Melanie Perkins Says Canva Is On Track To Hit 1 Billion Designs

Leading online design and publishing tool Canva is empowering everyone across the globe to design anything and publish anywhere. Here the inspirational Melanie Perkins from Canva talks about her plans for 2019.

Canva Founder Melanie Perkins told Women Love Tech “It’s been a huge and exciting year for Canva. Our goal has always been to empower the world to design, so in 2017 we launched in 100 languages. This year, we launched in China and set up a great team in Beijing, and we are launching in ‘right-to-left’ languages next week after a year-long effort from the team – so Canva will shortly be able to be used by Arabic, Urdu, Hebrew and Farsi speakers as well!

“We’re already used in 190 countries across the globe, so it’s exciting to ensure that Canva is available in everyone’s native language.

“We’re already used in 190 countries across the globe, so it’s exciting to ensure that Canva is available in everyone’s native language.”

“We’ve also continued to grow incredibly rapidly – last year in November we had 34 million designs created and this year we had 80 million. We’re on track to hit 1 billion designs next week!”

Right-to-left beta

This announcement signifies Canva’s official roll-out of its Arabic, Hebrew, Kurdish, Farsi, Punjabi, Urdu and Uyghur versions, empowering more people to design in the language of their choice. The Canva editor for right-to-left language users is in a mirror image of an equivalent English page, with all components on the page optimized for these languages including text alignment, ordering of functionalities including the editing tool, search, media library, and much more.

Rachel Carruthers, Localization lead at Canva said the roll-out is a logical step in seeing the company’s vision of empowering the world to design. “We’re committed to offering a truly local experience to our design community through our new Canva versions in Arabic, Hebrew, Kurdish, Farsi Punjabi, Urdu and Uyghur. Not only will our community get to choose their preferred language when designing, we’ll also be providing localized design assets and a populated font library that will resonate with the design aesthetics of our right-to-left markets. Canva is the design tool that anyone – from any part of the world –  can use out of the box and design intuitively.

Canva founder Melanie Perkins

Canva China

In order to tailor experiences to all markets, Canva has also launched a tailored product specifically for its design community in China. This includes social media enthusiasts, budding entrepreneurs, small-medium businesses, as well as big enterprise. Beike, China’s leading real estate service platform with over 170k agents operating over 95 cities, has recently adopted Canva as their design platform for all marketing collaterals across China.

Na Xiang, Growth Manager at Beike said, “It’s great to see that our growth and operations teams in all cities are able to independently design marketing materials without worrying about IP risks. It not only enables everyone to satisfy their design needs in a timely manner which relieves tremendous pressure off HQ, but also insures on-brand designs which promote brand image.”

Robin Zhang, CEO at Canva China said the team’s priority is to provide a product that is culturally relevant.

“The team focussed on delivering a brand new local product which is supported with a reliable media library of Chinese fonts and assets, and managed by a team based in Beijing. To provide Canva’s Chinese design community with reliable and risk-free design assets, we partnered with local businesses VCG to provide images, and Hanyi to provide a range of free and paid Chinese fonts.

“It was important for us to not simply ‘repurpose’ a product for our users in China; to serve our Chinese user’s unique requirements, we needed to build a specific product heavy with local features. For example, our community in China will require the ability to signup and login using Chinese social media accounts, and the ability to publish to local publish endpoints such as social media posts for WeChat, Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ.”

Robin explained how Canva will give everyone in the country the power to design with ease.

“Different markets have different design aesthetics. Online retailers especially will be able to adapt their design style to any market by removing any cross-border barriers abundant in functional design. With Canva, we are making it super easy to experiment with design by featuring local templates, as well as international styles.”

Canva’s diverse and inclusive Marketplace

Canva’s Marketplace features contributors from over 80 countries, bringing a diverse range of media assets strengthened by unique and local perspectives that will resonate with a global audience. Searches can be conducted in more than 30 languages, providing everyone access to the same pool of high-quality content.

Anna Guerrero, Head of Marketplace at Canva explained, “Diversity and inclusion have always been at the heart of our values, and aligned with our mission of democratizing design. We know that it’s not only important to have a diverse representation of our design community in our marketplace, but it’s also about providing a meaningful and tailored experience for our users. This is about providing everyone with a design and publishing tool that resonates with everyone regardless of who you are, or where you come from.”

As part of its diverse and inclusive Marketplace offering, Canva has also launched the Natural Women Collection, a completely free stock photo collection that showcases everyday women whose personal stories and experiences challenge both societal standards of beauty and gender norms.

About Canva

Since launch in 2013, over 15M users across 190 countries have created over 850M designs on the intuitive Canva platform, empowering users to design anything and publish anywhere. Today Canva is available in over 100 languages, and accessible on desktop, iOS and Android.