Canva and Affinity – Two rooms in one workshop

There are tools that take work off your hands. And there are tools that give you responsibility.

You're sitting in front of your computer, somewhere on your to-do list there's still a small graphic. Nothing big – a poster maybe, a worksheet, definitely something that needs to go out tomorrow. So you open Canva. The software seems unassuming. Almost as if it's seen this situation many times before. Templates appear, lots of templates. Design suddenly feels a bit like a buffet.

You take a little of this, a little of that, move an image, replace some text – and ten minutes later, something exists that wasn't there before. It looks professional. And the most remarkable thing about it: you hardly decided anything. And yet it works.

Canva is kind of like the IKEA of design. You go in, grab a few boxes from the shelf, follow a fairly self-explanatory guide – and suddenly there's a finished table in the room. Not exactly unique, but at least it doesn't wobble. And you usually have a spare screw lying around, too.

For a vast number of applications, this is perfectly sufficient. That's precisely why Canva become so successful.

And Canva really does its job well. Probably too well, in fact. You get results very quickly that look professionally designed. Colors harmonize reasonably well, spacing seems neat, and fonts look modern. Nothing screams at you. That alone is a small revolution, considering how many flyers used to look like someone had discovered WordArt and had a nervous breakdown at the same time.

But then you're back at your screen and realize: something's missing. Someone's asking for a vector file, the poster needs bleed, the font you curved looks a bit off. No catastrophes – just minor annoyances. A bit like the chair that's now wobbly a little. Maybe because a screw is missing.

And suddenly you realize: design is perhaps more than just a layout.

This only happens when design becomes technical. The moment someone asks for clean print data. Or when the logo is enlarged and looks like a sad piece of toast. It's not enough for it to look good. It also has to make an impact.

Programs like Illustrator or Photoshop have shaped this world for decades – but for many, they seemed about as inviting as a cockpit without flying experience. Too many tools, too many ways to go wrong. You just wanted to create a flyer and after three minutes you'd accidentally made some control panel disappear. At that point, many decided that design was perhaps a job for other people.

Then the Affinity Suite appeared. Professional tools, no subscription model, no feeling of immediate failure. Precise, powerful, amazingly elegantly built. Some designers noticed this. And gradually, more and more switched from Adobe to Affinity.

In 2024, Canva bought the company behind it. You could almost hear the collective bewilderment. A bicycle manufacturer acquiring a mechanical engineering firm. At first glance: makes little sense. On second thought: almost inescapably logical. Canva excelled at making content quickly producible. As soon as design became technical—vector graphics, precise print data, complex layouts—the platform reached its limits. Affinity could do exactly that.

Imagine a workshop with two rooms. In the first is Canva – bright, friendly, efficient. Things come together quickly. In the second is Affinity – calmer, more precise. You draw lines, construct shapes, check distances. Things come together more slowly but appear more stable. Don't just assemble furniture – start building it yourself.

You usually start in the first room. That's where you first realize that design can be fun. Then, at some point, something quieter happens: you start to feel bothered when letters are too close together. Lines no longer just need to be decorative, but precise. You no longer just want to put things together – you want to understand how it's constructed.

Not because Canva has suddenly gone bad. But because at some point you get curious. You want to know why some layouts look calm and others exhausting. Why a millimeter of spacing sometimes determines whether something looks high-quality or like a local club party from 2007. That's usually the moment when design starts to become uncomfortably interesting.

Perhaps that's precisely the logic behind the acquisition. Not replacing one of the programs – they're too different for that. But bringing both into the same workshop. You eventually find yourself moving between the two. You start where everything seems easy. And later you end up at a table where things are built more carefully.

Design often begins with a template. And at some point, it requires a tool.