6 Tools I Use Instead of Canva
I don't dislike Canva for the reason most people on the internet seem to hate Canva.
I actually rather like the idea of design being applicable to the masses, and I love myself a nice template if it means I can get something pretty out the door quickly and easily.
It’s not the idea of Canva I take issue with, it's Canva itself.
I'm shocked that I don't hear more people saying this:
Canva has an absolute garbage UX and UI. Especially considering it's a design app. I’m always surprised I don’t hear more designers talking about how clunky and unintuitive it is to actually use.
And you’re not going to convince me that I simply need to “get used to it,” because I I was an early adopter; I’ve been using Canva since it was founded in 2013. Eleven years later, it increasingly takes me longer to find what I need to create my graphic in Canva than it does to actually create it.
Good design should get out of the way, but Canva seems to thrive on being bloated, busy, and chaotic. If someone asked me to design something that would keep a restless toddler preoccupied for hours with bright nonsense to click on, it would look exactly like Canva’s homepage. I just brought Canva up on my MacBook, and without scrolling, there are sixty-four different things I can click on, most of which are different colors.
I’ll take a single, fixed sidebar and simple folder structure any day over yet another half-based AI-powered tool or “app.”
I'm of the mindset that apps should spark a little bit of delight when you use them, or at the very least not make you cringe when you have to open them. Canva fails on both levels.
I let my Canva Pro account lapse this year, and here are the apps I’ve been replacing it with:
Unfold
This is my favorite tool for creating aesthetic social media graphics, but I wish they had a web version or Mac option so I could design on my iPad or laptop. Even still, I could lose hours creating pretty graphics on this app; it’s just fun to use.
The Adobe Creative Suite
I've tried to quit Adobe twice; I don't love the interface or the pricing model. But I always come crawling back, specifically for Illustrator (logo design), Photoshop (mockups), and Lightroom (photo editing). It's nearly as ugly as Canva, but the unmatched functionality makes the icky interface worth it.
Pixelmator
I’m a sucker for apps that were built for the Mac (Adobe’s Mac experience is dreadful), and have been using Pixelmator since I bought it years ago. I prefer it to Photoshop, and use it for most light design tasks. The only thing it doesn't do well is Smart Objects, and since I have a lot of purchased mockup templates, I have to deal with Photoshop sometimes.
Apple Pages
For documents and page layouts, I just use Pages. It’s free on the Apple ecosystem, available on all of my devices, and forces me to focus on elegant simplicity. InDesign is better for complex functionality, but I don't need that. In fact, I’m increasingly finding that simple is almost always better, and nobody does simple better than Apple.
Adobe Express
Adobe Express is the company's attempt at competing with Canva, and it fails in one major way: the templates are puzzlingly atrocious. If you're a Canva user and you typically start with one of the built-in templates, you're going to be aghast if you try to switch to Express. But … if you're willing to build from scratch, and start with a blank template, Adobe Express has a few major edges over Canva: it has a simpler interface, better handling of layers, and my personal favorite features: access to Adobe Stock and Adobe Fonts. Both collections are vastly superior to the Unsplash and Google Font integration offered by Canva.
Keynote
I don't need to do presentations very often; I think those horizontal slide decks everyone likes to create for courses and webinars are a bad move; they don't look good when someone is viewing vertically on their phone. But if I have to throw one together, I'll use Keynote. It's free for Apple users (Powerpoint is the obvious alternative for PC users).
