<div><strong>By Mala Bhargava</strong><br><br>No one can do without design today. Not in this connected age where the visual rules over any other kind of content. But of course, everyone isn’t a design whiz, which is technology’s cue to step in with a good solution. And that’s exactly what Canva has tried to do with its anyone-can-design web application.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Canva Basics</strong></div><div>You can get to Canva in two ways – on its website, canva.com, or through its iPad app. That should be particularly fun to use on the iPad Pro. Get through the simple registration, and you’re in. What you have here is a drag-and-drop design environment in which you can very quickly create anything from a full-length presentation to a Facebook cover design. There are templates to choose from and lots of customisation once you’ve chosen. Parameters such as colours, fonts, layouts etc can be user-selected. There’s a searchable database of a million images to choose from and add to your creation. There are a large number that are free, but there are also photographs you may need to pay for at a mere one dollar a photo. You can pull in your images including from social media accounts. Once your creation is done, uploading and sharing is easy enough with its easy interface. A video tutorial will help if you’re lost.</div><div> </div><div><strong>How Canva Came About</strong></div><div>The story of Australia-based Canva began some eight years ago, when founder Melanie Perkins was teaching PhotoShop and InDesign. “It was super complex,” says Perkins, “It became very apparent that the need would be for such things to be easy, online, collaborative and affordable in future. So we started our first company, Fusion Books, which was an online design system for the school yearbook. But later, we founded Canva – for anyone to use.” Canva was launched two years ago and immediately attracted investors like Lars Rassmusen, founder of Google Maps and Guy Kawasaki as evangelist. “There have been over 15,000 blog posts written about Canva,” says Melanie Perkins, “And thousands of video tutorials.” Movie stars Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson are among the latest to back Canva’s most recent and third round of funding of $15 million. A total of $27 million has been infused into the graphics design company. These are to be used for product development and international growth.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Canva In India</strong></div><div>The Canva founding team decided to visit India when they found a sudden spurt of growth in the use of the product, making it their fourth largest user base without any promotion at all. This market has doubled over the past three months. “It’s exploding. In India we’ve had over a million designs created, 50,000 of those created just over a week ago,” said Perkins, “So it’s been growing really, really quickly.” The team wrote to users to connect with a handful but were amazed at the number who wanted to meet to discuss their feedback and the future of the product. “We’ve had a really strong uptake in the social media and blogger community,” explained Perkins, “There’s been incredible word-of-mouth spread I think because there’s such a strong design aesthetic in India, it’s all that people really need because it’s also very affordable, which is something we’ve aimed to do from the very beginning.” Canva is free to use but certain elements like photographs can cost a small amount. According to the team, those who need quick marketing material and social media graphics use it the most which is what makes it fitting for small businesses and startups.</div><div> </div><div>In fact, a number of media houses that bring out online content are using Canva. Globally too, the company is growing rapidly and the reason, according to the founders, is that the product solves a particular pain point while being affordable. “Also, every single profession is becoming more visual nowadays,” says Perkins, “A journalist used to have to write an article and that’s it, but today there also has to be social media posts with that. A marketing person has to make a visual pitch deck, and so on – it’s all about visual communication.”</div><div> </div><div><strong>Canva For Work</strong></div><div>At a cost of about $9 per user per month (for an annual subscription) and $12 per user for a month without the annual subscription, users get more features. Canva for Work, launched just a few weeks ago, allows brands to upload and use their brand kit, ensuring consistency across whatever is created. Logos, colours, visuals and fonts can come from the user brand and remain in the Canva account for use by multiple people who can also collaborate to edit artwork. Brands can also create templates so that everyone isn’t constantly reinventing the wheel. There are 35,000 user brands on Canva, including 50 per cent of the Fotune 500 companies. Canva’s users also include the Huffington Post with 150 people using Canva, Upworthy, Hubspot, Lonely Planet and Yelp. Blog articles can also be uploaded to the Canva platform. Output can also be printed.</div><div> </div><div>Canva has just also launched a Canva for NonProfits so that various volunteer and charitable organizations can be helped to create material easily and with no cost. UNICEF, in fact, is also using Canva.</div><div> </div><div>In the future, Canva is exploring adding video and many other features.</div>
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