agree Adobe could change their pricing models overnight and they would be in trouble.
I painfully switched to Affinity because of the rising Adobe subscription prices, I'd been a photoshop/illustrator user from the Dot com boom... I recall paying around 780 every two years for creative suite and given the hell I'd gone through by choosing Flex for a ERP project (Adobe's promises of iOS compatibility never materialising, then breaking compatibility - requiring a close-to-rewrite in their next version of Flex)... to cut a long story short - gave me shall we say - a few resentments towards the company. I suppose it's time to consider Pixelmator now, I'm such a grey-beard... subscriptions suck. ;-)
Pixelmator is nice for tinkering, but in no way it compares to Adobe Ps/Ilustrator for professional use. Workflow you can learn but there are subtle bugs that just crop up here and there like freeform transform handles just disappearing on some backgrounds etc. Some of the design decisions are different enough so that I haven't still gotten used to them after two years because it just doesn't feel intuitive to me, e.g. every single time I mess up working with text tool for the first five minutes time until I recall how it works.
Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income.
While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maximize profits at all times.
It happened or happens in B2B, car sales, music, film, in games, and drawing apps... Everywhere you see, really. And it's so convenient if there is already a scapegoat like Adobe, which transitioned to subscriptions for the same reason.
And yes, I hate it. Even though it's easier to swallow 10 bucks a month, eventually you will spend more. They know it and we know it. All we can do as customers is to not support those companies, but this only goes so far. And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?
Inkscape is quite good actually. But GIMP is lightyears away from ever being in the same league. We need an open source Photoshop and Publisher program.
I appreciate that, but it doesn’t deal with the reality that subscriptions are several times more expensive than buying up-front.
I can buy Affinity Designer for $50 and use it for 5 years. That’s less than a dollar a month. If they move to a subscription, I bet it’s going to be more than a dollar a month.
If it was really just about regular reoccurring revenue, we would see more $1 monthly subscriptions and fewer $5/month subscriptions.
I feel like they could have a sustainable model if they had a more expensive one-time purchase and every few years released a new major version that required a one-time purchase again. If you bought the old version you can continue to use it, but it's no longer officially supported nor will it receive any future updates.
I wish there was an option for this with e.g. Photoshop. I want to have PS because it's occasionally handy or fun for photoshopping my friends as a joke, but I don't need it for anything that makes me money so I can't justify paying. But if I had a slightly outdated version I could purchase once, I'd be find not getting all the latest updates.
> I feel like they could have a sustainable model if they had a more expensive one-time purchase and every few years released a new major version that required a one-time purchase again.
And people complain about this also. If everyone is going to complain anyway, they might as well go to subscription which is best for the business.
Do they? It's not super common, but I can think of the JetBrains IDEs that I believe let you continue to use the last version of the IDE before you stopped paying. Alfred, the Spotlight alternative for Mac does something like that, and you get a discount code if you own the last version.
I have a few subscriptions and most are annually paid. I consider that as a one time payment with updates free for the year. But what I don’t like is when the price don’t match the value, my data taken hostage, and updates that break my workflow (and “AI” features activated without my knowing). I got rid of anything like this in my personal computing space.
Hopefully this will allow the Serif team to improve their products. I bought their products from day one with the hope they would get better but after 10 years or so I'm still on Adobe.
It’s hard to sell an entire industry on replacing tools that “just work” with a new set of tools unless they actually work better. Consider what VS Code has had to do to try and get devs switch to it from other IDEs: they had to offer first-class support for pretty much every other IDE’s method of operating, e.g. plugins to take the keyboard shortcuts from other IDEs, plus offer better support for languages (e.g. LSPs, use of TextMate bundles), and on top of that offer new features not seen elsewhere (e.g. devcontainers, web-based IDEs, first-class GitHub integration…) and even then people will obviously still pick JetBrains products for Java or Python because you can’t actually copy every feature and win.
Likewise it only took me 5-10 minutes with Publisher before I started noticing missing features with text (Adobe has an excellent text rendering engine, go figure) and Designer in v1 was so frustrating that I haven’t used v2 much, though my use cases were pretty specific. I’ve actually found myself putting up with the bugs in OmniGraffle (oh so many bugs) because the infinite canvas there works so well when zooming around. When it works, that is.
Got a bit sidetracked in my answer, but Adobe has a lot going for it. Honestly this is probably great news for Figma, as they have an opportunity now to build better web-based photo and publishing apps before Canva can figure it out.
Affinity deals with boolean operations in different way Figma/Sketch/Glyphs also dont have pathfinder. They probably added it for some edgecases and because its easier for illustrator users to switch.
Publisher has pretty much same type tools as Indesign only the panels/features are positioned differently. Publisher doesnt have multi-line composer but that is paradoxically not used in professional setting anyway (its great for quick things though).
On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability,speed,connection between the software.
It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
> On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability, speed, connection between the software.
I think others would argue on that last point that Adobe is more than halfway there since Creative Suite and has plans to finish the job with Adobe Express, though we’ll see if they come to fruition.
> It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
This I agree with, 100%. And now Affinity will have a third struggle in that they are poised to go subscription and lose the pricing model advantage too. Even if they don’t change the pricing model, eventually you’ll need a Canva account to use the apps, ongoing annual support fees, and so on.
Maybe it is your particular needs, but so far I have been very impressed by the Affinity suite. I render from Blender in open exr, place in an AP document which I then place in a AP document. When I update the render, the whole pipeline is updated. This preservation of high dynamic range info would be impossible in the Adobe Suite.
I think that this is possible because under the hood the Affinity Suite uses the same core engine. In contrast, Adobe bought their suite from diverse sources, and interplay between them is clunky at best.
I agree that text preview in AP can be rough, but the output in pdf is as good as that in InDesign.
Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers. Don't be fooled by the cheeky templates and filters,they are going heavy on AI, with some interesting features such as inpainting and video background removal.
I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behind them. This acquisition gives them some good editors on desktop to use as a base to deploy some of this AI tech focusing on a more pro market.
This is a rather backhanded take. From what I understand of Melanie, she is one of the few folks I've read about that had a rather unique rags to riches story, and is quite driven. I don't begrudge her level of success.
To that end, despite her interesting story around her role in the business, Canva itself really appeals to the lowest common denominator, which probably explains why they have such gangbuster financials. It really isn't great for true creatives though, and I feel Canva is dragging the industry down, not pulling it up, in the name of profits.
>Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers.
Some WhatsApp group users in India use Canva to create posters for events and then post them on various WhatsApp groups.
Canva powers the scam market. It's played a big part helping the scam market expand. Everything from "make money online" creative to flooding Etsy with poorly designed AI garbage to crypto scams. Canva and Stan are the peanut butter and jelly of scammery in 2024.
This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else.
As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select and copy.
Explain why it's cheating? I'm a designer. I have been for over a decade. I don't use Canva, but I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
How is Canva any different than this? Part of design is being able to recognize what good design is, and utilizing the tools available to you. If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
The only way I could see is if they didn't modify the slides and part of the assignment was to create a unique branded slide presentation and they just used an out of the box design. In which case, no design work was done.
Someone shouldn't be penalized for the outcome based on the tools utilized unless the spec specifically excludes it.
It's like telling a clothing e-commerce company that they shouldn't use Shopify. If the work is done, why waste your time building an e-commerce site from scratch if it meets the specified need?
Canva is a great tool, and saves my clients thousands of dollars, while I get to avoid doing the completely mind numbing process of working in PowerPoint or designing social media posts. It's a win/win.
how would you feel about a student presenting stock images in a photography class?
> I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
Working professionaly has a different objective than school assignments. I think the distinction is very clear on many levels. Also, students using blatant off-the-shelf templates is very different professionals using templates "as starting place".
> If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
Well, that's not the case here. OP has explained that the design students in question aren't even using their low-effort canva templates right and exporting them as flattened pdf. It's very unlikely those who are this sloppy and careless have put any attention to the assignment or polishing other areas.
The key point is you can't delegate the main task. To use your Shopify example, if you enrolled in a "Web development using nodejs" class, and presented a premade shopify website that you purchased in a couple of clicks, the instructor won't be impressed, less so when you tell them you did it in 5 minutes "why waste time". If that's the student goal, fine, but they are in the wrong classes.
In Canva we do care about accessibility. While I admit our editor may still have a long way to go on providing an accessible editing experience, unselectable text in export result is more likely an overlooked bug than anything intentional.
And if you're coming from the Affinity side, don't worry your new corporate overlords DO care about people, and employees are their #1 priority </empty_talk>
Tapping into both my own uni graphics design and a past life as senior exec at a mega corp: because designers that use bad tools to make unusable presentations are failing "you had one job", to make something presentable across the variety of business modalities.
Being able to email the presentation and copy text from it are generally more important to communications impact and utility in the workplace than how it looks.
Being aware what your tool does to the presentation is part of the job you're learning in school.
same reason you'd downgrade a programming student if they handed in an assignment as an Excel macro? Not just because of the VBA but because to use it you now need to buy MS Office?
He does explain the rationale though. They’re both things I didn’t know about canva generated files. Makes sense for them to do that I guess, it means you won’t be able to reuse any of their stuff outside of their platform.
It's good advice sure. But downgrading their work, no. Unless you have explicit requirements that aren't met like your text being selectable, downgrading work because you have a prejudice against an authoring tool isn't cool. What if another educator has an issue with Power Point, and another with Sheets. Should students have to match their authoring tool with their educators for each lesson?
Students are there to learn, no to cater to your preferences.
What you're saying makes sense... if the OP explicitly tells the students to make their work available in a shareable and copyable format. The vast majority of presentations in schools don't live beyond the moment the presentation is finished.
I see now that I should have made myself more clear. slides made in InDesign are indeed a stated requirment. Why....
I teach Design. One of the key learning outcomes of most design courses is the ability to handle long documents through their structural styles: heading 1, heading 2, caption, block quote, lists etc. Most design apps offer this functionality, even Powerpoint. However, none do it as elegantly as InDesign. I'm no Adobe fanboy (I do most of my own work in the Affinity suite) but InDesign remains the leader of the pack in this regard.
One crucial strength of InDesign is that it that manages anti aliasing of text very effectively. Just compare the output of ID to MS Word and you will see. I guess you are familiar with pdfs from LaTex? Compare those with pdfs from MS word. Similar difference.
It also does not produce or allow fake bold/italic etc. If a font does not have a built in bold then it won't fake one up by thickening the characters. This is why the font and charter panels in InDesign seem so feature-poor compared to those of Photoshop or Illusustor which offer such fake variants.
One final reason... cloud based services are risky things to rely on, especially in a uni. This year one service many students and staff used closed its doors. Caused a lot of angst.
I'm surprised that other people here cannot separate their subjective opinions, whether they agree with your judgment, from fact, whether you're a good educator.
It would be more reasonable to say: A good educator would help students understand that PDF files should have a small file size, and if a student fails to notice that, you will have to downgrade them for lack of attention to important detail.
And, of course the acquisition is bad news.
Americans are the only people I've encountered that seem to celebrate the dystopian monopolized unfree market that we're headed towards.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them, as other companies do.
If the course makes it clear that grading is affected by accessibility and efficiency of file size, and then submitted work ignores those factors - regardless of Canva being used - then downgrading it is justified. Perhaps it’s obvious to designers that Canva has these problems, but to a non-designer like myself, the comment sounds like snobbery, with students’ grades affected by the capricious whims of their teacher.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them
Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
> Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
How is that off topic when there are literally people in this thread from Canva arguing the framing and not the main point he made? Everything you disagree with isn't off topic.
Hello, I'm an engineer in Canva's editing team, which is also responsible for rendering of designs.
Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so.
I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer of transparent text on top.
If you know any design that produces PDF file where text becomes not selectable, that might be a bug, and it would be appreciated if you can provide more details so that we can investigate and possibly fix.
You are assuming the parent poster actually attempted to go through support and work through the issue. I don't see indication of that. If anything, this thread indicates to me that many people form an opinion of a product and never seek support or never seek to revisit the issue and see if it has been fixed.
It's not support at all in this case, don't mix everything. Someone says something wrong about a product you're literally working on, there's nothing wrong in responding.
I confess I have never used Canva myself. However, every pdf that students send our way from Canva is basically just series of flattened images. This also applies to the many Canva derived pdfs which I see from job applicants. So... What is going wrong? I will look into it and message you if I find anything new.
Thanks greatly for making contact. Only on Hacker News.
To be fair to your product, it is the only viable means by which a set of slides can be worked on collaborativly and online. You saw that InDesigns collaboration tools suck and stepped in.
I realized that we provide an option called "Flatten PDF" [1] which does exactly what you described: flatten everything including text into a big image per page. It makes all text unselectable and also produces a very large file.
This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously tick it to make it happen.
But it seems that our support team sometimes presents this feature as a way to solve user issues, so maybe that's the reason.
"Flatten" comes from the world of desktop image editors. You "flatten" one layer down to the next to make one layer. Sometimes the people who work on these kinds of things forget their users might have never used software with metaphors like this.
Canva's approach has been to create a convoluted, frankenstein's monster, browser-first, mixed media editor that is largely inadequate for professional workflows. Also everything is locked away in their cloud from files to assets. I hate everything about Canva's UX and performance.
I suspect Canva will attempt to integrate Affinity into their cloud offering without fully comprehending the specific use cases and features that made Affinity successful in the first place. Canva's target is the novice and social media influencer, Affinity is a different market.
I wonder in these type of takeovers, when it seems clear that nothing good can come next for the product users, if it would be somehow possible for a cooperative style takeover by the customer base.
It's bad news and not because of the "fear of subscription" (if you think you aren't paying for a subscription now, you are deluding yourself).
The problem is that most acquisitions go wrong and that larger companies generally care much less about their users. There are no good scenarios and no possible benefits there for Affinity users (like me). In a small company, management cares about users, because these users provide a direct lifeline for the company. In a large business, management cares about "shareholder value" as measured by their bonuses and this quarter's earnings. That does not map well onto customer satisfaction (see Adobe, Dropbox, or really just about any company that became large or got acquired).
If they move Affinity to subscription, CorelDRAW is probably the only viable (commercial) graphic product left with a perpetual license. Apart from FOSS, of course.
Based on last published accounts (2022) Serif is very profitable and growing strongly: revenue £31.2m (up from £23.4m) and operating profits £17.9m (up from £14.4m). So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell.
Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.
They probably didn’t need to sell (but who knows) but an offer of a buyout at a 20x multiple (based on the Bloomberg report) when the core business faces competition from Adobe and Canva, not just for core features where depending on context, Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete (and AI is a big part of Canva and Adobe’s plans, whether certain vocal users like it or not), is compelling.
As a longtime user, this move makes me sad because I know I’ll lose some good tools to an inevitable subscription push (I also have Adobe CC and Canva subscriptions that I use for very different tasks so I’m not completely opposed to paying for a sub, but I certainly won’t pay Adobe prices for Affinity), but I can’t fault the company from wanting to exit, especially when the climate is what it is for the tools they sell.
Let’s put it this way, I can’t imagine them doing better than this.
> Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete
I think you've hit the nail on the head. AI tools will become essential and if you haven't got the resources to compete in this area you're likely to fade into relative irrelevance.
And at a 20x multiple probably a steal for Canva too given what this deal will give them - even without raising prices / going to subscription model.
I was a professional photographer until late last year.
Photoshop’s new AI tools are an absolutely incredible timesaver. Jobs that would have taken 30+ minutes (and probably wouldn’t look great) can now take 30 seconds. It was kind of amazing watching the perception shift online in photography groups from “AI is evil!” to “Wow, this is really helpful.”
There’s no way they could keep competing, even if they tried to take something off the shelf like Stable Diffusion and integrating it. Without some sort of subscription they’d need to have people run it locally, and that’s really only feasible with high end Nvidia cards too. I suppose the initial plan might be to add tools like that, have a separate subscription for that, and boil the frog to a full subscription.
Absolutely agreed. And your observation is the same I’ve seen with many of my artist friends. Everyone went from “fuck this Firefly shit” to “I need all of this yesterday.”
Canva already uses AI in really smart ways and if they can extend that approach into Affinity and have the two products compliment each other, that could def be a value-add for Canva users. But the more I think about it, the more I think this was the only thing Serif could do and although I sympathize with angry Affinity users as one myself, I think we have to acknowledge that Affinity’s chances of survival as a perpetually licensed product were basically over, acquisition or no acquisition, at least if you look out long-term.
Ugh. I've seen what happens with Canva's acquisitions once already, albeit at a much smaller scale: I used to use a free service for PowerPoint templates called SlidesCarnival[1]. Decent templates, very customizable, and generally significantly better than the PowerPoint defaults.
They also got bought out by Canva, and I've watched the quality drop massively- any new content is almost entirely unusable, often only available on Canva itself, and chock full of design tropes and poorly SEO-optimized content. (Some of them are so bad as to be unintentionally hilarious.) It's a real mess, and it makes me less than optimistic about them buying out Affinity.
To be fair, their model was wildly different from a fully-featured editing suite, and certainly welcomed this kind of change, but they absolutely gutted that site: the only positive is that the original templates are still there, if you search for them. I'm not holding my breath, but I expect the same treatment now. An absolute shame- I don't use a photo editor enough to warrant an Adobe subscription, so I'll probably stay on Affinity V2 until it stops working.
There was something so special and powerful about Affinity Designer V1. It was just a supreme amount of value and such a robust application that it became the tool I learned to do graphic design on, and the tool I loved.
I feel like something slipped with Designer V2 - the features went a bit weird and broad, and the amount of bugs got irritating and eroded my love for it and it being my go-to recommendation.
That all said, it’s still good software today and I’m glad the Serif team gets some kind of payday. I think the drop in quality of V2 makes the whole thing a bit less bittersweet for me.
It's a sad state of affair when the first thing people think (myself included, and rightfully so) is "how will the product worsen" (in this case, with subscription) instead of the opposite.
I'm also preparing for a mysterious update that will make the V1 and V1 of the suite non-functional because of non-visible stuff like "security improvement" and "system stability".
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadCanva, if you're on HN, seeing how we're going to respond, please don't take away the stand-alone, non-subscription-based, affordable system that Affinity's products are. I love their products. I don't want to have to find alternatives.
Adobe software is just better.
Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed.
The reason why everyone hates them is that last non subscription version Adobe CS6 from more than 10 years ago is pretty much the same thing what you get now even though users have been screaming for features and bugfixes. Adobe can have their cake and eat it too.
I disagree with all your points.
I've been using Adobe for 20 years and Affinity Design and Photo since they released in 2013 or so.
Adobe apps are faster on Apple Silicon than Affinity.
I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe and I have experienced crashes with Affinity quite recently.
Adobe has complete integration between programs. Eg: You can use AE timelines into Premiere, import Photoshop files into AE, edit vector objects from Photoshop in Illustrator, etc.
Affinity innovation pace is just glacial. V2 introduced some new features but it Serif what... like 10 years? And personally I didn't see any value in the new features. Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
Haha wow. I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon). You ought to play the Lotto.
> Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
"A lot" is drastically overstating the case. And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
But it's all kinda moot - fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly.
Believe what you will.
Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard.
It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me.
> And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
In what ways?
Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphics software since Corel Draw 4 and Illustrator still seems the gold standard. Figma is great for UI design but it's useless for anything else.
I do think Photo is a lot more usable than Designer and I could see myself using that instead of Photoshop.
> fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly
Trust me, I too wish there was a good alternative to Adobe. I hope with Canva's money they will be able to improve Affinity's products.
Off the top of my head...
Look and feel is a big one. It feels more responsive, and far less bloated.
The Export Persona smokes Illustrator's slices or whatever.
It handles symbols far more smoothly, and I like the way masks work better.
It's better integrated into Publisher, compared to Illustrator/InDesign. Publisher is awesome, and basically has Designer built in.
Working with non-square grids is sooooo much easier.
There's no Creative Cloud malware fouling up my computer, soaking up CPU and memory and storage and spitting pop-ups in my face for no damn reason.
... There are things I miss - vector brushes, and the Transformation tools. But they can usually be worked around. The feeling of being respected by the company more than makes up for those deficits though.
...Which is probably about to change :(
I think its all inertia to learn new things. Adobe soft has so many wierd things that we got so used to that it gets hard to do it otherwise.
Before that I was on the Corel suite using Draw and PhotoPaint since the mid 90s.
I’m on Windows, for what it’s worth.
Really though, Photoshop and Illustrator both got buggy on me on a weekly/near daily basis. I used them all for decades. It feels like they were stable for a few years around like 1999-2001.
Integration in Affinity Publisher is called studiolink you can use all Photo, Designer tools directly inside it by fliping a switch. Google studiolink you will see Adobe never had anything close to this. When you create a book you can actualy edit placed photo inside the layout seeing all changes directly in context. All Adobe cooperation is linking files that you then have to manualy refresh. You cant even easily copy paste vectors into indesign so they are editable.
I get that Adobe works and has some features Affinity does. But Affinity has some killer fundamentaly better features.
Yes. I owned CS6, then switched to Affinity essentially right when it was released. Been using it ever since. Great software. But very much lacking compared to Adobe.
I won't be installing that invasive spyware suite to my system even if they pay me monthly to use the software. It's that bad.
Actually I take it back, Acrobat is probably #1
Heck, I am frustrated that Canva didn’t have a layers panel, and now that they do, that it doesn’t behave the way I expect and I can’t pull it up easily… or that Canva makes it impossible to ensure assets match when searching for a matching sequence or set of templates. Or all the ways I can’t just do the thing I’m thinking of by right clicking or modifying layers or something. Canva itself is an exercise in frustration for power users. Affinity ain’t perfect either. Great matchup, really.
Text rendering algorithms are quite known quantity and lifted from LaTeX. Indesign has paragraph (multi-line) composer which in latex equivalent is microtype package. Affinity doesn't have that but paragraph composer is not really used that much in professional setting because when you do final manual fixes/adjustment of typography then with paragraph composer your changes could affect previous changes in paragraph (so people go by line by line). Paradoxically paragraph composer is pretty good for quickly getting OK enough results especially in more budget/non-pro setting.
Other than that i don't think the typography output (for print) is different I've seen some tests and it seems kinda exactly the same. Affinity might render type on screen a bit differently but the output is solid. I was more afraid of the quality of .pdf itself but even highend offset printers didn't see a difference/complained.
After Effects simplicity compared to the hellscape that can be node-based VG work. I mean, the programmer in me loves nodes, I even used MaxMSP frequently… and Origami. But the simplicity of After Effects is really nice and it has like every plugin in existence.
Don’t get me wrong, I use DaVinci with the quick editor and have considered buying other gear to make it work better, but… it’s really kinda a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-color-grading app. There’s a lot still to wish for.
Meaningfully competing with Photoshop & co involves breaking the lock-in (nearly impossible) and being much better use-case-wise. It's been done in certain niches where Photoshop is bad/mediocre/stagnates, like digital painting, but for general purpose suites like Affinity it means they have to be better at most things, which they just don't seem to be capable of.
If you are print designer than Publisher and Designer got to a point where they actually are better at many if not most fundamental things (speed, stability, ux of features, format support).
The main thing that has been keeping Affinity from adoption has been networking effects (adobe is in all companies and gets taught at schools).
Affinity is this close to turning this. Basically everyone has been waiting for them to allow third party plugins/scripting and the whole print industry would start to jump real fast.
That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existing version.
[1]: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/
- Affinity team (if they are pressured to go beyond professional designers or change to subscription, go to cloud, web etc.)
- Canva. Professional/enterprise is a very different ball game than the consumer market that they were focussing on. Ex. their mobile app for consumer itself is kind of broken, whereas mobile first experience is very important for the demography that they are targeting.
Plus Canva doesn’t really have the concept of “local files” so they’re stuck until they evolve to include every feature of Google Drive, at minimum, including local file sync. Canva ignoring traditional apps is like Chrome pretending the OS doesn’t exist and then building ChromeOS. Some concepts are necessary complexity, particularly for power users. Canva is a bit too simple still, and thus frustrating.
And here's few Affinity forum threads about the topic:
- https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201405-que...
- https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201403-can...
https://cdm.link/2021/11/ableton-reportedly-refused-investme...
> 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.
[1]: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/
Even if Canva was out to milk Affinity for every dollar, the size of the market for the professional-level tools is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the market for Canva-level tools. I can't imagine it would move the needle. But what do I know...
I think that many would be better off switching to Windows (or Linux if they can) but they still believe or are attached to how things use to be.
I use to really love macOS but it has become an annoyance on many front, removing plenty of what made it better all while making it more and more like iOS and generally more closed and inflexible system.
Personally I have lost faith and I think that even if they would start reinvesting right now, it would take 10 years of pain with ever more expensive hardware.
They will move to subscriptions (there will be many more of these moves, see VMWare), which will kill their differenitation towards Adobe and kill the product. If subscription, I can use Illustrator (which has 10x more tutorials than Designer). Most companies screw up M&A.
If they switch to a subscription model I will definitely be looking for alternatives.
Might save some non-Apple users some time.
Step 2: Tell everyone, that the current pricing model will stay and no subscriptions will be offered. Everyone will cheer and recommend the products.
Step 3: Wait until the dust settles and switch to subscriptions. The community will say "told you that this will happen" and life goes on.
Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income.
While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maximize profits at all times.
It happened or happens in B2B, car sales, music, film, in games, and drawing apps... Everywhere you see, really. And it's so convenient if there is already a scapegoat like Adobe, which transitioned to subscriptions for the same reason.
And yes, I hate it. Even though it's easier to swallow 10 bucks a month, eventually you will spend more. They know it and we know it. All we can do as customers is to not support those companies, but this only goes so far. And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?
Support open source software
I can buy Affinity Designer for $50 and use it for 5 years. That’s less than a dollar a month. If they move to a subscription, I bet it’s going to be more than a dollar a month.
If it was really just about regular reoccurring revenue, we would see more $1 monthly subscriptions and fewer $5/month subscriptions.
I wish there was an option for this with e.g. Photoshop. I want to have PS because it's occasionally handy or fun for photoshopping my friends as a joke, but I don't need it for anything that makes me money so I can't justify paying. But if I had a slightly outdated version I could purchase once, I'd be find not getting all the latest updates.
And people complain about this also. If everyone is going to complain anyway, they might as well go to subscription which is best for the business.
Both beloved pieces of software.
It’s hard to sell an entire industry on replacing tools that “just work” with a new set of tools unless they actually work better. Consider what VS Code has had to do to try and get devs switch to it from other IDEs: they had to offer first-class support for pretty much every other IDE’s method of operating, e.g. plugins to take the keyboard shortcuts from other IDEs, plus offer better support for languages (e.g. LSPs, use of TextMate bundles), and on top of that offer new features not seen elsewhere (e.g. devcontainers, web-based IDEs, first-class GitHub integration…) and even then people will obviously still pick JetBrains products for Java or Python because you can’t actually copy every feature and win.
Likewise it only took me 5-10 minutes with Publisher before I started noticing missing features with text (Adobe has an excellent text rendering engine, go figure) and Designer in v1 was so frustrating that I haven’t used v2 much, though my use cases were pretty specific. I’ve actually found myself putting up with the bugs in OmniGraffle (oh so many bugs) because the infinite canvas there works so well when zooming around. When it works, that is.
Got a bit sidetracked in my answer, but Adobe has a lot going for it. Honestly this is probably great news for Figma, as they have an opportunity now to build better web-based photo and publishing apps before Canva can figure it out.
Publisher has pretty much same type tools as Indesign only the panels/features are positioned differently. Publisher doesnt have multi-line composer but that is paradoxically not used in professional setting anyway (its great for quick things though).
On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability,speed,connection between the software.
It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
I think others would argue on that last point that Adobe is more than halfway there since Creative Suite and has plans to finish the job with Adobe Express, though we’ll see if they come to fruition.
> It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
This I agree with, 100%. And now Affinity will have a third struggle in that they are poised to go subscription and lose the pricing model advantage too. Even if they don’t change the pricing model, eventually you’ll need a Canva account to use the apps, ongoing annual support fees, and so on.
I think that this is possible because under the hood the Affinity Suite uses the same core engine. In contrast, Adobe bought their suite from diverse sources, and interplay between them is clunky at best.
I agree that text preview in AP can be rough, but the output in pdf is as good as that in InDesign.
It has been requested plenty of times and there are multiple threads in their forum. This one is 10 years old:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-is...
I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behind them. This acquisition gives them some good editors on desktop to use as a base to deploy some of this AI tech focusing on a more pro market.
They are also about to ipo so this acquisition probably gives the an additinal growth story to sell.
Started by some 30 yo Australian chick with no tech background too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep21f3ncvBk
To that end, despite her interesting story around her role in the business, Canva itself really appeals to the lowest common denominator, which probably explains why they have such gangbuster financials. It really isn't great for true creatives though, and I feel Canva is dragging the industry down, not pulling it up, in the name of profits.
Some WhatsApp group users in India use Canva to create posters for events and then post them on various WhatsApp groups.
As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select and copy.
I really hope you’re exaggerating
Using Canva for a design assignment is obviously a mis-step by the student, not a flaw of the tool itself
For short-term & quick usage, canva is a perfectly fine tool for editing/formatting stuff
How is Canva any different than this? Part of design is being able to recognize what good design is, and utilizing the tools available to you. If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
The only way I could see is if they didn't modify the slides and part of the assignment was to create a unique branded slide presentation and they just used an out of the box design. In which case, no design work was done.
Someone shouldn't be penalized for the outcome based on the tools utilized unless the spec specifically excludes it.
It's like telling a clothing e-commerce company that they shouldn't use Shopify. If the work is done, why waste your time building an e-commerce site from scratch if it meets the specified need?
Canva is a great tool, and saves my clients thousands of dollars, while I get to avoid doing the completely mind numbing process of working in PowerPoint or designing social media posts. It's a win/win.
how would you feel about a student presenting stock images in a photography class?
> I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
Working professionaly has a different objective than school assignments. I think the distinction is very clear on many levels. Also, students using blatant off-the-shelf templates is very different professionals using templates "as starting place".
> If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
Well, that's not the case here. OP has explained that the design students in question aren't even using their low-effort canva templates right and exporting them as flattened pdf. It's very unlikely those who are this sloppy and careless have put any attention to the assignment or polishing other areas.
The key point is you can't delegate the main task. To use your Shopify example, if you enrolled in a "Web development using nodejs" class, and presented a premade shopify website that you purchased in a couple of clicks, the instructor won't be impressed, less so when you tell them you did it in 5 minutes "why waste time". If that's the student goal, fine, but they are in the wrong classes.
The template driven nature on Canva also makes it really hard for them to learn multi page layouts and structured documentation.
The one thing in its favour is that it supports collaboration.
sorry $MEGACORP, but the employees never actually mattered to you. it's all money. every company wants money.
Being able to email the presentation and copy text from it are generally more important to communications impact and utility in the workplace than how it looks.
Being aware what your tool does to the presentation is part of the job you're learning in school.
Students are there to learn, no to cater to your preferences.
I teach Design. One of the key learning outcomes of most design courses is the ability to handle long documents through their structural styles: heading 1, heading 2, caption, block quote, lists etc. Most design apps offer this functionality, even Powerpoint. However, none do it as elegantly as InDesign. I'm no Adobe fanboy (I do most of my own work in the Affinity suite) but InDesign remains the leader of the pack in this regard.
One crucial strength of InDesign is that it that manages anti aliasing of text very effectively. Just compare the output of ID to MS Word and you will see. I guess you are familiar with pdfs from LaTex? Compare those with pdfs from MS word. Similar difference.
It also does not produce or allow fake bold/italic etc. If a font does not have a built in bold then it won't fake one up by thickening the characters. This is why the font and charter panels in InDesign seem so feature-poor compared to those of Photoshop or Illusustor which offer such fake variants.
One final reason... cloud based services are risky things to rely on, especially in a uni. This year one service many students and staff used closed its doors. Caused a lot of angst.
I'm surprised that other people here cannot separate their subjective opinions, whether they agree with your judgment, from fact, whether you're a good educator.
It would be more reasonable to say: A good educator would help students understand that PDF files should have a small file size, and if a student fails to notice that, you will have to downgrade them for lack of attention to important detail.
And, of course the acquisition is bad news. Americans are the only people I've encountered that seem to celebrate the dystopian monopolized unfree market that we're headed towards.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them, as other companies do.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them
Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
How is that off topic when there are literally people in this thread from Canva arguing the framing and not the main point he made? Everything you disagree with isn't off topic.
Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so.
I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer of transparent text on top.
If you know any design that produces PDF file where text becomes not selectable, that might be a bug, and it would be appreciated if you can provide more details so that we can investigate and possibly fix.
> "Hi, I'm a X from Y. Y already does Z. I did that last Tuesday."
Always my favourite genre of interactions on this site.
Thanks greatly for making contact. Only on Hacker News.
To be fair to your product, it is the only viable means by which a set of slides can be worked on collaborativly and online. You saw that InDesigns collaboration tools suck and stepped in.
This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously tick it to make it happen.
But it seems that our support team sometimes presents this feature as a way to solve user issues, so maybe that's the reason.
[1] https://www.canva.com/help/download-flattened-pdf/
I suspect Canva will attempt to integrate Affinity into their cloud offering without fully comprehending the specific use cases and features that made Affinity successful in the first place. Canva's target is the novice and social media influencer, Affinity is a different market.
Sad day...
The problem is that most acquisitions go wrong and that larger companies generally care much less about their users. There are no good scenarios and no possible benefits there for Affinity users (like me). In a small company, management cares about users, because these users provide a direct lifeline for the company. In a large business, management cares about "shareholder value" as measured by their bonuses and this quarter's earnings. That does not map well onto customer satisfaction (see Adobe, Dropbox, or really just about any company that became large or got acquired).
Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.
They probably didn’t need to sell (but who knows) but an offer of a buyout at a 20x multiple (based on the Bloomberg report) when the core business faces competition from Adobe and Canva, not just for core features where depending on context, Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete (and AI is a big part of Canva and Adobe’s plans, whether certain vocal users like it or not), is compelling.
As a longtime user, this move makes me sad because I know I’ll lose some good tools to an inevitable subscription push (I also have Adobe CC and Canva subscriptions that I use for very different tasks so I’m not completely opposed to paying for a sub, but I certainly won’t pay Adobe prices for Affinity), but I can’t fault the company from wanting to exit, especially when the climate is what it is for the tools they sell.
Let’s put it this way, I can’t imagine them doing better than this.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. AI tools will become essential and if you haven't got the resources to compete in this area you're likely to fade into relative irrelevance.
And at a 20x multiple probably a steal for Canva too given what this deal will give them - even without raising prices / going to subscription model.
Photoshop’s new AI tools are an absolutely incredible timesaver. Jobs that would have taken 30+ minutes (and probably wouldn’t look great) can now take 30 seconds. It was kind of amazing watching the perception shift online in photography groups from “AI is evil!” to “Wow, this is really helpful.”
There’s no way they could keep competing, even if they tried to take something off the shelf like Stable Diffusion and integrating it. Without some sort of subscription they’d need to have people run it locally, and that’s really only feasible with high end Nvidia cards too. I suppose the initial plan might be to add tools like that, have a separate subscription for that, and boil the frog to a full subscription.
Canva already uses AI in really smart ways and if they can extend that approach into Affinity and have the two products compliment each other, that could def be a value-add for Canva users. But the more I think about it, the more I think this was the only thing Serif could do and although I sympathize with angry Affinity users as one myself, I think we have to acknowledge that Affinity’s chances of survival as a perpetually licensed product were basically over, acquisition or no acquisition, at least if you look out long-term.
They also got bought out by Canva, and I've watched the quality drop massively- any new content is almost entirely unusable, often only available on Canva itself, and chock full of design tropes and poorly SEO-optimized content. (Some of them are so bad as to be unintentionally hilarious.) It's a real mess, and it makes me less than optimistic about them buying out Affinity.
To be fair, their model was wildly different from a fully-featured editing suite, and certainly welcomed this kind of change, but they absolutely gutted that site: the only positive is that the original templates are still there, if you search for them. I'm not holding my breath, but I expect the same treatment now. An absolute shame- I don't use a photo editor enough to warrant an Adobe subscription, so I'll probably stay on Affinity V2 until it stops working.
[1]: https://www.slidescarnival.com/
I feel like something slipped with Designer V2 - the features went a bit weird and broad, and the amount of bugs got irritating and eroded my love for it and it being my go-to recommendation.
That all said, it’s still good software today and I’m glad the Serif team gets some kind of payday. I think the drop in quality of V2 makes the whole thing a bit less bittersweet for me.
I wish Adobe had at least put all of Freehand's capabilities into InDesign --- I might still be using it if that were the case.
I'm also preparing for a mysterious update that will make the V1 and V1 of the suite non-functional because of non-visible stuff like "security improvement" and "system stability".
I hope that I'm wrong.