Design Studio or Canva?

In which instances can the free app replace a professional graphic designer?

Canva, an online graphic design tool, owes its growing popularity to its ease of use, simple interface and ready-to-use templates. It is used by people in marketing, sales, business in general, as well as by private individuals who create graphics for personal use – in a word, by those who do not design on a daily basis. Among them, the question often arises: can Canva be an alternative to a professional graphic studio?

There are certainly projects and use-cases where using Canva is ideal. Usually ad hoc, ‘on the fly’ graphics, documents with dynamically changing data or templates where only text or photos are replaced in a ready-made formula. It helps the client to speed up the delivery process, providing savings both financially and time-wise. However, it is worth bearing in mind that this tool has its limitations.

Genericity
When using the Canva creator, one must take into account that the theme they chose has already been used and repeated many times. According to statistics, by the end of 2022 Canva had 110 million monthly users, and the number is still growing. The internal image bank is getting larger every month, but is still limited. On top of this, there are licensing restrictions on using Canva images in projects created outside Canva. If you want to use the same image both in a banner in Canva and in a flyer prepared for printing by a graphic design studio, that might be difficult.

Unlike the work of a professional graphic designer, where every element of the design, such as the font, colours, shapes, images, the whole visual language are carefully thought out and tailored to a given audience, the graphics created in Canva re-use ready-made solutions instead of coming up with something fresh and original. You will not be able to develop a broad visual system for the brand in Canva, nor will you be able to create a graphic identity that makes you stand out.

Print
While Canva provides a number of templates to help design flyers, business cards or brochures, the option to prepare a document for print is severely limited. Providing users with option to upload logos in the CMYK colour space or ability to define brand colours is a big help for professionals, but a person without a technical background may get lost.

Appropriate setting of bleeds, colour mode, printing marks – these are the parameters necessary to obtain a correct print, so if you care about high quality, it is worth asking professionals for help.

What you should know
Creating branding, brand identity and marketing materials is an important part of the overall brand communication strategy. Most professional designers have the experience and knowledge to select the typeface, colours, layout and style appropriate for the project. Knowledge of design principles like rhythm, contrast, balance between elements helps to create concise and consistent communication.

Using Canva increases the risk of the company looking similar to others who also design in Canva. By outsourcing your graphic design to a professional graphic designer, you can tailor the creative message to your audience, creating a personalised brand language.

Apart from the aspect of originality and uniqueness, the quality and correctness of the creation is an important issue. Canva is definitely more screen-friendly than print-friendly. Printed documents require high-resolution images, bleeds and appropriate colour profiles, adjusted according to the requirements of the printer and the printing technique.

The golden mean
Graphics studios and agencies should not see Canva as a threat, but as a tool that perfectly solves the problem of preparing templates for their client’s in-house marketing or communications departments. Until now, the software has been a barrier – support for professional Adobe CC applications on the client side is rare. Canva fills this gap, allowing designers to prepare materials in such a way that client representatives can modify, update and reproduce them, in a reasonable range.

Thus, professional graphic designers design the brand’s logo, style and visual language, and then prepare a set of materials – logotype files, a brand book with example implementations. On this basis, they develop templates in Canva, which they pass on to the client for further processing, exercising only artistic control over compliance with the principles of the brand’s visual language and providing technical and stylistic advice.

As a graphic design studio, we have prepared many templates in Canva for our clients. This included, for example, a presentation of the free space in offices managed by our client. Instead of having to ask us for update each time a tenant has changed, they were able to change the values of the available square metres and even the colours of the spaces on each floor themselves, in Canva. We locked several graphic elements in the presentation, so that only those that were intended to be changed by the client were available for editing.

We also prepared a series of templates for social media posts in which the fixed elements were locked, but it was easy to change the contextual photo or text. We have also produced headers for urgent email newsletters, where the client only changed the title and then exported the whole thing to an image file, which was then used as a graphic element in mass mailing tools.

However, all this is only possible if there is already a base created. The prerequisite is to have a well-designed brand identity, which cannot be developed in Canva. We also certainly advise against creating new brand-related projects in this tool – Canva is not a replacement for graphic design applications, although it complements them perfectly.

We hope this post will help you clear up the ‘Canva or graphic studio’ dilemma 🙂

If you need ready-to-use templates in Canva, created invidually and in line with your brand, email us at studio@wedesign.pl.