Why Professional Designers Can (and Should) Use Canva
At this studio, we are professional designers who use Canva. Once in a while, we stumble across people in the field who find this off-putting. “Don’t ‘real designers’ use Adobe?” “Canva isn’t for ‘serious’ designers.” I think I may be a “real” designer, so I’ll get into it today.
Actually, not “today.” I first drafted this essay in late 2020, a year after we began offering in-house training to clients’ marketing and sales teams. Things were changing fast. New tools for content creation, customer support, and marketing mushroomed out of the internet. It was adapt or perish. Instead of gatekeeping design as work for serious professionals only, we saw ways to provide clients with more value.
“The short answer is that Canva is a powerful supplementary tool … not a replacement for more powerful software.”
What is Canva’s role in a design agency? The short answer is that Canva is a powerful supplementary tool for a design and branding studio, but not a replacement for more powerful software. At TBC Manila, Adobe Creative Cloud apps are our main tools for the bulk of our work — in branding, packaging (most print work, really), and production.
What changed?
From 2019 to 2020, I found myself working more and more in Canva to accomplish an important goal: for clients to have materials they could use more easily in-house.
Often, we maximize the support we offer by including organized, editable files with the final deliverables (this is a bit more work, so we don’t do this for all projects). For some freelancers and agencies out there, this might seem counter-intuitive. Why empower the client to not come back to you and pay you again if they need anything more?
Because we’re not just selling graphic design work. We’re in the business of offering creative help as a way to scale our clients’ businesses. In short, a consultancy. And if that means empowering clients to do things themselves if needed, then so be it.
As time passed, editable Adobe files weren’t cutting it for many of my clients — mostly startups less than five years old with teams of less than twenty. I’d find marketing assistants or even junior graphic designers scratching their heads over editable Adobe files.
These things started happening more frequently, and I had two choices:
Either I would stand firmly by my former practice of giving my clients editable Adobe files only;
Or, I could go with the flow and embrace modern solutions.
It felt uncomfortable to insist on so-called “industry standards” and withhold applicable alternatives from the client. If we didn’t adjust, it would be like telling them that if they want to work with me, they need to invest in an in-house professional, an Adobe subscription, or a powerful computer that can keep up with Adobe’s RAM-hungry updates. It was often too much to expect any client to have a) that in-house designer or team, b) an Adobe subscription, and c) the funds to keep coming back to me forever.
“Junior in-house designers would be able to focus on the design first, tool mastery second — and sales channels could start moving.”
Canva as a solution also made sense in Manila’s business landscape as we encountered it. In the cases of a few bigger companies, in-house designers and even Adobe subscriptions sometimes existed. However, if design is not a company’s core competency, its designers are often at the bottom of the payroll, still in the process of mastering Photoshop and Illustrator. Meanwhile, Canva is a pretty much drag-and-drop solution once branded materials are set up properly. Often, collaborating with clients’ teams on Canva meant work was done faster, and better. Junior in-house designers would be able to focus on the design first, tool mastery second — and sales channels could start moving.
The rise of the social media manager-slash-content creator
Cue the rise of the Social Media Manager/Content Creator, roles fraught with stress and scope-creeping. How much content should they create? Should they be writing copy? How much design work are they expected to do? Should they take photos, too? And is this a content creation role, or a community management role? Can you work in a fast-paced environment?
Creative professionals everywhere groan, “Shouldn’t a team be doing this?” And the answer is yes, a team should be doing it and clients should stop trying to get away with paying one person to do a team’s work. But for better or for worse, businesses will do what they feel they have to do.
“Social media managers … are key team members who can and should be empowered to easily manage branded content, even through changing suppliers.”
So today, the Social Media Manager/Content Creator is someone who exists in companies the world over. Usually, the job description covers basic content planning and post scheduling (and hopefully not much else). They’re usually not professionally trained designers, but dipping their toes in graphics is often inevitable in their day-to-day.
We worked with our agency partner Bambu to produce social media posts for InPlay. These designs were built in Canva, using a combination of InPlay’s proprietary elements, game provider designs, and premium stock assets.
Again, a large part of TBC Manila’s creative work is rooted in business consultancy. We crunch data before any design work starts, and we keep an eye on how files will be used internally after our project wraps up. Often, this means working with our clients’ social media managers.
They are key team members who can and should be empowered to easily manage branded content, even through changing suppliers.
Canva helps us offer our clients real value.
As designers, we enjoy the results of combining the powers of multiple tools. As business consultants, we appreciate how Canva helps us offer our clients real value, especially when:
They can’t afford to outsource [us] indefinitely.
Usually, when clients start working with me, we focus on big-picture stuff — brand identity, packaging, and other evergreen materials. As a supplier, it’s great to imagine this client returning every time whenever they need more help. It’s more work and more cash for us, right? However, this is not an ideal solution from the client’s perspective. Clients will naturally look for more cost-effective solutions in the long run, and we would rather be the kind of supplier that empowers them to do just that. This way, the materials we create have a better chance of being effective, for longer.
They don’t have an in-house design team or Adobe subscription.
And maybe they never will, because design is not one of their core products or services. They may scale up to a point where they’ll need an in-house designer or Adobe subscription, but you never know — that’s ultimately their call to make. Meanwhile, providing them with materials that can work on any computer with an internet connection can greatly help their business.
Consider the size of your client’s business and ask yourself: Do they have to call you back just to change an item’s price on their menu? To come up with a quick social media announcement? To change someone’s contact details on their business card?
What do we use Canva for?
Social media content.
We have pretty much transitioned all social media design work to Canva. It’s top-tier for collaboration. It also makes for faster revision rounds, multi-designer work, and asset imports.
Presentation design.
Like social media posts, presentations benefit from easy, multi-person collaboration and on-the-fly revisions. Adobe’s Share for Review function is similar, but editing is only limited to the designers with the software. Canva’s app+browser-based platform is ideal for presenters — they only need a link and an internet connection to make quick changes without a graphic designer’s help.
Extremely volatile layouts for small teams and/or startups.
This includes minor print needs like menus, where things like price changes can throw the client’s team for a loop when they’re unable to edit the file.
For most intents and purposes, in the cases of the above items, Canva isn’t a shortcut, but the better option — especially when you’re working with a mixed team of designers, copywriters, salespersons, approvers, and more.
“Clients will naturally look for more cost-effective solutions in the long run, and we would rather be the kind of supplier that empowers them to do just that.”
How can high-quality work be produced in Canva?
A Canva Pro subscription for stock assets. Pro gives us access to premium stock elements and a good selection of fonts. These are illustrations, photos, videos, audio files, and fonts that you’d have to pay more for, separately, if you needed them. Stock assets are invaluable for things like presentation design — you need effective materials, but it’s impractical to spend hours creating the perfect custom illustrations or shooting the perfect photos for some parts of your slideshow. Adobe has Adobe Stock, but it’s a separate subscription, so there’s still pretty high barrier for entry.
Follow best design practices. Having an “easy” tool doesn’t mean you resort to lazy design. It’s important, always, to follow design principles and, most of all, use custom, on-brand elements. Often, this involves using apps outside of Canva, before or alongside Canva.
What don’t we do in Canva?
Most things. But mainly:
Brand identities. Can you create logos and build brands from scratch in Canva? I don’t want to gatekeep and say no. If that’s the upper limit of what a starting-out business can do, then it’s the way to go. But for a truly scaleable brand identity, something that can keep up with a growing business — hard no.
Materials for brands that use Adobe Fonts. Pro tip: We sometimes supplement brand guides with alternatives from Canva Pro’s font library or Google Fonts (a free library), so that clients’ in-house teams have something to work with if needed.
Customized brand elements, like illustrations. We combine Illustrator, Photoshop, Procreate, or even traditional media to produce custom brand elements. Later on, if the client needs any work done in Canva, these elements will be available for import.
Packaging design, multi-page layouts, and other print materials. While Canva can create printables, it’s very limited in that area. Custom packaging is best done in the Adobe suite.
All tools are limited. The agency’s challenge is to maximize each of its available tools and find out how some can work together to get the best results.
Why the industry snobbery?
Let’s address the common reason why some people don’t like the idea of using Canva for professional work. It’s usually because of one of Canva’s main features: the pre-designed template gallery.
For graphic designers and agencies, this is the least of what Canva can offer. Rather, since we have access to more powerful tools, we’re able to use Canva so that we and our clients don’t even have to glance at the free template gallery.
“It’s heartening to see people’s creativity sparked by an easy-to-use platform, even if they’re not designers by trade. Everyone has a little bit of a designer in them.”
In the end, however, there’s no need to look down your nose at anyone — even beginner designers who are “not professionals” or digital creatives who are experimenting with making money with creative work before they’re able to invest in “industry-standard” tools.
The business world is kind of a playground. Some of us need to lighten up. And if people are stuck in what looks like a lower place to us, we pull them up and share what we can with them. This essay talks at length about business and design practices, but some things boil down to a basic kindergarten principle: Be Nice.
It’s always been a pleasure to work with clients’ in-house teams, teaching them to employ brand practices and design principles with Canva templates. It’s heartening to see people’s creativity sparked by an easy-to-use platform, even if they’re not designers by trade. Everyone has a little bit of a designer in them. It takes me back to when I was twelve and our computer guy installed pirated Adobe and Corel programs into our family PC. It, and I’m not exaggerating here, changed my life. (Please don’t come for me, Adobe, I pay now.)
Apart from all the practical and financial considerations, creativity is just really fun when shared. We all stand to make more money from a world like that.
And that concludes this hot take. I don’t have too many of them, and I waited years to publish this one. 😅
At TBC Manila, we supplement custom-branded Canva templates with workshops for in-house teams of all sizes. Design workshops are a little about Canva usage but focus more on loyalty to your brand’s visual identity, as well as on color and typography basics. We also teach teams basic writing for social media using your brand’s unique voice. If these sound like things you’d like for your team, feel free to reach out at hello@tbcmanila.com.
