It isn’t always as free as it sounds
I’m sure you know Canva? A software-as-a-service on the web, made in Australia and being tremendously popular for its easy way of arranging social media formatted pieces of graphics.
I have used it for the word marks and logo icons, I am using here on Substack, and at a few occasions also for other quick and lightweight graphical needs.
What it does is that it offers a lot of ready designs, that you can then adjust as you please, this making your process starting a bit into where it would normally have done, should you have designed the graphics from the start. And it offers a large pool of graphical elements, including clip art, videos, photos, etc., so that there is everything you need at hand, always.
You can design a set of features that fits a company profile, for instance, with the correct colors and fonts, and with all logos and other standard elements you use often being right at hand for inclusion in and shaping new images. And all of it is right there, without the need for saving and loading – it magically stays in the system, always available. So, it’s all about template-based design.
There are also some AI features that I haven’t used (not on purpose, and not knowingly, at least), and some media publishing management features that I haven’t used either.
Compared to such as Adobe’s Creative Cloud package of programs, which are Photoshop, Illustrator, etc., Canva is a lot easier to work with. And a lot cheaper, since it starts from free – but you’ll quickly get to a point where you need a “Pro” subscription, which is still much cheaper than the Adobe package.
However, with Adobe, you can do more advanced things, and it’s not without reason that the Creative Cloud has become a de facto standard for professional graphics workers of all kinds.
Some years ago, I was invited to take part in the beta testing of a new set of software products by a British company called Serif1, the software being in three packages, all called something with Affinity – each package corresponding in features and functionality to one of the most popular apps in the Adobe package: Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, for working with bitmaps, vector graphics, and page layout, respectively. I didn’t do much testing, to be honest, but I remembered the software when I later needed something like that, and I could then buy the full set, all three apps, in a perpetual license, for something like 80 Euros, as far as I remember.
That was a couple of years ago, and the software really did match the Adobe suite perfectly well, including the potential to use various add-on packages with brushes, etc., that is a big part of graphics workers’ world.
Well, knowing that there was this alternative to Adobe, wasn’t bad at all. It made me feel that I had a free choice of software – not being bound to paying for an Adobe subscription, such as it had been, effectively, during some years, because that area had consolidated, just like all other areas of the software business. And no logins, no registration of every mouse click by some big tech company that would then sell the data and otherwise interfere with my life and my personal freedom.
However, last year, in 2024, it was announced that Canva had bought Serif. And after a bit of waiting time, where Serif could tell that they would continue to exist without changes (like purchased companies always say), now, a few days ago, the meaning of it all was revealed: Affinity is now one piece of software, given away for free! All three apps have been gracefully combined into one, that really is, at a first test, both faster loading, less brutally demanding of the computer resources, and easier to work with.
There’s only one catch (well, a couple, but one main one): you’ll need to have a Canva account in order to start up the new Affinity app – it simply opens a web browser for the login procedure, and you must use your Canva login to even open the app on your computer, otherwise it won’t start. It can be an account connected to a free Canva subscription, but still, it must be there.
The other catches are, that you can actually decide to pay something, as a subscription, in order to make the Canva AI features available in Affinity. And, even though nothing has been announced on this yet, all those traditional extra brushes, etc., will probably also come at a price, as always.
What I see here is immediately positive: I have a Canva subscription already, and I use the old Affinity programs already. Now the whole thing is in one package, no extra money to be paid, and even with a smoother running computer while working with the graphics.
But I have to log in to use any of it!
I can’t decide to just work on my own, without anybody registering that I do so. I don’t know what is being registered, but obviously something, since a login is needed – to connect what is registered to my personal info. To tie the data to me, and what some company knows about me already.
And by that, we are on the same, wrong road as all the other big software vendors have gone down – you can’t use Microsoft Office products without logging in, and, actually, you can hardly use them without also storing your data in the Microsoft cloud (through the insisting use of OneDrive as a first choice for where to save files).
Almost every other piece of big tech software now works like that. In some cases it makes sense, because it is not on your computer, it’s in the cloud – so to make sure that you are entitled to use it, it has to ask who you are. But for software that’s already installed, running locally? Well, Adobe’s software works like that now. They made the shift some 12 years ago – before that time, I had a Creative Suite, which was all the same software running locally on my computer, not requiring any login. After that, it continued being locally running software that just couldn’t be used without logging in – and Adobe was even, with the package, installing a kind of control center, that is some of the most difficult software to get rid of again, if you some day want it out.
Adobe, just like Microsoft, likes to take over the ownership of your computer and dictate how it’s used. They want to be the first thing you see when you are going to work with a file. This way, I assume, trying to push themselves in front of potential other software packages you may have bought.
Various other product types, not just software, now also require a login: TVs, music streamers, stereo systems, cars, and whatever. I would almost expect my next washing machine to require that too, and then, as a next step, requiring a separate subscription to be paid for allowing it to wash wool, or socks, or jeans, or whatever they would see as separately billable, on top of what I paid for the machine itself.
It’s really a terrible trend, and it is possible to implement because consumers don’t complain about it – if they would boycott those devices that can’t just be switched on and then used, the vendors would have to think twice.
Well, about Canva and Affinity – technically nice, but with that new dimension of requiring a login, which I can’t help expecting to develop into a future subscription nightmare, potentially requiring extra payments for such as exporting files to another format than their native, or – which is very likely and partly the case already with Canva – extra payment when your amount of data accumulates, and you need more space in their cloud, since that’s where your date are saved as standard.
Locking yourself into, and subordinating yourself to, the world designed by a vendor is dangerous, and you might find yourself unable to leave some day, due to incompatible file formats or special features that aren’t available in another system, so that you can’t continue your work on the same old basis but have to design new templates, replace some copyrighted graphical and font elements, etc. – which isn’t all theoretical, since we have seen similar in the computer world (and with Adobe) during the years.
So, what to say – “free” software isn’t the same as freeing you. It can easily become the opposite. It can cause you to become bound to a vendor forever, seeing your data being abused and your credit card being emptied by those more and more “smart” ideas of how your use should be paid.
But I like the software itself – it’s really nice.
- Read more about Serif and their products in the now historical article at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif_Europe ↩︎
