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  • in reply to: “Canva”—what an absolute joke! #114353
    Dustin H
    Member

    We’re one of the rare online design companies that focused on print first (most started in social graphics). The biggest challenges for us were colors & bleed. Both for obvious reasons… Our solution to the color challenge was to create our own color picker vs doing what Canva and others did. What we wanted our color picker to do was display RGB colors that match up very well with a relevant CMYK color (we manually mapped them). This results in a less vibrant color selection than traditional online color pickers, but that’s because CMYK has less vibrant colors so you have to do that to get an accurate print representation.

    The bleed challenges were very hard in the early years (we’ve been around since 2009). The hardest part was communicating what bleed was to someone who has never heard of it. So what we chose to do after several years of failing at that, was to not talk about bleed and instead build some functionality that would result in objects that were close to that bleed being automatically pulled out and into the bleed. Similarly, if something was at the midway point we’d push it back into the main canvas area. It’s worked really well for us. Every now and then we need to slightly reposition shapes, but it’s definitely the best solution we’ve come up with in the online design space.

    Funny thing is that we’re a company of just 2 people (designer & developer), so when you look at what Canva has done with their company you can tell they’re mostly focused on creating content that generates traffic (They literally have over 3,000 pages talking about colors in case you don’t know what maroon is) and a little less on their editor.

    Feel free to check out our editor to see the color picker we built and the bleed experience. https://www.mycreativeshop.com/

    Good luck with those files ;)

    in reply to: “Canva”—what an absolute joke! #113996
    Dustin H
    Member

    Canva has always had a digital design focus (although the founder came from the printed yearbook space), which has made their transition into print to be a flawed one for those of us that care about print quality. A majority of their users are oblivious to the issues with PDF quality as they just see an editor that’s free for them to use.

    I do think it’s important for Canva to be very clear with the flaws in taking their designs to print. One simple way to identify a flaw in their print is to look at their color picker. Anyone that knows anything about colors will see the flaws in using hex codes on designs meant for print.

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