Canva, the world’s only all-in-one visual communication platform, announced the acquisition of Affinity, the award-winning creative software suite for professional photo editing, illustration, graphic design and page layout.

The acquisition significantly bolsters Canva’s vision to build the world’s most comprehensive suite of visual communication tools. While the last decade has seen rapid growth for Canva amongst the 99% of knowledge workers without design training, the integration of Affinity’s professional design software now unlocks the full spectrum of designers at every level and stage of the design journey. As visual communication becomes the status quo in teams and organizations around the world, the acquisition also accelerates Canva’s enterprise ambitions, unlocking a future where professional designers can craft designs and templates with Affinity to scale across organizations with Canva.

The Affinity and Canva Pledge:

1. We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.

2. We will double down on expanding Affinity’s products through continued investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite.

3. We will provide Affinity free for schools and nonprofits.

4. We are committed to listening and being led by the design community at every step in this journey.
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Dieter Telfser 2024

Launched in 2013, Canva is a free online visual communications and collaboration platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates ranging from presentations, documents, websites, social media graphics, posters, apparel to videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage, and audio clips, anyone can take an idea and create something beautiful.

Founded in 1987, Serif is the parent company behind Affinity, the renowned suite of creative tools for professional designers and photographers. Affinity’s cost-effective, high-quality and powerful design tools Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher have been recognised with industry-leading awards, gained plaudits from reviewers and are trusted by more than 3 million customers around the world. Serif employs approximately 90 people and is based in Nottingham, UK.

Europe-based acquisitions continue to fuel Canva’s product strategy — Acquisitions from Europe’s startup ecosystem have elevated Canva’s technology and continue to play an important role in expanding the company’s physical presence in the region. Over the years, Canva has found high caliber talent and compatible technology in Europe with a number of acquisitions that have become key to the company’s product strategy. Affinity marks Canva’s latest  Europe-based acquisition, joining  Flourish (2022), Kaleido (2021), Smartmockups (2021), Pexels (2019) and Pixabay (2019). Canva opened their first European HQ in 2023, based in London.

Procreate is dedicated to making exceptional creative tools for creative people by combining beautiful user experiences with high-performance engineering. Procreate for iPad is used by millions around the globe, has been the best-selling paid iPad app on App Store for the past six years, and has received two coveted Apple Design Awards. Procreate’s three apps — Procreate, Procreate Pocket, and Procreate Dreams — are placing more power in the hands of creatives, amplifying the company’s guiding principle: Art is for everyone.

»We don't make software to make money.
We make money to make more software.«
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Dieter Telfser 2023

Procreate Dreams is an industry game-changer, promising to unlock the world of animation in a way once thought impossible through accessible, robust, and powerful features. Designed for touch, Procreate Dreams introduces workflows of unparalleled speed, and tools so intuitive that now anyone can animate. Artists and animators can simply and spontaneously direct how the animation should feel, with new tools such as Performing, which uses gestures to automatically add keyframes as the tool records the actions. Performing brings work to life before the creator’s eyes in real time, with no animation experience needed.

Playgrounds is an institute and platform that connects and forms international creative communities within the fields of illustration, animation, games, digital design and art. — Our goal is to increase creative self-confidence, skills, knowledge and inclusivity within the creative industry. Talent development is the core of Playgrounds. This is key in all our activities and we have developed a tailor made talent program called Next. Partners in Next are Submarine Channel, The Panics, BROET, Natlab, Studio Biarritz, Herrie Film & TV, BredaPhoto, Art Academy St. Joost and Kaboom film festival. Supported by Provincie Noord-Brabant, Netherlands Filmfund and Netflix.

Firefly first focused on the generation of images and text effects will bring even more precision, power, speed and ease directly into Creative Cloud Experience and Express workflows where content is created and modified. Firefly will be part of a series of new Sensei generative AI services.

Generate!
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Dieter Telfser 2023

»Generative AI is the next evolution of AI-driven creativity and productivity, transforming the conversation between creator and computer into something more natural, intuitive and powerful,” said David Wadhwani, president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. “With Firefly, Adobe will bring generative AI-powered ‘creative ingredients’ directly into customers’ workflows, increasing productivity and creative expression for all creators from high-end creative professionals to the long tail of the creator economy.«

Giving Creators New Superpowers at the speed of their imaginations. Everyone who creates content – regardless of their experience or skill – will be able to use their own words to generate content the way they dream it up, from images, audio, vectors, videos and 3D to creative ingredients, like brushes, color gradients and video transformations, with greater speed and ease than ever before. With Firefly, producing limitless variations of content and making changes, again and again — all on brand — will be quick and simple.

It is obvious that the pandemic affects our daily lives and the way we operate as educators, students or practitioners in the fields of typography and visual communication. The aim of the conference is to ‘see’ beyond the obvious, discussing examples from the past, deepening into the present, and raising important issues for the future in the areas of history, theory and practice. Among the plans of the Organising Committee of the 2022 ICTVC is to have a special section on education, the challenges and opportunities in turbulent and uncertain times like these.

Since its inception in 2002, ICTVC has been established as one of the most prominent international events in its field. Supporting open, meaningful dialogue, the conference attracts people from many different countries and disciplines who share a passion for research, education, and practice in relation to typography and visual communication.

ICTVC’s thematic areas are informed by its previous events, and formulated in response to the sociopolitical, economic and cultural environment. It places this discourse in the context of the impact of new technologies on research, theory, history, education and practice in typography, printing, publishing, and other visual communication disciplines.

ICTVC 8 · Thessaloniki, 5 — 9 July 2022
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Dieter Telfser 2022

The 7th ICTVC took place from 19 to 21 June 2019 in Patras, Greece. The conference is organised by the Institute for the Study of Typography & Visual Communication in collaboration with the Library & Information Centre of the University of Patras and is supported by academic and professional organisations. ICTVC is examing the value of design for visual communication and provoking participants to challenge current assumptions.

ICTVC was founded by Klimis Mastoridi the first conference, which was held in Thessaloniki in 2002 with the support of friends and colleagues, was a big success. ICTVC now attracts speakers and delegates on an international scale and from a wide range of disciplines related to typography and design. The high quality of presentations is a hallmark of this conference.