New logo, same Canva
Written by Cat van der Werff — Executive Creative Director @ Canva
The face of our brand
Apple. Patagonia. Nike. I’m sure that when you imagine these logos, you also get a sense of what these companies stand for. A logo is one of the most important parts of your brand. It forms an immediate connection between your business and your community. It clarifies and codifies what you stand for. It’s a window into what you believe.
At Canva, we believe that design should be accessible to everyone, no matter where you live, what your socioeconomic status, or even computer experience. That’s because design is a critical skill that enables you to achieve your goals:
- Designing a great resume enables people to land a job
- Designing great marketing materials enables small businesses to grow
- Designing a great pitch deck enables people to turn their dreams into reality
- Designing cards helps people to celebrate important milestones
Refine, not rebrand
While our mission of empowering the world to design remains just as important as it was on day one, our product and brand have evolved a lot since those early days. We are now asking our logo to flex across more applications, from tiny buttons to huge billboards.
The Canva logo was originally designed to express the effortless flow you get in a creative moment, and it has done this well over the last 9 years. We needed to refine our logo, without losing the essence of the familiar brand that our community of 65+ million people across the globe knows and loves.
A labour of love
To craft the Canva wordmark, our in-house brand team collaborated with type designer and lettering artist, Rob Clarke. Rob has created logos for some of the world’s largest brands, and we like the way he can capture the unique personality of a brand through lettering — no two logos he designs are the same.
Rob Clarke on his creative process:
“When I was approached by Canva’s design team to redraw their logo I initially made notes as to what was working and what needed attention. Some characters were less legible than they could be, especially when reduced in size. Legibility is always of great importance when drawing logos.
I start by writing the word out numerous times with various pens to get a feeling of natural connections and strokes. Sketching by hand also allows the mind to wonder and explore other potential routes.
Next, I scan in various sketches and trace vectors over the top. Not too precise as I still aim to adjust weight, spacing and other elements. Once I have a rough vector I proceed to make refinements.”
A whopping 75 logo iterations later, we had our wordmark. Next, our brand team applied the gradient, brought it to life in motion, rigorously tested it, and ensured pixel-perfection across almost 100 different outputs. Now, our new logo was ready to share with the world.
Enabling craft at scale
Since the very beginning, our goal has been to empower the world to design, while enabling professional designers to create highly crafted assets in their program of choice, then import them into Canva to be used by organisations at scale. This means professional designers can focus on the things they love, while spending less time making small tweaks to individual templates each time an update is needed.
In our case, we handcrafted our logo and uploaded it to Canva as an SVG, enabling the 2,000+ people in our team to add branding to their presentations, social media posts, and marketing materials.
As I mentioned earlier, a logo is a window into what you believe. Here’s a few ideas we believe in, which we tried to express through our logo:
Design should be simple, not complex
Our core product offer is the simplicity and ease with which you can create a design. Ease of use is important, it means you can get in the flow, and design anything for work or play. Our new logo connects one letter to the next, with a playful loop in the v, to give the feeling of effortless flow.
Design is an inspiring process
The turquoise-to-purple gradient has become an iconic part of our brand over the years. It inspires and guides you across Canva’s design editor from left-to-right, from creation-to-completion. Our new logo glows with a radiant gradient, so you’ll know it’s Canva up close or afar, from any device, anywhere.
Design is for everyone
Everyone is born creative, it’s what makes us human. But we’re often educated out of it, or, lose the confidence to create as we grow up. By making design accessible, Canva gives people the confidence to give it a go. Our new logo is human and hand-crafted, to represent the creativity within every one of us.
We’re only just beginning
As a member of the Canva community, you help shape who we are. We’re constantly working to better our product and brand, in support of you. We’ll have more brand updates to share with you soon.
