# Canva

> An online design tool that lets anyone make posters, posts and slides from templates.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Tech companies, Software
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/canva/
- In Spanish: [Canva](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/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.

## An analogy

A craft table already stocked with cut-out shapes, stickers and nice paper, plus a pile of finished examples to copy. You do not start from a blank sheet; you start from something that already looks good.

## Keep in mind

- Founded in Australia in 2012 by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams.
- Template-first design in the browser, aimed at non-designers.
- Freemium: free basics, paid plans for premium assets and tools.
- Competes with Adobe from the beginner and team end.

## Go deeper

- [Canva (official site)](https://www.canva.com/)
- [Canva on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canva)

## Related terms

- [Web browser](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/web-browser/): The app that fetches web pages from the internet and draws them on your screen.
- [Training and inference](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/training-and-inference/): Training builds the model once; inference is using it, millions of times a day.
- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
- [Website](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/website/): A set of web pages under one address, stored on a server and opened in a browser.
- [Adobe](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/adobe/): The company behind Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Acrobat and the PDF format.