Canva has over 185 million monthly users and looks forward to continuing to grow its platform for small businesses around the globe.
Their recent Canva Create event was watched by over 2.5 million people around the world, eager to see what updates would be made available in this latest glow-up.
They sort of managed it, but I felt a lot of the features I am already using, and others are not relevant for small businesses.
So is it worth the glow-up, is the next question, specifically for small business users? I was one of the million users who had the first chance to see the glow-up on the platform and have fed back my thoughts so far on the new areas they shared.
Let’s take a look.
The homepage was the first area they covered, sharing a new editing interface to help streamline workflows and team collaboration.
This looked at:
Streamlined Workflow:
Start designing directly from the homepage with intuitive shortcuts and pre-selected templates, and enjoy an editing interface that places your favourite features front and centre.
Customised Workspaces: Personalise your workspace or share vital information across your organisation with the dedicated ‘Starred for Team’ section.
Enhanced Collaboration: Benefit from a more organised commenting system and suggested edits to improve team collaboration.
So far, not overly impressed, some areas have moved and are not in the obvious palces and the chnage of backgroudn from blac to white as made some areas difficult to see on a laptop.
Second up, was a feature I would be interested in developing further and that was courses.
Introducing Courses:
Courses now make it easier to scale learning and development initiatives. Directly integrated into Canva, these courses transform designs into learning materials, including presentations, whiteboards, documents, and videos, enabling seamless upskilling of your workforce.
So, I will have a review of that and let you know my thoughts. (Haven’t had a chance to get onto this yet!)
They then focused on a range of specific departtment work kits, primarily for the three areas Marketing, Creative, Sales, and HR teams.
These hubs offer a curated collection of resources, templates, playbooks, and applications to enhance your team’s performance.
Could be a great option for businesses who haven’t got their own design or marketing teams and also some semblance of order to develop brand kits, templates and graphic to reinforce company values, I am hoping I can use these from some of y clients in the future.
AI tools upgrades:
I have used the AI tools Canva has offered for a while now (adding the word Magic to everything in essence) many of these areas have been developed as you would excpect as the AI world is moving so fast.
The highlights on offer were:
Magic Media: Generate custom graphics, icons, and illustrations by simply describing your needs.
Magic Write: Create personalised text that matches your unique tone of voice.
Magic Design: Experience improved template generation with less need for editing.
Styles and Layouts: Easily apply on-brand styles and gain design inspiration with a single click.
Resize & Magic Switch: Quickly transform designs to suit different formats and purposes. (Already available)
Photo and Video Editors: Enjoy enhanced control and AI-powered features that simplify photo and video editing tasks.
Accelerating Content Creation:
New tools, such as Bulk Create, Ad Tech integrations, Data Autofill, and Recordings, are designed to speed up content creation and streamline marketing workflows, allowing you to produce on-brand assets efficiently and effectively. (Bulk Create Already available)
These advancements mark a pivotal moment for Canva as they continue to innovate and support a global community in achieving their creative and professional goals.
We will look forward to seeing how these new tools and features will transform businesses workflow and productivity.
The remainder of the event focused on a wide range of case studies of corporates who work with Canva, some words about their commitment to sustainability, ( admirable but not sure the benefit to me as a small bsiness in the UK) and their internal collaborations with AI develop teams.
So a few handy things to pick up and work with, and the glow up itself which not everyone has had rolled out as yet, will take some getting used, to, I was keen to revert back to the old style, but this isn’t possible. Some of the basic steps / tools I was using regularly have now seem to have been made a little clunkier and have added additional steps which is annoying, but hopefully the feedback coming to Canva will help them to revert those or make some changes. Still the filing from the home page hasn’t been addressed sadly, please note Canva!
So that was a brief overview of the latest Glow Up, so great new features to get involved with, but if you are using Canva regularly they are great at keeping you involved in new features coming on board. to see the full Canva Create presentation for yourself, go here or drop us a message as we are always happy to help small businesses master what Canva can offer. Sign up for one of our Canva Masterclasses here.
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