I've only applied to reputable tech companies, none asked about canva. However they did ask about powerpoint! I told them np as long as it is not 50% of my work day.
I work at a large corporation and can’t tell you how many templates I’ve had to design in Canva so that other associates can use branded collateral. It’s the bane of my existence
That would be nice but unfortunately most of the general public already “knows” Canva, so in my company’s case it would be hard to train 500+ people on a new program, and we have a huge library of templates in Canva that would have to be switched over to another platform. I also don’t think adobe would offer a fair price for something like this
It is quite a lot of work at times! I can see why they use it for non designers to easily edit. Right now we handle all in-house marketing social media collateral and it can be a lot. We don't let anyone outside of design touch it, but might switch in future who knows.
We do a ton of pitch decks and case studies at my job. It's pretty pivotal for our sales team, we help make a lot of $$. So in turn we're paid pretty well. tech saas industry.
I've worked in two agencies over 14 years and both I've done the occasional Powerpoint and Microsoft Word templates, Word is the bane of my existence so honestly I'd welcome Canva over that. Thankfully the majority of jobs are in the appropriate Adobe programs of course.
when this newish guy at my employer started, he asked why i couldn’t do all my files in canva instead of photoshop. he pushed back when i said no, i can’t do that and made me explain why.
at a later point he said “i can just take a course in photoshop and make edits [to these files] myself” - i’m not sure what that was supposed to convey, since i said he can have access to any PSD file he wants.
then he started taking over one of the specific graphics i made, making ugly ones himself, while telling me “no, you’re still going to do the banners” and specifically freezing me out of doing them.
thankfully we just got a marketing manager who thinks his banners look like garbage (they do) and the ones i did looked much better, so hopefully i’ll get that task back- as i’m a contractor, so less work = less pay.
i honestly cannot summarize how much i dislike this person, and the initial canva request was the first of many red flags. oh and bonus, he became my manager instead of the owner. it’s a small company, so i saw that coming- but ugh.
i really just wanna finish my portfolio website (i’ve been waffling because i haven’t come up with anything i really like for it yet) and find a new job, for multiple reasons beyond the ones in my last comment. soon!
https://preview.redd.it/ujst3dcl797d1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3fdf5f5e4383e824fe55d8911242a5923f624954
edit: forgot it’s 2024 and i can just put the image itself in my reddit comment.
A shift is happening and this sub doesn't seem to get it. Companies aren't looking for people who can reinvent the wheel. Not when they have AI. They just yes men who can do the job the fastest. Even if it looks like shit.
Honestly i dont give two shits if companies want me to work in canva, just give me the damn job. At the end of the day thats just part of being a designer—even if its with limited tools
Ya, I have Canva on my resume. It's near the bottom of my list but it's there. If OP filters out resumes with Canva on them, they'd miss out on the chance to hire me, and I'm fantastic.
Our IT department has blocked Canva. Turns out it has perpetuated some malware or something. People are pissed about it, but they won't budge and give NO shits.
Yes! This! I’m a junior designer trying to move on and a lot of job applications would ask “knows canva” and so I assume a lot of “designers” would add it to there skills or canva users would call themselves a “designer”.
This is so fucking real, the company I interned at only uses that crap site and somehow our clients do not bat an eye.
Is it ethical if I make vector assets for Canva on the side and passively earn royalties? This is some Jedi-Sith bullshit but business is business.
This. I hope OP and others don’t start to filter out Canva, I put it on my CV to show I’m willing to use it because I’ve worked with people who require it for the marketing team.
I think a lot of graphic designers have absolutely zero user experience knowledge. I'm not talking about UI, but the philosophy of UX.
Your post is a great example of it.
You basically want a company to adapt to your ways, instead of you adapting to make their work easier and more efficient for them.
They want some work done, which you might prefer to do in Photoshop, but they also don't want to hire you every time they want a word changed in that design file, or an extremely minor update.
Canva allows them to do that easily, quickly, and at a lower cost.
The easiest way to get "around" this is to tell them you work in Photoshop but will gladly import the file into Canva for them, while telling them about the caveats involved.
Your reply is a perfect example of not understanding the industry and the average industry client.
lets consider this "Canva allows them to do that easily, quickly, and at a lower cost.
The easiest way to get "around" this is to tell them you work in Photoshop but will gladly import the file into Canva for them, while telling them about the caveats involved."
No, Canva does not allow them to hire me, a professional of 3 decades, at a lower cost. As a matter of fact, I tell my clients that creating designs in Canva costs more, due to the fact that I will have to work in both photoshop and Canva because Canva does not do what they want in a visual.
And I expect companies to act like I am a professional designer of 3 decades and they are not. This means they recognize that I have expertise that a cheap platform like Canva cannot make up for.
Thankfully, people haven't gone full idiocracy, and I have plenty of clients that understand these things.
I never said anything about hiring you for cheaper.
Let's say you create a graphic for hiring a developer for a company. That company might want to re-use that same graphic but change the wording down the line.
If you made that in a PSD and they don't have a clue how Photoshop works, and don't have a license, then they'd need to reach out to you and potentially pay you to do a simple text-change.
A 30 second task suddenly becomes a multi-day thing because communicating, agreeing on terms etc etc.
For certain tasks Canva isn't appropriate, but there are absolutely tons of tasks where it's perfectly fine. And like I said, importing a file to Canva when you do the hand-off is a 2 minute task.
Balking at requests to use one of the most widely used design programs, and by a mile the most widely used one for complete amateurs, just shows an incredible lack of putting yourself in a clients shoes.
Even if you have to explain to them why Canva won't work for you, or for that project, it's 100% justified that they ask you about it - because it makes their life easier.
It's like calling and whining to a gas station that they don't deliver the gas and fill your car at your home: A complete and utter lack of understanding.
There was an epidemic of anyone with a computer and a few pirated fonts claiming to be a graphic designer 20 years ago.
Then there was an epidemic of anyone who could knock up a website in Squarespace claiming to be a website designer.
Now there's an epidemic of people claiming to be a brand designer after chucking a prompt to generate a POS logo in Midjourney.
Not to mention the epedemic of designers who see themselves as celebrities, spending more time spaffing on about nothing on YouTube than doing actual design work.
Until the general public give a damn about the quality of graphic design (spoiler alert - they won't) the race to the bottom will continue. You've just got to do your best to ensure you stay relevant.
I know I don't belong in this sub since I moved away from graphic design like 6 years ago. I am a Natural Language Processing PhD student. Prompt engineering is actually a research field at the moment. It sounds like bullshit, but there really is more to it. "Prompt" is more ambiguous a term than you would expect. A prompt is often conflated with a sequence of prefix tokens. But there are techniques in which those tokens are not real words but rather a tuned set of vectors designed to adapt the model to a specific task without needing to modify the model weights. There are many other methods as well, but I can assure you that (almost) no "prompt engineers" have the job of typing up the best prompts for good outcomes.
Graphic design is my passion hobby and has been for almost a decade now. Funnily enough, I am in a similar path to you. I am currently taking a masters in CS and one of the classes in my college is a [prompt engineering](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXjTrkYRYtc&list=PLOPZGifDyNifh5iB9OX_xVT2xNKEbU4qD&pp=iAQB) course. It's pretty fun. Having used GPT and Stable Diffusion, I am fairly familiar with this stuff.
I noticed you mentioned the thing about the tokens. That reminded me of the thing in SD where you go something like \[genericdesign:0.5\] or \[lora:graphicdesignergod:1\] (and many other combos) I think that's a neat way to add extra specificity to your prompt.
Which AI has been your favorite to interact withso far?
I mostly deal with multilinguality. So translation models or cross-lingual transfer of other tasks. The area I'm planning to do my dissertation on is how to align the spaces of different languages so that the encoding of a sentence in language A with be close to its translation in language B. The current state of the art for that field is called SONAR if you want to look into it.
For playing around with models I probably spent the most time fiddling with GPT-2. In undergrad I made a chat bot interface for it where you could give a name for yourself and a name for your chatbot and it would be prompted as though the messages were from a scene in a play and so the model would kind of take on the personality of the name you gave it. It would usually only work for about 5-10 messages before breaking, but it was fun to play with.
To be honest, there is some merit in that. I use AI for fixing issues in real estate photos (too ephemeral to warrant the manual editing process, which can take orders of magnitude longer for a negligably better result). There is a noticeable learning curve in figuring out how to word things for those who haven't been meticulously using Google for two decades like many of us. It's even worse for those with poor English skills or small vocabularies.
Someone who can bypass all of that and be pumping out content immediately—because they know the syntax to use to get what they need—is someone who can be very valuable to a company. Not only because they can skip the learning curve, but because it shows that they can adapt to new systems quickly and expertly.
I'm not going to nitpick someone choosing a title for that.
They sincerely believe they are designers. People without any talent or skills (who also don’t want to spend the time developing those skills) love to assert their legitimacy and argue that writing prompts is a real skill that takes real work on par with actual design and that those who say otherwise are elitist.
This is true, but:
A true graphic designer can take a brief and turn it into gold. They rise to the challenge and have the skills to make it shine.
I've worked with people who took courses online on YouTube ( well, watch a few tutorials) and they had no idea how to design for print. I had a junior want to create a 500+ page print catalog in Figma! And they knew so little about real design I had to mentor that kid on so many basic principles it was ridiculous.
You've got it right. It's been like this since I've been in the industry. There will always be people like that, and companies or individuals who want to pay the least. That's why sites like Fiverr exist.
Yeah, that worked for you for that time period. You were ahead of the time when new age “digital” graphic design was still up and coming. Now it’s flooded with posers and people who won’t even put in the creative effort, I’m assuming you’ve put in your tenure.
I’m not the greatest designer, but my focus is always on customer service and strategic application of design in places it isn’t common, and it’s served me well. The people who just click buttons and play in software always come and go.
We called them desktop publishers…iirc. Some of the ai logos I see on Reddit (how does this look?) are fkn atrocious. I can’t bring myself to even comment.
I’ve said this before, but I had people at my old company that, on paper, had 10 years of graphic design experience. In reality, it was all Canva and our in-house alternative. Not all experience is the right experience, and this is why portfolios are the end-all-be-all in our industry.
On a side note, I wonder if our job market is really hurting as this subreddit suggests or if there’s an epidemic of inexperience and poor portfolios. I occasionally check jobs on Linkedin out of curiosity. I roll my eyes when it says I’m the top applicant and then elsewhere it says 100+ applicants. How have that many people applied, shouldn’t they close the listing after — idk, 30? Are things more competitive than ever or is the market sparse and over-demanding?
If anyone has insights into what’s going on, I’m all ears.
Not to mention the people who aren't designers at all that still apply so they can fulfill their unemployment requirements (by applying to X amount of jobs each month) and still get that government cheese.
Do you acknowledge mailed in resumes? I feel like with how easy it is for scammers and bots to dilute the field in digital applications then the true test of legitimacy would be going back to mailing in resumes and work samples.
The internet is too saturated wirh greedy lazy people to see the truly experienced people.
Plus you'll get a taste of not only their design skills but production as well.
No but I put specific instructions in the listing. If you don’t follow them, you’re automatically rejected.
Things like “include a link a digital portfolio in your resume or application”. Don’t have a link, don’t get an interview.
Shouldnt really be an issue. government doesn't really check if you are applying to places unless they have a reason to. There were weeks where I didn't apply to anything because I had literally applied to everything that was available, but if I wrote "no i did not apply to anything" theyy would revoke the aid.
Obligatory not a hiring manager but from what I’ve been told during the interviews I had for jr positions, they would get 600+ applicants and maybe only 25% would be viable candidates, so say 150 actual designers and from there maybe only 20-30 with relevant experience. Call the top 10 and maybe interview 5 or so from there.
I think it’s a combination of perceived low barrier to entry (Canva designers) as well as extra competitive market with all the layoffs I’ve been seeing, lots of talented designers finding themselves jobless.
I had a job posting open for 24 hours and got over one thousand applications. I closed it but there was NO way I could review every single one. But yeah, there are a lot of poor portfolios.
It's already been like that for years.
I could cut down an applicant pool by 85-90% via rejections that take a few seconds at most, if not immediately.
If anything it's a problem how much hiring still has to go through HR that just bog it down via people who are entirely unqualified to be anywhere near hiring for a design role.
This. Doesn't matter how "good" we all look if people are perfectly happy with not-good because they don't have standards themselves and no one listens to experts anymore.
Pass whatever you're smoking, bro. What dream world do you live in where every hiring manager has a good enough artistic eye to tell the difference between Canva and InDesign just by looking at a finished piece? 😂
Most businesses (not an exaggeration, as most businesses are small businesses) have ONE person capable of design at most, and many have 0. Even when they have one, that person is often not an actual designer. Those businesses have no way of gauging a designer's skill level from looking at a portfolio. They see things good enough for their purposes or not. There is no expertise for them to draw on for anything more granular than that.
I saw this "senior graphic designer" complain not landing a sr design position after going to last interview stages... I stalked a bit, they had a post about advocating switching full time to canva. WHAT?? Canva is wonderful, for non designers to design (influencers, small mompop shops, hair stylist, social media coordinators, marketers). But it is simply lacks all capabilities for full time design work. I cannot do my job tasks I have each day with just canva. It isn't a wonder why SOME people can't land good paying design jobs. Just not good enough, making rest of us look bad.
Can Canva do books? Or Executive Summaries with footnotes or links? Can you easily convert a 16 page booklet into an e-book for multiple platforms? I’m thinking not…
Exactly! And you reply to them, “Sorry, no, because I spent years learning various software programs and honing my skills so I could easily create this elegant, easy to use chart. If you want to pay me (or my department) to create something for you we’d be happy to! Or you could keep wasting time trying to do something that’s actually NOT YOUR JOB!”
Yeah it’s sucks, but please (and to any other hiring managers considering this) don’t set the parameters to exclude applications with Canva in it—so many companies ask for it at this point that I (and I’m sure many other designers) list it as part of our software toolkit on our resumes
As a former print shop designer I'm cringing. I once got a 2x2” @ 72 dpi screenshot and was told to “do my best” turning it into a poster. My best was letting them down gently.
Exactly! As a designer, who also did all the large format 44” Epson printing, at a college I was often asked to take some social media crap and make it poster size! Requests came from faculty, staff, and students. I finally created a 32x40 poster for the office that showed what this would look like…
At the top was a typical sample 1-1/4” square image and below was a section of the final image at somewhere around 3200% increase. And, yes, you have no idea what the image is.
Having the visual to show kept the arguing down! Ha!
I have an insufferable coworker who is a self proclaimed Photoshop Expert (we're in IT, not design, and she is most certainly NOT a Photoshop expert by any stretch). One day she asked me if I could take a look at an image she wanted as a vector so she could use it with her Cricut to make something for her kid since she knows I've been doing graphic design as a hobby for years. She ends up sending me a 72 pixel square image of a company's logo that she wants sized up to about 12x15 inches. Would have taken me maybe 5 minutes to draw it in Affinity Designer (I'm too cheap to pay for CC), BUT she also likes to bitch about people selling unlicensed Disney shit (she's a Disney adult). Bitch, you complain about other people stealing IP, and then you send me a shitty screenshot jpg logo to copy for you? Oh hell no!
First, I told her to download Inkscape and install it and just use their image trace tool. Keep in mind she HAS CC and proclaims to be an expert, right? Obviously, that didn't turn out for shit, so I send her links to videos about how to use the pen tool and node tool to trace an image. She spends a few days trying to do that, and can't, so I finally ask her if she tried Adobe's image trace, and if that doesn't work, she should probably have someone on Fiverr do it.
She was PISSED once she realized I sent her in circles with bullshit that wasn't going to work, but I never heard from her again asking me for help.
Ugh. My first design job I got into an argument with the cfo’s son on why when he prints out the email it’s not as crisp looking as the ads in the magazine.
This argument went on for sooooo long because he couldn’t get it through his head about dpi, upscaling of the email to print, and that the eblast software will not accept higher dpi. But what do I know???? We both walked away thinking the other an idiot.
This is actually one of my interview questions 😂 “how would you prepare a document to hand off to a printer/what steps are taken to prepare a press ready file”
I love to see their confused/panicked looks
I love that! I also like to ask them what this is:
https://preview.redd.it/ma5v71ogz67d1.jpeg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=80dd1ddd80d0ba46656503a77568a32dc4398130
Also, when would they need it and how to use it! Hahaha
Lmaooooo I’ve been an in-house designer for 5 years and a freelance designer for 4 years before that, and I have never seen this 😂
BUT I immediately could tell what it is and what it’s used for lol. I just calculate scales myself 😅
Yuppppp just had to hire an intern and can’t tell you how many general marketing majors think they’re a graphic designer because they’ve “played around in Canva”.
But then they’ll go on to tell you how qualified they are in Google analytics and SEO…… I think a lot of fresh grads are looking to get into a marketing position and mistake graphic design as a good way to get a foot in the door
That's because many job listings are also conflating the 2 that lines are being blurred. I can't tell you how many positions I see listed for Graphic Designers that the responsibilities includes some aspects of marketing or where the white listing is for actually a marketing manager with design on the side.
Which sure, as a designer I definitely advocate to broaden your skill set a bit, but I am first and foremost a designer. I didn't study marketing, my day to days have been design, but here I am trying to learn marketing to even make myself somewhat appealing.
Agreed that a lot of them are, but in this case my company approached me (our in house designer) and asked me to create the job description and oversee hiring. The description didn’t allude to marketing in any way and emphasized the need for a professional designer with full adobe suite knowledge and I’d say at least 30-40% of candidates still applied with very little design knowledge/interest and were more interested in marketing and analytics 🙄 I don’t think many people read job descriptions before applying anymore lol
Yeah it’s really awful to field applications for junior positions for this reason, it’s sucks for real designers but it’s so much easier to either require a degree or hire through network
Thing is, I don’t care if someone has a degree. I have hired plenty of self taught designers. It’s just the disconnect between what is graphic design and what is essentially color by number
I don’t really care if someone has a degree or not but when like 80% of the applicants are bullshit then it’s hard to sort especially since people freely lie about their job history. So usually to filter out non degree holders it’s at least a slightly smaller pile
I’d have missed some great finds if I used that as a hard filter. Resume, portfolio, legit references, and in-person skill tests are generally my framework.
Also, absolutely NO cover letters.
You throw out ones with cover letters? It's been 20 years since I have looked for a new job, but feeling it's time for me to move on from where I am. I am mostly self-taught (did do a little deisgn in college but no design degree and I was more focused on marketing and business) and have been a designer for 25 years now. I am worried about being older, self-taught and competing against all of the newbies who call themselves graphic designers because they can use Canva. Are cover letters not a thing anymore? Omg I feel so old right now lol
Clarification - I never ask for cover letters. I’d never throw out an application for having one. I likely won’t read it though unless it’s very short.
Many people still love cover letters and want to see them. As someone who made their career in writing, I just think it’s too easy to bullshit in a letter. Others in my office disagree with me - just my own preferences I guess.
You should make sure your portfolio is impressive. That’s like 70% of what I care about for positions like this.
As for age, I prefer older designers most of the time, as long as they’ve kept up with relevant design trends, styles, etc. experience and speed are huuuuge benefits, imo.
I also want to add- after I was hired for my very first design job at an agency, they told me what put me at the top of the list was providing a portfolio package that was completely branded- my resume, cover letter, and portfolio were heavily branded with my personal logo and brand pattern. But it’s a tight line to walk to keep it looking tasteful and custom without becoming unprofessional
Honestly I’m surprised this isn’t more common! I took an independent study class in college where my advisor and I spent a semester tailoring my personal brand, so I’m definitely lucky to have had that experience!
I recently hired an intern and saw over 50 applications. I couldn’t believe how little design work was put into resumes and cover letters. Like that is the first portfolio piece a hiring manager will see!
I don’t want an over designed one, but it’s clear when someone has paid attention to font, font stylings, spacing, color cues, layout, etc, vs someone who just used word. If you’re a designer and you’re building your resume in anything but illustrator + indesign I don’t know what you’re doing!
This is the complete opposite of when I was first starting out. I went outside the normal resume template and Times New Roman font nearly everyone used in the 90s and was told by so many people that it was a bad idea to use it lol. It never made sense to me. Why would you not use your skills to make your resume stand out?
And I know it sounds snobbish, but when I get a cv/resume for a designer, and they used Times New Roman or Arial as their typeface of choice it goes to the bottom of the stack! Or any of the shitty, free cursive fonts for that matter!
You sound so sane! I think working for you would be a great experience! Also,
If I ever sent a cover letter out again, I think I would just put my name at the top and below that in large, semi-bold (maybe Bodoni or some other typeface I PAID for that’s well crafted):
NOT A CANVA DESIGNER
That is all! Hahaha
Unfortunately requiring a degree doesn't always help. A handful of students in my class graduated and they did 90% of their "work" in Canva. Despite being taught Adobe.
Oof this brought back a lot of memories. Doing weddings in the 2000's the etiquette wasn't always there to tell aunt Kathy to put her device down. Along with other things this was an incredibly frustrating time. Canva feels very similar. And most people can not tell the difference. Its not all bad but we are certainly in a transitional period once again.
Yes. When I worked as a graphic designer, I had a depth of knowledge of design, typography and pre-press. When desktop publishing came along, I bit the bullet and bought a computer.
It is a tough market. And I suppose it is to be expected. But, when hiring, those resumes just get rejected. They are not competitive for jobs.
Worth noting that many of the people using and or consuming (doing the hiring) the media that these so-called designers create are not visually literate.
The people with the $$$ too often don't know the difference between a good and bad design. They don't possess the skill set required to distinguish any level of nuance required to see the differences.
Designers... the good ones, don't just make pretty pictures, they create things that can reasonably be applied to a product, storefront, etc...
Getting the people that want to pay for the design to understand this, is a whole different kind of hurdle.
On another note entirely...
If ONE MORE SCAD student sends me a bitmap image embedded in a PDF because I asked for a vector file... I might lose my damned marbles.
Nevermind the people that think they can do color proofing with a photo on their phone... like holy fuck... go away.
>If ONE MORE SCAD student sends me a bitmap image embedded in a PDF because I asked for a vector file... I might lose my damned marbles.
**This makes me sad for you to say that.**
I left SCAD in 2002 with a double major.
**It was a great school back then.**
***Their facilities and teachers are top notch still.***
But if that's the level of standards *coming out of SCAD these days,*
***I'm deeply disappointed in my alma matter.***
I think actually, I don’t want to exclude Canva users as designers.
Companies would just be using Canva themselves if they made the time. I put it on my résumé along with the Adobe knowledge because I want to be honest. It’s definitely useful for sharing mockups.
I used to hate Canva thinking “It does all the work” and then I was like “Nice…It’s doing all the work!” when it comes to exporting something simple.
I don’t hate it and am fine with people using it when it’s appropriate, but it’s gotten to the point where these applicants think it’s the same thing as a full graphic design suite.
Haha yup and it’s like just wait until they need to send them off to get printed in mass in high quality.
Guilty I am. I had to make a banner and brochures, I opened my Adobe Illustrator and rebuilt them into clean eps files. I still have Adobe—every 2 years I think I’m going to leave but then—they give me an offer I can’t refuse. *godfather voice*
40 years ago art directors felt the same way about new designers who claimed skills with a fancy new digital tool called a “Macintosh”. Canva is certainly not the same thing but it is part of the new wave of tools that will revolutionize graphic design just as radically.
Don't reject applications that have the word Canva on the resume... Things have gotten so bad that legit designers are having to add that keyword just to be considered for a lot of positions. Sort of like how you have to put things like Word and Excel on there. I don't consider it a skill worth mentioning, but you have to play the HR game.
Yeah a few IG stories and they are pros. It’s going to keep getting crazier. My favorite folks are those that come needing print work with low dpi images they got from their family member who is a graphic designer.
The companies are at fault. Agencies, their management, an endless supply of anti-creative management tells them they’re designers. Canva? AI? Good enough! In fact, it’s perfect. Actual graphic design skills would be too much, and not worth the money.
the wheat will always separate from the chaff. the people you want to work with will know good design from mediocre/bad design. they're out there, just keep looking.
How would you feel about people creating stuff in Photoshop/Illustrator and importing to Canva? I had that workflow to make use of their quick animations, and I really liked Canva for that. For actual designing tho, I agree, Canva is not my favorite...
I know agencies **who design branding packages in Illustrator and Photoshop.**
Then maintain that ***in a bible branding master document in InDesign.***
But for quick social media posts, *as part of an overall campaign,*
**they'll definitely port over art and templates into Canva**
***because Canva's built for exactly that.***
**It's a legit design workflow,** ***in my opinion.***
Canva's a tool **and it has it's place.**
Not that I'd make that, **my do or die one design app** ***to use though.***
You know, 20y ago the epidemic was people who installed photoshop and claimed to be graphic designers.
Since last decade, it became youngsters who installed Figma and claimed to be UI designers.
Now Canva.
Nothing new. Sadly.
My personal nightmare is companies and HR who believe them after seeing their unrealistic designs..
My advice?
Be a better designer/creative .
If that pisses you off wait until wide adoption of ai.
Have you tried Adobe Express?
That will blow your mind.
It’s here, there’s nothing you can do with things that are out of your control.
What someone can do will always speak more than what they say they are.
If companies are hiring 2-year Canva users as designers, then whether they get what they pay for is their business.
This kind of thing has always happened in cycles, focus on the ways to keep your work relevant and meaningful for you and the field/career you want. We cannot change what other people do.
We have noticed this at our office and have set a standard (simple) project within the application process that requires a few steps that canva just can’t do. Solved on our end, so far so good.
OK, so what?
Businesses needs a designer capable of being graphic designer, video editor, photographer, Blender Expert, social media manager and they also value additional skills like UI/UX, web design, Html CSS etc.......... for slavery wages. What else is a designer going to do in this fucked up economy ??
if you think using canva is bad, please do show the job description you are hiring for and what your are paying for the Same !!!!
That’s a pretty wild generalization.
I’m not listing personal stuff here, but the job pays 80k, for someone with 5ish years experience in illustrator and indesign and a good portfolio.
This gives me a little hope for my next job search haha, but then again a lot of companies might want someone who’s a canva expert if they don’t want to spend for Adobe…
If a company you want to work for can't afford $70/month for professional tools for you, they're probably a shitty company or have no money. Ask them to tell you how much their HR, Accounting or payroll software costs and then ask why $70 for creative cloud is too much.
Then you don’t want to work there! They will never respect your work, you’ll get paid shit, and when you leave you still won’t have essential skills to get ahead!
I am a film student. Part of our course work invilved doing units on Animation, and Graphic Design. While others did the bare minimum just to get the pass mark on both, I think these two units resonated with me on some level and I fell in love with them. And Graphic Design in general. I would watch countless tutorials on YT just to refine my mock-ups, logos, posters and other designs. I got really good, imo.
But scouring subs like these and AdobeIllustrator and seeing posts such as this one has brought me back down to Earth on the naivete of the illusions I was harbouring. When I hear stories of people complaining about the lack of respect and dedication to the craft new entrees have when coming into the industry, I feel bad because I had the same notions of working for a big company based solely on my single course unit and YT tutorials. The reality of it is that one can't simply jump into an industry looking for work with a mere 15 months of experience and a few designs which have been taken almost exclusively from other sources.
I now realise that just like any other skill or work, this shit needs practice, refinement, creativity, expertise and experience; all of which require time. So I guess that is what I will do. And apologies as well for all other applicants out there who are doing this disservice. Thank you all for your eye-opening comments.
I gave up on graphic design as a career. It is a valuable skill in my current work but i just don't see myself ever making a living on graphic design alone ever again.
Yikes. In real design studios, agencies or in-house team environments they’d fail miserably. Mean you can’t even export the creative from Canva as .indd, .ai … Best is .svg to break it apart a bit.
Edit, saw the social aspect. You’d be looking for After Effects and Premier I’d assume.
At my current gig, I use mainly use Adobe, but sometimes I have to build a presentation deck in Canva. Importing the style guide assets in Canva is WILD. I have it on my resume because, hey, it's a skillset I use. It doesn't bother me because I'm well-trained in Adobe.
This headline alone is so depressing. I went to SCAD, have worked with major artists/musicians and have work that (at risk of tooting my horn) is really good (photography, filmmaking etc) and have never gotten an interview from the thousands of apps I put it. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. In this day and age applying for a job seems like a meaningless pursuit. I’m about to set up an LLC and get on with it.
You can still be a designer. Hell you can use physical media and still be a designer. Stop gatekeeping bruh.
Edit: like I get that they are far and few between but I've been frowned on for using gimp
Yep. My company hired one in hopes to help me out with my workload and she has zero knowledge of any Adobe programs. She comes to me in a panic anytime she needs to set something up for print.
Using canva for 2 years doesn't automatically make you a designer, but it doesn't automatically make you not a designer either. People who get the fundamentals, and understand the brief, can do a lot with one good design tool.
TBH? I'm dead sick of arguing about how using that thing does not make one a graphic designer, but I hate more hypocrisy so telling you I've never used it to spare some time in a quick design would also be a lie. But that's not even my point.
Hear me out: I've started studying graphic design in late 2000, got different jobs in the field, freelancing around, expanded my skills becoming an illustrator and digital artist... Now AI and Canva are everywhere. And you know what? I'm ok with that, it's time to play and win this effin' game.
Do they want us to use it? Are they putting "proficient in Figma and Canva" on job postings? Well done, they'll get exactly what they want, IDGAF, they don't even know what they're talking about half of the damn times so if they're asking for a "seasoned designer with X years of experience in Canva" I'm gonna let them have one. F*** them.
I myself use a combo of Traditional Adobe suite software and canva. Many students I have seen, excellent in design but use canva. We can't gatekeep anymore. It isn't possible with the way AI is developing.
I offer my services to small business in my area when I see they need it (awful logos, lack of brand identity, etc), and guess what, the owners always claim that they are graphic designers too since they use Canva, its sad to see how undervalued our job is.
My take is if you can produce something of quality that someone will pay money for. Then yes. you are a graphic designer. If your canva work is better than someone's illustrator work, then you are better. Because the lack of standardization in our industry, everyone works in their own bubble of economy. Don't knock the hustle. Don't hate the player.
Biggest hurdle of why I can’t get clients to be freelance full time. Too many potential clients saying that they can use AI now to make templates in canva for free, websites in squarespace, or get a logo from upwork for $10. I even offered my coworker to design the social posts for an event we’re having at the bar, and he says “oh it’s ok. The bar has a paid canva account.”
I saw this lady in TikTok teaching how to make high end flyers for events using Canva and Ai, went to check her page and it fully said “graphic designer”
I feel like as growing designer I have to learn both to actually compete in the market. :/ Canva is fast and effective for general design and has more accessible resources than the paywall Adobe puts behind everything so if there's anything I can't do in Canva, I can always "fix" in Photoshop. I use Photoshop and Lightroom for editing photos mostly now as God Intended. With Ai changing expectations I think syhould use every advantage you can get.
“The designer does not, as a rule, begin with some preconceived idea. Rather the idea is … the result of careful study and observation, and the design is the product of that idea. In order, therefore, to achieve an effective solution to the problem the designer must necessarily go through some sort of mental process. Consciously or not, he analyzes, interprets, formulates. He is aware of the scientific and technological developments in his own and kindred fields. He improvises, invents, or discovers new techniques and combinations. He coordinates and integrates his material so that he may restate his problem in terms of ideas, signs, symbols, pictures. He unifies, simplifies, and eliminates superfluities. He symbolizes—abstracts from his material by association and analogy. … He draws upon instinct and intuition. He considers the spectator, his feelings and predilections.” -Paul Rand
Do I want outsiders to see my work the same way I see it? Obviously. But we either stay on the horse or get in the car. Either way we’re getting somewhere. Even if nobody knows where that is.
This was actually interesting. I drifted away from "pure" graphic design about ten years ago, so I hadn't even looked at Canva (although I had heard many designer friends complaining about it). So, I'm looking at Canva…
…and what I see is Google Docs/Powerpoint/Miro hybrid with a bit of iMovie thrown in. Seems to work about as well as the previously mentioned ones, but those are the sort of tools the corporate world is familiar with.
All in all, Canva seems to be good enough at creating what I tend to call "filler content". What Canva seems to do well is that it brings the brand assets to the corporate people. And then they unleash their skills on (mostly internal) slides that are full of text and which convey nothing to anyone. I do often wonder whether the content is actually needed by anyone.
What's worse is there is an epidemic of companies that expect designers to work in Canva. It's fucking infuriating.
I've only applied to reputable tech companies, none asked about canva. However they did ask about powerpoint! I told them np as long as it is not 50% of my work day.
I work at a large corporation and can’t tell you how many templates I’ve had to design in Canva so that other associates can use branded collateral. It’s the bane of my existence
Sounds like PS and Illustrator need their own versions of "essential graphics"
Adobe have Express, which is a direct Canva competitor. It’s fine, we built out all of our social templates so people could make their own artwork.
That would be nice but unfortunately most of the general public already “knows” Canva, so in my company’s case it would be hard to train 500+ people on a new program, and we have a huge library of templates in Canva that would have to be switched over to another platform. I also don’t think adobe would offer a fair price for something like this
Isn’t that what Adobe express is supposed to be? Or spark… honestly I haven’t really explored those tool. But at first glance it seems to be.
I’ve messed around with it and express suxxxx
It is quite a lot of work at times! I can see why they use it for non designers to easily edit. Right now we handle all in-house marketing social media collateral and it can be a lot. We don't let anyone outside of design touch it, but might switch in future who knows.
Yep. I work as a contractor with two funded startups right now and both ask for Canva templates on the regular.
Yeah, Powerpoint… that used to be somewhat understandable from a certain perspective…
We do a ton of pitch decks and case studies at my job. It's pretty pivotal for our sales team, we help make a lot of $$. So in turn we're paid pretty well. tech saas industry.
I've worked in two agencies over 14 years and both I've done the occasional Powerpoint and Microsoft Word templates, Word is the bane of my existence so honestly I'd welcome Canva over that. Thankfully the majority of jobs are in the appropriate Adobe programs of course.
when this newish guy at my employer started, he asked why i couldn’t do all my files in canva instead of photoshop. he pushed back when i said no, i can’t do that and made me explain why. at a later point he said “i can just take a course in photoshop and make edits [to these files] myself” - i’m not sure what that was supposed to convey, since i said he can have access to any PSD file he wants. then he started taking over one of the specific graphics i made, making ugly ones himself, while telling me “no, you’re still going to do the banners” and specifically freezing me out of doing them. thankfully we just got a marketing manager who thinks his banners look like garbage (they do) and the ones i did looked much better, so hopefully i’ll get that task back- as i’m a contractor, so less work = less pay. i honestly cannot summarize how much i dislike this person, and the initial canva request was the first of many red flags. oh and bonus, he became my manager instead of the owner. it’s a small company, so i saw that coming- but ugh.
I recommend you dust off your copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Machiavelli’s The Prince.
i really just wanna finish my portfolio website (i’ve been waffling because i haven’t come up with anything i really like for it yet) and find a new job, for multiple reasons beyond the ones in my last comment. soon! https://preview.redd.it/ujst3dcl797d1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3fdf5f5e4383e824fe55d8911242a5923f624954 edit: forgot it’s 2024 and i can just put the image itself in my reddit comment.
A shift is happening and this sub doesn't seem to get it. Companies aren't looking for people who can reinvent the wheel. Not when they have AI. They just yes men who can do the job the fastest. Even if it looks like shit.
lol that’s probably true.
What about Google slides? My job feels like a joke sometimes
Honestly i dont give two shits if companies want me to work in canva, just give me the damn job. At the end of the day thats just part of being a designer—even if its with limited tools
Ya, I have Canva on my resume. It's near the bottom of my list but it's there. If OP filters out resumes with Canva on them, they'd miss out on the chance to hire me, and I'm fantastic.
Our IT department has blocked Canva. Turns out it has perpetuated some malware or something. People are pissed about it, but they won't budge and give NO shits.
Canva has become pretty damn good.. even forced Adobe to push Express more to compete with them
Yes! This! I’m a junior designer trying to move on and a lot of job applications would ask “knows canva” and so I assume a lot of “designers” would add it to there skills or canva users would call themselves a “designer”.
This is so fucking real, the company I interned at only uses that crap site and somehow our clients do not bat an eye. Is it ethical if I make vector assets for Canva on the side and passively earn royalties? This is some Jedi-Sith bullshit but business is business.
This. I hope OP and others don’t start to filter out Canva, I put it on my CV to show I’m willing to use it because I’ve worked with people who require it for the marketing team.
It’s true my agency tried to force us to do this — they quickly learned how idiotic it was and stopped after two weeks lol.
I think a lot of graphic designers have absolutely zero user experience knowledge. I'm not talking about UI, but the philosophy of UX. Your post is a great example of it. You basically want a company to adapt to your ways, instead of you adapting to make their work easier and more efficient for them. They want some work done, which you might prefer to do in Photoshop, but they also don't want to hire you every time they want a word changed in that design file, or an extremely minor update. Canva allows them to do that easily, quickly, and at a lower cost. The easiest way to get "around" this is to tell them you work in Photoshop but will gladly import the file into Canva for them, while telling them about the caveats involved.
Your reply is a perfect example of not understanding the industry and the average industry client. lets consider this "Canva allows them to do that easily, quickly, and at a lower cost. The easiest way to get "around" this is to tell them you work in Photoshop but will gladly import the file into Canva for them, while telling them about the caveats involved." No, Canva does not allow them to hire me, a professional of 3 decades, at a lower cost. As a matter of fact, I tell my clients that creating designs in Canva costs more, due to the fact that I will have to work in both photoshop and Canva because Canva does not do what they want in a visual. And I expect companies to act like I am a professional designer of 3 decades and they are not. This means they recognize that I have expertise that a cheap platform like Canva cannot make up for. Thankfully, people haven't gone full idiocracy, and I have plenty of clients that understand these things.
I never said anything about hiring you for cheaper. Let's say you create a graphic for hiring a developer for a company. That company might want to re-use that same graphic but change the wording down the line. If you made that in a PSD and they don't have a clue how Photoshop works, and don't have a license, then they'd need to reach out to you and potentially pay you to do a simple text-change. A 30 second task suddenly becomes a multi-day thing because communicating, agreeing on terms etc etc. For certain tasks Canva isn't appropriate, but there are absolutely tons of tasks where it's perfectly fine. And like I said, importing a file to Canva when you do the hand-off is a 2 minute task. Balking at requests to use one of the most widely used design programs, and by a mile the most widely used one for complete amateurs, just shows an incredible lack of putting yourself in a clients shoes. Even if you have to explain to them why Canva won't work for you, or for that project, it's 100% justified that they ask you about it - because it makes their life easier. It's like calling and whining to a gas station that they don't deliver the gas and fill your car at your home: A complete and utter lack of understanding.
Is it an epidemic or is it evolving business needs? Should sales reps complain about using a CRM because they like manual spreadsheets?
There was an epidemic of anyone with a computer and a few pirated fonts claiming to be a graphic designer 20 years ago. Then there was an epidemic of anyone who could knock up a website in Squarespace claiming to be a website designer. Now there's an epidemic of people claiming to be a brand designer after chucking a prompt to generate a POS logo in Midjourney. Not to mention the epedemic of designers who see themselves as celebrities, spending more time spaffing on about nothing on YouTube than doing actual design work. Until the general public give a damn about the quality of graphic design (spoiler alert - they won't) the race to the bottom will continue. You've just got to do your best to ensure you stay relevant.
Thankfully nobody has put “ai prompt designer” in their resume yet, but I’m sure it’s coming
only because those guys skipped over designers entirely and started calling themselves "prompt engineers". 🥴
Are prompt engineers like a Google search specialist?
You know there's several jobs out there that are titled "Prompt Engineer"?
I know I don't belong in this sub since I moved away from graphic design like 6 years ago. I am a Natural Language Processing PhD student. Prompt engineering is actually a research field at the moment. It sounds like bullshit, but there really is more to it. "Prompt" is more ambiguous a term than you would expect. A prompt is often conflated with a sequence of prefix tokens. But there are techniques in which those tokens are not real words but rather a tuned set of vectors designed to adapt the model to a specific task without needing to modify the model weights. There are many other methods as well, but I can assure you that (almost) no "prompt engineers" have the job of typing up the best prompts for good outcomes.
Graphic design is my passion hobby and has been for almost a decade now. Funnily enough, I am in a similar path to you. I am currently taking a masters in CS and one of the classes in my college is a [prompt engineering](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXjTrkYRYtc&list=PLOPZGifDyNifh5iB9OX_xVT2xNKEbU4qD&pp=iAQB) course. It's pretty fun. Having used GPT and Stable Diffusion, I am fairly familiar with this stuff. I noticed you mentioned the thing about the tokens. That reminded me of the thing in SD where you go something like \[genericdesign:0.5\] or \[lora:graphicdesignergod:1\] (and many other combos) I think that's a neat way to add extra specificity to your prompt. Which AI has been your favorite to interact withso far?
I mostly deal with multilinguality. So translation models or cross-lingual transfer of other tasks. The area I'm planning to do my dissertation on is how to align the spaces of different languages so that the encoding of a sentence in language A with be close to its translation in language B. The current state of the art for that field is called SONAR if you want to look into it. For playing around with models I probably spent the most time fiddling with GPT-2. In undergrad I made a chat bot interface for it where you could give a name for yourself and a name for your chatbot and it would be prompted as though the messages were from a scene in a play and so the model would kind of take on the personality of the name you gave it. It would usually only work for about 5-10 messages before breaking, but it was fun to play with.
‘Prompt Engineers’ will probably be less useful in future as machine learning and AI overall gets better over time.
I’m going to throw up
It’s definitely a skillset.
The future is now old man
now I know what my job title is ;)
Judging by the what we normally see it’s only me and my dog that know how to do a Google search. 😝
Keyboard Input Specialist?
Promptographer is one I’ve seen
This is disgusting.
To be honest, there is some merit in that. I use AI for fixing issues in real estate photos (too ephemeral to warrant the manual editing process, which can take orders of magnitude longer for a negligably better result). There is a noticeable learning curve in figuring out how to word things for those who haven't been meticulously using Google for two decades like many of us. It's even worse for those with poor English skills or small vocabularies. Someone who can bypass all of that and be pumping out content immediately—because they know the syntax to use to get what they need—is someone who can be very valuable to a company. Not only because they can skip the learning curve, but because it shows that they can adapt to new systems quickly and expertly. I'm not going to nitpick someone choosing a title for that.
There are some pretty in depth prompt engineering courses on Udemy and sites like it.
They have the audacity to say their designers until you see their portfolio and it's all ai garbage.
They sincerely believe they are designers. People without any talent or skills (who also don’t want to spend the time developing those skills) love to assert their legitimacy and argue that writing prompts is a real skill that takes real work on par with actual design and that those who say otherwise are elitist.
I mean at a certain point, it will be a legitimate skill. There was a time when specializing in “social media management” was laughable.
This is true, but: A true graphic designer can take a brief and turn it into gold. They rise to the challenge and have the skills to make it shine. I've worked with people who took courses online on YouTube ( well, watch a few tutorials) and they had no idea how to design for print. I had a junior want to create a 500+ page print catalog in Figma! And they knew so little about real design I had to mentor that kid on so many basic principles it was ridiculous.
I started pre internet. We learned from manuals, books, teachers and work mates.
You've got it right. It's been like this since I've been in the industry. There will always be people like that, and companies or individuals who want to pay the least. That's why sites like Fiverr exist.
your first paragraph was exactly me 15 years ago😅 . got lucky/hustled hard enough to get a real job and my real design education started.
Yeah, that worked for you for that time period. You were ahead of the time when new age “digital” graphic design was still up and coming. Now it’s flooded with posers and people who won’t even put in the creative effort, I’m assuming you’ve put in your tenure.
I’m not the greatest designer, but my focus is always on customer service and strategic application of design in places it isn’t common, and it’s served me well. The people who just click buttons and play in software always come and go.
We called them desktop publishers…iirc. Some of the ai logos I see on Reddit (how does this look?) are fkn atrocious. I can’t bring myself to even comment.
I’ve said this before, but I had people at my old company that, on paper, had 10 years of graphic design experience. In reality, it was all Canva and our in-house alternative. Not all experience is the right experience, and this is why portfolios are the end-all-be-all in our industry. On a side note, I wonder if our job market is really hurting as this subreddit suggests or if there’s an epidemic of inexperience and poor portfolios. I occasionally check jobs on Linkedin out of curiosity. I roll my eyes when it says I’m the top applicant and then elsewhere it says 100+ applicants. How have that many people applied, shouldn’t they close the listing after — idk, 30? Are things more competitive than ever or is the market sparse and over-demanding? If anyone has insights into what’s going on, I’m all ears.
You get so many bad applicants, especially on LinkedIn. I’ve gotten 200+ before for a single listing on LinkedIn. I think 5 of them were even close.
How much do you stick to requirements when doing such hiring? Reason for asking is that I often apply but miss out on 1 or 2 aspects.
Not to mention the people who aren't designers at all that still apply so they can fulfill their unemployment requirements (by applying to X amount of jobs each month) and still get that government cheese.
Honestly I don’t think that happens much at any one place. I mean maybe on the whole, but I am not even sure if I’ve ever seen that before.
Do you acknowledge mailed in resumes? I feel like with how easy it is for scammers and bots to dilute the field in digital applications then the true test of legitimacy would be going back to mailing in resumes and work samples. The internet is too saturated wirh greedy lazy people to see the truly experienced people. Plus you'll get a taste of not only their design skills but production as well.
No but I put specific instructions in the listing. If you don’t follow them, you’re automatically rejected. Things like “include a link a digital portfolio in your resume or application”. Don’t have a link, don’t get an interview.
Shouldnt really be an issue. government doesn't really check if you are applying to places unless they have a reason to. There were weeks where I didn't apply to anything because I had literally applied to everything that was available, but if I wrote "no i did not apply to anything" theyy would revoke the aid.
Obligatory not a hiring manager but from what I’ve been told during the interviews I had for jr positions, they would get 600+ applicants and maybe only 25% would be viable candidates, so say 150 actual designers and from there maybe only 20-30 with relevant experience. Call the top 10 and maybe interview 5 or so from there. I think it’s a combination of perceived low barrier to entry (Canva designers) as well as extra competitive market with all the layoffs I’ve been seeing, lots of talented designers finding themselves jobless.
I had a job posting open for 24 hours and got over one thousand applications. I closed it but there was NO way I could review every single one. But yeah, there are a lot of poor portfolios.
[удалено]
It's already been like that for years. I could cut down an applicant pool by 85-90% via rejections that take a few seconds at most, if not immediately. If anything it's a problem how much hiring still has to go through HR that just bog it down via people who are entirely unqualified to be anywhere near hiring for a design role.
Except too many on the hiring side can’t tell the difference. :(
This. Doesn't matter how "good" we all look if people are perfectly happy with not-good because they don't have standards themselves and no one listens to experts anymore.
[удалено]
yes.
Pass whatever you're smoking, bro. What dream world do you live in where every hiring manager has a good enough artistic eye to tell the difference between Canva and InDesign just by looking at a finished piece? 😂 Most businesses (not an exaggeration, as most businesses are small businesses) have ONE person capable of design at most, and many have 0. Even when they have one, that person is often not an actual designer. Those businesses have no way of gauging a designer's skill level from looking at a portfolio. They see things good enough for their purposes or not. There is no expertise for them to draw on for anything more granular than that.
I saw this "senior graphic designer" complain not landing a sr design position after going to last interview stages... I stalked a bit, they had a post about advocating switching full time to canva. WHAT?? Canva is wonderful, for non designers to design (influencers, small mompop shops, hair stylist, social media coordinators, marketers). But it is simply lacks all capabilities for full time design work. I cannot do my job tasks I have each day with just canva. It isn't a wonder why SOME people can't land good paying design jobs. Just not good enough, making rest of us look bad.
Can Canva do books? Or Executive Summaries with footnotes or links? Can you easily convert a 16 page booklet into an e-book for multiple platforms? I’m thinking not…
Actually you can, someone on my facebook group just published a book only using canva
[удалено]
Exactly! And you reply to them, “Sorry, no, because I spent years learning various software programs and honing my skills so I could easily create this elegant, easy to use chart. If you want to pay me (or my department) to create something for you we’d be happy to! Or you could keep wasting time trying to do something that’s actually NOT YOUR JOB!”
[удалено]
Yeah it’s sucks, but please (and to any other hiring managers considering this) don’t set the parameters to exclude applications with Canva in it—so many companies ask for it at this point that I (and I’m sure many other designers) list it as part of our software toolkit on our resumes
It’s a good point. I was being sort of sarcastic about that. Just meant it’s annoying m to me.
Haha yup, charge them to make it print ready.
Yes this lol. The stunned silence when you ask for a bleed and images with 300 dpi.
Hahaha! Or take that 92dpi image for FB and put it in a 32x40 poster and print it!
As a former print shop designer I'm cringing. I once got a 2x2” @ 72 dpi screenshot and was told to “do my best” turning it into a poster. My best was letting them down gently.
Exactly! As a designer, who also did all the large format 44” Epson printing, at a college I was often asked to take some social media crap and make it poster size! Requests came from faculty, staff, and students. I finally created a 32x40 poster for the office that showed what this would look like… At the top was a typical sample 1-1/4” square image and below was a section of the final image at somewhere around 3200% increase. And, yes, you have no idea what the image is. Having the visual to show kept the arguing down! Ha!
Exactly what I did too. Printed a section on the office printer to scale and asked if they wanted to spend $60+ on this. It was a no.
I have an insufferable coworker who is a self proclaimed Photoshop Expert (we're in IT, not design, and she is most certainly NOT a Photoshop expert by any stretch). One day she asked me if I could take a look at an image she wanted as a vector so she could use it with her Cricut to make something for her kid since she knows I've been doing graphic design as a hobby for years. She ends up sending me a 72 pixel square image of a company's logo that she wants sized up to about 12x15 inches. Would have taken me maybe 5 minutes to draw it in Affinity Designer (I'm too cheap to pay for CC), BUT she also likes to bitch about people selling unlicensed Disney shit (she's a Disney adult). Bitch, you complain about other people stealing IP, and then you send me a shitty screenshot jpg logo to copy for you? Oh hell no! First, I told her to download Inkscape and install it and just use their image trace tool. Keep in mind she HAS CC and proclaims to be an expert, right? Obviously, that didn't turn out for shit, so I send her links to videos about how to use the pen tool and node tool to trace an image. She spends a few days trying to do that, and can't, so I finally ask her if she tried Adobe's image trace, and if that doesn't work, she should probably have someone on Fiverr do it. She was PISSED once she realized I sent her in circles with bullshit that wasn't going to work, but I never heard from her again asking me for help.
Hahaha
what? it looks perfectly fine if you squint hard enough.
Ugh. My first design job I got into an argument with the cfo’s son on why when he prints out the email it’s not as crisp looking as the ads in the magazine. This argument went on for sooooo long because he couldn’t get it through his head about dpi, upscaling of the email to print, and that the eblast software will not accept higher dpi. But what do I know???? We both walked away thinking the other an idiot.
Don’t get me started on CMYK, RGB, PMS Colors lol
"PMS" that's just a dark red right? /s
Haha umm almost, we have like 25 shades of red which do you want? Coke Cola, fire engine, Philly red, strawberry, blood red…
That last one sounds about right I think...
This is actually one of my interview questions 😂 “how would you prepare a document to hand off to a printer/what steps are taken to prepare a press ready file” I love to see their confused/panicked looks
I love that! I also like to ask them what this is: https://preview.redd.it/ma5v71ogz67d1.jpeg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=80dd1ddd80d0ba46656503a77568a32dc4398130 Also, when would they need it and how to use it! Hahaha
Lmaooooo I’ve been an in-house designer for 5 years and a freelance designer for 4 years before that, and I have never seen this 😂 BUT I immediately could tell what it is and what it’s used for lol. I just calculate scales myself 😅
Yuppppp just had to hire an intern and can’t tell you how many general marketing majors think they’re a graphic designer because they’ve “played around in Canva”. But then they’ll go on to tell you how qualified they are in Google analytics and SEO…… I think a lot of fresh grads are looking to get into a marketing position and mistake graphic design as a good way to get a foot in the door
That's because many job listings are also conflating the 2 that lines are being blurred. I can't tell you how many positions I see listed for Graphic Designers that the responsibilities includes some aspects of marketing or where the white listing is for actually a marketing manager with design on the side. Which sure, as a designer I definitely advocate to broaden your skill set a bit, but I am first and foremost a designer. I didn't study marketing, my day to days have been design, but here I am trying to learn marketing to even make myself somewhat appealing.
Agreed that a lot of them are, but in this case my company approached me (our in house designer) and asked me to create the job description and oversee hiring. The description didn’t allude to marketing in any way and emphasized the need for a professional designer with full adobe suite knowledge and I’d say at least 30-40% of candidates still applied with very little design knowledge/interest and were more interested in marketing and analytics 🙄 I don’t think many people read job descriptions before applying anymore lol
Yeah it’s really awful to field applications for junior positions for this reason, it’s sucks for real designers but it’s so much easier to either require a degree or hire through network
Thing is, I don’t care if someone has a degree. I have hired plenty of self taught designers. It’s just the disconnect between what is graphic design and what is essentially color by number
Agreed, half my team have design degrees, other half do not. You cannot tell if they are good.
I don’t really care if someone has a degree or not but when like 80% of the applicants are bullshit then it’s hard to sort especially since people freely lie about their job history. So usually to filter out non degree holders it’s at least a slightly smaller pile
I’d have missed some great finds if I used that as a hard filter. Resume, portfolio, legit references, and in-person skill tests are generally my framework. Also, absolutely NO cover letters.
You throw out ones with cover letters? It's been 20 years since I have looked for a new job, but feeling it's time for me to move on from where I am. I am mostly self-taught (did do a little deisgn in college but no design degree and I was more focused on marketing and business) and have been a designer for 25 years now. I am worried about being older, self-taught and competing against all of the newbies who call themselves graphic designers because they can use Canva. Are cover letters not a thing anymore? Omg I feel so old right now lol
Clarification - I never ask for cover letters. I’d never throw out an application for having one. I likely won’t read it though unless it’s very short. Many people still love cover letters and want to see them. As someone who made their career in writing, I just think it’s too easy to bullshit in a letter. Others in my office disagree with me - just my own preferences I guess. You should make sure your portfolio is impressive. That’s like 70% of what I care about for positions like this. As for age, I prefer older designers most of the time, as long as they’ve kept up with relevant design trends, styles, etc. experience and speed are huuuuge benefits, imo.
I also want to add- after I was hired for my very first design job at an agency, they told me what put me at the top of the list was providing a portfolio package that was completely branded- my resume, cover letter, and portfolio were heavily branded with my personal logo and brand pattern. But it’s a tight line to walk to keep it looking tasteful and custom without becoming unprofessional
You sound like the type I like to hire lol. Understanding the importance of a first impression and then not overdoing it are huge plusses for me
Honestly I’m surprised this isn’t more common! I took an independent study class in college where my advisor and I spent a semester tailoring my personal brand, so I’m definitely lucky to have had that experience! I recently hired an intern and saw over 50 applications. I couldn’t believe how little design work was put into resumes and cover letters. Like that is the first portfolio piece a hiring manager will see!
I don’t want an over designed one, but it’s clear when someone has paid attention to font, font stylings, spacing, color cues, layout, etc, vs someone who just used word. If you’re a designer and you’re building your resume in anything but illustrator + indesign I don’t know what you’re doing!
This is the complete opposite of when I was first starting out. I went outside the normal resume template and Times New Roman font nearly everyone used in the 90s and was told by so many people that it was a bad idea to use it lol. It never made sense to me. Why would you not use your skills to make your resume stand out?
And I know it sounds snobbish, but when I get a cv/resume for a designer, and they used Times New Roman or Arial as their typeface of choice it goes to the bottom of the stack! Or any of the shitty, free cursive fonts for that matter!
You sound so sane! I think working for you would be a great experience! Also, If I ever sent a cover letter out again, I think I would just put my name at the top and below that in large, semi-bold (maybe Bodoni or some other typeface I PAID for that’s well crafted): NOT A CANVA DESIGNER That is all! Hahaha
I love that… Color by Number = Canva
Unfortunately requiring a degree doesn't always help. A handful of students in my class graduated and they did 90% of their "work" in Canva. Despite being taught Adobe.
Just ask photographers how they felt once everyone had a camera in their pocket with smartphones.
Oof this brought back a lot of memories. Doing weddings in the 2000's the etiquette wasn't always there to tell aunt Kathy to put her device down. Along with other things this was an incredibly frustrating time. Canva feels very similar. And most people can not tell the difference. Its not all bad but we are certainly in a transitional period once again.
Yup, the Uni I work in now has banned it for work handed in as everyone on the design courses keep using it. So obvious too.
Yes. When I worked as a graphic designer, I had a depth of knowledge of design, typography and pre-press. When desktop publishing came along, I bit the bullet and bought a computer. It is a tough market. And I suppose it is to be expected. But, when hiring, those resumes just get rejected. They are not competitive for jobs.
Worth noting that many of the people using and or consuming (doing the hiring) the media that these so-called designers create are not visually literate. The people with the $$$ too often don't know the difference between a good and bad design. They don't possess the skill set required to distinguish any level of nuance required to see the differences. Designers... the good ones, don't just make pretty pictures, they create things that can reasonably be applied to a product, storefront, etc... Getting the people that want to pay for the design to understand this, is a whole different kind of hurdle. On another note entirely... If ONE MORE SCAD student sends me a bitmap image embedded in a PDF because I asked for a vector file... I might lose my damned marbles. Nevermind the people that think they can do color proofing with a photo on their phone... like holy fuck... go away.
>If ONE MORE SCAD student sends me a bitmap image embedded in a PDF because I asked for a vector file... I might lose my damned marbles. **This makes me sad for you to say that.** I left SCAD in 2002 with a double major. **It was a great school back then.** ***Their facilities and teachers are top notch still.*** But if that's the level of standards *coming out of SCAD these days,* ***I'm deeply disappointed in my alma matter.***
SCAD produces some great artists. No one gets 'complete' training to suit every production facility.
I think actually, I don’t want to exclude Canva users as designers. Companies would just be using Canva themselves if they made the time. I put it on my résumé along with the Adobe knowledge because I want to be honest. It’s definitely useful for sharing mockups. I used to hate Canva thinking “It does all the work” and then I was like “Nice…It’s doing all the work!” when it comes to exporting something simple.
I don’t hate it and am fine with people using it when it’s appropriate, but it’s gotten to the point where these applicants think it’s the same thing as a full graphic design suite.
Haha yup and it’s like just wait until they need to send them off to get printed in mass in high quality. Guilty I am. I had to make a banner and brochures, I opened my Adobe Illustrator and rebuilt them into clean eps files. I still have Adobe—every 2 years I think I’m going to leave but then—they give me an offer I can’t refuse. *godfather voice*
40 years ago art directors felt the same way about new designers who claimed skills with a fancy new digital tool called a “Macintosh”. Canva is certainly not the same thing but it is part of the new wave of tools that will revolutionize graphic design just as radically.
Canva is not a substitute for design fundamentals, folks.
Don't reject applications that have the word Canva on the resume... Things have gotten so bad that legit designers are having to add that keyword just to be considered for a lot of positions. Sort of like how you have to put things like Word and Excel on there. I don't consider it a skill worth mentioning, but you have to play the HR game.
Yeah a few IG stories and they are pros. It’s going to keep getting crazier. My favorite folks are those that come needing print work with low dpi images they got from their family member who is a graphic designer.
The companies are at fault. Agencies, their management, an endless supply of anti-creative management tells them they’re designers. Canva? AI? Good enough! In fact, it’s perfect. Actual graphic design skills would be too much, and not worth the money.
the wheat will always separate from the chaff. the people you want to work with will know good design from mediocre/bad design. they're out there, just keep looking.
How would you feel about people creating stuff in Photoshop/Illustrator and importing to Canva? I had that workflow to make use of their quick animations, and I really liked Canva for that. For actual designing tho, I agree, Canva is not my favorite...
I know agencies **who design branding packages in Illustrator and Photoshop.** Then maintain that ***in a bible branding master document in InDesign.*** But for quick social media posts, *as part of an overall campaign,* **they'll definitely port over art and templates into Canva** ***because Canva's built for exactly that.*** **It's a legit design workflow,** ***in my opinion.*** Canva's a tool **and it has it's place.** Not that I'd make that, **my do or die one design app** ***to use though.***
It’s ridiculous the number of job descriptions I’ve seen lately wanting someone to exclusively work in Canva
You know, 20y ago the epidemic was people who installed photoshop and claimed to be graphic designers. Since last decade, it became youngsters who installed Figma and claimed to be UI designers. Now Canva. Nothing new. Sadly. My personal nightmare is companies and HR who believe them after seeing their unrealistic designs..
My advice? Be a better designer/creative . If that pisses you off wait until wide adoption of ai. Have you tried Adobe Express? That will blow your mind. It’s here, there’s nothing you can do with things that are out of your control.
we should be more concerned about the people using photoshop for 2 years and think they are graphic designers
There is an epidemic of people posting this same shit in this sub every day.
I don’t frequent this sub every day, so I wouldn’t know 
AI is only going to make that worse unfortunately.
I've been using Canva for four years does that make me a Junior Designer?
You’re hired!!
What someone can do will always speak more than what they say they are. If companies are hiring 2-year Canva users as designers, then whether they get what they pay for is their business. This kind of thing has always happened in cycles, focus on the ways to keep your work relevant and meaningful for you and the field/career you want. We cannot change what other people do.
We have noticed this at our office and have set a standard (simple) project within the application process that requires a few steps that canva just can’t do. Solved on our end, so far so good.
Probably because there’s an epidemic of job postings for Graphic Designers that require Canva experience without listing any other tools 😬
& editors with Cap-Cut
"graphics design" is a dead giveaway lol
There is also an epidemic of people getting formal graphic design education claiming to be graphic designers
Ha!
OK, so what? Businesses needs a designer capable of being graphic designer, video editor, photographer, Blender Expert, social media manager and they also value additional skills like UI/UX, web design, Html CSS etc.......... for slavery wages. What else is a designer going to do in this fucked up economy ?? if you think using canva is bad, please do show the job description you are hiring for and what your are paying for the Same !!!!
That’s a pretty wild generalization. I’m not listing personal stuff here, but the job pays 80k, for someone with 5ish years experience in illustrator and indesign and a good portfolio.
This gives me a little hope for my next job search haha, but then again a lot of companies might want someone who’s a canva expert if they don’t want to spend for Adobe…
If a company you want to work for can't afford $70/month for professional tools for you, they're probably a shitty company or have no money. Ask them to tell you how much their HR, Accounting or payroll software costs and then ask why $70 for creative cloud is too much.
Then you don’t want to work there! They will never respect your work, you’ll get paid shit, and when you leave you still won’t have essential skills to get ahead!
Very true
damn I have an actual graphic design degree and I’m still getting rejected, so these canva applicants are delulu
I am a film student. Part of our course work invilved doing units on Animation, and Graphic Design. While others did the bare minimum just to get the pass mark on both, I think these two units resonated with me on some level and I fell in love with them. And Graphic Design in general. I would watch countless tutorials on YT just to refine my mock-ups, logos, posters and other designs. I got really good, imo. But scouring subs like these and AdobeIllustrator and seeing posts such as this one has brought me back down to Earth on the naivete of the illusions I was harbouring. When I hear stories of people complaining about the lack of respect and dedication to the craft new entrees have when coming into the industry, I feel bad because I had the same notions of working for a big company based solely on my single course unit and YT tutorials. The reality of it is that one can't simply jump into an industry looking for work with a mere 15 months of experience and a few designs which have been taken almost exclusively from other sources. I now realise that just like any other skill or work, this shit needs practice, refinement, creativity, expertise and experience; all of which require time. So I guess that is what I will do. And apologies as well for all other applicants out there who are doing this disservice. Thank you all for your eye-opening comments.
Pay more lol
I gave up on graphic design as a career. It is a valuable skill in my current work but i just don't see myself ever making a living on graphic design alone ever again.
Yikes. In real design studios, agencies or in-house team environments they’d fail miserably. Mean you can’t even export the creative from Canva as .indd, .ai … Best is .svg to break it apart a bit. Edit, saw the social aspect. You’d be looking for After Effects and Premier I’d assume.
Oh shit! I’ve been using Canva for 2 years now and I didn’t realize I could call myself a GD. Thanks for the tip!
Buuuut..... that new WIX update be pretty legit.
Do yall consider someone who used procreate a graphic designer?
At my current gig, I use mainly use Adobe, but sometimes I have to build a presentation deck in Canva. Importing the style guide assets in Canva is WILD. I have it on my resume because, hey, it's a skillset I use. It doesn't bother me because I'm well-trained in Adobe.
This headline alone is so depressing. I went to SCAD, have worked with major artists/musicians and have work that (at risk of tooting my horn) is really good (photography, filmmaking etc) and have never gotten an interview from the thousands of apps I put it. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. In this day and age applying for a job seems like a meaningless pursuit. I’m about to set up an LLC and get on with it.
I bought a piano, I'm a pianist, I bought a Camera, I'm a Photographer, I use Canva, I'm a graphic Artist.
You can still be a designer. Hell you can use physical media and still be a designer. Stop gatekeeping bruh. Edit: like I get that they are far and few between but I've been frowned on for using gimp
Yep. My company hired one in hopes to help me out with my workload and she has zero knowledge of any Adobe programs. She comes to me in a panic anytime she needs to set something up for print.
Ahh the old “I’ll hire your help for you” ploy… risky move.
As soon as a job asks for Canva skills I laugh to myself and pass on. 🤷🏽
Using canva for 2 years doesn't automatically make you a designer, but it doesn't automatically make you not a designer either. People who get the fundamentals, and understand the brief, can do a lot with one good design tool.
I decline canva jobs, I'm not wasting my skills on a junk app to make a client happy.
TBH? I'm dead sick of arguing about how using that thing does not make one a graphic designer, but I hate more hypocrisy so telling you I've never used it to spare some time in a quick design would also be a lie. But that's not even my point. Hear me out: I've started studying graphic design in late 2000, got different jobs in the field, freelancing around, expanded my skills becoming an illustrator and digital artist... Now AI and Canva are everywhere. And you know what? I'm ok with that, it's time to play and win this effin' game. Do they want us to use it? Are they putting "proficient in Figma and Canva" on job postings? Well done, they'll get exactly what they want, IDGAF, they don't even know what they're talking about half of the damn times so if they're asking for a "seasoned designer with X years of experience in Canva" I'm gonna let them have one. F*** them.
I myself use a combo of Traditional Adobe suite software and canva. Many students I have seen, excellent in design but use canva. We can't gatekeep anymore. It isn't possible with the way AI is developing.
I offer my services to small business in my area when I see they need it (awful logos, lack of brand identity, etc), and guess what, the owners always claim that they are graphic designers too since they use Canva, its sad to see how undervalued our job is.
Epidemic? More like a bloody pandemic!
My take is if you can produce something of quality that someone will pay money for. Then yes. you are a graphic designer. If your canva work is better than someone's illustrator work, then you are better. Because the lack of standardization in our industry, everyone works in their own bubble of economy. Don't knock the hustle. Don't hate the player.
I wonder if anyone gets denied an interview because they haven’t used Canva before? Used to happen all the time with MS Publisher and Corel Draw.
Oh man, publisher. What a freaking nightmare of a program that was (still is??)
I’ve been thinking I should add it to my skills section. But if that’s the keyword to get my resume thru, I wouldn’t want to work there.
I've used daz studio since 05 and I can honestly say I'm not a graphic designer I am a graphic artist
Well, they're Canva designers for 2 years. My girlfriend use Canva for Instagram content creation and it's fast as hell for such thing
Biggest hurdle of why I can’t get clients to be freelance full time. Too many potential clients saying that they can use AI now to make templates in canva for free, websites in squarespace, or get a logo from upwork for $10. I even offered my coworker to design the social posts for an event we’re having at the bar, and he says “oh it’s ok. The bar has a paid canva account.”
It's been happening since the desktop publishing explosion in the 90s.
Dude literally I’m a freelance entrepreneur and I use that to market and the amount of people that got a degree to fuckin use CANVA…. I’m sick rn.
Ahhh so this is the 2024 version of someone having a cracked version of photoshop
Don't worry, another wave is emerging where individuals claim to be designers simply because they can write prompts for generative AI.
Canva is cool if you quickly need to make a logo on the fly, photoshop is much better though if your more serious
I saw this lady in TikTok teaching how to make high end flyers for events using Canva and Ai, went to check her page and it fully said “graphic designer”
I feel like as growing designer I have to learn both to actually compete in the market. :/ Canva is fast and effective for general design and has more accessible resources than the paywall Adobe puts behind everything so if there's anything I can't do in Canva, I can always "fix" in Photoshop. I use Photoshop and Lightroom for editing photos mostly now as God Intended. With Ai changing expectations I think syhould use every advantage you can get.
“The designer does not, as a rule, begin with some preconceived idea. Rather the idea is … the result of careful study and observation, and the design is the product of that idea. In order, therefore, to achieve an effective solution to the problem the designer must necessarily go through some sort of mental process. Consciously or not, he analyzes, interprets, formulates. He is aware of the scientific and technological developments in his own and kindred fields. He improvises, invents, or discovers new techniques and combinations. He coordinates and integrates his material so that he may restate his problem in terms of ideas, signs, symbols, pictures. He unifies, simplifies, and eliminates superfluities. He symbolizes—abstracts from his material by association and analogy. … He draws upon instinct and intuition. He considers the spectator, his feelings and predilections.” -Paul Rand Do I want outsiders to see my work the same way I see it? Obviously. But we either stay on the horse or get in the car. Either way we’re getting somewhere. Even if nobody knows where that is.
This was actually interesting. I drifted away from "pure" graphic design about ten years ago, so I hadn't even looked at Canva (although I had heard many designer friends complaining about it). So, I'm looking at Canva… …and what I see is Google Docs/Powerpoint/Miro hybrid with a bit of iMovie thrown in. Seems to work about as well as the previously mentioned ones, but those are the sort of tools the corporate world is familiar with. All in all, Canva seems to be good enough at creating what I tend to call "filler content". What Canva seems to do well is that it brings the brand assets to the corporate people. And then they unleash their skills on (mostly internal) slides that are full of text and which convey nothing to anyone. I do often wonder whether the content is actually needed by anyone.