I use Canva.com frequently for my SolarAcademy project.
I first heard of Canva from Emily Kirsch of Powerhouse. I think it was back in 2017. I complimented her on the simple and elegant designs of the graphics they were using in Powerhouse’s twitter posts. Emily shared with me that they were creating those graphics with Canva.
And then maybe a year or so later, I heard that one of my favorite VC’s, Bill Tai, had invested in Canva and that he was helping them grow from being a small startup based in Sydney, Australia to become a major player in Silicon Valley.
Canva is a very easy-to-use and powerful graphical design platform that combines elements from traditional graphical and illustration tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, as well as various other platforms which would host stock photos and unique fonts.
Canva’s founder Melanie Perkins started Canva with her boyfriend in her early twenties while working as a graphical designer and an instructor teaching graphical design. She created a solution to her own problem. Her problem was “having have to go to too many different platforms and desktop software tools to create an end-product of design to communicate ideas”.
This video from 4 years ago explains her story in detail.
And it is impressive to see the kinds of problems that the company is now working on now, in this more recent video.
Kerim Baran 