Canva might (not) be enough for you

If you work with marketing or design, or if you ever had to quickly whip up some designs, you probably heard of Canva, an easy-to-use design app.

Canva is a good choice for newbies and anyone that want to dip their toes into the exciting world of graphic design. With their design templates, it is easy to feel like a pro. 

With a few drag and drops here and there, you get a good-enough design output for you to use. It’s really not bad considering you don’t have to put much effort into it.

This same experience is shared with 30 million Canva users as of today, so much so that the website delivers [80 designs per second] 😲

Canva even lets you access a buffet of photos, animations, templates, symbols, objects, and stickers to be used in your content and also has a variety of attractive fonts for you to pick and choose from.

It is certainly enticing at first, but when you don’t know what you need, you end up with a plate of hodgepodge that doesn’t taste well together. 🤢

So, is Canva good enough?

Let me try and paint you a picture (pun intended):

You’re sitting down playing with Canva for hours, choosing the best logo template for your business. Done! You pat yourself in the back and share the logo with your friends and family on social media.

After a few minutes, your sister sends you a screenshot and says:

“Your logo looks just like this one:” [and shares someone else’s logo with you]

Yikes!

So now you got accused of copying and you felt cheap. And you haven’t even heard of this brand that created a look-alike logo! You then go back to Canva, try editing the logo as much as you can and there goes your time as months go by… [LOL just joking 😅]

A few hours later and you’re ready to show it again to everyone. After all, you’ve edited it yourself, it’s completely custom now. Nothing can go wrong, right? As you click the “download” button, Canva asks you for payment to remove the watermark.

Arrrrghhhh!

You don’t want to pay for it! That’s why you went to Canva in the first place as it’s supposed to be free!

And now you’re back to square one…

Welcome to the club 😭

I have been there myself. And one of our clients went through exactly the same thing:

Canva is a D-I-Y (do it yourself) platform

In Canva, you get to decide how your designs will look like. Unfortunately, if you are NOT a “creative” person or don’t have a design background, you might have an awesome idea in your head, but you won’t be able to translate it into a good design.

When you have a creative team like Deer Designer, as long as you can describe what’s in your mind, we can do the design magic. You won’t be doing the design work all by yourself anymore. No more touching Canva or Photoshop ever again!

And with an Account Manager, you have someone to take note of all your preferences, ensure that your briefs are clear and nothing is left out.

You also get a Quality Assurance hero to double-check each and every design before they even get back to you.

And that’s all on top of having a dedicated designer for your brand. A whole design team in your hands!

Your designs secure and always available

Canva is an online platform, which means that whenever they are under maintenance or their website is down for any reason, you won’t have access to any of your designs or anything until everything has been sorted on their end.

You might have to wait hours before Canva goes back online. So, if you haven’t backed your projects up… what a headache!

With Deer Designer, you have access to all Adobe layered source files from the moment they’re ready. We always keep everything in the cloud, but for your peace of mind, you can also download the source files for safekeeping on your own computer. 

So just in case, I dunno, everyone in the Deer Designer team disappears when Thanos snaps his fingers, all your designs are safe in your computer.

For the deliverables (the actual design files you’ll share on social media, use it for print, or even web mockups), the team will make them available in any file type you request.

No Templates, no B.S.!

Templates make your brand look cheap because everybody is using them.

Unfortunately, Canva’s recommended templates and layouts are overused – remember the 80 downloads happening every second? It’s nice that they’re organized into categories making it easier for people to choose from.

However, as their platform grows in popularity, 30 million users are reusing their templates EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

With Deer Designer, unless you say otherwise, you always get bespoke designs. We get your design brief and always try to make it unique. Some of our designs may be inspired by current trends but we stay focused on your branding to deliver custom outputs.

Even better, your designer can always provide you with design alternatives/options so you can choose from and decide which ones fit your brand best. All done for you. How cool is that?

Canva is an island 🏝

Whether you use the free or paid version of Canva, you are the only one who can customize the design assets you created.

In order for a colleague to tinker with it, they’ll have to be Canva users too. Then when it’s time for the clients to approve, they need to have Canva access as well. It sucks, doesn’t it?

If you’re a web design agency or a branding and marketing consultancy company, clients would like to see you working on raw source files.

And you want them assured that you know how to use the right tool for the right job. How will they feel when you tell them you don’t have Adobe files because created everything in Canva?

Careful, they might run away from you!

Professional design work requires flexibility, so it may be time to reconsider whether Canva is still good enough for you.

At Deer Designer, we work with Adobe Software (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign), which are industry-standard professional tools. Whenever you need to tinker with the designs yourself or even share them with a client, everyone will be able to use it without stress.

To make the comparison easier, have a look at this table and decide if you’re still using the right resource for your design needs.

All Clear with Canva?

Creating design work for your brand is unquestionably an extra burden for entrepreneurs, marketers or anyone in need of constant design tasks, really. You value your time, and it’ll be definitely better spent focusing on how you will grow your company. Quick templates will make your brand look amateur, cheap. You don’t want that.

And even if you’re using Canva but don’t want to waste time by putting your creations down the drain, try Deer Designer today and let us make it easy for you. We even have a 14-Day trial, so you’ve got nothing to lose!

Try our services now!