The popular design tool Canva is making a major acquisition: Affinity. Maybe Canva tells you more than Affinity, but it mainly means that Adobe has to be careful. Affinity makes the same type of products as Adobe. When Canva can also serve that audience, it is really time for Adobe to take notice.
Affinity
For many people, Canva is already the new Photoshop: you can’t do exactly the same things with it, but it can handle the standard things that many people do very well. Think of adjusting the size of an image, enlarging a certain detail, brightening a photo, and so on. There is even AI with which you can generate images, although that does not go as far as how the AI within Photoshop can change or invent entire parts of a photo. But we won’t be surprised if it doesn’t take long to arrive (or even if it is there, but we haven’t found it yet, so much is possible with Canva).
What Canva does not yet have is what Affinity does have: it offers options to create flyers and posters, for example, you can edit photos and edit PDFs. Affinity is sometimes accused of being slightly behind Adobe, but in fact you can ultimately do a lot with it that you traditionally do in Adobe. Affinity has an answer to InDesign, Adobe Writer and more. It is therefore no wonder that Canva was interested in this company, because it complements Canva exactly where necessary. It is unknown how many euros the takeover will take place for. It is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.
Canva
It will definitely make Adobe sweat: until now it has really been Adobe that has done the talking for people in the creative industry, but now there are more modern tools that are causing a bit of a stir and a much-needed breath of fresh air. Although Adobe certainly provides its tools with new options, the fact that we had to wait a very long time for something as simple as Photoshop on iPad is not great. However, in the past year it has introduced great tools in Photoshop when it comes to AI.
Canva is an Australian company that is not only used by graphic designers, but also widely used by influencers and websites, for example. You can easily create a corporate identity with it and there are numerous examples for Instagram and Facebook posts, in addition to video options. The tool now has 170 million monthly active users. It was really created to give people who have no design training the tools to make beautiful things themselves. That is popular and that is why it can make such a gigantic takeover. Affinity will continue to operate separately from Canva, although there will eventually be some minor integrations of Affinity within Canva. We hope for a convenient way to sign PDF documents, but that remains to be seen.
