Creating with Canva is amazingly easy & their story is inspiring

…and the company has
a beautiful entrepreneurial story

For years I ignored Canva. I figured since I used other design software, Paintshop Pro, at once time, Photoscape more recently and Adobe Photoshop and all her Adobe friends and a number of other design apps I’ve downloaded to my phone over the years, there was no need to dabble in another design app.

Sunny Lenarduzzi & Canva

Then, towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I was watching a lot of Sunny Lenarduzzi videos and she constantly spoke about how she designed all her social media posts on Canva and how easy it was.

I didn’t act on it at the time. Then around July this year, I was working on a new project and I wanted to develop lots of social media posts quickly. Canva suddenly came to mind. I set up an account and loved it so much that I instantly upgraded to the pro account.

Canva Speeds Design Up

Not only does it do social media posts that are the right size and aspect ratio for each social media platform, but you can also design logos (it’s currently my preferred logo design app), business cards, flyers, posters, t-shirts, graphs, charts, YouTube intros, lesson plans, presentations, greeting cards, etc, etc. It’s absolutely incredible.

And you can start any of these designs with a template. There are MILLIONS of templates to choose from.

I cannot believe how far we’ve come with all of this. There was a time when it was NOT POSSIBLE to have an online app be faster, more reliable, AND easier to use than a desktop app. Canva ticks all those boxes.

Another feature I love is the ability to export your design in various formats including video or transparent PNG! Yup.

Direct to Social

Then they just recently released a feature where you can automatically post to your social media accounts from Canva! So you don’t need to download your graphics first before uploading them.

You can also schedule posts so that Canva now also acts as a social media scheduler.

The Canva Story

Now, obviously, once I fell in love with the app, I HAD to find out who was behind it? What was the story that led to this amazingly intuitive design tool? And, as usual, when something works well, there is quite a story behind it.

Canva was started by Melanie Perkins (32 years old in January 2020) in Sydney, Australia. It is now valued at $3,2Bn dollars and competes with top players in the industry like Adobe and Microsoft.

Melanie started the company in 2013. She told CNBC “Our goal was to take the entire design ecosystem, integrate it into one page, and then make it accessible to the whole world.”

At university, Perkins used to teach fellow students how to use design apps, but they found them really hard. She was 19 when the idea first struck her.

“People would have to spend an entire semester learning where the buttons were, and that seemed completely ridiculous. I thought that in the future it was all going to be online and collaborative and much, much simpler than these really hard tools.”
– Melani Perkins in CNBC interview

With her boyfriend, Cliff Obrecht, she set out to make it happen.

They started off by building an online app that made it easy for schools in Australia to create their year books online. That venture was a success and is still running today.

Melanie still wanted to pursue this big dream of making design easy and accessible.

A Silicon Valley investor, Bill Tai, told her that if she came out to Silicon Valley he would meet with her. She did. He did. And a business relationship began.

Trivia: Investors include Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson.

Videos

CNBC Make It Feature
782,604 views on Mon Oct 5, 2020, 1415hrs
Posted 7 Jan 2020
12,000 Thumbs Ups
388 Thumbs Downs

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Interview with Guy Raz on How I Built This
5,185 views on Mon Oct 5, 2020, 1418hrs
Streamed live on 27 May 2020
49 Thumbs Ups
4 Thumbs Downs

 

Links

• Canva – Our Story
• CNBC- How a 32-year-old turned a high school yearbook idea into a $3.2 billion business
• The CEO Magazine- How Canva became one of the most successful start-up unicorns in history

 

Clippings