Affinity vector and raster software now free

[The Vector Doctor]

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www.affinity.studio

 

[TJnIA]

How can this be?
Seems legit though, what's the catch?

 

[WildWestDesigns]

How can this be?
Seems legit though, what's the catch?

This is just from my perspective, but one being have to have a Canva account (doesn't have to be paid, but do have to have an account with them as well).

There are features (which wouldn't appeal to me, but I'm probably in the minority) that are still locked behind the paywall.

This is a one way ticket for existing files. There is no backward compatibility. So if mixing/matching between old apps and new between different platforms, that could be an issue (I do think there is a lag between desktop and the more mobile platforms with regard to this update (or updating in general), but I could be wrong).

Of course, there are redesign UI concerns, but that happens from time to time regardless of the app.

 

[Solventinkjet]

How can this be?
Seems legit though, what's the catch?

They'll train their AI on your designs.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

They'll train their AI on your designs.

For what I read (again, I haven't seen an updated EULA, and that's where it really counts, if it's in the EULA and how it is in there), they don't train on local content, however, using the non-free "AI" (or what passes for "AI") features and/or uploading to Canva, that's were it is possible things can happen.

I just assume that anything that I put out there or use any program that has a company with a vested interest in "AI" is going to have some training pipeline setup. May or may not affect me, but I always assume that it is. Of course, if that worried, but still want to use those products, there are ways to "poison" the files that you create and how at this point in time "AI" can "learn" from them.

 

[Bobby H]

The short version: The "Affinity" app is a loss-leader to continually sell people on buying a premium/paid Canva subscription. Need clip art, templates. etc? Open thee wallet!

 

[mbasch]

It is also about market share. Adobe owns the market and Affinity has been trying for years to erode that with very limited success. If they can get a large group of initial users, they can gain take on adobe. My guess is that once they get critical mass for application adaptation, they'll start charging new folks who sign up. My suggestion is get in now while it is free. Adobe essentially has a monopoly and we see increasing prices for ne features few people need.

 

[cbdigital]

We've been an all-Affinity shop for a couple of years now, with zero regrets. Like many people, I had reservations about Canva acquiring Affinity last year, but so far, I haven't seen anything to complain about. V3 is exactly what I was hoping it would be, and the fact that it's free is just a bonus. For everyone asking how and why it would be made free, it's simple. This is a long game strategy for Canva; clearly, they want people to pay for Canva Pro, at $15 a month, but there's more to it than that.
1) Canva is built for marketers, not graphic designers. Affinity is built for designers, not marketers. The tools complement each other, and once they have two-way integration, it will remove some friction points. I know that 90% of the client files I receive daily are created in Canva. If I can just pull those into Affinity in the future and then make them press-ready, that's a win for me.
2) The current generation of marketers, as well as future generations of marketers, are cutting their teeth on Canva. If they ever want to level up, they can now stay in the Canva ecosystem instead of moving to Adobe. That's a win for Canva. It's no different than Apple giving away Emacs to schools 25 years ago; they were planting seeds that are now paying off in spades. Lifelong Canva customers.
3) It's a very similar approach to what Black Magic has done with DaVinci Resolve, and no one can deny that DaVinci Resolve has absolutely dominated Adobe in the video editing space over the last decade.
Canva has VERY publicly stated that they aren't training AI on Affinity user data, but why people keep saying that is beyond me. Anyway, we will continue to use Affinity happily and hope to for many years to come.

 

[Bobby H]

It is also about market share. Adobe owns the market and Affinity has been trying for years to erode that with very limited success. If they can get a large group of initial users, they can gain take on adobe.

The real problem is what part of graphics market Adobe's software has dominated: the professional side of the industry. The Canva folks are going to have to do a lot more work to win over professional users.

Canva already has hordes of people using their free online software; it's just that the vast majority of those people are not professional graphics workers. They're amateurs trying to D-I-Y their own graphics work. They're trying to avoid paying a real graphics person to do the work. And they're trying to avoid having to pay for any software. Both points underscore the allure of Canva. Out of all the people who've given me Canva-related art files to use in sign projects that past couple or so years nearly all of those people have been using the free version of Canva. I'm skeptical any of those folks would want to sign up for a $180 per year subscription. It's not like they're doing graphics work on a frequent, daily basis. Some of these amateur art projects are a one-and-done kind of thing.

I've tried recommending Affinity Designer to some of these people; $100 for a reasonably decent vector graphics app isn't bad, right? I think Affinity Designer is easier to use than Inkscape. Affinity Designer has a better looking, more functional UI than Inkscape and it can support color modes like CMYK (Inkscape is still RGB-only). None of these people have followed the recommendation. I've yet to receive a single .afdesign art file from any clients. I can try repeating the recommendation now that the Affinity App is available for free. But I'm still skeptical any of these amateur users will bother. They don't want to have to learn a new app. So they'll probably keep going to Canva. Or they'll do like more and more people I see: using friggin' AI bots to churn out "artwork" that's even more of a pain in the ass for people like me to handle.

I'm hoping the Canva people can use some of the structure of Affinity Designer to make the online Canva app better at creating and exporting vector graphics. But the fundamental problem remains: most amateur/hobbyist graphic designers don't know what they're doing. Most don't understand the very basic difference between pixels and vectors. Too many of them don't have a good handle on basic geometry either -"aspect ratio, what's that?".

 

[TarrifBoy123]

Wow, thanks for this post. It is very interesting seeing this competition for Adobe heat up. We use Adobe exclusively but they keep hiking up the price which has been on our radar. This news about Affinity Designer is good to hear. Competition is good for the consumer and innovation.

 

[cbdigital]

The real problem is what part of graphics market Adobe's software has dominated: the professional side of the industry. The Canva folks are going to have to do a lot more work to win over professional users.

Canva already has hordes of people using their free online software; it's just that the vast majority of those people are not professional graphics workers. They're amateurs trying to D-I-Y their own graphics work. They're trying to avoid paying a real graphics person to do the work. And they're trying to avoid having to pay for any software. Both points underscore the allure of Canva. Out of all the people who've given me Canva-related art files to use in sign projects that past couple or so years nearly all of those people have been using the free version of Canva. I'm skeptical any of those folks would want to sign up for a $180 per year subscription. It's not like they're doing graphics work on a frequent, daily basis. Some of these amateur art projects are a one-and-done kind of thing.

I've tried recommending Affinity Designer to some of these people; $100 for a reasonably decent vector graphics app isn't bad, right? I think Affinity Designer is easier to use than Inkscape. Affinity Designer has a better looking, more functional UI than Inkscape and it can support color modes like CMYK (Inkscape is still RGB-only). None of these people have followed the recommendation. I've yet to receive a single .afdesign art file from any clients. I can try repeating the recommendation now that the Affinity App is available for free. But I'm still skeptical any of these amateur users will bother. They don't want to have to learn a new app. So they'll probably keep going to Canva. Or they'll do like more and more people I see: using friggin' AI bots to churn out "artwork" that's even more of a pain in the ass for people like me to handle.

I'm hoping the Canva people can use some of the structure of Affinity Designer to make the online Canva app better at creating and exporting vector graphics. But the fundamental problem remains: most amateur/hobbyist graphic designers don't know what they're doing. Most don't understand the very basic difference between pixels and vectors. Too many of them don't have a good handle on basic geometry either -"aspect ratio, what's that?".

Agreed, that's why I'm really hoping that they build integration that allows Affinity users to pull in files created by Canva users for cleanup. It would make my life significantly easier. Currently, I have them share the Canva design with me, use my Canva Pro account to export the design as a PDF or SVG, and then manually import it into Affinity to clean up and make it usable for us.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

I've tried recommending Affinity Designer to some of these people; $100 for a reasonably decent vector graphics app isn't bad, right? I think Affinity Designer is easier to use than Inkscape.

Yes and no. If one is familiar with using SVGs and what that actually means, it's a better format in a lot of ways, for plugins (which from what I'm reading Affinity is shying away from, which is a shame), for manipulation etc (if going by how Ai and Draw handle SVGs, yea, I can understand why people have such a small opinion on SVGs).

Affinity Designer has a better looking, more functional UI than Inkscape and it can support color modes like CMYK (Inkscape is still RGB-only).

I agree with the better looking. I despise GTK based UIs, but that would have to be handled by the Gnome folks, good luck with that. However, when Inkscape came into being, there was either GTK or Qt (a much better toolkit (Maya uses it in some places, Moho I believe does, toon boom etc, but I digress) and even today Qt is in this flux area of licensing that makes it an issue (people really should go to Copperspice, but that's another topic).

However, with regard to CMYK, that is actually being actively worked on right now, so technically that isn't the case now as one can check out that branch before it's merged upstream (splitting hairs, but technically true).

They don't want to have to learn a new app. So they'll probably keep going to Canva.

That happens with "pros" as well. I learned this X amount of yrs ago, it was good at that point, it's still good now. The programs doesn't have feature Y, even though it does, but the person in question doesn't like how it's implemented or the implementation is so radically different, it never occurs to them to try it there. That happens a lot with Inkscape and the SVG format as well. I can understand it, but it's misleading as well when the features actually do exist, they just have to be implemented in a way that goes with the format's "quirks".

I'm hoping the Canva people can use some of the structure of Affinity Designer to make the online Canva app better at creating and exporting vector graphics. But the fundamental problem remains: most amateur/hobbyist graphic designers don't know what they're doing. Most don't understand the very basic difference between pixels and vectors. Too many of them don't have a good handle on basic geometry either -"aspect ratio, what's that?".

That happens with "pros" as well. That's the big thing with all of these higher abstractions, knowledge is lost. Going to be on steroids with "AI" going to be more mainstream. That's the price that one pays for more automation. If one didn't create the automation, don't really know what it is abstracting, hard to fix it when it goes wrong or even recognize when it did go wrong. I have seen that in quite a few industries.

And what adds to this issue is that these little implementations are vendor specific, so when one gets really good at one vendor's version of said abstraction, hard to migrate to another vendor without initial teething pains.

 

[Bobby H]

Yes and no. If one is familiar with using SVGs and what that actually means, it's a better format in a lot of ways, for plugins (which from what I'm reading Affinity is shying away from, which is a shame), for manipulation etc (if going by how Ai and Draw handle SVGs, yea, I can understand why people have such a small opinion on SVGs).

I'm not talking at all about the format Inkscape uses to save its files, I'm talking about the application itself. The app is ugly as hell. When I launch Inkscape it feels like going back in time 30 years. Affinity Designer has its own limitations, but the app has picked up enough cues from Illustrator and CorelDRAW that its user interface, keyboard shortcuts and smooth performance can help an amateur/hobbyist user be productive fairly quick.

That happens with "pros" as well. I learned this X amount of yrs ago, it was good at that point, it's still good now.

A real professional would continue trying to learn new things. I have only harsh judgment for graphics people who want to use only one creative app for everything.

A couple weeks ago I got saddled with re-building a logo some other "professional graphic artist" created. The asset I had to download from a Google docs link was TIFF image 1.5 gigabytes in size. The logo was nothing but lettering and geometric objects all with flat colors and hard edges. But this turd insisted on using Photoshop to create it rather than a vector graphics app like Illustrator or CorelDRAW or Affinity Designer or whatever. It's idiotic stuff. At least we were able to bill the client for the design time needed to remake the artwork.

I use multiple graphics apps everyday in my work. Most often I'm bouncing stuff back and forth between CorelDRAW and Illustrator. I use Photoshop frequently; InDesign not quite as much. Procreate is a really fun painting app to use on the iPad. Photoshop and Illustrator work pretty well on the iPad too. It's kind of fun being able to "zap" a layout between the iPad version of Illustrator and the desktop version on Windows.

I'll check out the latest version of Affinity Designer to see if its worth moving past my paid version of Affinity Designer 2.x.

That happens with "pros" as well. That's the big thing with all of these higher abstractions, knowledge is lost. Going to be on steroids with "AI" going to be more mainstream. That's the price that one pays for more automation. If one didn't create the automation, don't really know what it is abstracting, hard to fix it when it goes wrong or even recognize when it did go wrong. I have seen that in quite a few industries.

Yeah, I'm afraid there will be big consequences to pay for skills lost with so-called AI. So many programming/developer jobs are being eliminated since AI bots are being used more and more to generate code. Well, we still need human beings who know how to code in order to at least police the code these bots are generating. If a person can't make a good living as a coder we'll quickly run out of people who can proof-read code. Then we'll really be at the mercy of the black hats.

I don't like what AI could do to the graphics industry. Real hand-crafted artwork, even if it's digitally created, could be utterly devalued. Graphics workers could end up going from spending much of their time doing real creative work to merely cranking out random-ass slop via a text prompt and then filling the rest of the work day doing tasks that have nothing to do with graphics work.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

I'm not talking at all about the format Inkscape uses to save its files, I'm talking about the application itself. The app is ugly as hell. When I launch Inkscape it feels like going back in time 30 years. Affinity Designer has its own limitations, but the app has picked up enough cues from Illustrator and CorelDRAW that its user interface, keyboard shortcuts and smooth performance can help an amateur/hobbyist user be productive fairly quick.

I wasn't directing that part of my response to how it looked etc. My response to how the Inkscape looks aesthetically was here:

I agree with the better looking. I despise GTK based UIs, but that would have to be handled by the Gnome folks, good luck with that. However, when Inkscape came into being, there was either GTK or Qt (a much better toolkit (Maya uses it in some places, Moho I believe does, toon boom etc, but I digress) and even today Qt is in this flux area of licensing that makes it an issue (people really should go to Copperspice, but that's another topic).

What you had quoted was my response to Affinity being easier to use compared to inkscape. Inkscape is really easy to use if one is familiar with the SVG format and the multitude of ways to edit it that aren't using the hidden options/menus. Some of which are how one can get to options (especially related to fonts) that don't have direct menus in the usual places.

A real professional would continue trying to learn new things. I have only harsh judgment for graphics people who want to use only one creative app for everything.

I agree and also always be willing to evaluate if a tool that has been useful for decades is still up to snuff for them. It still maybe, but be honest about the eval.

Yeah, I'm afraid there will be big consequences to pay for skills lost with so-called AI. So many programming/developer jobs are being eliminated since AI bots are being used more and more to generate code. Well, we still need human beings who know how to code in order to at least police the code these bots are generating. If a person can't make a good living as a coder we'll quickly run out of people who can proof-read code. Then we'll really be at the mercy of the black hats.

Unfortunately, even that has happened. Most "coders" now are people that just bolt on this library with that library and maybe write a few lines of glue code and call it a day. And since we have had this shift to "vibe coding", it's only going to get worse. Having this push for "baby sitter" languages now (I include Rust in that camp, just instead of a GC, it's the borrow checker and that just doesn't work in every situation, have to use that dreaded unsafe key word) doesn't help.

I don't like what AI could do to the graphics industry. Real hand-crafted artwork, even if it's digitally created, could be utterly devalued. Graphics workers could end up going from spending much of their time doing real creative work to merely cranking out random-ass slop via a text prompt and then filling the rest of the work day doing tasks that have nothing to do with graphics work.

It has been devalued for quite a long time as it is. Especially since it's gone digital, even though the abstraction was less for the artist (had to know which tools to use, how to use them and when to use them) people could get further with less knowledge and thus have a more supply of "professionals" that lessened the demand, but now this exists. Some of this I blame on the vendors as their goal is to move product, they don't care what their users can get for said product that they create with the vendor's product.

Here is the silver lining, we really haven't had one thing that truly killed off something else. The market shifted, those that remained had a smaller customer pool, but everything still existed. Stage, movies, tv, radio, 2D animation (even still done on paper/cells as well), stop motion, traditional drawing/painting/sculpting all still exist. Market size is for sure different, but nothing really has killed off something else. Some of this has helped that we have more of a decentralized way of getting product. There are pros and cons to that. Biggest con is that there is less of a chance of having a shared cultural experiences (they may still happen, but say Beatlemania probably wouldn't have happened in this more decentralized way of consumption). Biggest pro is those that still like certain media that the corporations want to get out of or stories that they don't care to have told, can find an audience, not as big, but may still be able to find one nonetheless.

I wonder if there will be a shift back to more of what would be considered traditional creating (even if it's using digital tools, but still require the user to be in control of the entire process). Creating with "AI", is not really creation, not by the person entering in the prompt. If they feel like they are creating (or the people consuming that product think that the prompt writing is creating that) the end result, that's a delusion that they have. Even being a "fixer" for what they "AI" spits out is only really just fixing it, not creating it. The more corporate things become, the less creative things are. We can see that from music to movies (music for far longer as far as I'm concerned with being bad).

 

[Ron at Forest Litho]

In the end people will use the cheapest and easiest tools they can

 

[WildWestDesigns]

In the end people will use the cheapest and easiest tools they can

The irony is, software tends to make those two factors run at an inverse relationship. For different reasons depending on if talking about proprietary or OSS.

The confounding part that throws a wrench in things is the normies, which is really what all modern day features are for nowadays (even with the more "professional" tools that seem to believe in "AI" in everything).