I am a Canva Convert

As an ex-Canva-obsessed marketing student, I never thought I would grow accustomed to the big scary world of Adobe Illustrator without taking university courses in graphic design. It seemed daunting, and I didn’t think I would be able to grasp the software. Canva had so many ‘user-friendly’ (as I thought at the time) tools, so why would I want to leave that comfort zone?

Madi Verstoep, our beloved marketing intern.

For small projects, such as my invoices and short slide decks for university class presentations, Canva can be a wonderful tool that takes little to no effort. The biggest issue I see now: very little individuality. So many of my friends that I went to school with have the same resume template, and similar invoices, and there were even identical slide decks for presentations in class. If it takes individuality in the world today, how do I expect to stand out if others have access to the exact same templates as I do? I want to be different and allow employers to see me as a unique asset to their team, and that impression begins with the digital media I present to them before they get to meet me. On top of the lack of individuality, I have learned so much about the drawbacks that Canva presents to business owners and how Canva holds rights to the logos that are created using their software. How scary is it to think that someone else owns your creative and intellectual property?!

It has become a trend in the graphic design world of TikTok to make extremely fast-paced videos of ‘Canva hacks’ that cannot be followed and replicated because they go so quickly, use so many back-end tricks and even embed CODE. Most of us little guys haven’t taken code classes, so to expect the demographic who use a site like Canva to write code to create something unique isn’t exactly user-friendly.

All this being said Canva is great to get your toes wet in graphic design; to gain a vision of what good graphics can look like. It allowed me to see how arranging fonts, layering graphics and PNGs and playing with colour combinations can work.

Try a free trial on Illustrator and you’ll never look back!