Low/No-Design and the Future of Design

Although a lot has been written about the low/no-code movement and platforms, there hasn’t been much written about the parallel trend in design. Low/no-design¹ platforms allow non-professional designers or creators without prior design experience or knowledge to create professional looking designs. Low/no-design platforms utilize technology and user interfaces to automate design steps and decisions into templates, drag and drop components and simple controls.

In a “professional” design platform like Adobe Creative Suite, the designer starts with the most basic and fundamental design component, like a dot or a shape, often from a blank canvas. Lots of design skills and practical knowledge of the platform are needed (and sometimes even years of practice) to manipulate the pixels and lines into a finished design. All of the information (i.e. the copy) would need to be created, and all the design decisions including the layout, hierarchy of information, colors, font pairings, and other visual elements like images, icons and decorators would need to be decided upon. Because of the complexity of the creation process, this work is often done by professional designers. Prior to the availability of low/no-design platforms, creating graphics with “professional” design platforms often required a graphic designer or graphic design department.

With professional design platforms, most design work goes through the design department

With a low/no-design platform like Canva (or our design platform, Venngage), the user starts with a completely designed template that contains both the information and the visual design. Although the copy of the design often needs to be customized, it contains the layout, the hierarchy of information, color and font pairings, and relevant visuals all assembled together, providing a good starting point. Using drag-and-drop editing controls, anyone with basic skills can easily customize the copy and design of the template. We often say, if you can use PowerPoint, you can use Venngage. Low/no-design platforms include a lot of stock visuals including photos, icons, illustrations, charts, maps, and diagrams so that design elements can be added and edited without having to draw or source them from somewhere else.

With low/no-design platforms, most design work is done by their respective departments

Now that we’ve described the difference between professional and low/no-design platforms, we can ask some interesting questions: How big is the market for both of these design platforms? What is the growth trajectory for each one? What will the future of design platforms look like?

Low/No-Design Market Size

How big is the design market? Adobe’s annual report last year sized the 2024 total addressable market (TAM) for Creative Cloud at $63B. The TAM is divided into three large segments: Creative Professionals, which include the “professional design” market, and Communicator and Consumer markets which correspond to the “low/no-design” market.

Design TAM Source: Adobe Annual Report 2021

The low/no-design market is the larger piece of the total design market. Adobe estimates this market to be $38B, or 60% of the entire design market, though personally, I think the low/no-design market is even bigger. Canva, the “gorilla” in the low/no-design market, is already valued more than this estimated TAM at $40B (its valuation from 2021). I will write about how much Canva is worth in the next article in this series. Is Canva worth more than the entire low/no-design TAM? I certainly don’t think so.

Potential Users for the Design Market. Source: Adobe Annual Report 2021

The second reason why the low/no-design market is so large lies in the type and volume of users in this market. According to Adobe’s annual report, there are almost five billion potential users in the low/no-design market (including Consumers and Communicators). This is more than 60% of the world’s population! Adobe is indicating that pretty much any non-professional designer is a potential user of a low/no-design tool. If that’s the case, this market is definitely bigger than $38B. In fact, the TAM would be closer to a general purpose productivity tool that anyone with a computer could use, like Microsoft Office. I don’t know what this number is, but Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Process revenue was > $50B in 2021².

Low/No-Design Market Growth

There are two main forces driving the low/no-design market.The first is the sheer volume of users (as discussed above), while the second is the growth of design use cases that low/no-design platforms can cater to.

If anyone can become a designer with a low/no-design platform, then surely there will be an explosion of design use cases as adoption increases. We’ve already seen the rapid adoption of low/no-design platforms among marketers and those in the “creator” economy, making marketing content and social media graphics ubiquitous. Similarly, in the office, we’ve seen adoption of many visual content and document design use cases. These aren’t merely the “low-end” of design use cases, but cover complex design categories such as infographics, strategy plans, proposals, reports, diagrams, and more. I wrote more about design categories in the first part of this series.

Over time, even the most complicated design use cases will be performed by a low/no-design version of that niche. One example is the medical and scientific illustrations design use case. These graphics used to be created by designers with graduate degrees in medical illustration, primarily using professional Adobe design tools. But in the last few years, Bio-Render, a low/no-design platform in this category, has enabled scientists and students to create highly accurate and visually appealing graphics fit for publishing in scientific journals.

In contrast, the number of professional designers are limited and the use cases they can cater to are thus limited by their availability. Moreover, one can assume that most creative professionals already use a professional design platform of some sort (usually Adobe). Whereas, there are many more non-designer professionals and consumers out there who haven’t used a design platform before and are mainly still using Microsoft Office tools to create visuals (I’m looking at you, PowerPoint).

If you follow this logic, the future growth of the design market will be dominated by low/no-design platforms. The speed of this adoption will depend on the low/no-design platform’s ability to create templates and design components specific to these use cases. There are hundreds, if not thousands more design use cases yet to be discovered.

Please read the rest of this series here:

Part 1: Unbundling Adobe

Part 3: Is Canva worth $100B?

Part 4: Adobe vs Figma vs Canva

If you’d like to read other articles on design platforms and markets, please follow me.

¹ Other terms used to describe this market are DIY design or automated design

² This revenue number includes Linkedin, Dynamics and Server segments.