If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my roughly 30 years of working with design tools, it is that they come and go and that you should always stay curious and be open and ready to learn something new. As a teenager, I made my first clip-arty design attempts in CorelDRAW. Right after finishing high school, I dabbled in QuarkXPress during an internship at BBDO. As a student, I fell in love with FreeHand, and for my diploma project, I built everything in Flash. Years later, I was running workshops for and with Adobe XD. All those products have since disappeared – or at least lost their industry relevance – but one tool has weathered every storm and has somehow remained a constant: Photoshop.

Over the years, plenty of contenders have tried to challenge Photoshop’s dominance and Adobe’s position in the creative market. From Sketch to Pixelmator, from Figma to GIMP, there’s been a steady stream of tools promising leaner, cheaper, faster alternatives. And that’s great. Because monopolists become comfortable and lazy and that’s when progress stalls. Competition, on the other hand, always raises the bar for everyone – and we, as users of design tools, benefit from that.

One of the most serious attempts in recent years came from the folks at Serif, makers of Affinity, whose suite of tools managed to win a lot of fans for its speed, clarity, and one-time pricing. I bought the Affinity suite as well and used it in smaller and private projects. But even though they did a fantastic job to make so many things straightforward, their tools still felt a bit like niche products and never really made their way into agencies and design studios at large – until, perhaps, now.

Affinity just released a new version – and this version really feels big. Now being part of Canva, Affinity has been re-engineered into a single, unified app that merges the capabilities of what used to be separate apps for layout, photo, and vector editing into one. It’s now completely free to download and use – like, forever – with no subscription required for the core features, except AI generation stuff. And it supports major formats including PSD, AI, and IDML. Yes, you can open your Photoshop files and export them again as PSDs. They also introduced a new unified file format, .af, which everyone in a team can open with their free app – no additional licenses need for your copywriters and managers. That is maybe the biggest news, because that’s also one of the reasons Figma “won” against XD, IMHO.

After a first try, the new Affinity looks really promising. The app still has the ultra fast UI that I enjoyed a lot in Affinity Photo and Designer, so it is not constantly crashing, and you can customise your workspace into your own “studios”. All the edits are non-destructive, they added a few nice new filters, like a chromatic aberration glitch filter, and Affinity also finally has an image trace feature, as Affinity CEO Ash Hewson shared in a video providing a first look.

So, what’s not to like? Perhaps it’s reasonable to remain cautious when a company promises a product will be free forever and asks you to “burn your subscription”. Especially if it is now part of a venture-capital-backed company with a billion-dollar valuation (selling subscriptions) and although they claim that “There’s no catch, no stripped-back version, and no gotchas. The same precise, high-performance tools that professionals rely on every day are now open to all, because creative freedom shouldn’t come with a cost.”

But as the saying goes, if a product is free, you are the product. To me, it still looks like a pretty smart move, though: make the core product free for as many people as possible, and then offer an even more attractive package – Affinity with AI generation tools and Canva integration – to enterprise customers.

That said, usage data collection is optional so far. You’re asked to opt in when you open the app for the very first time – and your work is not being used to train AI. Even if Canva eventually decides that new features in Affinity will be for paying customers only, this free version is still an amazing offering. And if you feel “betrayed” because you payed for Affinity 2 products not too long ago? All existing customers will get a set of about 40 typefaces by Fontsmith for free as a thank you.

You can get Affinity here: https://www.affinity.studio/en/get-affinity

❦

This is post 25 of Blogtober 2025.

~