Canva

Canva is a design app that runs in the browser and on phones. You pick a template, say an Instagram post, a birthday invitation, a presentation or a restaurant menu, and change the text, photos, colors and shapes by dragging them around. No design training needed. It was founded in 2012 in Australia by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, and launched in 2013.

The idea came from Perkins teaching students to use professional design software and seeing how hard it was for beginners. Canva bet on the opposite: a huge library of templates, photos, fonts and illustrations, and an editor simple enough for a teacher, a small shop owner or a marketing intern. Teams can share brand colors and logos so everyone's designs look consistent, and several people can edit the same design at once.

Canva is freemium: most features are free, and a paid plan unlocks premium content and tools such as background removal and resizing a design for many formats at once. It has added AI features for generating images and text, plus whiteboards, documents and simple websites. It competes with Adobe, whose tools are aimed more at professionals, and it is one of Australia's best-known tech companies.