How Canva Became The Home of Everything

In the span of about two years, Canva went from being a nice to have tool to a cornerstone in marketing, design, and even productivity. Here’s how.

Canva’s opening days were, at best, mediocre. It’s main spin was that of a browser-only, simplified photoshop — its use of a grid-alignment feature made it a bit nicer than something like PaintNet or Gimp, but it still didn’t have any strategic benefit over any other grid-aligned design tool such as Adobe XD, Figma, or even Google Slides (which I’ll admit, back in the day I used for most of my design needs). And if you did want something more painterly, or aligned with a photo editor, then Canva still didn’t do better than the PaintNet/Gimp combo. It was the worst of both worlds.

But slowly, over time, Canva was building its competitive advantage — something that would allow it to leapfrog its competitors and establish itself as a legitimate design powerhouse. Something that much of their competition — including the seemingly invincible Adobe — would attempt to copy with little to no luck, because by the time they got there the moat was just too wide.

I’m talking about templates and Elements.

You see, while Canva by itself is a relatively dull design tool, its ability to seamlessly add in content from around the internet — free stock photos, videos, fonts, and icons — makes it a one-stop shop. Back in the day, you’d have to manually search through stock images or fonts on various websites to find exactly what you were looking for, then download them, then put them into the designer, and if you ended up not liking the stock then you’d have to start right back from the drawing board. With Canva you simply type what you’re looking for into its universal Element search, scroll through the results, drag in a few you might like, and everything just works ™️.

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But one problem for most is that starting from a blank slate is still hard, no matter how many tools you have at your disposal. It’s true that you could use references, but these too you’d have to download, and without the original project file you’d mostly have to guess how they put it all together to begin with.

This is where Canva’s templates come in.

You see, templates have always been a thing in design tools — premade projects that showcase how the software is used. The historical problem with these templates is that 1) they’re mostly used for educational purposes and not design references, and 2) they’re made by the developer themselves and therefore not very scalable to large numbers. But given Canva’s cloud-based approach, they came at templates from a different angle: incentivize Canva power users to “open source” their designs, and upload them as templates for any user to have as a starting point. This one simple strategy has allowed them to 10x the number of workable templates they have versus the next best competitor (probably Adobe).

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Indeed, Canva’s core strength comes from its mission to organize the (design) world’s information — a feat that seems simple in concept but in execution is difficult, which is probably a good reason why other competitors haven’t caught up. Canva succeeded in stealthily achieving a throne for itself, hiding its true power by being a boring design tool on the surface while on the backend it build up huge repository of free-to-use assets. Now, one question remains: what’s in store for Canva’s future.

And when it comes to Canva’s future, we of course have to talk about AI. Canva came out swinging during its internal conference a few years ago, praising AI as its “next act” alongside adding a new section of its Element search: Apps, or on-site integrations that usually have something to do with an AI power.

To be honest, Canva’s AI powers have converted the editor — AKA the actual tool — into something that might very well overtake its open source opposition. Background remover works like a charm, and so does erase and move — things that are all very beneficial to have inside a design app. The problem is that this sort of functionality can be done by any sort of open image AI, and it really only takes a software studio to attach that AI to their already existing service for them to gain those features. Adobe’s already done this, and certain free image software such as GIMP and Krita have third-party plugins that allow you to connect local models. It’s just not the same sort of moat, even if it does (usually) play well with its Elements.

But wait! I did mention that, beyond Canva’s in-house AI elements, it also created a new sector of Elements specifically for third-party AI tools [1]. This is where things could get interesting. Just as Canva outsourced design assets, and templates, it believes it could do the same with features, which is honestly a bold move that may solidify its lead. I’m staying away from mentioning too much on the Apps because, to be honest, I haven’t use much beyond the Google Drive and AI Upscale tool — but this is also its fastest growing section, and its worth keeping eyes on.

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AI’s not the only thing Canva’s cooking up, however. In the same WWDC ripoff, Canva also announced that it was working on two extensions of the design app: whiteboards and docs.

Honestly, I’m not going to talk about docs. I’ve used docs maybe once ever, and I really could not understand the use case beyond doing the exact same thing in the design editor. Though perhaps this is more reminiscent of the design editor’s early days, and they have plans to greatly expand this, for now I remain skeptical.

I won’t say the same, however, for the whiteboard feature. I’m honestly not sure why it seems so hard to make an infinite canvas — most other solutions such as Milannote and Miro have limited features that even then are locked under paid subscriptions. But Canva’s whiteboards has everything I would want out of an infinite canvas and more — the ability to plop down any Element or upload without restriction, as well as being able to use all the other design features natively in the whiteboard. This is where the “productivity” part from the first paragraph comes in — I love using infinite canvas to explore thoughts and plans, and Canva has easily created the place to do it.

And while Canva is in a net positive place, and remains my number one choice for design, not everything is roses. I think the number one concern for Canva at this point is that they try biting off too much — getting too confident about their success in design and trying to hop to other semi-related fields that require a lot more work or different approaches. We already talked about docs, but Canva’s video editor is — to put it bluntly — their worst feature by far. It is riddled with bugs and errors mostly due to its creation being just a Frankenstein appendage of the design editor. Kapwing — who has even described themselves as “the Canva of video” — is a much better solution, and even then they have often run into issues with the rather tricky and new process of cloud rendering. And while Canva has not yet made moves here, I think the same would be said if they tried to compete with photo editing or more “painterly” design apps such as Procreate or Krita. Canva’s photo editing is rather sparse and mostly relies around old design-tool workarounds rather than real editing tools (though to be fair, perhaps Apps can help with that) and Canva’s design editor is absolutely not built to handle any painter tools. Yet as I’ve addressed throughout this article, Canva’s future is a net positive — and it stays my design tool of choice, even over more traditional tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Designer [2].

[1] – Apps isn’t really for AI, but obviously its main strategic benefit is the ability to outsource improvements to the design tool, and at this point that usually means AI.

[2] – The latter of which Canva recently bought, for some strange reason. But that’s the topic of a different article.

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