From Startup to Sensation How Melanie Perkins Transformed Design with Canva

1. From Start-up to Sensation: How Melanie Perkins Transformed Design with Canva Have you ever used multiple apps or software for editing just a single video or photo and felt it was difficult? Yes, before Canva designing, and editing photos and videos was a difficult task. In today's world designing is an effective and powerful tool for communication, storytelling, social media platforms, and many more. In this article, we discuss one such effective online designing tool that is been widely used by people called Canva and followed by the entrepreneurial journey of Melanie Perkins, the founder and CEO of Canva. Melanie Perkins: Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins is a successful women entrepreneur from Australia who founded Canva along with co-founders Cliff Obrecht and colleague Cameron Adams in the year 2013. Perkins is a graduate with a BA in communication, psychology, marketing, and management from The University of Western Australia. She has done her public relations internship at Weber Shandwick and was a Multimedia Centre Technical Assistant and Tutor at The University of Western Australia. Later she founded and directed Fusion Books which is an online publishing system enabling people to create stylish and professional yearbooks easily and quickly. After this Perkins founded the online platform Canva for designing. Perkins, being frustrated with the difficulty of learning and using design tools like Photoshop, and InDesign along with her partner Cliff Obrecht and colleague Cameron Adams, came up with an idea to make designing simple and easy. They noticed the demand for design along with the growing need for good visual content day by day. Though initially, it was not an easy journey with Canva they made an effective strategy to make it a Unicorn in Australia. Canva was able to grow rapidly as it was solving a problem that was faced by many people all over the world, Canva provides access to designing for everyone without any prior training or experience with simple and easy-to-use software. They focused on building software with better user experience rather than replacing the existing tools and aimed to help everyone create professional and beautiful designs on their own. Melanie Perkins has been horned for her determination and inspiring other women, she was listed in the Forbes Under 30 Hall of Fame by Forbes and selected as a

2. member of Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30, in the tech category. In 2015 Perkins was awarded the top Prize at the NSW Technology Entrepreneur of the Year and has also gained many more. Canva: Design anything. Publish anywhere. Canva is a simple-to-use online design and publishing platform that allows everyone to create professional quality designs. Canva was co-founded by Melanie Perkins and was established in the year 2013. It has its headquarters located in Sydney, Australia. Canva is an online visual communications platform with a mission to empower and elevate design. The mission includes a two-step plan- to build one of the world’s most valuable companies and to do the best we possibly can. Canva values are- to be a force for good, be a good human, empower others, make complex things simple, pursue excellence, and set crazy big goals. Canva provides ready-to-use templates to design spotlights including virtual documents, docs, presentations, PDF editor, etc. It also provides access to photo and video editing with options like photo collage, photo editor, YouTube video editor, and many more. One can also enhance their business marketing by creating attractive logos, flyers, QR code generators brochures, websites, posters, and social media. Apart from all these, one can also print business cards, T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, invitations, and a lot more. Canva also provides business services such as Canva Enterprise, Business solutions, Use Cases, Business Resources, and many more features under them. Canva has three service models the first is Canva Free where anyone can design anything with free of cost. Second is Canva Pro which is for individuals, solopreneurs, and freelance designers with unlimited premium content to scale their business. Next is Canva for Teams which includes all the premium features of Canvas Pro and allows teams of size to collaborate easily. From the day of launch, Canva has around 130M+ MAUs, and 15B+ designs, and is available in 100+ languages. Along with 190 other countries it has attracted users from all over the world. Canva is recognized with several awards, it is a winner of the Accessibility Award in 2022, the Apple App Award winner in the year 2021, Disruptor 50 list in 2022 at CNBC Disruptor 50, and many more. By this Canva has proved itself as an effective and useful online tool for design and editing.