Affinity

Affinity is Canva's free page layout and desktop publishing app for macOS and Windows, used for books, magazines and brochures with no subscription.

Affinity is a page layout and desktop publishing app for macOS and Windows, built for designers who assemble long documents out of text, images and vector artwork. Its Layout Studio covers books, magazines, brochures, multi-page reports, newsletters, posters and templates in one document, so structure and typography stay under the designer's control from the first spread to the final export. The app is published by Canva: installing it signs you in with a Canva account, and the site's privacy policy and terms are Canva's own. Affinity and Serif remain registered trademarks of Serif Europe Ltd, the studio that built the original applications. Layout work starts with Smart Master Pages and shared text styles, which place repeating furniture and typography across a document and update every use at once. Text flows through linked frames from page to page, and the auto layout tools hold that structure as content grows. Typography reaches OpenType features, ligatures, artistic text on curves and variable fonts, with live previews of kerning, leading and line spacing on the page itself. Data Merge pulls a spreadsheet into a design to generate personalized pieces. The Pixel and Vector studios sit in the same window for editing images and artwork in place, and the Canva AI Studio adds Super Resolve, Generative Fill, Background Removal and Subject Selection inside the document for people on a Canva premium plan. Affinity fits independent designers, small studios and in-house teams who produce print and digital documents and want full page layout control without a subscription. It suits anyone carrying work over from Adobe InDesign, since IDML files open with page structure, text frames and basic styles preserved, although GREP styles, anchored objects and tables can need adjusting by hand afterwards. It is a desktop application rather than a browser workspace, so a document moves to Canva when other people need to work on it. The app is downloaded rather than subscribed to, and one install covers all three studios. Press and screen output make up most of the work: editorial spreads, event passes, digital magazines and website mockups, exported as PDF with bleed and crop marks or as SVG, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and EPUB. Finished files can be sent straight to Canva, where clients and colleagues take the design further in the browser. Around the Layout Studio sit the Pixel and Vector studios for retouching and illustration, the Canva AI Studio for image work on a paid Canva plan, and the separate Affinity V2 applications, which keep their own accounts and downloads for anyone still working in them.