Canva Acquires Serif and the Affinity Apps

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Canva has taken a significant step toward attracting design professionals this week, acquiring Serif, makers of the Affinity suite of products. This includes Affinity Publisher (an InDesign competitor), Photo (a Photoshop competitor), and Designer (an Illustrator competitor). 

The Affinity products have been increasingly attractive in recent years as their feature sets have matured, and because they have been sold at low price points with perpetual licensing, rather than forcing users into a subscription model. By contrast, Canva is a subscription-based service, with a single-user Pro license costing $120 per year. In their official statement on the acquisition, Serif claims there are no plans to extend the subscription model to the Affinity apps.

The acquisition makes sense because both companies have long emphasized the democratization of design tools by making them available to the largest number of people possible at reasonable costs. A Universal License to all three Affinity apps is currently on sale for $115 (regular price $165). Furthermore, each company has strengths in areas the other lacks. Canva is very strong in AI and web services. And Affinity offers pro-level tools, desktop and iPad apps, and an extensive user base of creatives. 

However, both companies have been criticized for not supporting several key technologies that the professional design community requires:

  • Extensibility: One of Adobe’s key strengths over the past 30 years has been the support of third-party developers building tools and workflows to automate production. Scripters, plug-in and add-on developers, and other IT providers have built robust ecosystems for designers and organizations. 
  • Accessibility: To date, neither Canva nor Affinity have released core accessibility features. This is a major problem for users, who are increasingly required by government regulations to build accessible documents. 
  • Prepress: Adobe basically invented prepress and print-ready workflows. As much as some want to believe that “print is dead,” that is far from true. It’s unclear whether Canva recognizes this. 
  • Server Solutions: Large scale publishing increasingly relies on template-driven, automated document construction, often run on servers, rather than on a desktop or laptop or phone.

It remains to be seen whether Canva will be able to—or is even interested in—developing their tools in these areas. Nevertheless, the acquisition of the Affinity suite should be seen as a “shot across the bow” of Adobe’s Creative Cloud battleship. 

Will Adobe respond by doubling down on Adobe Express, their AI-based design-for-everyone service? Or will they devote more resources toward extending their dominance in pro-level tools for the most discerning of designers? Stay tuned.

David Blatner is the co-founder of the Creative Publishing Network, InDesign Magazine, CreativePro Magazine, and the author or co-author of 15 books, including Real World InDesign. His InDesign videos at LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) are among the most watched InDesign training in the world.
You can find more about David at 63p.com

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  • Dov Isaacs says:

    My own take on this is that Adobe could be its own worst enemy. InDesign increasingly gets less attention within Adobe in terms of updated features, performance, and reliability and especially in terms of print. Where’s the support for PDF 2.0, PDF/X-6, and PDF/VT (including PDF/VT-1 and PDF/VT-3)? (I would be very concerned that InDesign might end up suffering the same fate as FrameMaker!)

    Adobe Express is really not (at least) currently a platform for developing serious content destined for print or even a combination of display and print. It has no real support for print publishing standards. All PDF output is sRGB, including black text. (And it has very much of a “walled-garden” – everything is in the cloud” aspect to it, similar to Apple’s world.)

    “Print” is really not on the radar of Adobe’s current generation of management (although licenses for Adobe PostScript and the Adobe PDF Print Engine are extremely profitable for the company). There appears to be a concern that even mentioning “print” in public will cause Wall Street Anal-ysts to downgrade the stock as that of a “smokestack industry” with obsolete products and technology. Advocating for or even simply supporting print issues within Adobe can in fact be very, very career-limiting as a number of us can attest to!

    • Gopa Campbell says:

      I would be interested in hearing about that (the “very career-limiting” thing). Adobe’s message board for Acrobat Pro has upwards of 700 comments from extremely displeased professionals. Adobe appears to care not a jot. My comment to them was to remember what happened to QuarkXPress when they decided that were to big to listen to their customers.

  • Alan Bell says:

    Why doesn’t Adobe just use their lunch money to buy Canva and be done with it? Everything has a price. Anti-trust?

    • Dov Isaacs says:

      Neither Canva nor Canva’s potential acquisition, Serif, offer products or technology that either better or in some cases anywhere near as comprehensive as what Adobe already has. What they do provide is $$$$ competition.

      Thus, anything that Adobe would do to try to “buy Canva” would certainly look like an effort to stifle competition. So yes, there would be serious antitrust considerations.

  • Gopa Campbell says:

    Sort of tangential remark, but with Adobe’s recent ongoing rollout of an almost unusable update to Acrobat Pro, I worry that they are going to destroy the whole line-up in favor of silly, supposedly phone-friendly applications. (when would you ever have wanted to enter 350 corrections to a book using a phone?) But Affinity does not have the features required for high-end publishing, which is very much alive!

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