TREND OF 2021: CONNECTION

Growing our inner entrepreneur with Canva

This elegant design app helped us share our big ideas.

Canva: Design, Photo & Video

Graphic Design + Logo Maker

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Canva is our 2021 Trend of the Year winner because... its simple design tools helped us connect to our creative passions and entrepreneurial spirit.

‣ Designs created in Canva to date: 7 billion
‣ New designs created every second: 120
‣ “Design ingredients” available: More than 100 million

As 2021 began, the Australia-based team behind the mighty design app Canva noticed business was booming.

Not their own business. Everyone else’s.

“We’ve seen a massive shift in what people are using Canva for,” says Cameron Adams, the app’s co-founder and chief product officer.

Originally Canva helped people’s social media posts sparkle with gorgeous designs – everything from spring-themed wedding templates to striking collages.

With templates, fonts and millions of design elements, Canva became the design tool of choice for professional teams – as well as those planning birthday parties.

As the year went on, Canva became an integral tool for for professionals looking to connect with their audiences. “About 30 to 40 per cent of our iPhone user base is small or medium businesses,” Adams says. “With so many people working from home, we needed to fill all kinds of gaps.”

With a few taps, use Canva to design business cards, a sign for your farmers market stand or just about any element of a brand campaign. Templates for presentations – tailored for colleagues, classmates and clients alike – became a major priority this year, and more than 30 million were created every month in the app. Indeed, 2021 was the year that “Canva expert” became a skill to put in bold type on your CV.

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Not that the app is difficult to master. Optimised for touchscreens, it lets you drag pretty much every element in a template to exactly where you want it (and use the Nudge option for even greater precision). From text animations to photos that slide into place to the other 1 million “design elements” Canva provides, the app connected us to our passions by helping us make them visual and share them with others.

The app’s video-editing tools blew up too: millions of videos, with elegant title treatments and spiffy transitions, are published in Canva each month. “The most empowering thing we can do is give people quick access to these tools so all they have to think about is their product,” says Adams.

One of my favourite reviews read: ‘Canva helps me get my creativity out.’

– Renee Psomadelis, Canva mobile growth lead

Canva founder Melanie Perkins was a 19-year-old student at the University of Western Australia when she came up with the idea for the app. Struck by how complicated graphic design programs were while helping other students navigate the basics, she envisioned a future where anyone could easily produce high-quality designs.

“The way I thought about it was: the future was going to be online, simpler and collaborative. So it seemed inevitable that future design would be all of these things.”

This was the year Canva reached Perkins’ goal – becoming a place where design is fast, doable on the go and easy to master.

2021 App Store Award winners