Coming in Hot ft. Canva & Adobe

Design Software Giants Take on New Products, Deals…and Expectations

6 min readSep 15, 2022

Within 24 hours, we’ve seen two design software giants make rather strategic moves that will radically affect their businesses while growing and supporting their user base. While the latter may not particularly be a response to the former, it is actually a rather timely move made. Didn’t want to to stress you with too many links so this is pretty much a two-in-one piece.

Canva: Started From the Bottom

Canva introduces suite of new workplace products for the modern era at inaugural Canva Create event (Graphic: Business Wire)

Design software giant, Canva has shrugged off its valuation plunge, unveiling a major product expansion that puts it in direct competition with Microsoft and Google, and cements its founders’ ambition of becoming one of the world’s biggest companies.

Co-founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams unveiled its new Visual Worksuite products at the first ever Canva Create event in Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on Wednesday, and said it would help boost the company beyond its previously held $40 billion valuation within 18 months.

The Austrailian-based design company announced a number of new features coming to their platform. The biggest being Canva Visual Work suite. This announcement expands Canva’s services into a suite of different products to create all types of content. These includes: Canva Docs — a mix between your typical Canva design and word processing program, Canva websites — a drag-and-drop website design editor with hundreds of templates, Canva whiteboards — collaborative designs with unlimited real estate space, as well as Data Visualizations 2.0 which will allow you to transform a spreadsheet into interactive displays and visualizations.

These tools will join products such as Canva Presentation, Social Media, Video and Print. The end result of this is what appears to be a powerful productivity suite of tools focused around visuals and design. Obviously, the new work suite has drawn comparisons to other productivity suites such as Microsoft 365 and Google workspace. This has actually led some to believe that Canva’s latest release is an attempt to take on both Google and Microsoft. Co-founder and COO, Cliff Obrecht, has stated in the negative as regards those speculations, stating Canva’s approach to be more visual. So the tools pretty much serve to be a sort of enhancers to the work created in Google and Microsoft. It may only take a short while before they actually test on havi those “Google and Microsoft Creations” done on Canva if you ask me.

For the immediate future, these offerings stand as a direct challenger to a company like Adobe. Specifically the Adobe Creative Cloud Express, which is a similar product to Canva. It also makes you wonder whether other products in the visual work suite can challenge similar services. For example, Canva Websites and Squarespace or Wix; Canva Whiteboards and Miro.

We’ll just have to wait to see how this all plays out. Really proud of the work the Canva team has done, no doubts.

Played on Canva on my mobile after about a year and to be honest, the new features I saw were so coooooool! Just thought to share here.

You can catch the broadcast of Canva Create on their Youtube channel.

Adobe: If You Can’t Beat Them, Buy Them

In what seemed to be a breaking news today, the Design world came to a halt upon the news of Adobe’s agreement to buy Figma, a Palo Alto, California-based maker of an in-browser interface design platform, for around $20 billion in cash and stock (split evenly). This would be the largest acquisition ever of a privately held software company, topping Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp.

Figma raised around $330 million in VC funding, most recently via a Series E round in 2021 led by Durable Capital Partners at a $10 billion valuation. Other backers include Index Ventures, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, OATV, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Fuel Capital, Counterpoint Global, Geodesic Capital, Base10 Partners, WndrCo, IVP and TeleSoft Partners.

Analysts aren’t convinced Adobe — creator of products like Photoshop and After Effects — had the edge on the competition that it used to, especially now smaller rivals like Figma are gaining traction. And real traction, at that: Figma got a leg up during the pandemic because its cloud-based design software lets hybrid workers collaborate in real time, and it now boasts goliaths like Google and Netflix among its customers. Adobe, in fairness, did put some graft into making more accessible web-based products like Photoshop Express, but that hasn’t panned out as well as it had hoped.

Buying Figma at such a generous amount seemed like the best way to go. Hopefully there isn’t a raise in subscription prices as Adobe’s already expecting big things: it’s estimated the market Figma sits in could be worth nearly $17 billion by 2025. Adobe shouldn’t need to wait that long for good news though: Figma’s predicted to surpass $400 million in annual recurring revenue — made from things like subscriptions — by the end of the year.

There have been mixed reactions — from their target community — that are a strong signal to Adobe and Figma to definitely keep an eye on how they integrate and take their users along to whatever the next step is.

Design and prototyping, for individuals and teams, executed in a very streamlined and modern, cloud-based environment, are Figma’s product strengths, and it’s amassed some 4 million users to date. Adobe meanwhile has been building and acquiring a number of businesses in the wider world of digital creation, and that has taken it not just into the larger and more general reaches of design but also marketing and other areas adjacent to design in the longer creation chain. Adobe’s DNA is in design, though, and it has built out iconic products in areas like imaging (such as Photoshop), fonts, illustration, video and 3D and more.

The idea now will be to create a seamless connection between these and Figma, essentially building it out as the native platform to bring them all together. Adobe, of course, already had something like this, in the form of AdobeXD. It’s not clear what happens with that when this deal closes.

This is a big money reminder about the centrality of design in tech interfaces, as user expectations have become more sophisticated.

In a similar fashion, I shall be gracing this article with yet another design I did on Figma.

Can’t remember the names of people I drew inspiration from to do the designs so bear with me as there are no tags attached.

#OnucheOfTheRoots #Job32:8 💙👑🌍

Coming in Hot ft. Canva & Adobe

Design Software Giants Take on New Products, Deals…and Expectations

Written by Onuche Ogboyi