The Importance of Prioritizing Design Software in Your Marketing Department: A Closer Look at Adobe vs Canva
As businesses continue to embrace digital transformation, the significance of compelling visual content cannot be overstated. From social media posts to web graphics, from advertisements to long and short-form video, visual content plays a crucial role in marketing strategies. In today's digital landscape, tools like Canva and Adobe are leading the way in providing solutions for creating captivating visuals for marketing departments. While Canva has a few unique strengths, it's essential for your businesses to consider the long-term risks associated with relying on Canva above Adobe. In particular, the decision to rely solely on Canva as I have seen explode lately should be made with caution.
Full disclosure: I have been using Adobe Creative Cloud and their products for over 30 years when Photoshop 1.0 was released to the world. I may have a significant bias based on my decades of experience and fluency with the application suite.
The Appeal of Using Canva: Instant Gratification
Canva has gained surprising (to me at least) popularity for its ease of use, low learning curve, and array of basic boilerplate pre-made, commonly used templates by those tasked for marketing a business with minimal budgets. Small businesses and teams with substantially less graphic design experience are attracted to Canva for its simplicity and speed when pumping out visual content. Users can quickly create pre-packaged designs without needing extensive training or really any background in graphic design at all. Furthermore, Canva's collaborative features, such as the ability to share designs and templates within a team, make it an attractive tool for many small businesses with low budgets.
However, this in my opinion comes at a more substantial cost to the company and their brand in the long run; risking brand fragmentation, limited marketing capabilities, and enabling a culture of low-quality, fast-food style, disposable, forgettable marketing content.
The Limitations of Canva
Despite its lauded quick rapid-fire benefits, Canva is certainly not without its limitations, particularly when compared to professional-grade software such as Adobe's suite of applications. Understanding these limitations is critical for companies considering standardizing their marketing materials on Canva to save a few dollars over using Adobe.
Limited Customization and Advanced Features
While it's easy to fall into the Canva trap to create convenient, quick, and easy design tasks, it lacks the advanced features and customizability that Adobe applications provide. Adobe offers intricate tools for photo editing, vector graphics, typography, and other high-level design feature capabilities for cross-department collaboration. For example, Adobe Illustrator enables intricate manipulation of vector graphics, Adobe Photoshop allows for complex photo retouching, and Adobe InDesign offers extensive layout options. For a marketing department handling complex projects or advertising campaigns (which most marketers deal with on a regular basis), these capabilities are absolutely invaluable.
Professionalism and Industry Standards Cannot Be Ignored
Adobe applications are in fact industry standard for professional graphic design. Using Adobe ensures a level of professionalism and polish in the final output that in all honesty, you can not come close to matching with Canva. If a marketing team is collaborating with other professional creatives or hiring new professional designers, they are going to be using Adobe.
Integration and Interoperability
Adobe's complete suite of applications integrate seamlessly with one another, providing a unified and efficient workflow between all departments. This compatibility extends to video and animation tools, like Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, which Canva cannot match or accomplish at all. If a marketing department frequently uses video content or animation in their projects, this integration can significantly streamline their workflow.
Application and UX design tools within Adobe are another package of powerful tool that provides designers with everything they need to create wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs that integrate with your brand and the products you are collaboratively trying to deliver.
File Ownership and Access
In Canva, your files are stored on their platform (cloud based only), meaning you could lose access to your work if you lose access to your account. On the other hand, Adobe allows you to save files locally and maintain full control over them in addition to their cloud storage capabilities. This is critical as a redundancy. This consideration becomes more critical for companies that need to maintain a substantial archive of their work.
Scalability and File Size
Adobe's applications can handle significantly larger files and more complex projects than Canva. This capacity is essential when dealing with high-resolution images, large-scale digital designs, or print projects that require a high level of detail.
Offline Access Limitations Can Stall Your Projects
Adobe's software can be used offline once installed, while Canva requires an internet connection to design and download your creations. This distinction could be crucial for teams who travel or work in areas of the country or world with unreliable internet. You are at the mercy of the ISP gods to ensure ample connectivity with Canva.
Real-Life Scenarios: Marketing Departments In A Bind
It's crucial to consider how the limitations with Canva could manifest themselves in real-world marketing campaign crisis scenarios.
A marketing team is given an Adobe Illustrator file from a partner for editing or applying final touches. Canva does not support this format, leaving the team literally unable to work with the file in any capacity and your marketing department forced to accept what they have as "good enough" or to completely start over, with industry standard products.
A marketing department needs to design a large-scale print project, like banners or outdoor advertisements. The resolution provided by Canva will likely not be sufficient, resulting in a pixelated or blurry print. Adobe, particularly Illustrator and InDesign, are industry standards for print work, allowing for high-resolution vector output and infinite control over print-specific settings such as color separations and bleeds. This is not possible with Canva.
In a scenario where the marketing department needs to create an animated social media post or edit a video for a promotional campaign, Canva's capabilities might not suffice to the standard you are attempting to achieve. Adobe's specialized tools like After Effects for animations or Premiere Pro for video editing offer a infinitely wider range of options and control for creating high-quality UHD 4K video content.
If your marketing department needs to adhere strictly to a brand style guide that requires the use of specific, custom fonts that are not available in Canva's font library, they would be unable to maintain brand consistency in their materials. Adobe software allows the upload and use of any custom fonts, ensuring consistency in all marketing materials. This is a critical factor for consideration.
Suppose your team is collaborating on a project that requires real-time editing and input. In that case, they may find Canva's collaboration features lacking compared to the shared libraries and document collaboration available with Adobe's Creative Cloud.
Finally, if your marketing team needs to work offline due to traveling or having unreliable internet access, Canva’s requirement for an internet connection to design and download will significantly hinder their productivity. In contrast, Adobe can be used offline once installed, providing a more flexible working environment.
Conclusion: Diversify Design Tools in your Marketing Department for Optimal Long-Term Results & A Solid Foundation
While Canva offers some benefits, businesses should be cautious about relying solely on its platform for their marketing needs. Its limitations, especially in the long term, could significantly restrict a marketing department's ability to create complex designs, adhere to brand guidelines, handle large-scale projects, collaborate effectively, and work offline.
Adobe's suite of applications, on the other hand, can offer a robust solution for these challenges and truthfully, save you considerable pain and re-inventing the wheels "the right way" later on down the road.
Therefore, a diversified approach that involves using different tools for different needs can ensure a marketing department's agility, flexibility, and capability to deliver high-quality outputs across a wide range of projects.
What i'm trying to say if you have not caught onto it already, lead your department with industry standard tools like Adobe, and supplement non-critical item deliverables with other platforms such as Canva.