Free design platform targets all
Easy, high quality, and free for anyone, anywhere, to use” is the thrust of online design platform Canva (canva.com). In a span of 13 months, the startup from Australia, which is a web-based design program that doubles as an image marketplace, has signed up 870,000 online users to create and/or collaborate on 6.2 million designs—the last 1.7 million in the last two months alone. Users draw from a curated repository of more than one million graphics, photos, and fonts, each tagged at only $1.
“We want to have everyone in the world to be able to use it…without price being a barrier,” says Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO, who is seeing her dream of democratizing design bear fruit. “I love that egalitarian aspect, how it’s not about your being able to afford the tools, or your being able to invest in years of learning visuals—it’s just about your [creative] ability.”
Apart from designers, Perkins says that Canva has been popular with bloggers, marketers, and small businesses, because the platform allows them to collaborate more easily with clients. Businesses from across all industries use Canva, she says, to design marketing materials, presentations, pictures, and client proposals, among others. All permutations of design—layout, photography and illustration, color psychology, font and typography selection and pairing, even branding—can be explored using Canva.
Creatives can also contribute their work to the archives, getting royalties every time an image or graphic is sold. Because it’s priced a low $1, versus the traditional stock fee of $10 to $50, users have access to a lot more photos, and providers get more orders. “It means that people are purchasing way more stock photography than normal. Rather than do 20 images that your whole company is using over and over again, [you] are purchasing many images a day. So it completely changes the dynamic,” says Perkins.
Canva’s big vision has always been to make it easy for everyone to turn an idea into a design. And so they engaged in extensive user testing and continuous, ubiquitous user education. “We wanted to build people’s confidence so they could jump in… because people feel so intimidated by design programs, and we wanted to completely change that,” says Perkins of engaging neophytes, while earning points for convenience from professional designers. “Designers can be designing presentation layouts, and the client can go in and change the text... [It has] become a lot simpler for the designers to be able to collaborate in ways they haven’t been able to do before,” she adds.
Perkins, with co-founders Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, launched Canva in August 2013, spinning off from Perkins and Obrecht’s earlier success with online design system Fusion Books. This time around, the founders took every opportunity to get the best people onboard. For instance, Guy Kawasaki, formerly of Apple, is their chief evangelist. In their first round of funding, they snagged $3 million from top Australian and U.S. investors, including Lars Rasmussen, director of engineering at Facebook and founder of Google Maps. Earlier in July, their second round, they raised an additional $3.6 million.
“Design is infiltrating every single industry,” says Perkins, “it is already becoming the centerpiece of everyone’s profession.” Creating engaging visual content is not just a concern of big brands but also smaller ones with a lower purchasing power. “[Canva] is really catering to the new economy,” she says.
Originally published in the November 2014 issue of Entrepreneur Philippines.
Photo of Melanie Perkins by Jonathan Baldonado.