A desktop publishing house starts again.

Affinity is a product name, and the company behind it is older than the name. Wikipedia says the developer, Serif (Europe) Ltd, was set up in 1987 by a small team of software engineers who wanted to make lower-cost desktop publishing software for Microsoft Windows. It traded as Roleage Ltd until 1988, and its home is West Bridgford, on the edge of Nottingham. The company name itself is a word from typography: a serif is the small stroke at the end of a letter.

Through the 1990s and 2000s Serif sold a family of programs with a shared suffix. Wikipedia lists PageStar, a simple advertisement layout tool for Windows 2.0, followed by PagePlus in 1990, DrawPlus in 1994, PhotoPlus in 1999, WebPlus in 2000 and MoviePlus in 2003. Ownership moved twice in that period. Wikipedia says the American company Vizacom bought Serif in 1996, and that ownership was sold back to Serif’s senior management in 2001.

The Affinity name arrived with a fresh start on a different platform. iMore reported on 2 October 2014 that Affinity Designer was now on the Mac App Store, after a team had spent the previous four years working on it. Wikipedia describes Designer as the successor to DrawPlus, written from scratch for macOS, and records that it was followed by Affinity Photo in 2015 and Affinity Publisher in 2019. iMore stressed one detail of the launch: there was no subscription fee, and once bought the software was the buyer’s to keep.

The new name gradually replaced the old suffix. Wikipedia says that in 2016, after Designer and Photo reached Windows, Serif stopped developing the “Plus” range to concentrate on Affinity, and that support for the legacy programs ended in July 2022. In November 2022 Serif released version 2 of the three apps with a single licence covering all of them on every platform.

Canva buys, then rebuilds.

The ownership changed in 2024. Forbes Australia reported on 26 March 2024 that the Australian design platform Canva had bought Affinity, and quoted Canva co-founder Cameron Adams, who said he had made contact with the company through LinkedIn and that the deal was agreed some seven weeks later. “We pretty much sealed the deal, after two days in Nottingham,” Adams said. The magazine listed earlier Canva purchases including Flourish, Kaleido, Pexels and Pixabay. Canva has owned Serif and Affinity since March 2024.

Affinity had been sold as a one-off purchase, and The Verge later wrote that the sale had raised concerns that Affinity would adopt Canva’s subscription-based approach. Wikipedia says Canva and Serif responded with a joint public pledge, published in March 2024, which promised among other things that perpetual licences would continue to be offered and that Affinity would keep being developed as its own suite.

The larger change came in 2025. Creative Bloq reported on 30 October 2025 that Affinity’s website had gone dark at the start of the month, prompting speculation, and that the company had then relaunched the product as a single program, “now simply called Affinity”. The Verge reported the same day that Canva was relaunching the creative suite as an all-in-one app for photo editing, vector illustration and page layout, and that the new app was described as free, with no subscription required. It ran on Windows and Mac, with an iPad version to follow, and used one universal file type.

Engadget, also on 30 October 2025, called the product Affinity by Canva and described how the three old programs had become tabs named Vector, Pixel and Layout. The app now required a free Canva account and could send a project straight to Canva, while Canva’s paid AI tools, such as background removal, sat inside it for subscribers. The Verge added that copies of the earlier version 2 apps would keep working for people who had bought them. Wikipedia records that the new release is treated internally as version 3.0.

Wordmarks, symbols and screens.

Design software carries its identity on surfaces that most brands never have to think about. The first is the app icon: a square of a few hundred pixels that sits in a dock, a taskbar or a launcher beside dozens of others, and that has to be recognisable at a size smaller than a fingernail. Icons for creative tools are often redrawn when an operating system changes its visual language, so a single program can accumulate several generations of icon over its life.

The second surface is the splash screen or start window, the image that appears while the program loads. For many users it is the moment they see the product name at full size, and it is frequently refreshed with each major release.

A third surface is the file format. A document extension appears in file names, in email attachments and in folder listings, and a distinct document icon lets a user spot a working file among exports. The extension often outlives the interface around it.

Finally, release names and version numbers act as a kind of sub-brand. A numbered release, a year-based name or a renamed edition tells users which generation of the tool they have, and the way a developer numbers its versions becomes part of how the product is talked about.

A lowercase a, and a file name.

The relaunch came with a new identity. It’s Nice That reported on 30 October 2025 that Affinity had unveiled a complete rebrand alongside the product, led by Tom Carey, Canva’s creative director for Europe, in collaboration with the studio Design by Twist. Carey told the magazine that the brand needed to feel connected to Canva without looking like a version of it, and that it had to move away from Affinity’s previous “angular” identity.

The symbol is a letter. According to It’s Nice That, the identity leads with a lowercase serif “a” logomark, made with the designer Rob Clarke. Its swooping curves are meant to stand for the artists and illustrators who use the product, and its sharp, precise points for graphic designers. Carey said the team wanted something more approachable and “wonky” than the uppercase geometric marks common in software, while still being recognisable in a desktop row of icons.

The type and colour follow the same idea. The magazine reported that the typeface, Affinity Serif, was made with the foundry Ohno as a bespoke adaptation of its typeface Swear, in six weights. The palette is built on material tones named charcoal, graphite, putty and paper, with a lime green that Carey described as a “punch of punk”, and six “ethos tags” were drawn by Made By James. The new .af file extension doubles as a joke across merchandise, as in a “Sketchy.af” notebook, and the brand line is “for creatives, by creatives”.

For a design guide, Affinity shows how a renamed and re-owned product can take its symbol from the craft its users practise, and how a file extension can become part of the tone of voice. Compare Canva, which has owned Affinity since 2024, and Adobe, whose illustration, photo and layout programs cover the same three kinds of work. For this guide we use charcoal, putty and lime with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Affinity’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.