Canva Acquired Affinity to Expand Offer for Pro Designers
The all-in-one design platform Canva announced that it acquired the professional graphic design suite Affinity this week.
While Affinity will continue as a stand-alone service, Canva will be rolling out new developments that bring its power to the user-friendly creation website.
Through this acquisition, Canva seeks to serve further professional designers, who were not their main target until now, with more advanced yet simple features and functions.
Why Affinity
Affinity is a UK-based company providing first-class photo editing, graphic design, and page layout software for Mac, Windows, and iPad. It is renowned for its high-end capabilities, intuitive interface, and affordable pricing. It has three main apps: Affinity Designer to create and edit graphic elements in vector format, Affinity Photo to handle basic to complex photo editing, and Affinity Publisher, which combines images, graphics, and text to design page layouts for different purposes.
Per the announcement, Canva believes the two firms share a common vision of empowering people worldwide to design. While Canva’s initial focus was to democratize graphic design and make it accessible for non-designers, Affinity’s main goal was to offer pro-level editing tools at lower price points and with less complex interfaces.
However, the user-friendly Canva has expanded enormously in later years, and its latest efforts have been made in the enterprise and professional segments. Attending to the growing creative needs of companies and industries in an increasingly visual society, Canva wants to ensure that all types of designers have all the resources necessary to create powerful visual content, whether for internal use or big marketing campaigns.
For that, they decided acquiring Affinity and accelerating the development of new features on its design suite was the best way forward.
What to Expect from Canva + Affinity
The announcement came out a few days ago, so there aren’t many details yet. However, we know that Affinity will continue existing and that its 90-person staff is joining the Canva team, just like it happened with previously acquired companies.
While they haven’t yet announced any new products or features coming to either Canva or Affinity, the buyer company has published a pledge to the Affinity user community with four relevant points:
- They will maintain Affinity’s affordable pricing and distinctive lifetime licenses.
- They will accelerate new features and services within Affinity to enhance its utility for designers.
- They will include Affinity software in their accessibility program that gives educative institutions and nonprofits free access to Canva premium plans (now also to Affinity apps)
- They will take community feedback onboard when tracing the future of the platform
That’s as far as they have shared so far, but knowing Canva, we can expect new features and developments to launch soon enough. So, let’s all stay tuned!
