Affinity: Why You Should Pay Attention

Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of the CreativePro podcast. Today I’m here with Steve Caplin. We’re going to talk about affinity by Canva and why we think you should be paying attention, why it matters for professional designers.

Welcome new listeners, if this is your first time joining us at the CreativePro podcast, just a little about CreativePro. We’re here for design professionals like you. We offer real-world insights, practical tips, inspiring conversations like the one we’re going to have today, and we’re here to help you stay current and work smarter.

CreativePro offers membership, a welcoming creative community, how-to events, articles, tutorials, and quick tips. Basically, we’ve got it all for you. For being here, you can use the code podcast to save $100 on any upcoming CreativePro events.

That includes CreativePro Week. CreativePro Week will be in Nashville this year, June 29th to July 3rd. We cover a little bit about everything, well a lot about everything that professionals need to know.

We hope you can be there. Today, I’m here with Steve Caplin to talk about affinity by Canva. Steve is an artist, author, illustrator, designer, Photoshop expert.

He has his own podcast, Gadgets and Gizmos, and just in general, Steve is the most creative person I think I’ve ever met. He loves to make stuff. He’s a lifetime maker.

He’s a sculptor, musician, Adobe expert, and now he’s getting into affinity, and he has a lot to share with us about what he’s learned. Steve Caplin has been a CreativePro speaker, and he’s also a content contributor for CreativePro. His most recent member article is affinity for Photoshop users, and you can find some of his video demos of affinity filters on the CreativePro YouTube channel.

Hi, Steve. Hi. Hi, Theresa.

Great to be here. We’re talking affinity, but you are fully Adobe branded. Look at all those cushions behind you.

I am. I am. I’m an Adobe fangirl.

Yeah, that’s good. I certainly fit into that category. I think so.

I think we have a lot in common. We have decades of creative use of Adobe tools, I would not be what I am today without Adobe. No question about that.

Affinity or Adobe? Oh, Adobe. Absolutely Adobe. Affinity is kind of new.

Well, affinity is new and very, very interesting as we will discuss. Yeah, we’ll get into that. I wanted to do a little trip down memory lane because I have this really fond memory of meeting you in person.

Well, first, we should we should set the stage here where we are. I’m located in Southern California, San Diego County area. It’s it’s it’s morning time.

I’m still having my breakfast. And where are you located at, Steve? I am in cold, windy London, where it is early evening. And even though it’s April, it’s chilly out there.

Well, it was sunny. I was cycling around London over the weekend and it was the sun was shining and it was glorious. Yeah, that was good.

Yeah. Londoners love their sun. Everybody goes outside when it’s sunny.

Right. We don’t get enough of it to get bored of it. Well, it’s almost always sunny here in San Diego.

I’m quite spoiled by that. But I love that we could be together and have this conversation, even though we’re in very different parts of the world. And I appreciate you spending your your late afternoon with me.

It’s so good to be here. So do you remember meeting me? I was it was in New Orleans was New Orleans. It was at a CreativePro conference, um, which was huge fun, which was really good fun.

I think it was the second CreativePro Week in New Orleans. And I was there as an attendee. And you were a speaker.

Yeah. And I was talking about how you could do 3D in Photoshop. Not anymore.

You can’t. Wow. Yeah, you can still do 3D in the Adobe ecosystem.

But interestingly, that they kind of pivoted that into Illustrator, which I don’t know that I totally understand. But that is a that is another story. They they didn’t so much pivoted as cancel it and reinvent something similar in Illustrator.

Well, by no means the same kind of thing. Yeah. Well, I remember meeting you at the bar, which wasn’t it was in the lobby.

The lobby of the hotel that we were at was just this big open air lobby. And you could sit anywhere and a waitress would come and service. It was a really nice location for CreativePro for that reason.

There was a lot of room for the community to hang out. So it was a lot of attendees and speakers late afternoon, I think. And it was also indoors.

And that’s the key thing, because if you remember, it was very hot and very, very humid. And you walked outside in your glasses, like instantly fogged. Exactly.

Exactly. And you’re walking down the street and I would pop into every store that I went past just to use their air con for a few minutes. Exactly.

That was my first and only time in New Orleans. And I really enjoyed my time there. Hmm.

I kind of skipped out a couple times and went out and explored the area. I’d like to go back and spend more time there. But anyway, you and I struck up a conversation.

I can’t recall how it started or even exactly what we talked about. But I probably do you do you remember? We probably talked about Adobe. I think no, I think it was more specific than that.

I think we really connected on our love of Photoshop as a tool for artists as a way to be creative as a way to be able to create whatever we could imagine. I believe that that’s where we connected. I just remember that I loved the conversation.

I remember that fondly that I really enjoyed having that conversation with you. And I don’t know if you remember this, but you had to leave. You were actually flying out.

So at some point, you were like, I’m really sorry, but I have to catch my ride to the airport. I have a flight home. That was I was disappointed.

But I was also really grateful that we had that. I don’t know, 20, 30 minutes to connect. Yeah, indeed.

That was it was good. It was very good fun. Yeah, we’ll have to do it again sometime.

All right. Well, we’re here to talk about Affinity. I invited you to this conversation because you’ve been exploring Affinity for CreativePro.

You have a recent article about the filters in Affinity that is for members only in the magazine. And then you have some videos on YouTube. And I just came back from the Canva Create conference.

So I came back with a lot of a lot of new thoughts. And I’d really like to bounce them off of you. So why don’t you tell our listeners what Affinity is? Why? You know, what is it we’re here to talk about? Well, there’s a small company in the UK called Serif who have been making design software for quite a long time.

And about 10 years ago, they came out with a product that they called Affinity Photo, which is to all all intents and purposes, Photoshop. It’s extraordinary. It does maybe 80% of what Photoshop could do, but it does a lot of it very much better.

So Photoshop has been going for decades and they have such a legacy of old code. They cannot simply rewrite everything. So a lot of the filters in Photoshop, particularly the what used to be called the gallery effects filters, they came out in 2003 and have not been updated since.

So these filters have a little thumbnail that big. And and that’s all you see. And then you guess and you hit it and then you hit OK and then you see what happens.

You ask for what I wanted and you go back and you try again. Affinity, everything is full screen. Everything is live.

It’s really it’s it’s easy to use. It’s a little quirky. A lot of tools behave slightly differently to the way in Photoshop they do Photoshop.

So these are the lasso tool is a different behavior, but you get used to that. So they brought this out and and they made a one off purchase. I think it was $50.

That’s it. One time purchase and they update it for the rest of your life. But a lot of people moved to it because then Adobe started charging their subscription.

Then they brought out Affinity Publisher and Affinity Designer, effectively their versions of InDesign and Illustrator. And what was really interesting about that was they use the same interface for all three programs. So you’d be working in in designer, you know, laying out laying out something and you want to bring in a photo and you want to edit the photo.

Well, you just press a button and you switch from the effectively from Illustrator into Photoshop. So from designer into photo within the same document. Can I ask a question there, Steve? Did Serif create that UI or did that happen when Affinity purchased or when Canva purchased it? No, Serif created that UI.

They also brought out all three applications at the same time for the iPad. Not versions of them, but identical apps for the iPad. Affinity had a dev team of 13 people.

How did they do it? I do not, unless they were absolute slave drivers and they didn’t let the people go home to sleep. I do not know how it’s possible for them to create what they created with 13 people. So what you have is these three apps that look like each other, that behave like each other.

And the big news this year was that they bundled all three into one. So now you have the photo studio, as it’s called. It’s called the studio and you also have the design studio.

No, they’re called the pixel studio, is the Photoshop one. The vector studio is a version of Illustrator and the design studio is effectively InDesign. I think it’s layout.

Layout. Pixel, vector. They changed the name.

Yes, you’re absolutely right. And so it’s all built into one. So you’re working on, imagine you’re working in InDesign and you place a photograph and you think, wouldn’t it be nice if that person’s head just came up above the headline here? Just tie it all together.

Well, rather than going into Photoshop, making a new document, come back and design, duplicating it. In Affinity, you can just duplicate the layer and then switch a tool set. So switch tool set from your layout tool set to your your pixel tool set.

Take out the background and do it all within the one app. And because it’s all within the one app, you’re not constrained to just working in pixel mode or vector mode or in layout mode, because you can still see the other objects on the page and you can move them around whichever mode you’re in, whichever studio you’re in. So it gives you tremendous creative freedom.

So that’s, you know, one of the two pieces of really big news that they announced this year. The second one was it’s free. Absolutely free.

The whole thing, free. Well, we’ll talk about that. It’s free.

It’s free. Yeah. There are premium.

The premium version is if you want the AI tools, then that’s a hundred dollars a year, which is not huge, given the tool set that you get. Effectively, for everyone that doesn’t want AI, not everyone wants AI in all their tools. It’s free.

So it’s a tremendous set. And it was when they were bought by Canva that Canva turned it free. So Canva have been gunning for Photoshop, gunning for Adobe, really, for some time.

But the Canva tools have always been seen very much as an amateur tool set. And they want to grab the professionals. And so they’re trying to do that through Affinity.

And to a large extent, they’re working. There are drawbacks to some of the Affinity tools. And we can talk about that a little.

But if you haven’t used it, then it’s free. Download it and try it. So what I did with my video that you’re talking about, about using Photoshop filters.

Photoshop filters can be very clumsy, but you use the same filters better. In fact, even far better versions of the filters with live effects directly in the Pixel Studio in Affinity. Affinity will open native Photoshop documents.

And then you can go back into Photoshop to finish up. And the time it takes to switch from Photoshop to Affinity is far less than the time that you would spend tinkering in Photoshop, trying to get the results you want. So a couple of questions.

I know you can open, you can just place a Photoshop file into Affinity. I was at Canva Create and I took a lab and we did that. But can you then save those edits back to Photoshop? You can save a Photoshop document from Affinity? Yes, you can.

Yes, you can. And then, okay, so there’s one keyword that I haven’t heard you say, which kind of surprised me. The filters aren’t only live previews and full screen, but they’re always non-destructive.

They are not always non-destructive. Most of them. There are two sets of filters.

The standard burn them into the image filters, but there are non-destructive versions of almost all of the filters, which is fantastic. It’s kind of similar to using filters on smart objects in Photoshop, but it works much more smoothly. So to take one really good example is the displace filter in Photoshop.

So what this place does is it moves your image around based on an image map. And that image map is just any image you like. And you can make light colored pixels move up and to the left and dark colored pixels move down and to the right.

So to use it in Photoshop, you create your image map and you save it. Then you open the displace filter and you type in some numbers. You type in the percentage that you want with no preview whatsoever.

And you hit okay and it does it. And you think that’s not at all what I want to do. So undo, go back to the filter, type in some different numbers, see if it works.

It’s crazy. With Affinity, you can see what you’re doing live as you drag. So within the document you’re using, you can bring your image map into that document and you can tell Affinity which layer you want to use as the bump map, as the image map.

You can adjust the strengths of it and you can have several versions of that image map. So I did an example of rippling a flag over a satin surface. And when you use just the picture of the satin as the surface, it works okay.

But the satin’s got a texture to it and that means that your flag is very distorted by that texture. So what you can do is duplicate that layer, blur it with with Gaussian blur, and then you get a much smoother version just with those contours. And you can use that, but you can do all that without ever leaving this document that you’re in.

Just by duplicating the layer and say don’t use this layer, use the copy of that layer which I blurred and try it now. And it just works. You recorded a video of that for the CreativePro YouTube channel.

And when I watched that video, my mind was just exploded. So I don’t know if you recall, but years ago I created a self-portrait of Paisley Pattern. And it was really at the turning point of my career where I started going in another path.

I went to Photoshop World. I won a Guru Award for that. A lot of people still remember that self-portrait.

I spent hours and hours using Displacement Map in Photoshop to create that because I drew the Paisley Pattern and then I applied it to a white blouse. And when I was done, it looked very realistic. So I understand very well how painful the Displacement Map filter in Photoshop is.

And Affinity just does it the way it should work. And it’s mind-blowing. And the fact that all three, the Pixel Studio, the Layout Studio and the Vector Studio, all use the same interface.

And Adobe can’t do that because of their legacy. I remember some years ago being at a conference, an Adobe conference, and the Illustrator team were there. And I said to them, why don’t you do the rubber band effect like you get in Photoshop for the pen tool? Because it’d make it a lot easier to see where you’re going to pass the next point.

They said, what effect is that? They didn’t know because they didn’t use Photoshop. You know, one team was in one city, the other team, I think the Illustrator team was actually in India. And there’s no communication between them.

Plus InDesign based on PageMaker. So that came from a different place again. So there is no real interaction between them.

And this is a real problem with Adobe apps, isn’t it? Particularly with, say, After Effects and Premiere, which are both video editing tools, but the behaviors are completely different. The keyboard shortcuts are completely different. And it’s really frustrating.

As a creative, you are constantly switching between Premiere and After Effects for doing different things. And you have to use a different mindset for each program. So there’s news in that area, too.

Did you hear that a FIN or Canva purchased Calvary, which is a competitor to After Effects? And then they just announced it’s free. So Calvary is very interesting. Adobe must be running scared.

Hang on to those those pillows behind you because they are going to be collector’s items. I don’t know. Honestly, Steve, I’m not I’m not ready to go there.

And no, neither am I. Yeah. And I mean, maybe that’s so maybe that’s self-preservation that I’m not ready to go there. There’s still quite a bit that that’s lacking or that.

Isn’t available for a professional if you choose the affinity route and the tools that Canva are purchasing. They’re they’re kind of putting stuff together. They’re patching stuff together.

So it’s not it’s not all within this the same ecosystem. I think that their goal is to put it there. And I think, you know, there’s limits.

I think they will get there. I mean, this is still, you know, affinity of the app. This is still version one.

Right. If you think back to what version one of Photoshop was like, and I was there, I remember it. It was quite different.

It has changed a lot, you know, since then. So let’s just talk about some of the things that are missing from affinity, particularly from the layout studio, which is their version of InDesign. So what it doesn’t have is scripting, which means if you use you currently use InDesign to to make catalogs or directories from spreadsheets, for example, from, you know, external data, you’re not going to be able to do that in affinity.

The data merge, it’s there to a small extent, but not very sophisticated for books. Yeah, you can make long documents in affinity, but you can’t have each chapter as a separate document and then thread them together. So the page numbering goes through.

So the indexing goes all the way through so that the styles are maintained throughout all of them. Of course, not everyone wants to produce long documents, but I think a big deal is there’s no grep yet in affinity. And for those who don’t know, grep is a way of automating styling to text.

So you can say, you know, you write a text and you say every time the word affinity appears, I want it to be in bold and blue. And you just write a little command to do that and it’ll do it. I just had a thought, Steve.

Maybe, maybe they’re betting on AI to be the solution. There’s going to, we’re going to reach a point where maybe we don’t need grep. We don’t need a no grep.

We just type in a command that says, find all of a certain, a certain font or a certain word and fix it. Maybe. That’s possible.

And that’s quite a scary thought. And you could say to find it retrospectively. Could you say, find it going forward? So the next time you type affinity, it’ll also be in blue.

I mean, writing grep is a, is a real art form. And it’s, it’s Erica is the absolute genius at doing this. She has almost devoted her life to grep.

And Erica, if you’re editing this podcast, look away now. Erica says, I’m not an expert. I’m not a grep expert.

We all look to her as our grep expert. Yeah. So, um, I don’t know about their nested styles in affinity layout.

No, not quite as sophisticated. There are nested styles. They’re hidden away, but they’re not quite as sophisticated as they are in, uh, in, in design.

So, so who is affinity for? Wait, I want to ask a question there. Sorry. My head is spinning.

This conversation just has me like all these questions. Do you know if affinity can export a PDF with tags? Um, can it create a tag tree for accessibility so that screenwriters can read the document? This is the huge, I don’t know that. I don’t know definitively either.

I do know that Canva can’t do that. Now, maybe I should have looked into that. I am not sure if somebody is listening, you have an answer, leave us a comment, let us know.

Um, because that accessibility is, it is a very important topic and that may be one of the number one reasons to stay in InDesign. There are, there are quite a lot of reasons to stay in InDesign, but if you are already working in InDesign, have been for some time, then all of your legacy documents are going to be InDesign. And yes, yes, you can open them in, in affinity.

Sort of. Sort of. What do you mean by sort of? Well, it’s like InDesign can open PDFs.

Yeah. Sort of, you know, you open a PDF and it’s not quite what you expect. You don’t have to put quite a lot of work into it.

So I have got 20 years of working in InDesign and I’ve got artwork that I want to modify, to update, to repurpose. I’m not going to create all that from scratch in Affinity, despite the fact that, you know, Affinity is great. So at the moment I would say, I mean, they’re gunning for professionals.

They’re absolutely trying to take the professional market from Adobe by making Affinity free. But as yet, Affinity, it’s a fantastic tool for casual users, for home users. I’m not going to call them amateurs because that’s disparaging and there is nothing amateur about the way that freelancers or the home user will create fantastic work using these tools.

But if you’re in a publishing environment, it’s going to be a while before, you can’t get everyone to shift to Affinity. So Adobe has still got their core market there. Can you create threaded text boxes? Oh yeah.

So what are the key things? We don’t know about accessibility. It doesn’t do chapters. What were the other things? Only basic nested styles.

I mean, there’s some things that are really nice. So creating paragraph styles and character styles, you just have the one palette for that, one panel. They’re not split in different places.

It’s really easy, if you want to change something, then just to update the style from that panel. It’s much easier to navigate really than InDesign. How do colors work? Like the color swatches, are they global colors by default? In the latest version, which came out this week or last week, if you’re listening to this podcast next week, they have now produced a unified color systems for designers to work across their organizations.

Really big deal for our listeners. It includes the Pantone libraries. And it includes the Pantone libraries.

Yeah, that’s a big deal. So there are very irritating things about InDesign, one being that if you quit and relaunch InDesign, every panel, you have to check the preview button. You know, you have the character styles and you change something and nothing happens.

Oh, I haven’t checked the preview button. You have the paragraph styles. Why is that? I haven’t checked the preview.

You have the drop shadow. You change something, nothing happens. Why would you want to change anything without checking the preview button? Why is there even a preview button? No one wants to turn these things off.

It’s crazy. So InDesign, you know, it has its frustrating elements to it. Not as frustrating as Quark used to have.

I don’t know if you remember the Quark expression. Oh, I remember. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We had to purchase a plugin to create layers in Quark.

Yes. The only file format we could place image format was EPS. Oh, we could place TIFFs, but TIFFs were huge and wasteful.

But EPS for vector images, yeah. So we’ve come quite a long way since those days. We’re showing our age, Steve.

Yeah, I was using PageMaker before Quark. I was using Image Studio before Photoshop. Think of that.

That’s going back a bit. I was using Cytex Prisma Workstation. Wow.

OK. Those were the days. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. We’ll knock about that.

So there’s the thing with the Affinity. It is great for freelancers. If you’re working by yourself, if the people you’re working for say, oh, I want to have your original file, you can just say no.

Or you can hand over the Affinity files and leave it up to them. But if they want you to work in InDesign, you have to work in InDesign. But if I were if I was starting out, as a designer now, it’s a no brainer.

Affinity is free. It works really well. It does most of what I want to do.

And and I’m not signed up to paying Adobe’s kind of ruinous monthly fee. It’s got higher and higher. So I years ago, I wrote a series of books called How to Cheat in Photoshop.

And I started a Photoshop forum, which is still going to this day. We do a weekly Friday challenge where I give people an image and say, do this, do that, do something imaginative with it. They always ignore my instructions and just do really imaginative stuff.

But they are more and more moving from Photoshop to Affinity because these are people sitting at home. They’re doing it. A lot of them are tired and they don’t want to fork out a huge amount for Photoshop every month.

And Affinity does a lot of it for them. So I’ve heard from a lot of educators and this is a really big deal and a really important challenge for students, especially recent graduates. They are getting their Creative Cloud subscription while their students had a reduced price.

And depending on the institution, they may even be getting it for free. And then they graduate and they need to continue working and building a portfolio even before they’re employed to be employable. And it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to find those jobs.

And so they’re in a place where they don’t have the funds for a Creative Cloud subscription, not a full price one. What do they do? Where do they go from there? Well, they are increasingly going to Affinity, going for tools like DaVinci Resolve for video editing. The free version, again, it’s not fully featured, but it does almost everything that your average video editor needs to do.

And they’re going to go for the free tools. But the problem is, I used to spend a lot of time going into advertising agencies, into publishing houses, teaching them how to use Photoshop more effectively. The people who, by and large, use Photoshop for a living have no interest in Photoshop.

They want to correct their images. They want to adjust the colors. They want to sometimes turn them to grayscale.

And that’s about it. When they go home, they don’t want to look at Photoshop. The people who are doing the really creative work, who are pushing Photoshop to its limits, are the freelancers, are the students who are getting the most out of it.

And if they can’t afford to use it, then they’re going to go to Affinity. And so Adobe are trying harder and harder to push Photoshop towards new users. So they’re building up the, you know, here’s how to get started with Photoshop.

Here are all the recipes that you can use. Here’s the custom actions. And they’re kind of turning their backs to some degree on the professionals who are their core business.

And it’s kind of a shame that they were doing that. Having said that, Adobe are bringing fabulous new tools into Photoshop. The rotate object tool is astounding.

Mind-blowing. But that’s AI. If I’d had that when I was, you know, when I was doing a dozen illustrations a week for newspapers, that would have changed my life.

Absolutely. Well, I think Adobe has got incredible tools. And they are listening to what it is that we want to use in our Adobe suite.

I think the challenge is the price point, especially for independent freelancers or students. I think Adobe is really gaining in the enterprise. And I don’t know that Canva or Affinity have a model that matches that.

So in some respects, it’s like they’re going after two different audiences. And so maybe there isn’t really a direct competition. I don’t know.

I don’t know where that falls. I love my Adobe tools. I’m not going to, I don’t think this conversation is about picking a tool.

It’s about being, knowing what’s going on and paying attention and knowing that these free tools are available to you to use. I was at Create, Canva Create, just came back from Canva Create. And it was really an eye-opener for me.

And I left there feeling like Affinity is only this big, you know, minuscule in the whole Canva ecosystem right now. And that it’s Canva’s awareness that they need to have a solution for professionals. And the reason why professionals need a tool is because those professionals are surrounded with their teammates and colleagues who are using Canva.

And there is a friction there. There is a really strong friction between the designers and the marketing teams. And I think Affinity is Canva’s answer to bridge that gap between them.

And I don’t know exactly what that looks like or how that’s going to play out, but that’s the takeaway that I got. So you asked me before I left how Affinity or how Canva thinks people are going to pay the $100 for the premium and why they would do that. And I don’t really think that it matters because you’re not paying so much for Affinity if you buy the premium, you’re buying a premium Canva account, right? So their income, they make their money off of Canva users and they have billions of Canva users.

It’s not a small number. So they are giving Affinity as this olive branch to the professional creators on the teams that are using Canva saying here, this is your access way. These are the professionals you want.

Canva is a great tool if you want to do things their way. It’s like, you know, a lot of my work is building websites and I use WordPress for everything. This week I’ve been asked to redesign a website for an artist who built it herself in Squarespace.

Now Squarespace, it’s great if you want to do what Squarespace wants you to do. If you want to step outside their walled garden even slightly, it’s a nightmare. You cannot apply a CSS class, you can write CSS, but you cannot apply a CSS class to a page or an object or a section.

You have to try and dig in and find out their internal code for that object and then guess at the CSS. So they make it very, very difficult. And that’s kind of the same with Canva.

If you’re happy to work within their restrictions, within their guidelines, then it’s fine. But if you want creative freedom, then yeah, Affinity will give you that. So you can see that obviously, as you say, their olive branch to the designers is, okay, you know, here you go, you can do it.

You don’t need to use Adobe. Well, this is what I heard from marketers. They love being creative.

They love, love, love that Canva has made it accessible for them to create themselves. They see themselves as creative people and they want to create their stuff. They don’t want to deal with a design department.

They feel like the design team is a bottleneck for their creative ideas. They want to get their ideas out there and they want full control over it. Canva is giving that to them.

Now, that’s creating some nightmares in some situations because what do you do about brand when you’ve got a huge team of marketers and they all have their own Canva accounts and they’re not communicating with each other. They’re creating their own content and they’re putting it out there. And then the creative team, the professionals are sitting over here going, hey, those aren’t the right brand colors.

You’re using the wrong font. That’s not the messaging we want. So there’s a friction happening there that’s probably bigger than I realized before going to Canva Create.

It is. And you speak to anyone who actually controls the branding in an organization. And when you get people redrawing the logo because they didn’t know where to get it from, it is a nightmare and they don’t see that they’re doing anything wrong.

And it’s a really big, big problem. It is. That’s an interesting, I got a little story on that.

I was at a demo, like a demo booth for Affinity. Oh, by the way, Affinity was at Canva Create, but the lab to take the Affinity workshops was behind everything, like was hard to find. And I don’t know if that was by design or not, but they did have a booth with workstations that you had to wait in line to get up and get to a workstation.

So I’m playing around with Affinity. I want to ask somebody some, your questions that you would email me on this. This woman was standing next to me and she asked an Affinity employee, um, how do I get my logos in Canva to not be pixels? When I, when I send it to my printer, my printer says that my logos, they can’t fix the colors because they’re pixels and not vector.

And the Canva employee or the Affinity rep or whatever, didn’t have an immediate answer for this person and said, I’ll come back. I got to find out. And I, I leaned over and I said, I am 99.9% sure the answer is in the SVG file.

He said, I’m not a Canva expert. I don’t use it. Um, I don’t know what I know about file format.

PDF. Yeah. You can, I Googled it while I was standing there.

I’m like, yeah, Canva accepts SVGs and you, you, she goes, well, I made PNGs. And I said, well, that’s the, you need to have SVGs. She goes, well, I have all my logos as PNGs.

I said, well, you know, now you have the challenge of trying to convert them to vector SVGs, which is, there’s no easy solution for that yet today. The image trace programs are, are fair to maybe sort of good at best. So anyway, if there’s text in their logo, you can’t use image trace and get anywhere close to decent results.

This is why you need a pro designer. The first place, whoever first creates those logos will have done them as a vector artwork. That’s right.

And this is, this is where this friction is happening and this challenge is, and I don’t know that it’s a big picture, like Canva really cared. They just wanted a billion users and they’re not really educated on, on file formats and just even design hierarchy and color and typography and all of that. And so then you have professionals who are working with these people on their teams and they’re trying to figure out how to communicate so that everybody can do their job better.

And I, I think there’s just a lot of friction there right now. I think there’s a lot of people who don’t really understand how design works and who think, yeah, I did it in Canva. Canva says it’s fine.

It looks okay to me. And leave design to the designers. I remember a few years ago, there was a news story about a newspaper that was firing its photographers and giving smartphones with cameras to the journalists.

And one photographer said, have you thought of firing the journalists and giving pens to the photographers? And obviously that’d be crazy. Well, it’s crazy doing it the other way around. You know, the people who write don’t always think visually and they look at something and they don’t see what’s wrong with it.

And they use colors that look great on screen. You know, I have a really bright lime green against this reflex blue background. And wow, that jumps out, but that won’t print.

And you can’t explain to people why it won’t print until they have printed a hundred thousand of these leaflets. And they say, oh, that’s why it won’t print. Why did no one tell me? Because you’ve got a trained designer, because you haven’t learned how to do this.

I think if you’re a professional. I don’t mean to rant. No, I think this is the challenge for professional designers is they’re feeling threatened and, you know, for real reasons, but it’s really on them to articulate what their skill set is and why what they know matters.

If you need to figure out how to communicate that with your team, what it is, you know, and why it really matters to the brand and to the company. And figure out how to how to sell what your skills are, because right now the marketer is like, I don’t need you. I got Canva.

And the thing that non-designers really don’t understand is typography. Why can’t I use Arial? Why can’t I set my headline in Comic Sans? I think that looks great. Because you can’t use Comic Sans because Arial does not convey the message that we want to convey with our product, with our organization.

I don’t get it. No, you don’t get it. Give it to someone who does get it.

That’s the whole point. This is the type of training you get at CreativePro. We have the experts that can teach you about typography.

So even if you’re using Canva, we have a lot of valuable training. I remember years ago, my son, when he was starting doing a little bit of design at school, and he was saying, why are there so many fonts? Why do we need so many fonts? And I said, why do we need so many songs? Surely there’s enough already. Why are people still writing new ones? Because they evolve, because they have a different message.

And I’ll point out something in a font and say, well, I don’t see why that does what you’re saying. Because fonts work subliminally. They work on a subconscious level.

And it’s because people don’t interpret them, don’t rationalize them. That’s why they work. That’s why they work subconsciously, because they produce an emotional response, just like colors produce an emotional response.

And you need people to understand how these responses are engineered to create the effect that you want to create. That’s a whole art form in itself. I think it’s a good place to wrap this up, too.

We’ve been talking a long time, Steve. And it feels like just minutes. It does.

It’s reminding me of that first time we met and that conversation that just, it was so enjoyable. And then you had to leave, fly back to London. So I think we should revisit this in six months or nine months.

Affinity is not going to stand still. No, it’s not. We should come back and look at the things that are missing and see if they bring them in.

And certainly take a look at who else is attacking Adobe and from what direction. Because they’ve had it all their own way for a long time. And I don’t think they can assume that they always will.

The landscape is definitely changing and we should be paying attention to it. And that’s why we have this conversation. Hopefully our listeners are, if they weren’t as aware before, they are now and they’ll go spend some time checking out Affinity, trying out the tools and making their own decisions.

It’s free. It’s not much of an investment to give it a try. Awesome.

Well, thank you, Steve, for your time. We will be at CreativePro Week in June, July, and would love to have you there. Unfortunately, Steve won’t be with us this year, but hopefully we’ll get him back in a future year.

And Steve, we’ll do this again. We’ll come back in several months and check in and see where things are. Thanks again, everybody.