 |
|
|
|||||
Last year Canva reworked its user experience and tools in a full-frontal attack on the productivity and enterprise markets now dominated by Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Now the Australian company is going for Adobe’s jugular. Affinitythe British company Canva bought in 2024is out with a new app that aims to sink Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with a simple proposal: If you are a professional designer, here’s an integrated photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout studio seamlessly integrated into a single application, with a feature set comparable to Adobe’s apps and a fully customizable UI. For free. [Image: Canva] You know, free free. “Free forever,” as Canva’s cofounder and chief product officer Cameron Adams tells me in a video interview. Free as in not paying a single dime for eternity (allegedly) instead of the up to $70 per month that Adobe charges for its full Creative Cloud subscription. If the new Affinity lives up to its promiseand, from what I’ve seen, it may actually do that and then someit will be a hard thing to ignore for any Adobe Creative Cloud user, even if they are fully invested in the company’s apps. Canva Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams [Image: Canva] When Canva bought Affinity, it kept British company independent and injected the capital needed to revamp the Affinity suit of apps into a bona fide Adobe competitor. As Adams tells me, the move was born from a radical rethinking of the entire creative world. “We’re really viewing the entire design ecosystem as one big entity,” he says. “It’s not about separation anymore. It’s not about professionals on one side, nonprofessionals on the other. It’s really about your entire team working together.” The company also saw an opportunity in the feedback they were getting from the creative community, who Adams says are fed up with “pricing model increases, with lack of transparency, just the feeling they weren’t being listened to, and a lack of innovation in the tools that they’ve been using for a very long time.” Break the workflow walls For Affinity CEO Ashley Hewson, this launch fulfills a vision his team has had for a long time: to finally bring the separate apps of Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher into one consolidated experience. “That’s what we’ve been building an entirely new app,” he says. Studios workflow [Image: Canva] Simply called Affinity, it organizes its immense power into dedicated “studios”Vector, Pixel, and Layoutthat you can switch between instantly within the same window, using a button bar switch on the top left corner of the UI. This is similar to other apps like DaVinci Resolve, which moves from edit to color correction, automagically morphing the interface to show you the tools you need at each stage without having to move to a new app, import a file, save, and move back to the previous tool. Affinity CEO Ash Hewson [Photo: Amber Pollack PhotographyCanva] With Affinity, the canvas, the layers, and everything else stays as you switch from bitmap to vector to layout and back. This isn’t just about convenience; it’s about eliminating the maddening workflow interruptions that kill creativity. “Previously, you’d have to kind of change app to do some more advanced vector sort of design work, and that would always mean kind of exporting this, bring it into a different app,” Hewson explains. “Whereas now, I can just go to the Vector Studio if I want to do any of that work.” Thanks to full GPU acceleration, everything is live and nondestructive, from applying a Gaussian blur to a vector object to painting a pixel-based mask on a filter effect. As Hewson demonstrated for me, you can adjust a gradient, warp text, or scrub through your entire edit history with zero lag. Even with thousands of layers, he claims. “I keep saying it, but it’s kind of very important because, obviously, it’s kind of what the competitors don’t do,” he says with a hint of pride. Custom interface In the new Affinity, you can customize the UI in any way you want. Hewson showed me how users can create their own “perfect studio,” a custom workspace that mixes and matches tools from any of the core disciplines. “Let’s say your workflow often includes raster brushes, vector tools, maybe even some layout tools as well,” Hewson says. “What you can do is actually just create your own studio.” [Image: Canva] This is a level of personalization that goes far beyond rearranging a few panels. You can build a lean UI for logo design, a robust one for photo compositing, and another for publication layout. These custom studios can then be saved and shared, creating a new way for teams to standardize workflows. [Image: Canva] It’s an appealing proposal, given that every designer works differently. It’s also a good solution against the one-size-fits-all bloat that has plagued professional creative software for years. The new Affinity gives you the power to build the exact tool you need, and hide the rest. [Image: Canva] ‘Craft to scale’ So, how does a free professional tool make business sense for Canva? Adams explains it to me with a simple mantra: “craft and scale.” The high-end, pixel-perfect “craft” happens in Affinity Studio. The “scale”where that craft is used to generate massive amounts of contenthappens in Canva. By making the craft tool free, Canva is betting it can grow the entire design ecosystem. The strategy is to build a frictionless bridge between these two worlds. For enterprise teams, this is the endgame. “The high-end designers or the creative team within an enterprise [will be] using Affinity to create all of their brand assets, their templates,” Hewson explains. “But then they upload all of those to Canva seamlessly so the rest of the teams within the business, who are not skilled designers, can scale on that.” [Image: Canva] The AI question Hewson says that unlike Adobe’s tools, the new Affinity remains a pure, unadulterated craft tool with no generative AI baked in except for enhancing existing tools like image scaling, which runs on-device. However, for those who want to edit with AI, that’s available through a new dedicated Canva AI Studio panel in the app. This is an optional, subscription-based layer. As he explains, you need a Canva Premium plan, and the AI features use the same credit pool as your main Canva account. Crucially, the optionality respects the designers who resent paying for AI they don’t want or trust. You can run the entire free experience without ever touching it (or just take it out of the UI altogether). The generative features, like Generative Fill, run on cloud servers using models from Leonardo, an AI company Canva acquired in 2024. It’s a good approach that runs counter to Adobe’s all-in-on-AI strategy. For professionals who are fed up with Adobe force feeding them generative AI in their subscriptions, Canva’s opt-in assistant option will be appealing. Combined with a good toolset (still have to test this one) and the zero price tag, Canva may be launching a philosophical and strategic H-bomb at one of its biggest competitors. If it delivers, the creative world is about to feel the shockwave that may finally bust Adobe’s decades-old foundations.
Category:
E-Commerce
Generative AI ranges from gimmicky to powerful, depending on its context. But the biggest shortcoming is that whatever you make isnt really all that editable you typically have to juggle several apps to get the outcome you want. Now, a new update to Canva, called Ask @Canva, makes just about everything youre working on editable by AI with a tap and a request. Ask @Canva is built upon Canvas first foundational modelan AI model it trained in-house specifically for its own purposes. Instead of generating static designs, it produces new projects as full, editable design templates. That means when Canva uses AI to generate your slide deck or social post, all of the text and photos are discreetly editable with the same basic interface Canva has offered for years. [Image: Canva] Typography is pulled from its library to match the tone of your work. Images and illustrations are generated by default, but swappable with your own. At the core of all of Canvas UX is invisible AI arranging and rearranging your work with aesthetic balance. But now, Canva is putting generative AI within close reach on every element in your work. Think of Ask @Canva as a design intern, or perhaps save me! button, that you can request to redesign or rewrite any element on the pageand even critique your entire project. [Image: Canva] How Ask @Canva works The feature follows Canvas aggressive adoption of generative AI into its UX. In 2023, Canva was the first in its peer group to bring barebones generative AI into its app. Then in 2024, it introduced Magic Studio, a suite of AI tools that solved practical problems for users (like extending an image or creating a simple animation). Earlier this year, it introduced the Visual Suite 2.0its biggest front end redesign in 13 years, which basically consolidates a lot of the app and its varying templates within a single window, so you could completely rebuild your project, switching it from a slide deck to a website, all while remaining within your main canvas in the Canva app. With its new model, Canva is repositioning its app as a creative operating system that uses AI to bind all media together. All of Canvas just make it for me AI tools should improve alongside the update. There is one big difference, however, in terms of Canvas new approach to AI beyond mere improvements to the model: Now, when you select anything on a pagea block of text, an image, a background colora tooltip pops up with an option to Ask @Canva. Tap it, and you can simply ask the software to do whatever youd like it to do to the asset in plain languageas if youre talking to a colleague, but the colleague is a robot. [Image: Canva] Ask Canva is part of our commenting . . . system, and it now lets you interact with Canva like it’s a collaborator, explains Cameron Adams, cofounder and chief product officer at Canva. What makes Ask @Canva so powerful is that it understands both the element youre highlighting and its context within the greater project youre editing. So you might ask Canva to change an images illustration style to better match others on the page (a method traditionally known as style transfer). In a demo, Adams successfully asks the system to make a slice of pizza float in space. These AI edits all happen in situ. That said, you can also use Ask @Canva a step zoomed out, requesting its advice for how you should change your design. Im amused when Adams does this, and Ask @Canva compliments his use of a purple-blue gradient (which is so on-brand for Canva I cant tell if the AI understands its brand standards or if its algorithmic bias). But the AI also (astutely) calls out an unflattering contrast between the left and right sides of the page. It was the same critique I had waiting on my tongue. [Image: Canva] Building AI into every layer of Canva The human versus automated balance that Canva is working toward with AI has been interesting to track. You can now start any project by typing what you want into a Google Search-esque bar. Its AI will now ask you follow ups, tooabout the topic and tone of your projectso that its first draft of whatever you want to create is as close to your vision as possible. [Image: Canva] But Adams recognizes a lot of its customers still dont do that. They prefer to work from Canvas template library and just see a sample that resonates. With Ask @Canva, the company is likely appealing to these customers, too, by offering AI at a deeper layer of the project. Here, AI is not the tool used to start a project creatively from the top, but instead its entrenched deeply inside the interface to help solve a problem for which there may be no other ready tool. Every person is different, and it’s been the same [story] in software development for decades, says Adams. Yu’ve always needed to give people different approaches to the same problem, because some people are visual thinkers. Some people have no idea what they want on the page. For now, the great unifier of AI within Canva seems to be Ask @Canva: a tool hiding a click away for when everything else might fail. Yes, its another iteration of the prompt. But now, its not some grand orchestrator of your vision. Instead, its more like an emergency button available all the time, on every asset.
Category:
E-Commerce
The obesity rate in the U.S. is continuing its downward trend. The news comes three years after obesity rates hit a record high. In 2022, almost four out of 10 (39.9%) of Americans met the threshold for the classification, however, the number first began to shrink in 2023. Now, the rate of obesity is now down to 37%, according to new data from Gallup. The new findings are based on data from three nationally representative surveys of 16,946 U.S. adults. And while the numbers don’t seem massively significant, the report found that those three percentage points add up to around 7.6 million Americans who no longer meet the criteria for being obese. According to the newly released data, the numbers coincide with a growing number of Americans who have begun relying on GLP-1 medications, like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound, for weight loss. “The percentage of adults who report taking this class of medicine specifically for weight loss has increased to 12.4%, compared with 5.8% in February 2024 when Gallup first measured it,” the report explains. The report also notes that far more women are taking the drugs than men (15.2% and 9.7%, respectively), which helps explain why women’s obesity rates have dropped off more abruptly. Likewise, the largest reduction came from 40 to 49-year-olds and 50 to 64-year-olds, which, uncoincidently, are also the groups who most use GLP-1s for weight loss. The news comes as reliance on GLP-1s is continuing to surge. On Thursday, Eli Lilly, the maker of weight loss drug Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, topped estimates for the third quarter, as demand for weight loss drugs continues to escalate. Zepbound posted $3.59 billion in revenueup a hefty 184% from the year-earlier period. The impressive numbers come shortly after an experimental pill from Eli Lilly outperformed Novo Nordisks oral semaglutide. The pill, orforglipron, helped patients lose more weight and control their blood sugar better than Novo Nordisks Ozempic, Rybelsus, and Wegovy. “Lilly delivered another strong quarter, with 54% revenue growth year-over-year driven by continued demand for our incretin portfolio,” David A. Ricks, Lilly chair and CEO, said in an October 30 press release. “We advanced orforglipron through four additional Phase 3 trials, enabling global obesity submissions by year-end, and we achieved U.S. FDA approval of Inluriyo (imlunestrant)marking key progress across our pipeline.” And, as the market for weight loss drugs grows, drug companies are battling it out for a competitive edge. On Thursday, Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, made an aggressive bid on U.S. obesity biotech firm Metsera in an effort to dominate the weight loss drug market. Novo Nordisk bid $8.5 billion, topping Pfizer’s $7.3 billion bid. Interestingly, while obesity rates have taken a major dive, diabetes diagnoses have actually gone upreaching a record high of 13.8%, per the recent data. “As diabetes is a lifetime disease, short-term reductions in the obesity rate would not be expected to curtail the percentage of Americans who have been diagnosed with it,” the research explains.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||