At 99 years old, WWII veteran Sam Baker has dedicated much of his life to helping others. Read some of Sam’s life lessons as part of our Holiday Story series.

Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1922, Sam was raised in an inclusive household and was taught the importance of giving back to people at an early age through his hardworking parents.

“I didn’t see my mother very often because she went [to work] early in the morning. I remember as a four-year-old I used to get up and have breakfast with my dad at six o’clock in the morning and then go back to sleep because that was the only time I could see him,” Sam tells Canva.

Sam’s father, a cotton farmer, lost the family farm during the Great Depression, and his mother’s business was also shuttered at the time. Despite these financial difficulties, Sam recalls seeing people come to his family home searching for food and work. His parents never turned anyone away.

Once Sam turned eight, he started a paper route and gave his earnings to his mother to buy groceries.

“I always had this feeling that I could solve a lot of problems in this world,” Sam said.

The Power of Education and Creativity

Sam fell in love with reading and learning as a youngster. Education was instilled in him and his three sisters, Alma, Judy, and Harriet, early on and books became a way to spend quality time together as a family.

“We had to make our own entertainment. And my father would read to us all the time,” he said.

As a child, he remembers hearing his mother talk about teaching Emma, a young 15-year-old black woman, how to read, write, sew, and cook. Emma became an important part of the Baker family.

“My parents taught me to see everyone as being worthy of honor and respect. As a child, you develop based on what you see and experience,” he said.

Sam later graduated from Mississippi State University with an engineering degree in 1943.

He joined the Marine Corps at age 19 and served in the South Pacific and China during his service.

Sam’s successful post-war professional life included working with the U.S Coast and Geodetic Survey, and taking a flight assignment over the North Pole. He was assigned to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where he was responsible for increasing the accuracy of tracking missiles. In 1966 he became a Director of the National Geodetic Survey, later named the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA).

Sam ended his service with NOAA after serving 30 years in the organization. During retirement, he worked with the Brookhaven National Laboratory, before becoming the world’s first GPS salesman.

Family Life And Becoming A Children’s Book Author

Sam married his wife, Jan in 1955 and together they had two children, Sally and Michael.

As a father, Sam would share his passion for storytelling with his two children, drawing on his experience and lifelong lessons learned growing up on the Mississippi Delta. “At the time, they didn’t want me to read to them, they wanted me to tell them stories. That is why it’s so important for children to imagine,” he said.

Today, Sam is inspiring the next generation as an award-winning children’s book author. His passionate stories creatively feature important life lessons and values such as kindness, inclusivity, and friendship.

“Children learn values early in life and if we teach them and embed those values early on, they last a lifetime. We need to see people for who we are, not for what we perceive them to be,” he said.

His first book, The Silly Adventures of Petunia and Herman the Worm, was published at age 95, and focuses on sharing lessons of love and friendship. His second book, Oscar The Mouse, was released at age 98 during the COVID pandemic, and touches on teaching children inclusion and acceptance.

At that time, a close friend of Sam’s, Linda Larson-Schlitz, used Canva to design creative for a crowd-funding campaign to promote the release of Oscar The Mouse. The successful fundraiser ultimately led to an outpouring of donations and Sam’s second book was published in September.

“Reading is so important for children’s development and imagination. And I wrote [Oscar the Mouse] to bring joy. We need as much joy in the world as possible,” he said.

Spreading Sam’s Lessons With The World

Now at age 99, Sam, who’s based in Scottsdale, Arizona, is showing no sign of slowing down.

He lives in his own apartment within his retirement village, reads the newspaper every day, exercises four days a week, regularly takes part in discussion groups, and is already making plans for his third book.

“My books are always about accepting people, no matter who they are or what they look like,” Sam said.

Sam’s lifelong mission, he says, is to spread joy, kindness, and spark creativity and learning in people of all ages, drawing on the valuable lessons he’s learned during his fascinating nine-plus decades on Earth.

His number-one piece of advice? “No matter what, be kind, because at the end of the day we’re all more similar than you think.”

“Age is no barrier to fulfilling your lifelong goals,” he says. “You never know about life so you should live every moment on this earth, you should live it. You never know what’s happening tomorrow”.

Sam Baker features in Canva’s ‘With love’ Holiday 2021 campaign

For more on Sam Baker’s story and to discover his books, visit sambakerbooks.com

Sam’s Story: Lessons From WWII Veteran-Turned Children’s Book Author was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our latest update brings everything from fun new games templates to new team management and workplace features to boost your productivity.

Games Templates

Player, are you ready? We’re excited to announce new virtual games. Now you can easily play games and stay connected with your friends, colleagues, and loved ones, near and far. Team up and play multiplayer games like chess and checkers in real-time. You can even set up quizzes and games like “two truths and a lie”.

Charts

Our latest integration with Google Sheets makes it easier than ever to create impressive charts. Use them to nail your next presentation, sales pitch, or report. Easily connect your Google Sheets to Canva and watch your data spring into action.

Shared with You

We know you’ve been busy creating and collaborating on lots of awesome designs. Now you can find all your shared designs and folders under the “shared with you” tab.

Sorting in folders

We’ve made it even easier for you to view and sort your designs in folders. Now you can arrange content within your folders into a list view. All you need to do is select the column headers to sort and choose list view.

Image style match

Creating visually stunning designs just got even easier. Now anyone from beginners to experts can create color-coordinated designs. Just select any photo, and choose “apply colors to page.” Canva will magically restyle your page, so the colors complement your image. You can also shuffle the colors in your quest for the perfect design.

What’s New in Canva — October was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The last decade has fuelled an incredible surge when it comes to the amount of visual content, photos, and videos we’re creating and sharing. Now more than ever, millions of people worldwide communicate their ideas, tell stories, build businesses, and create memories through visual content. While we’re now sharing more kinds of content than ever before, photos have always been a staple part of the way we communicate.

The rapid rise of social media has made sharing photos more critical than ever. Whether you’re a small business creating a range of product imagery, a restaurant showcasing your latest menu, an influencer capturing your day, or an everyday creator capturing and sharing memories with friends and family — photos, and visual content, have become the default for impactful communication.

More than a trillion photos have been taken in the last year alone, but taking photos is only half of the equation. The other half is editing and sharing your photography with the world. But editing photos shouldn’t take expensive software, complex processes, or advanced knowledge.

Effortlessly Remix Photos

Whether you’re editing a portrait, product, or selfie, Canva’s Photo Editor combines powerful editing effects into one simple experience. It’s easier than ever to create standout content across every channel. Whether you’re uploading a selfie to Instagram, creating a product mockup for your online store, or editing that perfect vacation shot — Canva makes it simple to enhance, retouch, focus, filter, frame, mockup, stylize or otherwise remix your photos to create the perfect image.

Our photo editor lets you upload, edit, design, and share your photos in just a few clicks — and we’ve focused on tools that simplify previously complex tasks. With a single tap in Canva, you remove or blur a background, automatically enhance or retouch your image, or create a realistic product mockup. We’ve got everything you need to create professional photos on any device.

View the complete list of effects here.

Simplify Your Creative Workflow

Since launching Canva, our goal has been to create an all-in-one platform for visual communication. Instead of switching between multiple programs to achieve each step in your creative workflow, our Photo Editor combines all of the Canva features you already know and love, making the end-to-end creative process more seamless than ever before.

With Canva, we’ve simplified the process from uploading your photos to sharing them with the world and every step in between. All of our powerful editing features that you know and love can be combined with our photo editing tools, from one-click background removal to our library of thousands of stickers and illustrations to make your content stand out from the crowd. Choose from our new frames, add some stickers, apply your favorite effect and schedule or instantly share your photo with just a few clicks.

Our library of thousands of templates makes turning your photos into social media posts, collages, photo books, magazine covers, mockups, flyers, posters, or presentations a breeze. Simply browse through our library of templates and discover just how much you can do with your photos.

Browse our templates.

Design on the Go

Our photo editing features are available on any device, meaning you can post with confidence anytime, anywhere. Our Content Planner allows you to edit photos and schedule them to be shared with your audience later or publish directly to all of your favorite social media platforms from the Canva Desktop, iOS, or Android Apps.

Remix your photos in just five easy steps, from anywhere, on any device:

1. Upload your photo(s) from any device
2. Crop the photo to your desired size
3. Edit the photo with your desired filters, effects, adjustments, and more
4. Customize your photo by taking it further with stickers, templates, frames, and illustrations
5. Share it instantly to your favorite platform, or save it for later.

We’d love your feedback and thoughts as you edit your photos — feel free to share your creations with us on social media using #canvalove; we’ll be keeping an eye out!

Start editing for free

Remix Your Photos With Canva Photo Editor was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Jo Magno – Group Lead, Canva Video

Everyone is consuming video at a massive scale, from content on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, to workplace training tutorials and online fitness classes. But video tools have either been too complex, expensive, or limited for most people to access. Today, we’re excited to unveil our Canva Video Suite, combining intuitive editing, recording, and collaboration features, thousands of customizable video templates, and an extensive media library, in one easy-to-use platform.

Since we launched our first iteration of Canva Video back in 2019, we’ve seen incredible examples of people using our platform to achieve their goals. Just recently, the two co-founders of Elsewhere Travel were able to launch their brand during the pandemic, using Canva’s Instagram Reels to engage and inspire their online audience.

The launch of Canva Video Suite is another exciting milestone in our mission to empower the world to design. A core part of this mission is making video creation simpler and easier than ever before. Our new features make it easy to create any video for work or play on any device — whether that’s a social media ad for your small business, a workplace video for your team, or fun messages to celebrate Halloween and New Year.

A Simple but Powerful Scene-Based Interface

We believe that making a video should be simple and intuitive for absolutely everyone, but until today, creating professional videos has required complex and expensive software. When we first set out to launch Canva Video Suite, we spent hours learning from our community and realized that the multi-layer timeline that most video tools use can be hard to understand for those without experience creating professional videos. With this in mind, we created a new interface that splits videos into scenes that have a similar look and feel to presentation slides — which most people are more familiar with using on a regular basis.

This scene-based editing functionality makes video editing a breeze. Since the single-layer timeline resembles a collection of slide thumbnails, it feels instantly familiar. Anyone can add animated transitions and trim video or audio tracks without having to learn a new interface. It’s easy to drag and drop content directly from Canva’s media library, and from there, apply effects, text, audio, animations, transitions and more directly within the canvas.

We also built the product with the goal of ensuring our community doesn’t feel overwhelmed by too many features at once. Powerful functions like the ability to add animations, add scene transitions, or split clips, are available but only present themselves as they are needed.

Our animation combinations feature, which will launch in the coming weeks, will apply the best combination of animations to every element in a scene at once, empowering anyone to create engaging and professional videos in just a few clicks.

Video Creation on Every Device

For most people, traditional video editing tools have been out of reach due to the processing power required to run these programs. That’s why we’ve built Canva’s Video Suite to work seamlessly on the web, desktop, iOS and Android.

To achieve this, our engineering teams developed technology to overcome the video-specific limitations between web browsers, making video rendering consistent while also making video editing possible on mobile browsers too.

Our dream is to equip every audience with simple but powerful video tools. We saw the largest uptake of Canva’s existing video features in Brazil, while Indonesia and India have also seen massive adoption. Building a truly local product is an important part of Canva’s mission to empower the world to design – our video editor supports over 100 languages, offers video templates that are tailored for local holidays, and is built to support right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic.

Empowering Teams with Collaborative Video Tools

According to a recent study by Canva, 68% of US knowledge workers say that video is becoming more important in the workplace, and 53% of workplace teams have created video content in the past 18 months. With Canva Video, marketing teams can scale their video creation operations and stay on brand, sales teams can create customized video proposals, and internal comms teams can better engage their teams. Our Pro and Enterprise customers can manage logos and fonts through Canva Brand Kits that help everyone create on-brand content every time.

A Full End to End Visual Communications Platform

Video creation takes more than editing features alone, and Canva supports everyone at every step of the journey, from finding the right dimensions and sourcing content, all the way to publishing. Our royalty-free media library of stock video, images, audio, graphics, photography and more, means there’s no need to worry about securing copyright when creating videos.

The launch of Canva Video suite means you can now create videos on the same platform as everything from presentations to infographics, posters, social media posts, videos, flyers, business cards, letterheads, and much more.

We’re truly only 1% of the way there, and we’re incredibly excited about the work we’re continuing to do to make video creation simpler and more accessible than ever before. We’d love your feedback and thoughts as you explore the product and create videos — feel free to share these with us on social media using #canvalove, we’ll be keeping an eye out!

Introducing Canva Video Suite was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Climate change is the single greatest threat to global stability, security and life on earth (UN Security Council, 2021). From bushfires, to rising sea levels and climbing global temperatures — the clock has already started. The dangerous effects are already reverberating around the world. Like many technology companies, we’ve been vocal about our stance on protecting the planet and the urgency in which we need to take serious action. As one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world, we’re also in a unique position to help champion this effort.

Slowing the effects of climate change is going to take the work of many. It’s why we’re excited to announce that Canva is the first Australian company to sign The Climate Pledge. Co-founded by Amazon and Global Optimism, The Climate Pledge is a global commitment to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, and meet The Paris Agreement 10 years early.

To date, The Climate Pledge signatories generate over $1.8 trillion in global annual revenues and have more than 7 million employees across 26 industries in 21 countries. By coming onboard, it’ll see us measure and report our greenhouse gas emissions as well as continue to implement decarbonisation strategies in line with the Paris agreement through business change and innovations. We’re pleased to be making progress in this space, but we also know there’s so much more that Canva — and others — can continue to do.

Rianne Van Veldhuizen, managing director, Amazon Web Services in Australia and New Zealand told us, “We are excited that Canva is our first customer in Australia to join The Climate Pledge, and we are looking forward to working with [them] to help achieve their sustainability goals. Amazon is committed to building a sustainable business for our customers and the planet — solving the world’s environmental and sustainability challenges is a task that no single organisation can take on alone, but working together, we can make a significant impact.”

Joining the Climate Pledge is more than a formality. It’s also a chance to create joint action and sustained momentum in collaboration with fellow signatories such as Salesforce, Schneider Electric and HEINEKEN who we’re looking forward to working alongside to address the critical climate challenges facing our planet. No single individual, organisation, or government can do this alone. Everyone must play their part.

At Canva, we are guided by a simple Two-Step Plan

As we continue to make progress on Step 1, Step 2 becomes more important than ever. We have both an incredible opportunity and a huge responsibility to use our voice, our reach and our resources to leave our planet in a better place for the next generation. Joining The Climate Pledge is one of the first steps in a long journey as part of Canva’s commitment to sustainability. It’s also deeply aligned with one of our core values as a company — to be ‘a force for good’. It’s a statement that steers the decisions we make, the goals we set, and the culture we create as a company. It also drives us to work harder on our journey towards sustainability.

We’ve made promising headway in this space, with our Australian operations already achieving carbon neutrality, while our Global operations are on track to hit the same milestone by the end of the year. We’re also working on transitioning our print operations to become fully carbon neutral. We hope that by turning Canva into a carbon-neutral company we will not only be contributing to tackling climate change but also inspiring other companies to join us in making the switch.

In addition, our head office in Australia is powered by 100% renewable energy and our global operations and data services will be transitioning to 100% renewable energy — thanks to collaboration with partners like AWS. We’ve also set the huge goal of being completely climate positive by 2023. The focus is on reducing our footprint, with a target to reduce our per employee emissions by roughly 50% over the next five years. What we can’t reduce, we’ll offset with internationally recognised carbon projects, planting initiatives and other sustainable practices.

Investing in our environment

For every print order placed with Canva, we’ve committed to planting a tree. It’s part of our One Print, One Tree campaign — a 1-for-1 reforestation program that will see over 3,350,000 trees planted in its first year. We’ve partnered with Reduce. Reuse. Grow. (RRG), a Sustainability-as-a-Service business that operates programs to help offset impacts from print, consumer packaged goods and technology industries, to manage the tree planting process on our behalf. The campaign has already committed more than 3 million trees to be planted in Kenya, Mozambique, Philippines, Tanzania, Brazil, Haiti, the United States and Madagascar.

By focusing the program on these countries, we can help restore and rejuvenate vulnerable ecosystems, contribute to the fight against climate change by planting carbon-sequestering forests and mangroves, and deliver ecological and social benefits to local populations. There’s no limit to the number of trees we can plant. Together, we can make each print order count as an investment in our environment’s health for future generations.

Going organic

Another way to be kind to the environment is by going organic. Organic farming is better for the environment because its practices involve less pollution, soil erosion and energy. One of our most well-known perks is providing breakfast and lunch for our teams across the globe. In our Sydney office, 70% of produce is sourced from regenerative agriculture & organic farms. We choose to only work with suppliers that embrace environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes. Two of those are Hebron Fram and Tathra Farms. They now grow most of the veggies we use for our meals and they do it organically while using modern regenerative farming methods. We have also partnered with Black Duck Foods who are committed to traditional food growing processes that care for Country and return economic benefits directly to Indigenous people.

We also host volunteer weekends out at Hebron farm — it’s become a really great opportunity for the team to see where our food comes from and be part of the process. We’re also extremely conscious of food waste — if there is any food left over at the end of the day, we encourage the team to take it home and share with their family and friends.

Getting bee-sy

We also produce some of our own food and supplies at our Sydney office in the heart of Surry Hills. Around the world bees are in drastic decline, with whole populations being destroyed overnight as a result of introduced threats. The loss of bees will have a detrimental impact on ecosystems across the globe, with rippling effects on all plant and animal life.

Fortunately, urban beekeeping is helping to rebuild decimated populations and prevent potential extinction. It’s a practice we’ve also embraced in our Sydney office, with a beehive on the roof which has produced more than 50kgs of honey. In total, we expect to produce up to 250kgs a year. We use the honey in our kitchen, but beyond that, our bees also pollinate a radius of up to 1.5km around our offices.

What’s next?

These are just some of the initiatives we’ve introduced as we work towards a sustainable future. A carbon free future is not an impossible undertaking. It’s commitments like The Climate Pledge which will help us to set ourselves the goals which will preserve the natural environment and in doing so address the climate crisis and solve the challenges of decarbonising our economy.

We encourage other corporations to follow our footsteps and sign-up to The Climate Pledge. It’s only through collective action that we can preserve our planet for future generations.

You can learn more about Canva’s ongoing sustainability work here.

Canva Signs The Climate Pledge was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Written by Cat van der Werff — Executive Creative Director @ Canva

The face of our brand

Apple. Patagonia. Nike. I’m sure that when you imagine these logos, you also get a sense of what these companies stand for. A logo is one of the most important parts of your brand. It forms an immediate connection between your business and your community. It clarifies and codifies what you stand for. It’s a window into what you believe.

At Canva, we believe that design should be accessible to everyone, no matter where you live, what your socioeconomic status, or even computer experience. That’s because design is a critical skill that enables you to achieve your goals:

• Designing a great resume enables people to land a job
• Designing great marketing materials enables small businesses to grow
• Designing a great pitch deck enables people to turn their dreams into reality
• Designing cards helps people to celebrate important milestones

Refine, not rebrand

While our mission of empowering the world to design remains just as important as it was on day one, our product and brand have evolved a lot since those early days. We are now asking our logo to flex across more applications, from tiny buttons to huge billboards.

The Canva logo was originally designed to express the effortless flow you get in a creative moment, and it has done this well over the last 9 years. We needed to refine our logo, without losing the essence of the familiar brand that our community of 65+ million people across the globe knows and loves.

A labour of love

To craft the Canva wordmark, our in-house brand team collaborated with type designer and lettering artist, Rob Clarke. Rob has created logos for some of the world’s largest brands, and we like the way he can capture the unique personality of a brand through lettering — no two logos he designs are the same.

Rob Clarke on his creative process:

“When I was approached by Canva’s design team to redraw their logo I initially made notes as to what was working and what needed attention. Some characters were less legible than they could be, especially when reduced in size. Legibility is always of great importance when drawing logos.

I start by writing the word out numerous times with various pens to get a feeling of natural connections and strokes. Sketching by hand also allows the mind to wonder and explore other potential routes.

Next, I scan in various sketches and trace vectors over the top. Not too precise as I still aim to adjust weight, spacing and other elements. Once I have a rough vector I proceed to make refinements.”

A whopping 75 logo iterations later, we had our wordmark. Next, our brand team applied the gradient, brought it to life in motion, rigorously tested it, and ensured pixel-perfection across almost 100 different outputs. Now, our new logo was ready to share with the world.

Enabling craft at scale

Since the very beginning, our goal has been to empower the world to design, while enabling professional designers to create highly crafted assets in their program of choice, then import them into Canva to be used by organisations at scale. This means professional designers can focus on the things they love, while spending less time making small tweaks to individual templates each time an update is needed.

In our case, we handcrafted our logo and uploaded it to Canva as an SVG, enabling the 2,000+ people in our team to add branding to their presentations, social media posts, and marketing materials.

As I mentioned earlier, a logo is a window into what you believe. Here’s a few ideas we believe in, which we tried to express through our logo:

Design should be simple, not complex

Our core product offer is the simplicity and ease with which you can create a design. Ease of use is important, it means you can get in the flow, and design anything for work or play. Our new logo connects one letter to the next, with a playful loop in the v, to give the feeling of effortless flow.

Design is an inspiring process

The turquoise-to-purple gradient has become an iconic part of our brand over the years. It inspires and guides you across Canva’s design editor from left-to-right, from creation-to-completion. Our new logo glows with a radiant gradient, so you’ll know it’s Canva up close or afar, from any device, anywhere.

Design is for everyone

Everyone is born creative, it’s what makes us human. But we’re often educated out of it, or, lose the confidence to create as we grow up. By making design accessible, Canva gives people the confidence to give it a go. Our new logo is human and hand-crafted, to represent the creativity within every one of us.

We’re only just beginning

As a member of the Canva community, you help shape who we are. We’re constantly working to better our product and brand, in support of you. We’ll have more brand updates to share with you soon.

New logo, same Canva was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Written by Chris Low – Head of Vibe @ Canva

It’s safe to say the pandemic has completely transformed the way we work both today and in the future. While we recently announced Canva’s plans for the future of work, the majority of our team have been working from home since the beginning of the pandemic to help prevent the spread of COVID in our local communities.

Though change has been constant over the past 18 months, our mission at Canva remains the same: to create an environment that cultivates our culture and inspires us all to do the best work of our lives.

With Australia, the Philippines and many other parts of the world experiencing continued periods of lockdown, our priority has been the health, safety, and wellbeing of our team and the community. Over the last few months, we’ve been thinking about how we can continue to scale and evolve our culture and workplace experience to support our growing and distributed team across the globe. In doing so, we’ve introduced a number of new initiatives to bring Canva’s culture to life in this new virtual environment.

We thought we’d share some of the lessons we’ve learned and some of the initiatives that we’ve found to be most impactful. We hope these initiatives can help to spark ideas and inspiration in other companies too.

Future-proofing our benefits and perks

The last year has highlighted the importance of thinking about workplace experience beyond the physical walls of an office. Since the very beginning, we’ve designed Canva’s benefits and perks to be meaningful additions to our culture. We believe that by empowering our team to invest in themselves, we’re able to create a genuinely impactful environment for everyone to both do their best and be their best.

With the shift to a hybrid world of work, we recently reimagined all of our perks to be adaptable and impactful no matter where or how our team chooses to work. We know that to thrive in any environment, you need the right resources and tools around you to achieve your goals. Based on this, we recently introduced a new program called Vibe and Thrive, designed to double down on flexibility and location-agnostic benefits.

We’re providing everyone at Canva with an annual stipend to spend on everything from gym memberships to home office setups, coffee catch ups, textbooks, language classes, meditation apps and a whole lot more. The categories are intentionally broad — this way, we’re able to cater for a wide range of working styles, hobbies and interests outside of work. Ultimately, we hope that by implementing this new way of thinking, we’ll be able to empower everyone at Canva to tailor our perks and benefits in a way that best fits their lifestyle.

Reimagining events and online connection

Celebration and team bonding has always been a core part of Canva’s culture. While we’re not able to celebrate in person, we’re continuing to double down on creating new and exciting ways for teams to come together in unique and engaging ways.

One example of this is Canva’s Season Openers. Since our very earliest days, Season Openers have been an incredibly powerful way of communicating what’s happening across every aspect of the company. They’ve also become an important way of bringing our global team together to celebrate our progress and plans for the future.

With most of our office locations currently under lockdown, we weren’t able to get together in person for our most recent Season Opener. Instead, we organised for local hampers to be sent directly to everyone to enjoy while tuning in from all over the globe. To add a bit of extra fun, we also created a virtual world where we all had an opportunity to come together in a unique and interactive way.

Keeping the vibe alive

We’re also hosting online events such as cooking classes and trivia nights to foster the same sense of community that we’re used to experiencing when we’re able to gather in person.

Community is a huge aspect of Canva’s culture, which is why we’ve transitioned our 400+ clubs online. Everyone is encouraged to join or create any kind of club they like — and there’s a club for almost everything. From #philosophy-club, to #campervan-club, #drawing-club and #pickle-club, we cater to a wide range of interests. Our clubs have a monthly budget which they’d normally use to meet in person, so throughout lockdown, we’ve been shipping boxes to the team so they can continue to participate in club events from home. From pasta making to drawing and pottery, we’ve been keeping busy!

Beyond transitioning our clubs online, we’ve also built an internal ‘Vibe Alive’ hub which serves as a one-stop shop for all Vibe related activity. It includes suggestions for teams looking to plan remote celebrations, a complete list of clubs that anyone can join, details on where to score the latest Canva swag, our online fitness timetable and much, much more.

Being kind to your mind

We know that prolonged periods of isolation and the ongoing pandemic can cause feelings of anxiety and uncertainty for many of us. As well as our Canva-hosted activities, we offer a confidential Employee Assistance Program (EAP) where anyone at Canva can seek up to thirteen paid sessions with professional wellbeing specialists.

We’ve also transitioned our health and fitness program to an online environment, with virtual classes around the clock. Whether you’re interested in yoga, meditation or bootcamps, our virtual fitness sessions provide everyone with the opportunity to stay healthy and switch off from work.

Company-wide ‘Recharge Day’

There’s no better way to recharge than unplugging and relaxing. To help prevent burnout and promote the importance of taking time off, we recently held a company wide ‘Recharge Day’ where we all switched off for the day by taking a long-weekend.

It was great to see all of the creative ways that our team were able to spend the day recharging and taking some time for themselves — from making jam to completing a set of lego or spending the day at the beach.

Supporting Parents and Carers

Homeschooling has been one of the biggest challenges for parents around the world who are working while caring for those around them. To support our parents and carers, we’re regularly running a range of interactive sessions designed to help navigate this unique situation. We’ve also created a Slack channel and a Parents and Carers Hub dedicated to housing this content and sharing tips and tricks. Just the other day, we threw a Spiderman themed Zoom party for all of the Canva kids!

What’s Next?

While the path out of lockdown for much of the world is still uncertain, we’ll continue to invest in these kinds of programs and initiatives that provide support, both in and beyond the workplace. We’re also looking forward to embracing Canva’s approach to the Future of Work as we begin reopening our offices once it’s safe to do so.

Stay tuned for more updates, and in the meantime, check out how we’re approaching the future of work as we balance both flexibility and connection.

How we’re supporting the Canva team through lockdown was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the most important initiatives I’ve worked on is making Canva a true Celebration of Diversity. Before Canva, I was at a company of 40ish people and wanted to build a workplace where everyone felt that they belonged. I attended seminars, talked to Diversity experts, and read a lot. Still, many of the ideas seemed too far ahead of the stage we were at. The mountain of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) was too daunting, and for a time I was stuck, fearing I could unintentionally offend someone if I launched initiatives incorrectly.

Out of apprehension, I didn’t take action as much as I wanted to. But I kept learning. When I was asked to work on Canva’s DE&I strategy — I jumped at the chance. At Canva, we have a company-wide approach to Diversity; we believe that we’re all responsible for creating a diverse environment. While our DE&I working group is a team of 16 from all corners of our team, true diversity takes the work and continuous learning by every one of us.

As a global team, we have focused on a cycle of listening, learning, setting goals, doing, reviewing to ensure our growing team is as inclusive as possible (alongside the teams working on our Product Diversity Initiatives).

While it’s still early days for us, we have made a commitment, as a company, to continuously learn and put in the work. I​n this blog I’ll take you through some of the actions we have taken at Canva to build a more inclusive team. Our intention is to share for two reasons:

1. Share what’s working for us, so that anyone in the position I was in can take ideas that might work for their teams.
2. Share with those thinking of joining the Canva team so they can openly see what we’re working on and how much more we still want to do.

That’s not to say we have it all figured out — we don’t. While we have made progress, we know there is so much left to learn and a long way to go.

While this list is not exhaustive of what we’re doing, in this blog we’ll focus on inclusive hiring, awareness and education, health and wellbeing, learning; and then more tailored information on supporting parents and caregivers and the LGBTQIA+ community. First up:

To create a team rich with dynamic perspectives who work together with shared values towards a shared vision, it’s crucial everyone involved in hiring is supported by the right processes and makes an intentional effort. Some steps we’ve taken to create a more inclusive hiring process:

• We added a note to job postings to ease imposter syndrome: We value all types of experiences here at Canva, so if you don’t meet all the qualifications, we’d still love to hear from you.
• Removed unnecessary degree requirements and exclusive language, such as “guru” and “rockstar”, from job descriptions. We found diversity decoders helpful to check this.
• Our job descriptions and benefits don’t refer to social gatherings that may exclude people. For example, beers at the office at 7pm aren’t everyone’s idea of a good time, so we excluded this language from our job postings.

Sharing a welcoming work environment can show candidates who you are and offer a peek into your culture; we recently did this by sharing a video of our team’s own stories.

• Being transparent about policies through partnerships with organisations like Work180 can help applicants make informed decisions on benefits and policies before applying.
• We host workshops for everyone involved in hiring to ensure we all understand how to fairly assess candidates, recognise and mitigate biases, and help to improve our standardised interviews and feedback.

• Hiring for “Culture-Fit” can be detrimental to inclusive hiring, so we assess candidates “culture-add” using our values in interviews instead. For example, for our Empower Others value, we look for candidates who have developed themselves and others and who openly share information.

Inclusive hiring requires continued focus, and will never be “done”.

As well as making our hiring experience as inclusive as possible, we have also set representation goals across all our specialties (our term for areas like Engineering, Product, Design, Marketing, Operations etc) and, critically, at all levels of the organisation, so that we’re not just creating diversity at one level.

While views on quotas can vary, we do believe in the importance of setting goals to measure and hold ourselves accountable to progress. For example, in terms of gender representation in our hiring we’re starting to see these seeds previously planted coming to fruition:

• 50% of roles hired in the US in 2021 are women,
• 21% of our Engineering hires in 2021 are women (Australia average is 19%* women),
• 41% of our Product hires in 2021 are women (Australia average is 37%* women).

There’s a lot more we want to do, but each of these new team members bring critical differences and richness of perspective, thought, background, life experience and decision making to Canva teams.

• Based on LinkedIn Talent Insights Data: Sept 2021.

Inclusive awareness and education help us all form empathy and an understanding of why diversity is so important. With that comes action. Some things we have been doing in this space:

• Bringing a global working group together to localise DE&I initiatives. Diversity has different meanings globally, so involving local perspectives and partnerships is crucial.
• Each week a different person in our team shares an Acknowledgement of Country in our global All-Hands and tells a story of the history or culture of the land they live or work on to continue a weekly tradition of indigenous cultural learning.

• To make sure that our internal events feature a variety of artists and entertainers and use guardrails to ensure at least 50% come from underrepresented groups.
• We believe in our responsibility to champion diversity externally too. We encourage everyone at Canva to only participate in external events or panels if there is a diverse range of speakers.
• At Canva, we love to celebrate. It’s important that celebrations factor in cultural sensitivity and individual circumstances such as being mindful of an event time being parent and caregiver friendly, events being organised with decent notice, alcoholic drinks as optional, and remote-friendly events. A few of our previous celebrations:

• Accessibility is core to our product and workplace. We have a fantastic team working on this at Canva that recently hosted an Accessibility Day where we all came together to work on our accessibility goals. If you’re interested in increasing accessibility, the Canva team wrote a blog on inclusive design here.

The health and wellbeing of everyone at Canva will always be our top priority, and it is crucial every decision in this space is as inclusive as possible. Different people around the world will find different things most helpful for their wellbeing. Some initiatives we see working well at Canva:

• Surveys help us to hear directly from our team. Especially if they are succinct, not too frequent, and actions are taken quickly. Some of the steps below are from survey suggestions.
• We introduced Vibe & Thrive, a dedicated allowance that each person can claim for whatever best supports their wellbeing; from health memberships, to celebrations, to wellbeing and education.
• Based in fostering both flexibility and team connection, we recently updated our Future of Work policy; this approach is helping to support and hire more people from diverse backgrounds who have different needs and personal priorities.
• We offer a confidential Employee Assistance Program that allows our team (and/or their immediate family members) to seek up to 13 paid sessions per year with a fully qualified practitioner.
• Meet-Free Wednesday and ‘Sacred Lunch Hour’ have been added to everyone’s calendar to give space for deep work and give introverts or those not comfortable on Zoom a break.
• During the global lockdowns, we made a week of paid Flex-Leave available to anyone needing an extended break. The team also isn’t required to formally log periods under 1 day off when caring for themselves or others.

• A recent survey showed that adding a Canva-wide Recharge Day for a collective team break has been one of the most impactful initiatives for wellbeing, especially for those in our team caring for others.
• A way of supporting our team has been inviting our Wellbeing Partners, Select Wellness, to share tips. E.g.: Habits to Ease Anxiety, Creating Boundaries, and The Juggle is Real.

Research shows diverse teams are great for teams; they are a driver of innovation and help improve the decision making playing-field. Our goal is for everyone at Canva to know why DE&I matters to them and adopt inclusive daily habits by embedding D&I as a core part of our learning and development programs.

• A good place to start is by identifying areas your team wants to excel in, possibly through a survey. Then develop programs or partnerships in those areas that the team can choose to take part in. Some programs we developed are Leadership Development, Coach Essentials for first-time coaches/managers, and Unstoppable Me.

• We formed a partnership with Project F to help us audit and improve our processes to achieve more equal and gender-diverse teams across all levels.
• As part of the Canva team onboarding, we have an Introduction to DE&I session to ensure everyone who joins the team has the same access to information on the importance of DE&I from week 1.
• We have recently shifted to a big focus on process documentation, avoiding reliance on casual knowledge to accommodate different learning styles for everyone to do their best work.
• We have Fix-It and Diversity-Ideas forms for our team to voice ideas for improvements across Canva:

Our Celebration of Diversity working group has 15 sub-groups of DE&I focuses, but we thought it could be helpful to share some specific ideas in a few of these areas. These lists are not exhaustive but give an idea of some of the work we’re doing in 2 of the 15 areas. More to come on the other focus areas in another blog!

Belonging is a commitment we take seriously. If you’d like to learn about how we support the LGBTQIA+ community, Canva’s Hugo Welke wrote a piece, Out at Work and #proudtobe. A few we hear are impactful:

• To ensure we use correct pronouns, we give space to identify these in applications, on Slack and our internal intranet, aiming to normalise sharing and the importance of using the correct pronouns.
• We use Zoom backgrounds with pronoun visibility options, and share backgrounds for our team to show support of LGBTQIA+ events like Wear It Purple or IDAHOBIT.
• Our #diversity-inclusion and #lgbtqia-pride-club Slack channels have been really helpful for everyone to discover resources, support, events and posts, and get involved.

• Celebrating Pride is an important time to authentically support our team by raising awareness, organising educational sessions, and listening to how we can all best support professionally and interpersonally. A sneak peek of Pride Week at Canva.

• We encourage our team to bring their full selves to work; respecting and valuing everyone for who they are, not by their gender identity. In our Sydney offices, bathrooms are all gender-neutral and fully stocked with free menstruation products to make everyone feel comfortable.
• We believe in empowering others through education, providing a safe environment for discussion. Canva’s previous topics have included:

1. Key definitions and concepts of sex, gender and sexuality,
2. Out at Work: Q&A panellist with Canva’s LGBTQIA+ community
3. Common barriers LGBTQIA+ people face at work and how we can all listen and help
4. Tips on supporting LGBTQIA+ people interpersonally and professionally

Providing parents and caregivers with a supportive workplace that can adapt to their individual family needs is important to creating a truly diverse workplace. We recently refreshed our parental leave policy to be more inclusive of all family constructs. Some of the things parents and caregivers told us that they valued:

• Equal leave is a great accelerator for gender equality. We want to normalise parents taking leave and equal roles in caregiving. We removed carer labels (eg Primary, Secondary) and offer parents 18 weeks paid parental leave for AU, NZ & US, which is fully flexible across 2 years, with superannuation paid throughout.
• We offer a flexible Return To Work policy, including keeping in touch days throughout leave periods, and working 3 days for the first 4 weeks following leave and receiving full-time pay.
• We offer sessions with our external EAP/wellbeing providers as well as our internal coaching team throughout pregnancies or in the lead up to adoption, and return to work, to help with the transition.

For lots of helpful tips on supporting parents at work, this blog by Canvanaut and parent Hannah Heffernan has a wealth of great ideas.

• Company-wide policies aside, an impactful initiative is to create a delightful, seamless experience for the diverse needs of families is Canva’s Parents and Carers Hub. The Hub includes:

1. Handover templates for communicating news and handing over projects.

2. Tips from our global parents and carers community.

3. Tips for coaches coaching new parents or caregivers.

4. Links to the #parents-and-carers Slack channel.

5. Office information including fully stocked parents room and breastfeeding facilities.

• During school holidays we host a kids program on-site. During the pandemic, this hasn’t been possible so we do pop up events for kids and parents, like Zoom magicians, an online Superheroes Party and Kids Trivia, and a Virtual scavenger hunt at our Season Opener.
• [Trigger Warning] In the case that someone at Canva, or their partner, experiences a miscarriage, we offer 2 weeks paid leave as well as paid Flex Leave for any additional time needed.
• [Trigger Warning] For stillbirth or infant death, parents are eligible for the whole 18 weeks paid leave, and the option to take 12 months unpaid leave.

That’s it for this update of Diversity and Inclusion at Canva; I hope you found some helpful ideas here for your workplace or community :) This blog was just a slice of what we are doing towards becoming a celebration of diversity. We are only 1% towards where we want to be, and the work represented is the result of efforts across our whole team.

We have committed to reporting back our progress towards our company-wide goals once a Season at our global company-wide All-Hands, but it is ultimately the actions and behaviours of us all that will determine how diverse and inclusive workplace culture is. At Canva, DE&I is, and will always be, owned by everyone — not just a few working in a formalised team.

If you have any thoughts, feedback, ideas or would just like to talk about all things DE&I, feel free to reach out.

Jennie
Leadership Operations for Canva’s CEO and COO

The importance of diversity at Canva and how we are working on it was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Student Activist Tiana Day On Designing For Change,
And Empowering The Next Generation Of Change-Makers

For Tiana Day, the summer of 2020 will forever be remembered as the time that changed her life.

Back then, the San Ramon native had just graduated from high school and was committed to starting college in Southern California until the pandemic put her plans on pause. Then one night while scrolling through her social media, a post she saw sparked something in the 17-year-old to take charge.

“My whole plan changed because of this one moment that I decided to just make stuff happen,” Tiana tells Canva.

A social media post from Mimi Zoila, 19, from Marin County in California, called out for a leader to steer a peaceful Black Lives Matter march across San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

“I’d never led a protest or spoke in front of big crowds before, but I felt inclined to get involved in the movement,” Tiana said.

Tiana and Mimi, who’d never met in person until the morning of the protest, got to work immediately to plan the public event. Eager to get the word out, Tiana turned to Canva — a design tool she’d used previously for school projects — to create a flyer promoting the protest and shared it across social media.

The teens hoped a few hundred people would join them in the rally. Within 24 hours, Tiana and her co-founder, Mimi, marched across the Golden Gate Bridge with more than 50,000 people.

“I put [the poster] on my social media and went to sleep. I woke up the next morning and there were thousands of people waiting to march in solidarity to the Black Lives Matter movement.”.

“That impulsive moment ended up becoming something that has completely taken over my life,” she said.

Empowering Youth To Make Change

Tiana says the momentum of the protest “lit a fire” within her and sparked her passion for activism.

She became empowered to be a voice for the younger generation and her community.

“I was like, this is what I’m supposed to be doing right now,” she recalls.

Today, Tiana, 18, is the founder of non-profit organization, Youth Advocates For Change, which champions youth-led causes and supports students to take action on intersectional social justice issues.

“I was seeing that thousands of people were impacted by actions that I had created.”

“And I knew that if other young people had someone to push them, to inspire them, and encourage them to just speak their opinion, maybe they can also make a bigger impact,” Tiana said.

As a biracial student growing up in her suburban area, Tiana admits she felt singled out at school and was subject to bullying and discrimination, experiences that her non-profit community closely relates to.

“I wanted to create an organization that would be a safe space, because I know that that’s something that I needed when I was younger and would have gotten me voicing my opinion earlier.”

Tiana’s main mission is to use her platform to encourage students to speak up on social justice issues.

“This generation has a lot of passion. And I feel like it’s not being heard when we talk about things like racial equity, education rights, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and a list of other things.”

“And now more than ever, it’s important that we get up and we get loud and we make sure that our voices are heard,” she said.

Creating Change Through Visual Design

With 150 chapter members located across the United States, Canva has become an essential tool in the non-profit’s daily operations, providing a collaborative platform for the team to create impactful and memorable branded material from posters, flyers, social media graphics, and presentations.

“We’re able to collaborate with our out-of-state chapters. So students from all over the country can be working on one design, or one project, or slideshow presentation, and we can all be on the same page,” Tiana said.

The visual design tool also supports Tiana’s team in engaging students to join in their mission.

“We can easily recruit by making flyers that we can post on social media. With Canva, I can easily impact the next generation of change-makers,” she said.

The non-profit founder also notes Canva has allowed the team to create a strong visual brand that connects with students and supports key messaging, which has been crucial to promote their work.

“People always tell us that our designs are really thought-out and informational, which is funny because we literally just take templates right off Canva and put our own words into it.”

“So we take the compliment, but honestly I owe it to Canva!” Tiana laughs.

Planning The Next Chapter

Today, Tiana has started college while continuing to focus on her organization and connecting with her growing community. The student founder admits she’s landed exactly where she needs to be.

“My proudest moment was getting an email from a girl in Ohio. She had seen me in an interview and was like, I don’t know how, but I want to get involved in your organization.” So Tiana created a chapter in Ohio.

“I’ve stepped into my own shoes and I really know who I am now because I’ve stuck with my gut.”

Her main message for future generations? “Empowered people empower people. Being the first person to take initiation can impact millions of people but you won’t know until you take the leap of faith and just do it.”

“At the end of the day this is not a moment, this is a movement. And my goal is to get more students involved in Youth Advocates For Change, where there’s a space for everyone, whatever your passion is.”

Tiana Day is one of three Canva users appearing in the company’s ‘With Canva, you can’ campaign.

Student Activist Tiana Day On Designing For Change,  And Empowering The Next Generation was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Future of Work: Flexibility and Connection

An update on Canva’s long-term approach to the future of work as we focus on flexibility and connection.

It’s safe to say the last 18 months have changed the world in ways many of us never thought possible. One day, the majority of us were commuting to physical offices — the next, we were working from our homes around the world. For many, the pandemic became the catalyst for an overdue evolution of when, where, and how we work.

While the global situation is still in flux, we believe traditional workplaces will become the exception when it comes to the future of work. If one thing’s for sure, it’s that we’ve disproved the notion of collaboration being best in one way or in one place. We’ve seen this through our own platform, with team adoption and collaboration skyrocketing as millions of people around the world embrace a more hybrid way of working.

Though the world has undoubtedly changed, the goal we’ve had since day one remains the same. To create a culture and an environment where everyone is empowered to do the best work of their lives. Today, we’re excited to share an update on our long-term approach to the future of work.

Looking ahead, Canva will continue to foster a hybrid model focused on balancing Flexibility and Connection. We won’t have any strict requirements for the number of days spent in an office. Instead, we’re empowering teams to determine the balance that works best for their unique needs. We believe in the mantra of ‘what works for you, works for us’.

Balancing Flexibility and Connection

We believe in striking an important balance when looking at the most sustainable and long-term model for the future of work. For example, our recent survey results show that 79% of our team feel productive working from home and that 81% would like to continue balancing this flexibility while having regular opportunities for in-person collaboration.

As we look towards the months and years ahead, we want to create an environment that captures the aspects of remote work that we’ve enjoyed — such as working more flexible hours; while also ensuring we create opportunities for the moments we’ve missed, such as in-person connection and collaboration.

With this in mind, we’ve identified two core pillars as we foster this model.

Flexibility: Ensuring flexibility for our team to work in the way that they feel most productive, whether that’s predominantly at home, in an office, or a mix of both.

Connection: Empowering our teams to collaborate and create meaningful connections while having the space and opportunity to connect and look towards the future.

We won’t be setting any strict requirements for balancing working from home versus working from an office. However, we’d like to see everyone able to visit their nearest Canva Hub at least twice a season. By balancing these two pillars, we’ll continue to make decisions and evolve our model in a way that prioritizes individual flexibility and work-life balance while ensuring we’re creating opportunities for teams to establish meaningful connections.

Building for a Hybrid World

The shift to remote work has highlighted several great benefits that we’re looking forward to continuing as we adopt a long-term hybrid approach. From introducing Meeting Free Wednesday to increasing context-sharing and global alignment, we’ve been able to accelerate our global growth as we plan for an increasingly distributed future.

Our Season Openers, once regionally focused, have become global experiences with both remote and in-person components. We’ve had all sorts of themes ranging from an Aqua Spectacular to the Canva Olympics, Canva TV, Around the World and Canva in Pyjamas, to coincide with the shift to a remote world. As we continue to evolve our long-term approach, we’re looking forward to scaling these events to continue fostering a sense of community while connecting our team in every corner of the globe.

While we don’t have every answer, we’ve set three guiding principles that we’re encouraging everyone to keep in mind when thinking about a hybrid future. We hope these will be helpful for other companies too.

1. Think team first: The exact balance of virtual and in-person activities will look different for each team. We’re empowering individual teams to make their own decisions when it comes to cadences and rhythms. Whether it’s a team bonding day, a planning session or simply a brainstorming session, it’s important to think as a team when planning meaningful time to connect and work together.

2. Plan some office time each season: We’ve been very intentional about building a unique culture at Canva. From eating lunch together to planning crazy big celebrations when we achieve our goals. While our culture is constantly evolving to suit a hybrid environment, we’re keen to ensure everyone is able to return 1 to 2 times per season for important opportunities to come together in-person. We know many people will continue to come into our offices more regularly than that, and we’ll continue investing in creating our amazing ‘vibe-y’ office experiences.

3. All company-wide events will continue in a global and hybrid format: The last year has seen incredible growth across our entire team. With more than 2,000 Canvanauts across the globe, we’ll continue to hold all company-wide events in a globally hybrid format, with components for in-person connection for each of our hub locations.

Keeping the Vibe Alive

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at ways to continue growing and evolving the culture that makes Canva special. As our team continues to expand around the world, we’ll be introducing a number of new initiatives to support regular opportunities for connection, no matter where or how teams choose to work.

We’ve already made headway in this space, with location-agnostic perks, hybrid celebrations, and by converting our 400+ social clubs to operate in a hybrid world. As we continue to test and learn from our approach, we’re looking forward to introducing more initiatives to bring the culture from our physical offices into a virtual world.

What’s Next?

The last 18 months have given us the opportunity to rethink the way that we work together. We hope this balance between flexibility and connection continues to empower our team to do the best work of their lives. While we don’t yet have all of the answers, we’ll continue to evolve this model based on our learnings and continued feedback.

The future of work is an exciting one, and we’re looking forward to providing more updates as we embark on this journey.

Canva’s Future of Work: Flexibility and Connection was originally published in Canva on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.