Canva for Work has Arrived and it’s… Meh.

I’ve been getting excited about the prospect of Canva for Work being released. Today, I got an email announcing that it was finally here. Prior to the launch, I responded to a request for input into features and this is what I said:

“It would be amazing if we could save color palates for repeated use. It’s a pain to type in our brand colors on every project.

Copying and pasting or dragging and dropping elements from one project to another would also be a plus. Lastly, more fonts! Specifically, in our case: Courier and Wisdom Script.”

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As you can see, I had rather modest expectations for the new roll out. Even so, they weren’t met. Yes, you can move elements from one design to another (I haven’t tried that, yet, but it’s a feature mentioned in the welcome.) You can save ONE color palate, which is better than none, but I would have to create an account for each client to save their brand standards. Unfortunately, there are no new fonts and no way to import your own. I either have to use a font that is somewhat close or finish my work in PicMonkey where you can use your own fonts. That wasn’t such a big deal when the tool was free, however it’s not something for which I want to pay a monthly or annual fee.

The graphics in this article are an example of my using the new brand template. The brand kit asks for your fonts (headings, subheadings, and body) and then doesn’t use them in the templates. What was the point? You can save your colors, which is a huge help. However, you cannot reorder them by dragging and dropping, but must retype the hex code. That wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience, but the order of the colors highly impacts the template color choices and they do need to be rearranged, at least initially. You also upload your logo(s) which are then left off your designs, as well. The “Magic Resize” feature is a great jumping off point and is certainly a shortcut versus the old method, which involved making a separate graphic from scratch for each social network. I would not suggest magically resizing and then not further editing because most of the graphics have much too much empty space; it just looks weird. Also, don’t forget to change the name of each graphic before downloading your files. The tabs display the social platform the new images are sized for, but the graphic descriptions (also the file name when you download) are all the same.

Do I like the new features? Kind of. Mostly. I like it, but I don’t love it. I was expecting more. Am I willing to pay to use these features? Most likely not, especially since the fee is per person and there isn’t an agency version to handle client accounts. I realize that it’s a simple tool and it’s a very good one, but right now it’s somewhere in between the awesome free tool that I have come to love and the paid version of which I have higher expectations. I have 60 days to decide… or rather, Canva for Work has 60 days to announce updates. We will see.

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