I use Canva, but I don’t really love Canva like so much of the creative professional community does.
I’m all about the elegance of simplicity, and Canva is about as far from elegant and simple as I’ve ever seen in an app.
It does a lot of things really well, but the interface is ghastly. I’ll take a single, fixed sidebar and simple folder structure any day over yet another half-based AI-powered tool or “app” and a rainbow icon that looks like it was designed to keep a toddler engaged.
I often use Canva when designing templates for others. One thing the app excels at is the ability to create and share templates . But when it comes to my own work flow, I almost never open it.
Below are the tools I use instead.
Unfold
This is my favorite tool for creating aesthetic social media graphics, but I wish they had a web version or Mac option so I could design on my iPad or laptop. Even still, I could lose hours creating pretty graphics on this app; it’s just fun to use. Though, it’s gotten a little slow in recent updates, so it might be time to reassess the value of my longtime favorite.
The Adobe Creative Suite
I’ve tried to quit Adobe twice; I don’t love their user interface or the pricing model. But I always come crawling back, specifically for Illustrator (logo design), Photoshop (mockups), and Lightroom (photo editing). It’s nearly as ugly as Canva, but the unmatched functionality makes the icky interface worth it.
Pixelmator
I’m a sucker for apps that were built for the Mac (Adobe’s Mac experience is clunky), and have been using Pixelmator since I bought it years ago. I prefer it to Photoshop, and use it for most light design tasks. The only thing it doesn’t do well is Smart Objects, and since I have a lot of purchased mockup templates, I have to deal with Photoshop sometimes.
Apple Pages
For documents and page layouts, I just use Pages. It’s free on the Apple ecosystem, available on all of my devices, and forces me to focus on elegant simplicity. InDesign is better for complex functionality, but I don’t need that. In fact, I’m increasingly finding that simple is almost always better, and nobody does simple better than Apple.
Adobe Express
Adobe Express is the company’s attempt at competing with Canva, and it fails in one major way: the templates are puzzlingly atrocious. If you’re a Canva user and you typically start with one of the built-in templates, you’re going to be aghast if you try to switch to Express. But … if you’re willing to build from scratch, and start with a blank template, Adobe Express has a few major edges over Canva: it has a simpler interface, better handling of layers, and my personal favorite features: access to Adobe Stock and Adobe Fonts. Both collections are vastly superior to the Unsplash and Google Font integration offered by Canva.
iA Presenter
This is one of my favorite tools on the planet and it revolutionized the way I thought about presentation decks. I got so used to seeing glossy, fussy slide designs, that I’d forgotten what really matters: the content. With this app, you simply write what you need to say, and it formats everything for you. Creating a new slide is as simple as hitting enter three times. 🤯 For one of my courses, I was able to create the decks for all 50+ lessons before noon. This means I can focus on providing the best content possible, not fussing with fussy slide deck formatting.
Share post: