After quite a long period of hesitation I upgraded from Affinity Designer version 2.0 to version 3.2. I admit that I was not exactly thrilled by the way in which the acquisition of the Affinity suit by Canva had taken place. In addition to which I dislike the subscription model that the 3.2 version is included. After testing it however, I decided to implement the upgrade anyway. The transition was handled in quite a logical way, I must say; The vector, pixel and DTP modules are now combined into a single program, about which I was often puzzled why Affinity had not done that when they still owned the entire suit, particularly since most of the necessary conditions to make an assembly work, were already in existence. I have fiddled with the Canva version for a day or two and I admit their Studio version makes a lot of sense and speeds up the time to complete a file significantly, regardless if it is a vector or pixel file or a DTP document.
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I still think Serif (the company that originally built the Affinity suit) could have done a similar thing by themselves. But now we will never know if that would at some point have taken place. Around the time that the acquisition took place Affinity's technical head honcho wrote that there will be no subscription model, but that strategy did not emerge. It is one of the things that bothers me most, simply because it went on to the subscription path anyway. That could be expected to be honest, but it would show dignity if the buy and own the program would have been extended. But Affinity is of course much smaller than Canva and they would probably not have a feasible opportunity to continue what the seemed to have in mind. Outside of that, smaller companies get overtaken by bigger ones all the time when they have developed interesting programs. But that could have been shared with the Affinity user base in a more honest way, which explains my hesitation to upgrade. It just shows that in modern times it requires to take promises of the smaller business before the acquisition with a grain of salt.
However, the upgrades that are implemented under the Canva flag are too effective to ignore. Users must obviously accept that the overtaking of a small company's project by a larger player is what today's business world reflects. The dog eat dog mantra just whacks good intentions and leaves users with no choice then to deal with the result of an acquisition, if they want to profit from regular updates of the program they chose to use. In this article I am not going into the details of the improvements of functionality; I need more time to make a sensible effort in that direction and my do so in a not too distant future. I wrote this post mainly because I felt the urge to express what bothered me about the events surrounding Canva's acquisition against the promises made by Affinity around the take over.
I am not pleased by the way the acquisition went, but I am satisfied with the functionality of Canva Studio and rather displeased with the subscription model aspect of it. But the newly introduced function upgrades allow me to work faster and better, partly because of an increased AI integration, while offering a suit that includes functions that give Adobe a pain in the rear end. Since 3.2 is significantly improved over version 2.0, I am curious what the future of Canva Studio will bring; will they go head on against Adobe and just keep adding functions that makes the more attractive fro graphic designers or are they a few surprises that will surprise the future of graphic design and DTP. Bearing in mind how relatively fast Canva introduced the upgrades to Studio compared to Affinity Designer, we will most likely not have to wait a long to find out, I guess.
