Canva: Democratizing Design

“Design is a relationship between form and content” — Paul Rand

The goal of any design tool is to simplify this relationship between the content you wish to communicate, and the form you want it to adopt. Canva is one such digital design application that allows users to prepare graphics such as presentations, social media posts, Zoom backgrounds, etc. through simple drag-and-drop UI and a vast library of templates. Its custom layouts, presets, and editing tools aim to let users ‘Design anything, publish anywhere.’ In a short time-span, Canva has become my favorite design product thanks to its low barrier to entry, versatility across content types, and intuitive user experience.

From a consumer context, Canva caters to users who need to share content in an engaging format. This ranges from students working on a variety of assignments, professionals making presentations, posters, or infographics, and social media users looking to create appealing posts for their profiles. All these users are not necessarily looking to learn the intricacies of a complex tool or show off their design chops — instead, they want the most efficient way to make high-quality work that is aesthetically pleasing. Much of Instagram’s early success was a result of meeting a similar need, through filters that made ordinary photos look artistic. This is the same reason that users like me love Canva — it democratizes design by allowing individuals to use simple tools and elevate their content.

“Great design doesn’t give users choices they don’t care about” — Ian Spalter

Canva’s biggest advantage is a set of delightful features that make for a superior user experience. It removes the traditional obstacles to learning design by provided snap lines for symmetry, text formatting, and automatic scaling to fit any dimension. Thanks to this, users aren’t bogged down by details like aspect ratios and letter kerning. They can simply select a template that matches their needs and make larger decisions regarding content placement and colors. Canva boasts that users can learn the basics of the tool in 23 seconds, in stark contrast to the steep learning curve associated with other design tools like Adobe Illustrator (2+ hours) and Spark (18 minutes).

The second major advantage of Canva is a library of over 50,000 templates that spans the breadth of content formats. While tools like Piktochart (infographics), Crello (social media), and PowerPoint (presentations) focus on one or two formats, Canva has built beautiful presets for each of these — users are therefore much more likely to come back to Canva for all their design needs, especially once they are familiar with its features.

Thanks to social media, individuals are now constantly engaged in developing and maintaining a personal brand. Canva has created a unique feature to meet this need — it allows users to automatically generate custom templates that match their brand or aesthetic. These personalized templates hook users to the product and help them maintain consistency in their online persona. I have personally found this feature extremely useful when making graphics for blog posts, or organizing events that may need posters, Facebook banners, and other forms of specific media.

One of the pitfalls of Adobe Spark, Canva’s closest competitor is the difficulty users face in finding the right template. Canva, on the other hand, has a powerful search engine that ensures users find exactly what they are looking for. A simple query like ‘restaurant menu’ pulls up 6 templates for Mexican, Italian and French restaurants. Canva seems to have identified that the value of these templates is entirely contingent on users finding the right one at the right time. The searchable interface, combined with the other features mentioned, makes Canva the best tool on the market for non-designers.

To improve Canva, we need look at the design process itself — design is often collaborative; while Canva allows documents to be shared, it does not permit collaborative editing. Creating a low latency, concurrent editing system for documents would encourage users to work on documents together — in the process, allowing users to bring in even more customers. In the long term, Canva can look at a market segment it doesn’t currently serve– professional designers. It could set up a shared marketplace where designers can showcase and sell templates. This would end up making the product more worthwhile with every new designer that jumps on board. Ultimately, Canva makes the best design product on the market, that allows users to express themselves through the vocabulary of experts — much like a good quote!

“Don’t try to be original; just try to be good, the rest will follow.” — Paul Rand