Great design matters wherever you are online, although we’ve all become accustomed to the ‘Upload a file’ prompt, and having to trawl through folders to find the asset we’re looking for.
The Canva Button integration aims to give the world a way to create the perfect image or video, at the time of need, anywhere on the web.
Canva was born out of a need to make design accessible to the world.
Creating any kind of digital asset a decade ago used to be highly complicated, and Canva’s mission has been to democratize design by simplifying this complex process. Tens of millions of people now choose Canva for their visual creation needs. But how do their creations end up in their final locations?
Our team saw an opportunity to bring the simplicity and power of Canva to every single upload destination across the web, taking the hard work out of designing the right visual, anywhere you need to.
So who’s using it?
We’ve had the good fortune of collaborating with some incredible partners, who’ve each built platforms which offer customers an ability to visually communicate to their audiences.
From designing a social post in HubSpot, digital signage in Upshow, or a contract in PandaDoc, we’ve seen a huge variety of applications where the Canva Button has solved a design problem.
Wattpad Co-Founder Ivan Yuen on how his writers are using the Canva Button
Wattpad’s authors use the Canva Button to design covers for their stories.
Yuen says,“Wattpad is the world’s largest social storytelling platform. Over 90 million people use Wattpad each month to read and write stories such as science fiction, romance, mystery/thriller and fan fiction. For writers, it is a place to discover and reach your readers no matter what your story is about.”
“Writers on Wattpad are creative storytellers. They use their imagination, and feedback from readers to help craft their story. Although they are great storytellers, not all have the visual design and artistic skills to create a cover that captures their story’s themes and emotions. We wanted to offer our writers a tool to help them achieve the vision of their story”, says Ivan.
Before Canva, Ivan says that writers were uploading low res images from their phones or creating covers in other programs without the structure of a template. And while some writers were also excellent designers, many of them weren’t so it created an uneven playing field when it came to attracting readers.
Ivan says that the biggest change since they got the Canva Button has been the overall quality of book covers created.
“Because it’s so easy, most writers will take the extra couple of minutes to make a beautiful cover. And when others see these covers, it inspires them to create even better ones,” he says.
But even better still, here’s what one of Wattpad’s top performing authors, Jess Cunsolo, thinks about the Canva integration.
“I started writing on Wattpad for fun when I was 17 years old. I quickly amassed over 100 million reads, and now that same book, She’s With Me, is published in English, French, and Spanish.
“A lot of people forget that a huge part of being an author is promoting yourself and your work. I have benefited from Canva by using it to not only to make catchy covers for my stories, but more importantly to market them. You only need to make a cover once, but I make graphics for self promotion all the time and Canva really helps with that, especially since there are easy templates I can make my own or use for inspiration. As an author, it makes a huge difference and helps create a cohesive brand image,” says Jess.
So how does it work?
The Canva Button is an API that can be integrated with only a few lines of code, making it a low effort integration for product teams to bring design capabilities to their own users.
It provides access to the Canva platform, featuring 250,000 free design templates, over 2 million copyright-free stock images, 800,000 icons and illustrations, stock videos, and over 700,000 fonts.
Image Credits: Canva (opens in a new window)
The interface is the Canva platform that many people know (and love), so you’re saving them the hassle of switching between platforms to create, upload, and publish their perfect design.
What’s next for the Button?
Image Credits: Canva (opens in a new window)
Video.
As video becomes an even more important medium to communicate, and our partners launch more and more video functionality, we too are augmenting Canva to meet this demand. We’re thrilled to be bringing the video experience enjoyed by millions of our community on Canva.com, to the Canva Button API.