The 800 lb. gorilla of the week

Author

Catherine Beebe
March 28, 2024

Can I send out a newsletter this week without talking about Canva and Affinity? I think not. Many, myself included, were caught completely off guard by the acquisition.

In this issue:

  • Add shadows to text in Affinity-new video

  • New niche idea shorts series on social

  • Niche idea of the week: vehicle logs

  • Sub-niches for travel journals-new blog post

  • This week’s link shares about multi-tasking, fresh pins, and the acquisition

  • And, my thoughts on Canva buying Affinity

Recent Video Tutorials

This weeks tutorial is a simple “how-to” but I have filmed and edited 7 videos this week, and there are a few project videos coming up (hint: clip art and patterns are the general themes).

And a new short form video from my series on niche ideas. You can find these on the Facebook page, Pinterest, or Youtube. I am still digging into travel, and this one gives three specific examples of activity based travel journals and what to include in them. New shorts launch each week.

Follow me on Pinterest.

Follow me on Facebook (this is the public page, not the group linked below)

And let’s pause and take a moment here to talk about multi-channel marketing. When I first started blogging, we were encouraged to be everywhere. Then Facebook, and later Pinterest, stopped “working.” We were encouraged to focus on just SEO, and, on one platform until success before adding more social media.

It seems we are full circle. IMHO, having been at this for over a decade, everything cycles around so don’t put too much pressure on yourselves to be everywhere, but when it’s easy to re-purpose the same content to multiple platforms, why not? More reach without ramping up the overwhelm.

From the Blog: More Travel Journal Ideas

This week I published the second post about travel journals. This one focuses on niching down in different ways, as well as ideas for differentiating your content. Going beyond just a fill in the blank journal will add value for your customers and set you apart from the competition.

Niche Idea: Vehicle Logs. Some examples might be:

Maintenance records: Track oil changes, filters, wiper blades, and repairs. Users may want to track gas mileage stats as well.

New Driver: In many locations, people learning to drive need to track their hours and may need to separately track the number of night time hours. This would great for a series of printables since you could research requirements in different states, provinces, or countries and create location specific new driver logs.

The full video short for this niche idea will release to social on Monday

You make also like

Ruth Bowers shares 3 reasons why multi-tasking hurts your creativity. As a multi-passionate, I can’t focus on one thing but that’s not the same as multi-tasking. I am trying to establish new rhythms of batching so I can switch between projects without losing momentum.

Are you really creating fresh pins or just tweaking existing ones? Kate Ahl has a short blog write up based on a recent podcast episode on what a fresh pin really means. After all, if your pin with pink text didn’t get any engagement, how much difference will blue text really make?

This article on Canva’s acquisition echo’s many of my own thoughts (below).

Random Musings: Canva Acquires Affinity

This of course is the 800 lb. gorilla topic this week. Arguably Affinity users are more concerned about this than Canva users.

My first reaction of course was complete shock. When I read the announcement and how both have a vision to make design more accessible to everyone it started to make sense.

One of the most surprising things is that Serif is not some startup in need of cashflow. In fact Serif started in 1987. It sounds like they weren’t looking to sell, but rather Canva came knocking.

I took a look back and I believe I started using Canva around 2016 for blog images and social media images. Back then, that was about all you could do with it. Looking back, I could even say that using Canva was a turning point for me in wanting (and achieving) better design.

Thanks Canva! I was using that Paint program that came with Windows prior to Canva. Egads!

My Affinity journey started in 2019. I had been through a two year learning curve trying to use InDesign for low content books and like many, the idea of ditching the Adobe subscription appealed. Sidenote: still have the Adobe subscription, lol. Right now I use Premiere for video editing so still can’t give it up.

The biggest concern Affinity users have is the prospect of it becoming a subscription product. I have seen comments that people thought they were buying lifetime access. So let’s start there.

To be honest, I own very few pieces of software that are truly lifetime. Audio recording software, screen recorder, Filter Forge, Corel, all tell me that I can upgrade to get the latest version. None give me lifetime updates for free.

In fact, none give me feature updates for free. Usually the free updates are patches and fixes, and new features come with new version releases. Affinity, on the other hand has added features for free with both V1 and V2.

The old versions of all these software still work though and the upgrade is optional. If you change computers and your operating system is no longer compatible, that’s about the only time you need to upgrade.

What I didn’t like about the switch from Affinity V1 to V2 is that they made us buy it all over again. Other software lets me upgrade to the newest version for somewhere between 30-50% of the full cost.

There was a long gap from version 1 to 2. Publisher is the newest and it was released around 2018-19. Affinity Version 2 came out around late 2022. With 4+ years in between I will forgive them for making us buy V2 all over. Just this once.

My hope is with a much higher revenue company like Canva behind them, we will see them give existing Affinity users a discount to upgrade to V3 next time around. Especially since the gap between releases looks like it will be much shorter.

So let’s look at potential positives—all speculation on my part:

  • Having an investment by a much larger company gives Affinity more resources to develop and catch up to Adobe.

  • Combined, Affinity + Canva come much closer to matching the things the Adobe suite can do than either of them on their own.

  • Following that train of thought, might there one day be two tiers of Canva subscription, one that includes Affinity?

  • Canva has added some AI features to its platform, might they do the same for Affinity? Adobe has already integrated some of their AI features directly into their apps.

  • Will Affinity users be able to export projects directly into Canva and vice versa? Affinity is missing the built-in cloud storage that Adobe has and it would be lovely to access Affinity projects on different computers without needing to save to an external cloud drive like OneDrive or Dropbox. I envision doing simple stuff like social images in Canva but being able to reach to Affinity for functions Canva doesn’t have.

I am curious to see where this all goes. For the most part, I don’t expect much change in the short term. To be honest, Canva and Affinity currently appeal to two different types of users and probably only a small percentage of us are in the group that use both. I believe them when they say they will remain separate apps for now.

I only wonder what’s in it for Canva?

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.

Until next time,

Catherine