Web-based design platform Canva has bought the Affinity creative software suite, which includes professional photo editing software Affinity Photo, which is among the best Adobe Photoshop alternatives.

Canva reported in January this year that its design platform had attracted around 170 million monthly global users. ‘While our last decade at Canva has focused heavily on the 99 percent of knowledge workers without design training, truly empowering the world to design includes empowering professional designers too,’ Canva said in a press release. ‘By joining forces with Affinity, we’re excited to unlock the full spectrum of designers at every level and stage of the design journey.’

Via: The Verge.

From Canva:

Since launching Canva in 2013, we’ve been on a mission to empower the whole world to design. As visual communication becomes table stakes in workplaces across the globe, we’re proud to now be empowering more than 175 million people to achieve their goals – but as we often say, with a mission this big, we’re still just 1% of the way there.

Today, we’re incredibly excited to welcome Affinity to the Canva team as we set our sights on empowering every kind of designer. Trusted by more than three million creative professionals across the globe, Affinity’s award-winning suite of professional design software has become a sought-after solution for everything from photo editing to complex graphic and vector design. Together, we’re setting our sights on empowering every kind of team and organization to achieve their goals.

Empowering every kind of designer

The past few years have seen a dramatic increase in the need for effective, efficient, and compelling visual communication. From internal communications teams producing onboarding materials to marketing teams scaling global campaigns, the world of work is becoming an increasingly visual place. As the volume of content and channels increase, designers have become inundated, spending more time editing and less time creating.

While our last decade at Canva has focused heavily on the 99% of knowledge workers without design training, truly empowering the world to design includes empowering professional designers too. By joining forces with Affinity, we’re excited to unlock the full spectrum of designers at every level and stage of the design journey.

We share Affinity’s belief that professional design software should be intuitive, affordable, fast, and smooth. With Affinity, professional designers have access to everything they need at an affordable price and without the complexity of traditional design tools. Together, we’re excited to turn their movement into a revolution.

Award-winning creative software

Affinity shares our vision for powerful simplicity and accessibility. In the same way we’ve spent the last decade building an all-in-one platform to make visual communication seamless and accessible, the Affinity team has been developing and evolving a lean, powerful, and dynamic suite of creative tools loved by designers around the world.

From our very first conversations, we knew Affinity’s vision to pioneer simple yet state-of-the-art technology was a perfect match with our own mission to empower the world to design – which includes enhancing our capabilities and offering for professional designers.

Available across Windows, Mac and iPad, Affinity’s creative suite includes:

Affinity Designer: The top choice for thousands of illustrators, designers, and game developers, Designer is Affinity’s vector-based graphics software for everything from creating digital illustrations to concept art, unique graphics, logos, brand designs, web mock-ups, and more.

Affinity Photo: The only fully-loaded photo editor available across MacOS, Windows, and iPad. Perfect for everything from basic editing to advanced retouching and creating multilayer photo compositions, Affinity Photo is quickly becoming the industry standard for image editing.

Affinity Publisher: The next generation of professional page layout software, this smooth, intuitive app lets you combine images, graphics, and text to make beautiful layouts ready for publication, from books, magazines, and marketing materials to social media templates, website mock-ups, and more.

What’s next

We couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities ahead as we welcome Affinity to Canva. Based in the United Kingdom, they join a number of other European companies who have become part of Canva, including Flourish, Kaleido, SmartMockups, Pexels, Pixabay and SlidesCarnival. They bring with them a 90-person team who we’re thrilled to have joining Canva.

You can expect to hear more from us about our plans to unlock the power of Affinity’s technology within Canva over time. Watch this space!

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