You’ve got to love Canva and, by extension, the Affinity design suite that is now an integral part of it. But hey guys, you can’t go on not charging people forever.
And I would be the first to admit that I’m a customer for all the wrong reasons.
Not least that a change of laptop meant abandoning the copy of Adobe’s Creative CS5.5 I was reluctant to replace with a monthly subscription – and importantly the Sierra 10.12.6 Mac operating system old enough to run it.
Affinity, which we’d been writing about in GXpress for years, was a free alternative to Photoshop and the very occasional forays I make into InDesign or Illustrator, enough of which my near-octogenarian brain could handle. Somewhat proscriptive, Adobe had also begun to remind me of Quark on a bad day.
Still out there incidentally, Quark popped up a couple of months back arguing its “paying for a production system that meets requirements the free tool doesn’t” case…
All a long, long way from chatting with, I think, Adobe co-founder Chuck Geschke over a pre-Pacprint breakfast at Melbourne’s Exhibition Building (there, that’s dated it, but Google can’t help me on whether it was he or John Warnock who attended – I’ll have to dig out a 1996 copy of Ink magazine to check it!).
Oh, and did I mention Canva is Australian, and headed by the charming (and distractingly gorgeous) Melanie Perkins and her husband, Cliff Obrecht, who founded the ‘unicorn’ company in 2013 with Cameron Adams?
I watched the recent Canva global presentation online, and was impressed by the way in which every one of its staff was given credit at the end. Now some of these team members are being shown the door, in an inevitable but high-profile consolidation being blamed on AI.
Canva is in the news for the announcement it will affect more than 1271 jobs in what Perkins says is “the hardest moment” in its 13-year history.
The problem is “slowing growth”; the “incredibly hard” solution being to return to the “small, empowered teams” on which the business was built, with most of the cuts “in the office”.
There’s been a letter to employees, and hopes that teams will spend more time in the office, “to build trust, learn from one another and strengthen the connections that make Canva special”. While at least one Australian state government is espousing the nonsense that you can work without leaving home, Canva is boldly saying that it expects most of its ‘hybrid Canvanauts’ to spend two or three days in the office from January (or “around two to thirds days” according to some reports. The $60.3 billion company plans to merge product, growth and platform teams into a single unit, based in Sydney, with some being asked to relocate, and others take on new roles or leave.
The company has had to revise financial expectations for the year, despite revenue growing by 25 per cent in the June quarter to $US921.9 million (A$1.32 billion).
Perkins says the aim is to “get back to spending more time building and less time navigating how work gets done”.
Maybe ‘back to basics’ is the best approach, especially given the success in cutting the cost of serving AI tasks in the latest Canva AI 2.0 release. Oh, and charging for stuff.
Peter Coleman
Pictured: Melanie Perkins at the 2019 Web Summit in Lisbon (photo: David Fitzgerald/Web Summit via Sportsfile)