Canva, if you don’t know, is a tool that opens up the potential of graphic design to the masses. In the very visual world we live in today, that’s a very valuable trick.

The company founders created Canva based on the visionary idea that just about anyone should be able to design anything. They have delivered on that idea and in the process created a company valued at something like 40 billion dollars.

Adobe Systems released Create Cloud Express, an offering that is similar to Canva, at the end of 2021. Many reviews of this new product from Adobe suggest that it’s in response to the success of the competitive product Canva. I only mention this to underscore the difference between these two companies.

Adobe is a mature company with a broad and also, in some cases, dated line of products. Some of their graphic design tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign date back to the 20th Century. These applications had their hour of glory decades ago, and for a very long time have been kept up to date with incremental changes. Incremental change is a big part of Adobe’s business model. Adobe Systems’ release of Creative Cloud Express is an incremental response to the competitive challenge posed by Canva.

Canva, on the other hand, is a young company with innovative new ideas. By democratizing design, they have opened up the field of design to the average user. You no longer need a graphic designer to create the mundane visual elements of modern business. Making graphic design much easier and more accessible to the masses, as Canva has, is an example of transformational change.

Both companies provide value to their customers. The Adobe legacy tools are a good fit for graphic design professionals who have spent years perfecting their design skills. Canva, on the other hand, is the tool of choice for creative individuals who just want to get the job done.

This is sort of a clash between the past and the future. On the one hand, you have the legacy tools and the people that use them, and they purport that design is something that takes years to learn and regular people can’t do it. And, on the other hand, you have the new breed of tools that leverage new technologies and new approaches to simplify graphic design so that it’s something that regular people can do for themselves.

Canva is part of a trend now to transform and simplify technical challenges. Part of a whole new breed of DIY software app that empowers consumers. Another example of this kind of empowering tool is the website creation tool Squarespace. Yet another example of this class of tool would be Webflow, a no-code tool for visually designing websites.

Collectively, these tools empower consumers and entrepreneurs to do more of the technical work of creating a website or a social media presence themselves, and in the process, they can bypass the professional designers and developers that sometimes present an additional challenge to the successful completion of a website project.

In the case of Canva, innovation is also valuable. As the article states, the company is valued at 40 billion dollars.