For all those creators out there, Canva has brought the best of tech to the design world to make your life easier. Move over Google and Adobe, Canva is here to take the world by storm, most possibly a colourful storm.
Canva Create is Canva’s annual event where the company unveils the latest developments on their application and also what’s in store for the coming year. This year, Canva introduced the Canva Visual Worksuite, essentially being a tool to make work more fun!
Established in 2013, Canva had humble beginnings with just a few design options and templates. Today, they have 85 million Canva accounts, which created more than 13 billion designs! This year, with the theme ‘The Future is Visual’, Canva announced a number of new tools that make creating content even more easy and accessible.
Keeping the pandemic in mind, Canva decided to have a Work-From-Home-centric unveiling. As many work from the comfort of their homes, collaboration can be a bit of a task for some. Thus, they added the feature of the ‘Canva Whiteboard’, with live collaborations and templates, making brainstorming sessions much more fun and colourful. Unlike other whiteboards, Canva’s whiteboard includes all the features within Canva. So, you can create designs as you bounce off ideas with colleagues, classmates or friends.
Canva has truly reimagined the way we work. No more boring black and white documents or boring squares and circles. The most exciting launch of this year’s Canva Create was the unveiling of Canva Docs! That’s right. Just like Google or Microsoft Docs, Canva has created its own version but with a huge difference. With Canva doc, you can add videos, designs and even embed items into the document, without having to leave the doc. It allows for collaboration and can easily be converted into a presentation with just a click of a button. Canva Docs is still in the works, but you can get on their shortlist to test it out on canva.com/docs.
Presentations on Canva could not get any more interesting. By bringing design to every aspect of life, Canva’s goal is to also introduce it into your workspace. And, Canva Presentations is simply the best way. At this year’s Canva Create, Ashley Gilgrist, the Presentation Product Manager announced the new feature of remote control with Canva Presentation. By connecting your laptop or phone, say goodbye to ‘Next slide please’. Additionally, for business people and well, anyone who uses graphs and charts, they have introduced bubble maps and bar race graphs to make graphics more interactive and engaging.
The main aim of Canva was to make design software more accessible, affordable and easy for creators everywhere. To give back, Canva has introduced Canva Creators, a platform to earn an income by contributing templates and designs for Canva. Already, the company has over 1.5 million templates and contributors have added 22 million images, as mentioned in the event by Silvia Ovieda, the head of Content and Design and Anwar Haneef, the head of Ecosystems. So, if you want to earn some money, Canva can help you out.
Along with these releases were the new updates on Canva Websites. Now, you can seamlessly incorporate other designs into your website to create a portfolio. Well, you can even purchase the domain name, through Canva. The company integrated many more apps into its interface to help artists easily access what they need to create a design. Sally Woellner, the Lead for Product Design also introduced the ‘Text to Image’ feature that is perfect for creating unique images. Now, you can make one-of-a-kind pictures just by telling Canva what you need. By just typing out the words, this feature will create a picture that is best suited for you. If you need a picture of a dog riding a bicycle on the beach, all you need to do is type it out and Canva will create it for you. Pretty Magical.
Canva also announced that from now on, Canva education will be free of cost and companies that are Non-Profit Organisations using Canva Teams will get, not 10 but 50 free seats on the team. This year, Canva also started a new tradition of having the ‘Canva Community Awards.’ Three people walked away with being the best creators, including Dr Terrerai Trent, Heather Lamb and Franz Siasat. Dr Terrerai used Canva to make designs that helped her crowdfund resources to help girls in Zimbabwe. She collected money to support their education and provided for them, so as to better their lives and give them a future. Franz Siasat from Zolo Australia created designs to spread awareness about electronic waste. With his efforts, his company was able to refurbish 2000 devices and provide new solutions to deal with this environmental crisis. Heather Lamb is a librarian from Texas, US. During the pandemic, schools were closed, so she decided to make ‘Mo, the bookmobile,’ a mobile library to take books to where the children are. By using Canva, she transformed a regular school bus into a colourful library for kids to enjoy. In her journey, she has circulated 11,000 books and provided over 500 meals to kids in her community.
As a creator, Canva strives to better itself with every passing year. Next year, they plan to make their new features betters and easier for creators to use. Canva has grown immensely and is the first choice for designers in need of quick and easy designs. Being a creator myself, the tools that Canva has are unmatched, even in its free version. So, unleash your imagination and creativity and create magic today.