Ben Guttmann
I remember the first time a client asked us for a Canva template. It was 2020, and I was frankly a little annoyed – you were hiring us to be professionals, why do you want us to use an “amateur” tool?
In retrospect, I was wrong to be peeved by this ask. There’s a time and a place for a tool like Canva. But I still don’t actually find myself recommending it to most people I speak to. And I still don’t use it myself.
Canva was founded in 2013, but consumer-grade design software has been around for decades. Most millennials remember messing around with MS Paint at least once (and probably hundreds of times) in the 90s. If you were fancy, you had a copy of Kid Pix, which I remember mostly for the vivid, parent-annoying sound effects.
I did some of my first real design work in Broderbund’s The Print Shop. I don’t recall how this CD ended up in our house, but I used it for everything: flyers, brochures, CD labels, and anything else I could spit out from our little inkjet printer. At just ten years old, I even designed and published my first ever website using their primitive web design tools.
The Print Shop was accessible. It let me play with fonts and colors, drop in clip art, and tinker with spacing. But it didn’t have a thousand menu items and jargony terms, and everything was easy enough for a literal fifth grader to figure out. Only because of this experience did I eventually graduate to the scarier Adobe and Macromedia platforms of the “professional” world. Decades later, I’m grateful for this on-ramp—I wouldn’t have had my career (in design and beyond) without it.
This brings us back to Canva, today’s spiritual successor to The Print Shop. Canva allows a lot of people to make a lot of stuff that looks pretty good. Will the Pentagrams and IDEOs of the world be using for multi-million-dollar engagements? No. But most people aren’t Pentagram and IDEO. Most people just want an Instagram post that looks cute for their dog-walking side hustle. Maybe one day, some of those people like doing that type of thing so much that they do eventually level up.
I meet many designers who scoff at Canva. And I love designers, but these are often the same ones who feel they need to make a joke about Comic Sans in every other conversation. They care about their image as designers more than doing design that solves problems.
Falling in love with a tool is a dangerous thing. Over and over again, with each technology cycle, I’ve seen people identify themselves with the tools they use instead of the work they do. We had legions of Flash designers, and then Apple killed Flash and put them all out of work. We had Drupal and Joomla development shops, some of which pivoted to WordPress as that platform took over. And now I see people brag about being a Webflow studio or a Shopify partner.
Through each era, one thing stayed the same: the end user doesn’t give a hoot. And most of the time, the clients in the middle didn’t care that much either.
You don’t care what kind of wrench your plumber uses; you care that the pipes don’t leak. You don’t care what brand of range the restaurant has; you care that your dinner tastes good. Bragging that you use Figma or Photoshop, instead of Canva, for your work is the same thing. At the point of consumption, people care about the results, not so much how you got there.
And if Canva is the way you get there, so be it.
But I still said before that I don’t use it, and I don’t find myself recommending it. Why?
Part of that is bias: I speak to a lot of young and aspiring design professionals, and thus, I find myself recommending the professional tools. If you want to make it in a competitive agency, and generally, if you want to solve big problems in big arenas, you need to master how the game is played in those spaces. And today, that still largely means plunking down for an Adobe license. Canva is just not what the design industry uses at this level, and it’s vital that you can work with other designers in the way that they are already working.
The other reason is related to the output. Consciously or unconsciously, our tools shape the things we make with them. And tech writer Joan Westenberg recently put words to something I’ve been seeing a lot of in the last couple years: “The Canva-ification of everything.”
With everybody having the same access to the platform’s prebuilt templates, color palettes, stock assets, and typefaces, everything ends up looking a little too samey. Here’s how Westenberg describes the issue:
“But while Canva has unlocked design for the masses, an unintended consequence has been the dulling of creativity into a uniform “Canva aesthetic.” Because the app makes it so easy to create competent designs, much of its 55 million-strong user base simply relies on the platform’s most popular templates and elements. The result is a visual sameness wherever Canva designs show up, as if the world has been blanketed by an army of aspiring graphic designers who all graduated from the same school.”
Every tool leaves an impression on the work you make with it, but I think Canva’s fingerprints are deeper than Figma’s or InDesign’s. Most things made in Canva look like they were made in Canva. Which, while that’s again fine for your bake sale, it might not be OK for your brand.
You might have come across this article looking for a list of the pros and cons of using a particular piece of software, and I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’m not here to tell you which tool is the best and which is the worst. People make stunning and effective designs in Microsoft Excel. People make ugly and unworkable UI in Figma. People write dreadful books using fancy apps like Scrivener, and others write masterpieces on a discarded legal pad. I’ve had flavorless meals at expensive restaurants, while some of the best food I’ve ever eaten came from a disposable aluminum pan.
Don’t get distracted by the tool. A good paintbrush doesn’t make a good painter.
