I’m Janet Johnson with Social Media Hangout Time. I am very excited today, well I’m a little disappointed today because Kimmy, our social media puppet a.k.a Lisa Saline, is not able to join us today. But we are going to have blast because I have a very, very special guest. And her name, some of you may have heard of Canva but some of you who haven’t heard of Canva yet, you are in for a treat because we have the owner here Melanie Perkins. So welcome Melanie.
Hello, thank you so much for having me on.
Absolutely! We’re very much looking forward to it. I’m going to read a little bit about your background and talk about that then I’ll let you take off talking about Canva.
That’s great.
Melanie is, she’s the CEO and co-founder of Canva and Canva is an online platform that makes graphic design amazingly simple for everyone. And I can vouch for that because I’ve used it many times. Since launching six months ago, more than 1 million designs have been created using Canva by 320,000 users. This company has grown really fast. Everywhere I turn I hear social media people talking about this. Previously at age 19 Melanie founded her first company Fusion Books, an online design system for schools to create their yearbooks. Fusion Books is now the largest yearbook publisher in Australia and recently expand branch in New Zealand. Now that’s an interesting note, wow, you started young! That is awesome! Well thank you Melanie for coming on and let’s talk a little bit first, let’s start out, let’s start out with the cool announcement you had yesterday.
Yeah sure. We are really excited to welcome Guy Kawasaki to our team. It’s absolutely phenomenal for us. Oh it actually started out with a Tweet, he said to show you the power of social media. We actually saw that Guy had created a design in Canva and then one of my co-founders shot to him and next thing we knew we’re chasing him to join our team at his place in Palo Alto.
Wow!
Yes, really exciting.
Yes. That is incredible, just amazing. Just through a Tweet, I mean it does. You’re exactly right, it shows that power of social media is just amazing. Well congratulations on that, too. We’ll hear more about that, I’m sure and let’s talk a little bit about how you came up with this idea because some people have never heard of Canva here so let’s talk about what made you create this in the first place.
Yeah, sure. When I was in university I was teaching design programs like Photoshop and Indesign. And students struggle to learn the basics. This was very costly like communications and for sciences. And people also need to design for all sort of different things. But without the tools and with really complex tools, it’s really difficult. And so I realized that in the future design we will be all online and collaborative and simple. So that was 7 years ago now. And I’ve been pursuing that vision ever since so as you mentioned before I started my first company Fusion Books which was an online design system for the school yearbook market. But every time people were using it they were saying to me, “use this for other design.” And we said whoa, feel into and said okay, yeah let’s do this. So a couple of years started out in the hole, Silicon Valley journey, meeting investors over that way and decided to really take that concept to simple design to mass consumer market and so we launched Canva in August last year. And we’ve just actually hit 1.5 million designs as of yesterday. So it’s been absolutely insane.
Well I also heard that, you know I’ve used a lot of your designs and like it’s so simple to make a Facebook cover for instance. Or I like to just go in there sometimes and put my own dimensions and just create from scratch kind of my own designs, throw in a logo. Or I actually have a graphic designer myself because the exact reasons you said I got to a point where I was like I can’t learn everything. I just can’t be the graphic designer, the social media person, the SEO person, you keep going on and on. I just couldn’t do it and so I hired and I send him to Canva all the time, too, not that he needs it necessarily but for the different layouts that you have in there are so cool so I’m like, “go get ideas there.” And also to grab images for a dollar, love that. So why don’t you talk about that a little bit – images for a dollar.
Well actually we’ve found huge uptake with designers, as well. Designers often struggle going backwards and forwards with pdfs with their clients trying to, you know, every time they’re making a text change, change one there to another there. And all these tiny little annoying text changes. So having Canva they can just sent client the link. So for business card that’s super helpful when they have new staff start and all sorts of fires when you just wanted to update the text. So that’s been really great to see Canva take off in the design community so well. With the images for dollars, what we wanted to do is to make stock photography of photo for everyone. At the moment there’s stock photography libraries where you might be paying $20 or $50 for an image. And we can’t afford that for every social media posts that you want to do or blog when you’re just trying to create really nice. Some people are posting many times a day and for bloggers that’s just affordable at all. So what we wanted to do is really bring that price right down to a place where people can use it much more frequently and stops people stealing images because it’s much easier paying a dollar for an image and to know that you’re legally sound. But then why we’re able to offer such a low price since we introduced the whole new business model. We’ve got it’s called one-time-use. So rather than purchasing an image and downloading and using it over and over for it for $20 or $50, we want to bring the price down and give it to use on 1 design, at least. Which means you can use a lot more images and not having to use the same images time and time again.
Nice. And that’s why I go to search now for image like you just tick the little search and there’s so much, so many come up. It just goes on and on and on so anybody that hasn’t used Canva you just got, one of the things I suggest is try and got to go and play with it. Now I Iistened to also Pinteresting a lot. And that you’ve been, actually that is the place I’ve learned about you, yeah, that is the very first place. And she mentioned, she talks about you all the time, too. And she mentioned just the other day that you came out with a new Pinterest sizing and layout and stuff like that.
Yeah, we launched Pinterest in the perfect dimension for Pinterest but that’s really, but with Canva really getting started we have so much more yet to do. Every design type in the world needs great design and needs great inspiration so we’re just really getting started with that but yes, launching Pinterest has been really fun. It’s so well-received by the pinner community.
Nice, nice. Yeah I love it because I’ve heard so many different sizes, many different, you just aren’t sure a lot of times what sizes to use and so now you can refer to Canva. What size should we use? Oh well we got to go to Canva, they have the right sizes.
Exactly.
Well now you wanted to, you have maybe some things you can share with us visually. Did you want to go ahead and screen share? And for those of you that listening just try to capture the best as you can. She’s going to try to explain it as well as she can and if you’re not catching it then come back and watch the show anytime you like.
Fantastic. So can you see?
Yep, yep, I locked it.
Excellent. So what I thought I do is start off by showing you the 23 Second In Chart. So the funny part is I guess when I was teaching the design programs that it was taking the whole semester just to navigate the site and it seem so crazy and so when we launched Canva we really want to help people get over the fear they can’t design or that it’s going to take too long to learn. And so we put this 23-second to help alleviate any of those concerns. So you just come in, this is what you’re shown in when you log in to Canva for the very first time. So I’ll click Show Me How it’s Done. And so naturally come over here and search for whatever it is that you want. And you see the search result and you can drag it onto your page, you can resize the element. You can come over to the text tab, then add text on to your page. You got all sorts of text you can choose from and click publish and you can download as an image or pdf. And so that is literally at that. Main learning curve with Canva is just search and drag and then publish. And then what we do is you take this Starter Challenges. Because I guess everyone’s so concerned they are not going to be able to design. They think that it’s not something that they have or part of the repertoire of things that they could do. So it’s really important that we completely alleviate that with this Starter Challenges. And so you literally just scroll down that’s all in Canva and you’re learning the in-space and how it works. And you get taken through to some really simple challenges like change the color of the circle so you literally just click on the circle and click on the icon there and choose your favorite color. And you can scroll down and do the next one and it says ‘Search for a hat and put it on this monkey.’ You have this picture of this monkey here but we want to get people familiar with searching so make sure they come over here and search for a hat. And then you can find your favorite hat and drag it onto your page.
This is cool. I’ve not been through down, I just kind of jumped right in.
Oh, fantastic. So you choose the hat that you want and just drag it onto his head. And of course you can resize but that looks pretty perfect to me and add background to the page. Over here on the left-hand side we have all the different tabs which take you through things like layout and text and background and of course you can upload your own photos. And so it makes it really, really simple to get all the assets that you need without having to worry too much about finding the asset and cutting them out and using all the different tools and stock photography libraries and that sort of thing. I can literally just drag a background directly onto my page. I can even actually change the color of the backgrounds here. And of course if you get stuck you can just click ‘Need a hint’ and it will actually show you a video of how to do the challenge, as well, which is really good resource if you get stuck during any of this.
This is like, this is so simple, which is what I need. I mean that is what people need – they need simple. Like I told you I’m an elementary education major and that’s where bringing it down to the first grade and second grade level is what people need because the internet got so complicated now.
Absolutely. And I really fundamentally believe that software programs shouldn’t be about the use of having to spend years upon years learning how to use them. They should be so inviting and so simple that you can just jump in and you still confident and you feel happy and I would have get what you want done quickly rather than it being this whole process that makes you feel dumb because you don’t know how to do something.
I completely agree.
Just drag images directly into that photo place holder. And so you can do things like crop, we just actually recently introduced the whole range of photo filters so you can just click on them. Actually this is really fun. We just launched this quite recently. So we’ve got this Instagram-style photos which look really nice.
Nice.
So if you click the advanced options here we actually have all these different sliders, about 7 sliders, so you can change the color of the tint. You can blur the images which makes beautiful background. You can add a vignette around it. All these things and then what is particularly cool is if you find a filter that you really like, you can just copy this filter code and use it on another image. So for branding you always try to make your brand have the consistent image which often tries to convey a certain message. And so having, using a consistent filter codes for either a blog series or for your whole brand on social media, can really help to convey that beautiful image that’s very consistent.
It takes your brand to one of the things that I’m always preaching is you lie your brand. And so what you’re putting out there is going to represent you. And if you’re putting out, nowadays images are visual marketing is obviously, obviously become one of the big things out there and so we want to make sure that it’s looking quality and that’s what your company provides, not just some random thing. You know you’re going to get quality with Canva from everything we’ve seen.
Yeah. It’s so important I think that back in the old days when you describe your brand and text or only the big brands had beautiful imagery. It was easy to get away with not being able to convey your brand hopefully. But nowadays everything is so visual and having really ugly graphics or not having any graphics at all, it’s really hard for your brand to stand out and fill grow a loyal following and to have a personality that’s conveyed. I think images are great way to help to do that and having that consistent imagery, consistent coloring and even consistent font can really help to convey your personality.
Absolutely. Yup, love it.
We can come over here and can drag a layout directly onto the page and you can see this images place holders so you can upload your own images. You can pull your photos directly from Facebook, it’s all designed to be fully inside the application so you don’t have to worry using any other tools or not having the stock photography that you need. And you can see here we’ve got loads of beautiful layout that you can use and you can just drag straight to your page.
Can you talk about a little bit about, now here you’re finished and then after that when you, can you talk a little bit about the different or specific layout that you have too because I know you all this specific to Facebook and Pinterest, and we’ve mentioned the Pinterest obviously.
Yeah. So what I would do I’ll come here to my homepage. So to actually change a layout all you have to do go to your homepage and we have all sorts of different design types that you can see. All you have to do is literally click on one of them and it’s done. You come in here and it gives you a little bit of demo — create, edit and learn for the first time you come through. You can click social media graphics, presentations, posters, Facebook covers, blog graphics, Pinterest, documents and you can scroll through here as well.
Documents? I have not caught that one before, interesting!
Yeah. Cards and photo collage and business card and invitations and Facebook ad. And then of course you can use custom dimensions and so you can just put it whatever number that you want and click Design and it will create a design in that size. And then while we’re here I’ll show you if you’re looking. So we’ve got editor’s picks so you can choose one of these designs by clicking on them just to give you a little bit of inspiration. And then design tutorials. So this is a fantastic place to come if you wanting to learn a little bit more about design. So every week we send out a new tutorial. So even if you have absolutely no design skills at the moment, I mean firstly you can just use the layouts. But as you start to use Canva more and more you might want to start experimenting with your unique design. So just like that tutorial we went through then you can go through these tutorials and it takes you through things like depth and photo filters and columns and branding and all sorts of different things. We really want to make that very simple to help learn some of the fun fundamentals of design.
Yeah, yeah. And I get that email each day and I think that’s a very simple, to-the-point and I love the little lessons because it’s something that you make it short and simple enough so that we’re not moving away from our main business. You know that’s the one thing that always concerns me with you know, the business owners. Our audience is mostly small business owners and entrepreneurs, that kind of thing and they don’t have a lot of time for this and that’s what you’re saving them tons of time but giving quality.
Absolutely. Yeah. It is about just trying to help people to get to what they want to do as quick as possible. The shortest line there feeling confident, feeling happy and getting a design that you feel comfortable with is certainly important. So you mentioned before Pinterest graphics and here is my Pinterest page comes with all sorts of graphics that are designed specifically for Pinterest. And so again what you do is drag the image onto the page and you can replace the images with your own images and so being designed to be very quick and simple. All you do is put your design there and click publish and you can publish it, download and upload it to Pinterest, so very very simple.
It’s almost like infographics are so popular. And we’ve done many of those — many inforgraphics ourselves but this looks like you can almost create your own inforgraphics.
Yeah, absolutely, definitely. It’s all been designed to be like you can do any graphics. So if you found people doing presentations, I mean many, many presentations. Absolutely everything under the sun. When we first started I would find it hilarious that someone in Norway was building a brochure for his fish company, fish market. I just thought it was a really bizarre — the globalization being able to have people around the world creating brochures and marketing materials and blog graphics for all sorts of design things that I would have necessarily expected.
Huh. I love it! I love it! Do you have any specific advise for the graphics, I mean what would you. If somebody, let’s just say I’ve played with it a lot but say somebody has never been on Canva before. After they go through that tutorial, obviously that would be their first step. What would you say would be the next steps to do for them? Somebody who doesn’t know anything. Let’s just start with somebody really not a graphic designer, not into branding, they don’t really get it, let’s start way at the beginning.
Well I think the first, the absolute first thing that they need to do is obviously just get on. I think that one of the biggest hurdle of these people who’re just feeling scared of it and it’s absolutely designed to be as unscary as humanly possible. I think once they get online, they’ve done those starter tutorials then just publish a design. I think that sort of, as soon as you publish your design or post it on your blog or post it on social media and you’ve got that feedback and people like ‘hey, how did you design that?’ or ‘that looks awesome!’ then people feel a lot more confident to keep doing this over and over again. It’s just really about getting started and diving in.
Yeah, love it! Love it! And the other thing that I’ve noticed one thing I’d like to use it for is even just putting your branding on an image, that kind of thing. You can create it but then you can also put in, if you do, would you suggest I’ve done this where I’ve done a PNG and you just add a little logo at the bottom or your website at the very bottom of any image you want to use and that way when people are sharing it, it’s getting out there you’re also getting your brand out there. Any suggestions on that kind of thing?
Yeah absolutely. That is a great Idea. Any images that you are publishing from your brand, it will be great to brand it, of course because it is being re-pinned or shared. People actually see your brand. And a really easy way to do that is actually if you create a design you can actually same that design over and over again. You can copy the page and have it, I didn’t show you in there, but next to the page is a little button that says copy and so it means you can copy that exact same page. If you created a nice template you can just use that over and over again and very simple to keep that consistency — the positioning of your logo, that sort of thing. You don’t necessarily need to create a new document and try to reposition each time. And the same applies on the home page, there’s a copy button so you just can copy the same template again and again so you can reuse it — all the elements that you’ve created. If you create a really great social media graphic and you want to do a series, just changing up the text each time or changing up the photo, it’s very simple to do that.
Nice. I have not used the copy yet. I caught it but I guess I didn’t realize what to use of it with for. I like it. Okay. So that saves just, saves tons of times, too. So basically to follow up with wrap all these up, your company is, in my opinion going to save people time, money, energy, create people graphics, let’s see, we can go on and on. But it really is money and time saver and it’s simple.
Yeah. That’s certainly what we hope to see.
Love it. And what do you see your future with images and that kind of thing? Do you have anything down the road that you can reveal to us that you’re thinking about doing or coming up with?
We have so much down the road. There is a lot going in Canva at the moment that we’re working on very hard and so over the next few months in particular, you’re going to see a lot of new aspects of Canva revealed. Our vision is to take, enable people to take their idea and turn it into a design where that be for web or print really, really quickly and so we feel like we’re just getting started by being able to help people do that.
Good. Well like I said I’m a big fan and I’m sure everybody listening will be a big fan too after hearing this. So I appreciate Melanie so much your coming on the show because we’ll have to have you again, maybe Guy at some point. We definitely need to keep the word out about Canva and spread the love of Canva.
Thank you so much.
Thank you too, have a good one, thank you very much.
You too, bye.
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