The Decline of Microsoft Publisher, the Power of InDesign, and the Rise of Canva: Five Years of Desktop Publishing and Design App Trends

"Canva leads today’s design world with 250M+ users" — well, make that one less. I do have an account, but I haven’t logged in for a year, so I’m hardly an active user

A few weeks ago I tried to recreate some Flyers I made in Affinity Designer in Canva, I didn't like it much and I gave up. But then I tried Figma, after playing with it for an hour or so, I created the same Flyers made with Designer. They look identical, it was fast and easy. The thing I missed was the quick access to the Photo app to make corrections to my images. And the free account can certainly be sufficient for a lot of people.

Did you just hear that very faint sigh?

That's Corel Ventura in its digital grave.

The digital graveyard is full of retired software, sleeping the silent sleep of of digital death. Most were murdered by Adobe: Freehand, Director. Flash, Fireworks, ImageReady, PageMaker et al...

RIP., sweet software. Sleep peacefully.

Hopefully, there is room in that graveyard for Adobe too...

Who will acquire Photoshop when Adobe go into liquidation? Who will buy Illustrator? Who, InDesign? After Effects? Premiere?

it'll be like releasing the Munchkins from the Emrrald City jail...

Creative Freedom is Coming.

...and Adobe is dying. In monochrome. Pixilated and scratched, canker-ridden. Gone are the bright colours. No CMYK now, no RGB. Everything is grey and dusty, like Miss Havisham's wedding feast.

And here's the best part. Adobe has to pay a subscription fee to stay in the digital graveyard. And the price is going up as I type. If they can't pay, Adobe will be exhumed and thrown into a pauper's grave.

And who will mourn Adobe? No one. Sorry, who?

Looking forward to what's coming on the 30th. Hope it's worth the wait.

No subscriptions please. TOTAL Freedom, now.

We're salivating...

Quote from DelN

Who will acquire Photoshop when Adobe go into liquidation?

I don't think Adopay will go bankrupt in our lifetime. If the company were to get into financial trouble, the crown jewels would certainly not be put up for sale right away.

And Affinity by Canva won't take over the photo, design, and publishing market overnight. But if Affinity achieves a certain level of market penetration, Adopay will certainly respond.

And I am firmly convinced that there will be a subscription model. Not for the basic functions, but for AI functions that have to be executed on the server side. Because these servers cost a lot of money. And I assume that those who do not need advanced AI functions will not have to take out a subscription. This would mean that Canva would be fulfilling one of its four pledges.

• If we offer a subscription, it will always be just an option alongside the perpetual model for those who prefer it. This goes hand in hand with the fact that Canva users can now get to know Affinity. We could also offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows by using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets with others, if they choose to do so.

I also have a different assessment of the market. If Canva helps the Affinity brand gain greater reach, Corel will have to brace itself.

Quote from komatös

the crown jewels would certainly not be put up for sale right away.

Crown jewels. Like it...

Quote from komatös

If Canva helps the Affinity brand gain greater reach, Corel will have to brace itself.

Why Corel?

Quote from DelN

Why Corel?

Because, in my opinion, Corel will sooner or later slip to third place among the suites.

I thought Corel was already further down in the pecking order.

Corel try to be too much like Adobe - with 'subscriptions', but they also have the option of 'One-Time Purchase', because they have listened to the anger of Adobe users online about 'subscriptions'... CorelDraw is really quite a good drawing program, albeit rather expensive. Corel PhotoPaint, when I used it in the 1990s, was pretty good too, although masking was a pain (but better than Painter, which only had a Masking Brush).

And CorelDraw was great if you design fonts. You could draw the glyphs in CorelDraw and export them all to .TTF TrueType font format and all the glyphs were in their glyph cells when you opened it in Fontographer or FontLab. So intuitive, even back in CorelDraw version 5...

And CorelDraw recognise bitmap colour fonts. You can type with them and use them in your designs. Microsoft also recognise bitmap colour fonts, which are (they say) the future of type design and is only in its infancy. I'm currently drawing my glyphs in Affinity Photo, exporting each character as .png, then importing them into each glyph cell in FontLab. It's laborious, but Affinity Photo or Designer doesn't export to .TTF or .OTF yet. Incidentally, nor does Illustrator or Photoshop...

Affinity Photo/Designer are exceptionally good drawing apps - especially for the money. I haven't used CorelDraw for about 8 years.

I still mourn Macromedia Freehand. Adobe bought Macromedia, as their tools were really good and they saw them as a fierce cometitor to Illustrator, only to retire them all, and sell Fontographer, which was snapped up by FontLab (thankfully)...

Corel also own Painter, which used to be really good. They haven't updated it since 2023. Personally, I think they have retired it. The interface was dull and very 90s. The disorganised brushes were a nightmare, but there were some features, like the metal rain and glass raining tool (hidden in the 'Layers' palette, which were really cool... even back in Painter version 5...