I met Canva for the first time in 2018 and we’ve been inseparable ever since. I’m totally into the relationship and I can’t see it ending anytime soon.
Founded in Australia five years before our first encounter, this magical tool was a concept created by three founders, one of whom had been a design tutor at the University of Western Australia. Having coached students who found it hard to navigate complicated design software, Melanie Perkins came up with the idea of creating a tool to help creatively minded people with minimal graphic design skills. That’s people just like me and the million plus other people from 190 different countries who use it.
An ex-journalist and copywriter, I have always been full of ideas, but my creativity has always originated from the written word. It’s not that I don’t have a visual eye but as a young brand marketer, with zero graphic design skills in my repertoire, creating the visual concept in all its technical complexity was never part of my skillset.
Then Canva came along and changed everything for me - and for the masses. Never will it quite supersede human design flair (in my opinion), but it’s empowered even the most visually creative impaired to experiment with ideas and create something from scratch. It’s builds confidence and it gets creative juices flowing.
Don’t get me wrong, nothing builds the creative vision more dynamically than working with a talented in-the-flesh design artiste, but in the absence of one, Canva is a life saver. And for cash-poor smaller business owners and emerging entrepreneurs, it’s quite literally a wonder tool.
I’ve come across a few cynics who claim to be able to spot a Canva design from a mile off. While that might be true of the designs that come directly from a generic template, for every fixed template, there’s a whole lot of possibilities to explore. For every obvious Canva design, there’s another creation that’s been personalised and polished to produce something uniquely brilliant.
It’s the idea that sparks visual brilliance after all. Have that, throw in a few intuitive tools and anything can happen.
The people behind Canva believe that visual communication is becoming an increasingly critical skill for everyone. I couldn’t agree more. It’s now critical for every individual, every company, every nonprofit - every team. What Canva has cleverly done is make design accessible to absolutely everyone and that’s brilliant.
*Stat www.thesocialshepherd.com
