Affinity Users?

[Mel Weyant]

Hi all! 

I run a makerspace at a public high school in Cincinnati, and I'm wondering if anyone else has used the design software Affinity by Canva with students. We're curious if it could replace any of our specialized Adobe tools like Illustrator.

Thanks!

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Mel Weyant (she/her)

Research and Innovation Specialist

                       

Wyoming High School                   

106 Pendery Avenue

Wyoming, Ohio  45215

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[sbar...@ucc.on.ca]

Hi Mel.

In our middle school design program, we needed a vector graphics program that was much simpler than Illustrator. We landed on Gravit Designer years ago. It was taken over by Corel and renamed Corel Vector. It has since been phased out. We moved all our vector graphics for laser cutting to Affinity over the last year with great success. It does exactly what we need and feels a lot like Illustrator, so it's a nice stepping stone for our students who will move to Illustrator later. 

We haven't had a chance to play with their photo or layout tools much yet.

Sarah Barclay

Innovation & Technology Coach

Upper Canada College 

[Keith G Braafladt]

We are just in early discussions about learning Affinity at our school (I’ve paid for and have been  using the trio of Serif applications for a number of years personally)  

I know it may seem problematic, but we have been using Inkscape and once they learn how to do a couple things our fifth and sixth graders take to it with ease… plus it’s free and it’s multi platform. (which fits my own principles in that if they learn to use it, they can also just download it at home with no additional cost for family like the subscription applications) 

It has a learning curve mostly for the teacher - not really the students because the teachers can create the workflows and supporting materials, such as screen casts

As well, we use it with our lasers, Cricuts and  it even has plug-ins to create embroidery sewing files. We have schoolwide access to illustrator, except that some constraint on our middle school grades with the number of licenses.

Mounds Park Academy Makerspace coordinator

Keith 

Keith Braafladt

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[Melissa Anthony]

Hi Mel,

I don't have any experience with Affinity, but I just switched from Illustrator to Cuttle.

It's free for education, browser based, and optimized for laser cutting.

It isn't an Illustrator clone, but has the features I used most from illustrator: basic shapes, repeats, offsets and boolean operators, plus a regular pen tool. In addition, it can remove holes and overlaps, does auto layout, and the text tools are better suited for laser cutting. The biggest limitation I've noticed is that image trace only works on simple images, but it has been improving. The pro version has integrated access to the noun project which makes this mostly a non-issue, but the emojis and symbols included in the basic version do a decent job and you can always download a vector from the noun project and add it to your cuttle project yourself.

There are plenty of other features (like parameterization!) that are worth exploring in depth. I like it for its low floor and high ceiling.

Best,

Melissa

On Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 12:36:38 PM UTC-5 wey...@wyomingcityschools.org wrote: