“Fake it till you make it” is given as advice devoid of any irony. Instead, deception and inflation of numbers is seen as a smart move until you have the resources and knowledge to properly do the task. KPIs and OKRs are meant not to reflect delivery goals but aspirations. When you’re not gunning for a promotion every half year you’re not seen as a go-getter or having a growth mindset. In other words, we encourage bragadocious behaviour and language. Some of the things you hear from heads of states and other politicians in interviews sound like Muhammad Ali at press conferences before a fight in the 60s or old school rappers in the 70s and 80s.

We’re really viewing the entire design ecosystem as one big entity,” he says. “It’s not about separation anymore. It’s not about professionals on one side, nonprofessionals on the other. It’s really about your entire team working together.

In the new Affinity, you can customize the UI in any way you want. Hewson showed me how users can create their own “perfect studio,” a custom workspace that mixes and matches tools from any of the core disciplines. “Let’s say your workflow often includes raster brushes, vector tools, maybe even some layout tools as well,” Hewson says. “What you can do is actually just create your own studio.”

This is a level of personalization that goes far beyond rearranging a few panels. You can build a lean UI for logo design, a robust one for photo compositing, and another for publication layout. These custom studios can then be saved and shared, creating a new way for teams to standardize workflows.

A year and a half ago I wrote an optimistic take on what Canva was doing with Affinity. I think that there is reason to be nervous, but this strategy feels right. Rather than feeling choked by its power users, it’s turned those power users into a loss leader. Usually, it’s the low-end users that are the loss leaders.

Thanks to full GPU acceleration, everything is live and nondestructive, from applying a Gaussian blur to a vector object to painting a pixel-based mask on a filter effect. As Ashley Hewson demonstrated for me, you can adjust a gradient, warp text, or scrub through your entire edit history with zero lag. Even with thousands of layers, he claims. “I keep saying it, but it’s kind of very important because, obviously, it’s kind of what the competitors don’t do,” he says with a hint of pride.