Tag: Canva

Australia – Global visual communication platform Canva has announced the acquisition of design platform Affinity. The acquisition significantly bolsters Canva’s vision to build the world’s most comprehensive suite of visual communication tools. 

While the last decade has seen rapid growth for Canva amongst a large chunk of knowledge workers without design training, the integration of Affinity’s professional design software now unlocks the full spectrum of designers at every level and stage of the design journey.

Moreover, as visual communication becomes the status quo in teams and organisations around the world, the acquisition also accelerates Canva’s enterprise ambitions, unlocking a future where professional designers can craft designs and templates with Affinity to scale across organizations with Canva.

Designed for the latest hardware and packed with features to simplify real-life professional workflows, Affinity’s all-inclusive photo editing, graphic design and desktop publishing products serve as a powerful, cost effective and subscription-free solution for photographers and designers requiring versatility and precision. 

Canva will continue to invest in the Affinity suite to ensure it not only meets the needs of professional designers, but also enhances their experiences and empowers them to do their best work. Together, Canva and Affinity will be a powerhouse combination built to supercharge the goals of every type of designer.

Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and COO at Canva, said, “Visual communication is now ubiquitous in the workplace and investing in strategies that enhance our B2B offerings is core to the future of our business. From sales and marketing to brand and creative teams, the need to create effective and engaging visual content is on the rise. The Affinity team comes with an incredible caliber of talent and technology, and we’re delighted to welcome them to Canva as we enter our next phase together.”

Meanwhile, Ashley Hewson, CEO of Affinity, commented, “Since the inception of Affinity, our mission has been to empower creatives with tools that unleash their full potential, fostering a community where innovation and artistry flourish. We’ve worked tirelessly to challenge the status quo, delivering professional-grade creative software that is both accessible and affordable. Canva’s commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with those values. We couldn’t be more excited about becoming part of the Canva family and can’t wait to see what we will achieve together.”

Sydney, Australia – Canva, today’s top all-in-one visual communication platform, has announced a new suite of brand management features and AI-powered design tools, built to help teams and organizations of all shapes and sizes to communicate visually and produce content at scale. 

“Ten years ago, we launched Canva driven by a vision to empower everyone to design anything, no matter their skills or experience,” said Canva Co-founder and CEO, Melanie Perkins. “Today, we’re thrilled to advance that vision by introducing a whole new range of features, focused on empowering brands to scale their creative outputs. As technology continues to advance, we are reimagining the design process by making it even easier to take what is in your head, get it onto a page, and out into the world, faster than ever before.”

At its most recent ‘Canva Create’, the platform’s dedicated event for announcing new product features, it has unveiled the new ‘Brand Hub’. 

Canva says the new range of tools and features was developed out of the augmented demand it saw for teams to produce incredibly high volumes of content which are often targeted at a global scale. May it be social media graphics to presentations or video content to documents, the visual communications imperative is at an all-time high, says Canva. 

The platform expands the capabilities of the Visual Suite with ‘Brand Hub’, specifically aimed at helping teams and organizations create with efficiency and stay on brand.

To serve as ‘the home for every brand’, Canva’s ‘Brand Hub’ offers the following: 

  • Brand Kit: Allows teams to create a Brand Kit with the right assets in their immediate arsenals such as logos, colours, fonts, icons, imagery, graphics, and brand guidelines.
  • Magic Replace: Allows teams to instantly update brand assets across one’s entire company with a single click.
  • Brand Templates: Allows teams to design and share Brand Templates for them to quickly create on-brand, compelling content. 
  • Brand Folders: Allows teams to set up Brand Folders to keep branding organized and accessible. 
  • Brand Guidelines: Allows an organisation’s brand guidelines to be automatically and contextually surfaced within the Canva Editor. 
  • Brand Controls: Allows teams to set brand controls and gain the confidence that they are always designing on-brand content. Admins are able to limit fonts and colours, eliminating the need to check hex codes or look out for unapproved fonts.
  • Approval Workflows: Allows admins can use approval workflows directly in Canva, ensuring designs are reviewed and approved before being published.

Aside from the new ‘Brand Hub’, Canva is also supercharging its Visual Suite by unveiling a collection of new AI-powered tools that aim to accelerate the design process whilst unlocking unprecedented capabilities. 

The new features are as follows: 

  • Magic Design: Simply upload an image then select a style, and Magic Design will create a curated selection of personalised templates ready for download to further customize. 
  • Magic Edit: Add or replace anything in an image. Identify where to add something, describe it to Magic Edit, and watch as it appears.
  • Magic Eraser: Clean up unwanted details in images with Magic Eraser. Brush over the area and watch as the distraction is magically removed. 
  • Magically generate new Presentations: Prompt the editor and watch as Magic Design generates a range of presentations with an outline and content on each slide.
  • Canva Assistant: Unlock the best of Canva with the tap of a button. Search for eye-catching elements, get recommendations for images and layouts, or generate custom AI content to elevate your designs.
  • Beat Sync: Automatically match video footage to the soundtrack.
  • Translate: With the click of a button, automatically translate the text in designs to over 100 different languages. 
  • Magic Write: Create content from a simple text prompt in seconds. Canva’s AI-powered copywriting assistant is now available across the entire Visual Suite including Presentations, Videos, and Websites.

Furthermore to the new ‘Brand Hub’ and AI-powered visual suite, Canva is debuting an array of highly requested features from its global community as well as sprinkling ‘extra magic’ into existing ones.

Here’s the list of the new capabilities:

  • Draw: Allows for freehand drawing, underlines, or annotations. 
  • Layouts: Allows to add content to a page and be recommended layout ideas for a design. 
  • Styles: Allows to develop a signature look and feel by matching current designs to previous work. Users may find inspiration by browsing suggested colour palettes and font pairings. 
  • Layers: Allows to adjust elements without affecting other parts of designs. Users can see all elements in one place – whether it’s text, shapes, images or video.
  • Gradients: Allows to quickly add gradients to any background, shape, table cell, or frame. 
  • Precision Position Tools: Allows to customise positioning, alignment, spacing, and sizing with ease. Users can select one or several elements, then open the new Position panel and customize everything from one place. 
  • Alt Text: Allows to create alt text for media, images and elements that describe what’s happening, providing extra context for those with visual impairment or accessibility needs. 
  • Smart Design Imports: Allows to drag and drop any file straight into the editor to transform it into an editable Canva design. Design Imports are now easier, faster, and more precise than ever. 
  • 953 New Fonts: 953 of the world’s most popular fonts are now available including Arial, Avenier, Courier, Helvetica, and Times New Roman.

Canva has been continuously bolstering its capabilities with customised value propositions for every type of creator. Just within the same month, the platform has also launched a new subscription offering for college universities. 

Called ‘Canva for Campus’, all college and university institutions across the globe can now obtain free access to Canva for their students when they begin purchasing Canva for Campus licenses for staff.

Sydney, Australia – Global visual communications platform Canva has unveiled new suite of workplace products to empower anyone to communicate visually, on any device, from anywhere in the world. The new products were announced during Canva’s latest global event, ‘Canva Create Conference’.

The new workplace product suite includes ‘Docs’, which makes traditional text documents more visually appealing, while also including key collaboration features like comments and real time collaboration; ‘Websites’, which has responsive professional-level website templates, customizable domains and adjustable page heights; ‘Whiteboards’, which comes with a range of features designed for brainstorming and team collaboration, from sticky notes to images and diagrams; and ‘Flourish’, which makes it possible to turn dense data and statistics into simple, clear and easy to understand interactive data visualisations.

Other products include ‘Video Background Remover’, ‘Remote Control for Presentations’ and an expansion of its ‘Print’ feature, which allows anyone can print more than 35 products through Canva Print and have it delivered to their doorstep in record time. This includes everything from invitations to flyers, photo books and hoodies, mugs posters, and much more.

Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO at Canva, said, “Visual communication is becoming an increasingly critical skill for teams of every size across almost every industry. It has been incredible to see the continued growth of Canva over the last few years, as more and more people embrace the power of visual communication to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals.” 

She added, “With the launch of our new Visual Worksuite, we’re bringing simple design products to the workplace to empower every employee, at every organisation and on every device.”

Canva’s new visual worksuite comes as the company marks the milestone of more than 85 million global users. As enterprise usage soars throughout a variety of professions and industries, Canva is rapidly becoming the design platform of choice in the workplace.

Manila, Philippines – Global visual communications platform Canva has launched ‘Canva Whiteboards’, a new and collaborative way to seamlessly organise ideas and bring them to life. This is available for free on the web, desktop, and mobile.

From workshopping projects to project planning and brainstorming, Canva Whiteboards is a simple and interactive way to map out big ideas with all the familiarity of the Canva editor. It offers seamless integration with Canva Presentations, which allows users to expand their page to a Canva Whiteboard with a simple click of a button — creating an infinite space for brainstorming, and real-time collaboration, which empowers users to capture ideas and brainstorm with their team instantly, as well as extensive media library, which enables users to access to Canva’s media library of over 100 million images, videos, audio tracks, and graphics.

Melanie Perkins, CEO and co-founder of Canva, shared that after more than a year of development, they are excited to launch Canva Whiteboards to the world – bringing the power the community knows and loves about Canva and enabling them to collaborate with their team on an infinite canvas

“In this day and age with teams working worlds apart, we believe the right visual communication tools will not only help teams come together with ease but will also fuel greater collaboration and productivity in the workplace. This is at the heart of Whiteboards, and we’re excited to see the magic it will unlock for our community around the world,” said Perkins.

Canva has also unveiled Canva for Teams, a new paid subscription plan for teams of all sizes looking to create professional content together and collaborate with premium workplace tools and content management workflows.

The new subscription plan includes all the magic previously in Canva Pro and unlocks features exclusively on Canva for Enterprise, to become the new plan for teams of two or more people. It includes features like brand controls, approval workflows, and template locking. With the rollout of Canva for Teams, Canva Pro is now Canva’s paid subscription for solo users like entrepreneurs and content creators. 

Jen Howard, VP of Canva for Teams, said, “As companies embrace flexible and hybrid-working models, there’s an increasing reliance on technology to communicate and collaborate. In today’s visual economy, workplaces need compelling ways to meet the needs of globally distributed teams. Canva for Teams, our new paid subscription plan, is built to empower millions around the world to seamlessly create and collaborate together.” 

Meanwhile, Yani Hornilla-Donato, country manager of Canva Philippines, commented that they are happy to unveil both Canva Whiteboards and Canva for Teams in the Philippines as they continue to empower content creators, entrepreneurs, and teams of all sizes to collaborate at scale, wherever they may be.

“With Filipinos going digital now more than ever, Canva Whiteboards will be instrumental in bringing any team’s ideas to life while the introduction of Canva for Teams will empower businesses with an all-in-one design tool they need in creating impactful content,” said Hornilla-Donato.

Auckland, New Zealand – Digital out-of-home (DOOH) provider LUMO Digital Outdoor has forged a partnership with visual communications platform Canva to launch ‘Billboards For Good’, an initiative that supplies New Zealand-based charities with free outdoor campaign activation.

The Canva design team will supply creative and design support and LUMO has provided inventory across LED screens in Auckland, Tauranga, Hamilton, Christchurch and Wellington.

To kickstart said initiative, LUMO and Canva’s first beneficiary will be Voices of Hope, a charity breaking the stigma around mental illness to decrease suicide rates, the first to benefit from the partnership. The initiative will officially start at the end of February.

Hamish Smith, chief marketing officer at LUMO says he hopes this initiative inspires others in the ad industry to use the power of media for good by making the important work of not-for-profit organisations more visible. 

“We are approached on an almost daily basis by charities and non-for-profits at LUMO.Through our own recent charity initiatives we’ve come to realise how valuable and powerful billboards are when it comes to making a difference,” Smith said.

He added, “These organisations are often understaffed and lack resources; as such they struggle to deliver great creative to make these campaigns effective. So, it was only natural Canva got on board to help these groups deliver great creative and get in front of wider audiences. For us it’s about being able to help raise awareness and provide support to the community how we can, and this partnership gives us another opportunity to do that.”

The partnership is the latest initiative from LUMO Digital Outdoor, a long-time supporter of-not-for-profit organisations. The outdoor media company has supported over 30 charities over the last 12 months promoting messages of awareness and fundraising drives across their nationwide network of 41 screens. 

Robyn King, head of social impact at Canva, commented, “We’re excited to partner with LUMO to support some amazing, yet under-resourced, local non-profits by leveraging Canva’s unique design skills to create campaign assets for the Billboards for Good initiative. One of Canva’s guiding values is ‘to be a force for good’ and we hope this is the first of many collaborations to help shine a light on a range of worthy causes and amplify the impact of nonprofits.”

Manila, Philippines — As part of the Valentine’s Day celebrations, Canva Philippines has launched the #SayItSaCanva campaign, which brings users a series of love-themed templates and elements to help Filipinos express their love through creative content.

Canva’s campaign is still in line with the current challenges of the pandemic that gave people limited channels to show gestures of love. The newly released Valentine’s Day themed templates are meant to help Filipinos express their love in different formats whether that is through videos, presentations, social media posts, and more.

Yani Hornilla-Donato, the Philippines’ country manager for Canva, said that while the pandemic has affected our physical bonds, this doesn’t mean that it should also restrict us from sharing our love and appreciation for our loved ones.

“Canva’s mission is to empower the world to design, and we found this opportunity for Filipinos to express themselves in a creative and unique way through our engaging tools and resources; Canva wants people to share their stories and ‘Say It Sa Canva’. We want to enable Filipinos to share what’s in their heart, not just this February but all year-round with a diverse content library for all the milestones you want to commemorate and the feelings you want to celebrate,” Donato said.

All the special content for Valentine’s Day will be found in the Content Hub (public.canva.site/say-it-sa-canva) for the convenience of the platform users. The menu centre offers an array of unique content one for each beloved namely significant other, family, best friend, yourself, among others.

Canva’s campaign also features a timed design challenge where participants can choose a love letter template from the Content Hub, customize the design, and post it on their social media accounts with the hashtag #SayItSaCanva or comment it on Canva’s Facebook page. Interested participants can send their entries until 11:59 pm on 22 Feb and the top 30 designs will be announced by the end of the month.

Starting an online business is becoming more of an option amid the ongoing pandemic as more people are relying on online purchases to obtain their needs. Albeit such a trend, deciding to put up a digital business can still be a tricky affair, as you’re dealing with matters that of any other type of business such as setting up a capital, procuring suppliers for your products, and building a staff among others. 

One of the considerations that must be taken into account is your marketing strategy, and with the influx of social media tools at your disposal, one must learn to leverage such tools in order to translate branding into sales, and eventually start seeing those bucks rolling  in.

Social Media Strategist Janelle Swing of the entrepreneurship and freelancing group Filipina Home-based Moms (FH Moms) shares the best ways to do just that. 

Janelle imparts six expert but doable steps the you can do right now to maximize the available online platforms, and eventually see an improved growth on your business online.

1. Product knowledge should be at the back of your hand

Start off by listing the features, benefits, and real of your products in order to identify how to properly draw your communication and marketing plan.

Janelle said that these three facets are essential for customizing branding and helping the product or service stand out amid a sea of online sellers breaking from the clutter 

“As an entrepreneur, you must be fully aware of the product feature and offerings that you are selling. It builds credibility and institutes trust amongst your target customers,” said Janelle.

2. Identify your target audience

As an entrepreneur, you have to walk in your customers’ shoes and identify correctly your customers’ concerns, needs, and pain points. Once you have figured your business audience, you can come up with an effective marketing effort, content plan, and communication treatment to reach out to your target audience.

3. Identify your price points

As an online seller, it is important to identify accurate price points of your offerings. Reaching a reasonable price point will be based on factors like your target audience, their consumption habits, the market competition as well as the value for money the product offers. 

Janelle further advises that an estimated price point lets you benchmark your position and helps you customize your communication plans for promoting your offerings and engaging well on social media without overdoing it. If gauged well, a well thought of price point can scale up a business to a great extent.

4. Craft a content strategy

An essential way to maximize social media reach for your business is to have a content strategy calendar in place, which if properly utilized can prove advantageous for most brands or businesses.

“It doesn’t have to be an expert strategy. But rather, you must identify what would best appeal to your audience. You just have to be able to use the existing tools of your platform in order to get the most out of it,” shares Janelle.

Showcase your products with multiple photos

While Shopping online you would want to vet a product and inspect the product details quite minutely before making a purchase. Similarly, it is essential that your customer gets to view different angles of the product you are cataloging in your website. Always make sure that you upload multiple photos that are shot well, backed by suitable lighting conditions and background, for your audience to fully appreciate it.

Leverage FB’s pinned post option

You can highlight the product or service that you want to feature with this option. It could also be an FAQ, or a “ways to order,” and descriptions showing available modes of payment in order for your customers to easily navigate their way and understand your offerings.

Use the auto-response feature

Using an auto-response feature is the best way to engage your customers, while you’re away. You can earn loyal and new customers depending on reliable and satisfactory customer service. With this auto feature, you can assist customers and answer their queries in real-time without having to log into your account every single time.

Use the FB live-selling feature

Part of your content strategy must include FB Live sessions to further engage your online audience. With this feature, you can directly engage with your audience in an instant while also offering your product and services. However, live sessions must be well planned in advance and spaced out adequately to build a sense of anticipation amongst your audience. Do not rush into these sessions, live selling is a terrific opportunity and if leveraged well, can have a reaching impact for your brand and business.

5. Find a bankable supplier to tend to your overall business needs

Apart from a considerable social media presence, as a seller, you should have access to the best available space to procure your regular supplies.

Always make sure that your supplier is a legitimate source of products with trusted sellers and offers dedicated customer service.

6. Your creative materials are the most essential tools

Presenting a fetching catalog of product photos is no easy task – it takes a good amount of creativity and adequate photo skills to make your product stand out from the clutter of online sellers. There are a lot of good options to curate highly engaging content online as per your business taste and needs.

Use Canva

“For starters, you may use Canva in creating your layout. This is an easy- to-use platform where you can use templates to layout your product photos, plus it is free. You just have to be consistent with the colors and template style of your photos to have an effective brand recall and brand association,” said Janelle.

Using social media to get positive leads and generate revenue doesn’t need a big budget. As an entrepreneur, you need the right attitude, a positive and go-getter mindset, and the ability to tap into free online tools at your disposal to unlock the social media prowess and strive towards a successful online business venture.

This article is brought to you by Zilingo Philippines.