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Canva bought Affinity, the professional design suite, in March 2024 and promised to preserve its power. In late 2025 it relaunched it as a single app combining vector, photo and layout studios and, the headline news, free for everyone. The identity had a tricky brief: to feel part of Canva without looking like a version of its louder, mainstream sibling.

The work was led by Canva's creative director for Europe, Tom Carey, with Canva and Affinity's in-house teams and the studio Design by Twist, guided by Canva's Designer Advisory Board and an Affinity Pro Panel. Carey told It's Nice That it needed to feel connected to Canva, otherwise what was the point, but independent enough to win over creatives, and unlike other pro tools, which he called complicated, corporate and costly.

The team started with voice: irreverent, knowing, built around the .af file extension, as in fresh.af and bold.af. The symbol is a lowercase serif a drawn with Rob Clarke, deliberately approachable and wonky against the uppercase geometric marks of software, with swooping curves for illustrators and sharp points for graphic designers. Ohno adapted its Swear into Affinity Serif in six weights, precise when light and small, strange in heavy italic. James Martin drew playful graphic assets, ManvsMachine animated the launch, and a neutral palette lets users' work lead, with a lime green Canva called a punk accent. It replaced Affinity's earlier angular identity.

Canva's announcement explained the product logic. For too long, it said, professional designers had almost no choice, stuck with bloated software, stacking subscriptions and workflows that interrupt creativity, and the new app was shaped by thousands of conversations and feature requests from the community. After ten years as a tool for people who care about craft, Affinity was entering a new chapter. Making it free is the real brand statement; the identity just has to look worthy of it.

It's Nice That said the rebrand toed the line cleverly and felt very different from other design-software brands.

As an identity it does exactly what a challenger to the incumbents should: it looks made by designers, for designers, and has a sense of humour. The risk is the joke. A voice built on .af is fun at launch and wears thin by the hundredth tote bag.