»We believe that design is the new language of work« › PAGE online

Bild: Amber Pollack PhotographyOnly a few days after Canva announced their partnership with design software company Affinity, we met Duncan Clark, Head of Canva EMEA at our Munich office for coffee, pretzels and a chat about the future of design. In a bold move, Canva opted to make Affinity free forever, including a desktop app and all future updates for the tool – which went viral throughout the professional design community. We asked Duncan about the intention behind the launch, Canva´s positioning within the professional design industry and how he views AI as a tool to help scale the design process.

In this interview, we talk about:

+ A Rethink of Design Tool Architecture

+ On a mission to democratize Design

+ User-Driven Development

+ The Creative Operating System

+ Craft in the Age of AI

Anne: It’s been just a few days since the launch of Affinity by Canva and we’re seeing rapid user growth. How many of those are professional creatives, now testing out Affinity? And what can you tell us about their background?

Duncan: We have had 2 million registrations of the new Affinity product in the first two weeks and we had a million of those in the first four days. So it’s been an amazing rush of new users. But I wouldn’t say it´s only professional creatives, but rather all kinds of advanced designers coming into the Canva ecosystem, which is really exciting.

Obviously our core user base is vast. We have 260 million monthly active users and we are at the point where in some countries one in five Internet users use Canva every single month. So the addressable market is much bigger for non-experts. But we see the expert segment as absolutely strategically central to the whole design world within Canva.

Europe has some of our most penetrated markets. For example, in Spain, we’re at 1 in 7 Internet users who use Canva every month. Germany is one of the fastest growing markets in the world and quickly becoming a bigger part of our business. And we can also see an extremely strong presence for the Affinity product in Western Europe, which has been leading the charge for downloads since we launched in the last two weeks.

Anne: You have always been a creative yourself, with your background in journalism (The Guardian) and your own firm for data visualization that is also part of Canva´s ecosystem today. How would you convince professional creatives to try out Affinity, even if they have been using other tools for a long time?

I think there are several reasons why all professional designers should try Affinity. The thing that’s most exciting about it is that the new Affinity interface is the first major rethink for how these types of tools work architecturally. What Affinity has done is, it´s pulled together a professional grade photo editor, professional grade vector editor and a professional grade page layout tool into a single canvas. A single editor, which allows you to move seamlessly between the different disciplines without having to change tools.

Once you’ve tried this – and I promise you, because I’ve been on this journey in the last couple of months with the beta product – it’s very strange to look back and think that you had separate tools. Now you can work within one interface and all of your document types work within a single universal file format, which is really game-changing for advanced designers. That´s something that is very philosophically aligned with what we’ve done at Canva, where you can seamlessly move between a video presentation and a whiteboard.

Another reason is performance. Affinity has built an extraordinarily performant product. You can have incredibly rich vector images where you can zoom in to 10 million percent with no loss of rendering speed. You can make real-time edits non destructively with new types of advanced filters and you see the effects instantaneously. So there’s no dragging a slider and waiting a couple of seconds to see the result.

And then there is the way that Affinity works together with Canva. Our philosophy is that you can craft in Affinity, and scale in Canva. You can create brand assets, logos, vector illustrations – whatever it would be as a specialist in Affinity – and then with one click, upload these assets to Canva and put them in a tool where everyone else can make use of them.

Canva itself invested really heavily in how to scale a brand across an organization. You can have templates which have certain elements locked so that users can stay on brand really easily. We see this as a whole stack solution that empowers professional designers to in turn empower their colleagues to use a brand really well.

Anne: …and to work better together. Because – speaking from experience – getting the marketing team to adhere to the brand guidelines is a whole other challenge.

Totally. I was talking at an event yesterday and the phrase that came up there, was moving from being the brand police to being the brand enabler. And I think Affinity plus Canva is an amazing combination of tools to do that.

On a mission to democratize Design

Stefan: Before we delve deeper into the tool, I naturally have to ask a question about the cost. Affinity is and will remain free – as stated in your initial communication and campaign. Looking into the future: do you believe, this business model will still exist in five years?

Yes, we are completely committed. When we came out with this launch, we specifically wanted to say free forever rather than just free, because if we’d said free, people would have thought of it as an introductory offer – free for a year. Everyone starts using it and then we want to charge. But that isn’t the case.

Our belief is that a downloadable desktop application, which costs us nothing marginally for each user we add, is an incredible opportunity to truly deliver on our mission to democratize design not only for non-specialists, but for professionals as well. Obviously there is a commercial justification, which is owning what we’re now calling the Creative Operating System, an entire visual communication platform across all types of organizations. That is a huge commercial opportunity for Canva. And we see that providing this new advanced tool for free will help us ultimately win more users, including those who might want to to pay for extensions such as Canva AI, which you can now also use in Affinity, if you are on a paid plan.

»We want people to understand that we are genuinely seeking to democratize design and not just saying it for commercial benefit.«

Our philosophy at Canva has always been – and this is totally central to our growth – that you should provide a really good, genuinely valuable free product. And that’s important not only because of adoption, but because of how people understand the brand. We want people to understand that we are genuinely seeking to democratize design and not just saying it for commercial benefit. It´s supposed to be a genuine tool, not an evaluation offer.

And we’ve just extended that philosophy over to Affinity, where we specifically decided not to charge for the core desktop tool. There’s no particular need for us to do so. And in fact, by making it free, we also create the opportunity for people to be confident, that everyone will always be able to open the file. Because when we spoke to professional designers, we found a number of points of common frustration with pre-existing tools. Besides being overpriced and lacking innovation, one common frustration was, that people felt locked into a proprietary file format, which could be opened only by people who had an ongoing subscription.

And that´s so contrary to our thought of open access. We just think it’s so exciting when you think of the global potential of expert designers and new creatives. For example in low income countries, or among school students, there are all these people who could and should be learning the craft of professional design, but they’ve been priced out of the market and that just seems like such an avoidable problem.

User-Driven Development

Anne: The software market is evolving rapidly. Big players and newcomers are constantly launching new tools. Is there anything you at Affinity consciously choose not to do because the competition is doing it?

So, this might sound like a rehearsed answer, but we really don´t think much about competitors. We are just obsessed with our customers and users and we listen really, really attentively to what they tell us. At Canva, we have a program called Close the Loop where every single feature request gets logged. And even if it’s two years later, when we actually launch that feature, we’ll go back and we’ll tell the user who requested it. It’s about really remembering that what users are telling us is the foundational building block for future product development. And Affinity is a natural extension of that. Listening to the professional design community, and their common frustrations, was the perfect way to enter into that space with Affinity.

Stefan: Of course, this answer could also come from one of your competitors. But fundamentally, we share the same views. Our job at PAGE is to highlight everything that’s happening in the market, to examine what the community truly wants. That’s our mission.

Anne: Also, we are incredibly curious, so you can count on us actually giving it a real try. This type of curiosity is something that we really want to bring into our community as well. And if I might suggest something:  if you really want to position Affinity for creative beginners, maybe start looking into the different design universities and start working closely with them. That way you could actually make studying design more accessible and affordable.

Yeah, we’re really excited about the potential for Affinity to become the de facto tool for students who are starting to experiment with graphic design. And we’ve been working with partners like Creative Lives in Progress in London to help that early career designer try and work out how to navigate this rapidly evolving world.

Anne: I think there could also be a generational shift, when someone who started with Affinity moves into an industry that uses other design tools.

We are already seeing something very similar with Canva presentations. A lot of people have used Canva at university or at school. They’re entering a workplace now and they’re just insisting that Canva goes with them.

Which is why we have this enormous bottom up adoption inside almost every large company in the world.

The Creative Operating System

Anne: With PAGE we are currently trying to gain more visibility for the value of design. It´s a whole new target audience for us, because within a company, the people making the decisions about design will often have a different background – they´re from marketing or strategy and would inherently be more comfortable with Canva. So, in a way, integrating Affinity into Canva might give design more visibility in those circles. Can you walk us through, how Affinity could change the daily work for creatives within a company? And explain the term Creative Operating System?

So maybe let´s first set the scene with the Creative Operating System. Canva has what we call the Canva Design Engine. It’s like a platform that runs at the foundation of what we do and it was also part of the original Canva pitch deck, from 15 years ago. On top of that, we built a whole bunch of applications, everything from video presentations, social media to print products.

And then now, adding the AI layer all the way across our products justifies calling it the Creative Operating System. We are not new to AI by any means. We acquired Kaleido, the leading visual AI company from Vienna four to five years ago and have been using AI in different ways in the product for a long time.

But since the rapid growth of large language models, we’ve really seen a big acceleration. We launched Magic Studio a couple of years ago, and since then we’ve had 22 billion uses of our AI features. That’s everything from removing the background of an image through to translating a pitch deck into different languages.

»Increasingly, every part of the organization is producing visual assets.«

So you can look at it as that three layered system, the foundational platform, the AI enabling layer, and then the end user facing applications. AI is just another way for us to achieve our mission within that system. It’s about getting users to their design outcomes faster, setting a higher quality bar, getting rid of bottlenecks.

Getting to your question: within a workflow, a CMO for example might be struggling with the fact that the expectations in this highly visual world in which we now live are going up and up and up. It’s more content, more formats, more platforms, more languages, more segments. Increasingly, every part of the organization is producing visual assets. It’s not just the marketing org, it’s the HR team, it’s the sales team, it’s the legal team. And it’s hard for marketing organizations to keep up, even though everyone has understood that unless you’re communicating visually, your communication will be ineffective.

So we’ve really tried hard to build a tool that lets a company unleash the power of visual communication while staying on brand. And Affinity allows you to do that, because Affinity is where you’re going to fine tune individual assets, where you can craft logos, where you’re going to work with advanced typographical features, but then still be able to drop that directly into the platform where everyone in the company is actually producing their work.

Anne: So, Affinity, as part of Canva, could also bring the professional creative back into the loop of the people who are actually making the decisions.

One hundred percent! Just a couple of weeks ago, we upgraded our Brand Hub, which allows you to incorporate brand guidelines, typically created by a brand designer, right into the editor where people are producing work.

We’ve seen this problem where brand guidelines end up as a PDF on a Dropbox folder somewhere and everyone knows they’re there, but no one has the time to actually think about them at the point where they’re quickly producing that deck for their big pitch.

We think that incorporating the brand guidelines as an interactive, rich, visible part of the tool that people actually use to produce their visual assets, is a bit of a breakthrough in terms of brand consistency in organizations.

Craft in the Age of AI

Stefan: So, all these possibilities are enabling non-designers to do more by themselves. Does that mean, we don´t need full service agencies anymore? Do you believe, we still need design specialists in the future?

We are great believers in the importance of expertise and craft. And we think that the need for deep specialist designers, true experts who can craft original, engaging, creative work, is bigger than ever. And in fact, our decision to not only acquire Affinity, but to offer it for free speaks to our commitment to professional designers.

Because we actually think that the rapid rise of AI is increasing the number of people involved in design. And the more people involved in design, the more important it is to have the brand architect, the brand specialist as the curator and the tweaker and the human editor on top of however else this work is being produced.

People sometimes ask me, do you think that with a combination of Canva or AI that there’ll be fewer people involved in actual design? And I just point to our user numbers. Because our user numbers go up exponentially and have been for 15 years. So, while there are more people designing than ever before, there are also more people working in professional design than ever before.

Anne: I feel like we have reached a point where we also need to discuss what design actually is. I love that you used the word Craft, because that is something we are trying to reintroduce in our narrative as PAGE. Because design is much more than just creating assets as fast and efficiently as possible, it´s about the expertise and the added layer of heart. Because that is what differentiates us from AI. What is your take on AI, and how is it integrated in Affinity?

We have a three-pronged approach to AI. We have our own models and our own research in areas where we think there’s something that we can do better than the wider market. We also incorporate third-party models and tools that are the best way to empower our users. And then we also have our ecosystem platform that allows third party developers and companies to incorporate new features into Canva using apps and APIs. And many of those are AI powered.

So we are consciously approaching AI, which we see as a really foundational tool for the next decade across those three different pillars. We actually just released our own foundational model, because we saw a problem with traditionally visual AI models: they are producing flat images. Text, for example can be incorporated, but it´s only on a pixel base. It´s not design, it´s image generation. But we believe that the actual design part is in the combination of components such as typography, color, and composition.

So we set out to create a model that was for design rather than image generation. And we released this just a couple of weeks ago. And the way it works is, that it has been trained on our huge template library, which is produced by creators who make money from creating templates. I want to be clear on this though: We very consciously made sure that they get royalties for the use of their templates in training. And it’s all opt-in. The model, is also not trained on user designs.

But the template library provides us with the perfect training set to help AI understand what actually makes a good layout. How do you assemble the elements on the page, not just as an image, but as a complete configuration of design elements? So that’s our major new contribution in this space. And because the result is an editable Canva design, you don’t have this barrier, where AI takes you so far and then it’s a dead end or costs you time and money to keep prompting for changes. You can actually have AI create a starting point which is fully editable – and can, again, be fully on brand.

Anne: With AI getting more powerful, there will be a lot of people who´ll view these editable, generated designs as the finished product. How do we keep professional design relevant in 2026?

The way I see design and visual communication, is that we are fundamentally visual creatures. The way our brains work is wired for visual inputs. We respond to color and movement on a very sort of primal level. And what has happened over the last century is that the technology has been gradually catching up.

So, at first, communication was black and white printed text. That was all, that technology was capable of, and therefore it was all that we received. And since the launch of first desktop publishing, then social media, and then democratizing tools like Canva, what we’ve seen is a rising expectation that everything is visual.

»It’s a visual world and Design is everything.«

We now live in a visual economy. It’s a visual world and Design is everything. You can’t have visual content without it being designed. So, at Canva, we see the current trend in everything becoming more visual and the visual bar going up and up as the world catching up with how we are hardwired. And we don’t think that this journey is over by any means. We think that the world will continue to become more visual. We think that more and more people will be designing in one form or another.

We believe, that design is actually becoming the new language of work. The way we interact with the world is fundamentally visual now, and that this trend – and with it, professional creative work – is not going anywhere.

Anne: What skills would you tell a young creative to learn?

I think a creative starting out in 2026 should be thinking simultaneously about the capability to produce content with craft, but combining that with real creativity of ideas. Because we are in an attention economy as well as a design economy. And increasingly the people who can most easily find their position in different companies are those who can produce work of a really high standard, but they can also produce really great ideas. Ideas that will cut through the noise in a world where more and more visual content is being produced.

And a second thing would be learning to scale their work. If you can go into a small organization in your first role and you understand that it’s not just about producing nice assets, but it’s about scaling those to all different markets, languages, segments, platforms, then you’re going to be in high demand.

Stefan: Final question: For you as Head of Canva EMEA, what does business look like in the next five years?

So for me, if I look ahead of the next five years, I think there’s enormous opportunity to unlock the power of design and visual communication for the majority of people in the world who still are stuck in legacy tools. There’s also the opportunity to do a lot of good along the way. With Canva, a significant proportion of its equity has been pledged to good causes.

And so, when we imagine ourselves offering value to the world through our tools, we’re also looking at creating value that we feed back in other ways. We’ve just donated $100 million to GiveDirectly to help start to solve and innovate around extreme poverty.

I want us to think big picture and ask ourselves, what good that we can do through people buying our tools and helping us make a difference to the wider world.

About Duncan

Duncan Clark is Head of Europe at Canva. Duncan joined Canva as the co-founder of Flourish, the data storytelling platform that became part of the Canva family in 2022. He is based at the company’s European HQ in London and oversees Canva across EMEA, with a close eye on data visualisation products. 

Before founding Flourish, Duncan worked as a data journalist at The Guardian, where he focused on climate change, data visualisation and interactive storytelling. His profound interest in climate change led him to co-author “The Burning Question” – a data-driven analysis detailing climate change as the most fascinating scientific, political and social puzzle in history.