canva has ruined me as a younger designer strong words there my friend strong words indeed but
has canva just put the final nail in the coffin for many designers around the entire world the
truth might not be what you think canva has gone from launching in 2013 to a waiting list of 50
000 people where might I add it had a very small team of buffings working under the canva name two
today were over 15 billion designs have been made on the platform a platform that has over
135 million users all controlled by a team of now 4 000 buffins impressive numbers sure but
is canva Harmon creativity and a lot of designers globally speaking well coming back to our friend
black lace here they say that after picking up their first in-house design position a new team
of social media marketing designers came into the workplace and they all happen to use well
canva trouble is brewing over time the op of the thread found themselves using canva and they say
their skills in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop started to get worse and worse and worse and it
got to the point where they ended up designing pretty much everything in canva and to this person
here that was a bad thing I guess they kind of felt like they owned a Ferrari but also on the
other hand they owned a Ford Escort but they just kept driving around in that Ford Escort day in day
out reading on some people started to encourage the op to practice more in Adobe Illustrator
and craft their skills with the pen tool others commented on the limitations of canva but wait
what's what's this here I've been a designer for 30 years canva works extremely efficiently
for templated items or things that are just built similar using the same basic elements if you have
other skills it can still be an extremely useful tool and then there's this we should not get our
mind stuck on the tools we are designers and well we design what tool we use is irrelevant if it
gets the job done fast and efficiently see that's the thing a canva is a tool much like illustrator
Photoshop it probably has a time and a place now if you're working for a company that needs to kind
of Smash out quick cheap social media banners they might prefer that you work on canva simply
because of their quick access to those templates and you will just bash out the designs real fast
time is money to a lot of businesses however you cannot design a highly functional Vector
logo inside of canva well not yet anyway but the plot thickens on canvas websites they boast about
many different situations where big brands have used canva to grow and expand their business one
of their success stories is a fitness brand Orange Theory now it states how the social media manager
Jessica Fong worked prior to canva individual Studios would email the marketing team with
a specific request and the marketing team would actually triage requests and submit to the design
team designers would create whatever was needed it would be approved and it would be delivered to the
studios sounds like a perfectly normal business and design situation if you ask me Studios were
creating their own assets and had a lack of brand knowledge that was diluting our image
there was a lack of consistency on their social channels she says not good for business Jessica
not good at all so apparently Orange Theory needed a tool that could support the company's continuous
growth it wasn't really where we wanted to put our resources we had a top-notch creative team and we
wanted to use their skills in Creative campaigns and bigger initiatives Fong says so they picked
up canva they rolled out their plan and their business grew did it work that's the thing did
it actually work their Twitter account has over 60 000 followers yet the posts have a pretty low
engagement rate considering their somewhat large following so there might be something
a bit lackluster with the templates on canva and the end Solutions and engagement in the audience
on the other end but here's another example from their success stories meets Ray White and his real
estate brand let's just kick back and watch this video for a moment we're a big Network we have
843 give or take offices in Australia 250 people take in New Zealand and so for a network of that
scale we could quite easily lose that power of consistency canva is one of those tools which
enables us to really drive the consistency home yeah that's something these big Brands often
talk about when talking about canva and that is consistency my thing is that a high level designer
or design agency will understand consistency in a project anyway so yeah but let's keep watching
from an efficiency perspective we can create a template and distribute it to our greater
Network within a drop of our hair so for us to be able to do that very quickly especially when
markets change or even when seasons change us to be able to be really Nimble and to be able
to create really great campaigns and censor Network really easily is a big benefit to us
the sharing of specific templates to specific teams within our greater network is obviously a
big one for us because we have multiple businesses within one business we're able to allocate a
commercial based template to the commercial team a residential template to our residential
team and okay let's pause it here a minute so that's something we can see right here that's
a canva design and yes it is very basic it's just an image of some kind of bland basic font
but it's functional the design is functional and it was made very quickly indeed and again that
comes back to the business and what they want they obviously are going for consistency and
time they want to make the best of their time or do things as quickly as possible
or even if it's for our state corporate teams we can then give recognition and
also community-based events based on the state that they're located in
so that ability to be able to share to those specific teams within our team is a really
important feature for us and basically that's what it comes down to is functionality and speed
canva is going to be useful to some businesses in some situations but to others not so much so
but it does look like canva has some really big plans in the works they've got their own space
they're rolling out AI across their entire design software they have a visual suite and I'm sure
there are more things to come in that pipeline the question is are they going to stay in their Niche
that being quick designs using templates that even non-designers can pick up and use or are
they going to Branch out to more complicated Tools in their Creative Suite but do you use canva or do
you know somebody that does use canva I'd love to hear comments in the comment section below about
this topic and also what you thought of today's video but if you want to learn something the canva
can't do just click the video on screen and until next time design your future today peace foreign
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