For our 2025 The place the Design Jobs Are report, Quick Firm checked out which design instruments have been being talked about in job listings throughout varied disciplines, and the way that has modified over time. With graphic design, there have been a few significantly fascinating findings. Asks for Blender experience grew 82% yr over yr (examine that pattern right here), whereas requests for proficiency with Canva went up 72%.
Once we put Canva on our cowl in 2022, some individuals within the design world seen it as borderline heresy. The simple-to-use app had change into extraordinarily standard as a result of it promised that anybody could possibly be a designer—a notion that naturally upset some skilled designers. However Canva’s templated strategy to designing all the pieces from social media posts to T-shirts took off with the lots, and it spilled over to professionals.
The working thesis is that Canva, having gained over advertising groups first, is now changing into a prerequisite for designers working alongside them. (This makes some sense, particularly because the design division has began reporting to advertising in lots of corporations.)
The excellent news is that designers we’ve spoken to extra just lately have come to understand Canva’s up to date model administration instruments, which primarily enable a designer to codify requirements behind logos, typefaces, and colours for others to make use of. That implies that when a marketer creates a slide deck or new social media advert, the requirements keep in sync, with much less oversight. Canva additionally requires a fraction of the training curve of any Adobe product: Lots of its instruments could be picked up immediately.
Apparently sufficient, about twice as many graphic design job listings we tracked (9.5%) ask for Figma (the defacto fast prototyping software headed to IPO this yr) than Canva. However 13 million individuals use Figma month-to-month, whereas 240 million individuals use Canva (together with 95% of all Fortune 500 corporations).
This hole in mindshare demonstrates that Canva, regardless of its wild set up base, merely isn’t seen as important inside design as friends just like the stalwart Adobe Artistic Suite and InDesign, each of which seem in round 40% of graphic design job listings. However Canva has hardly given up on successful over the capital D design market. Final yr the corporate acquired Affinity, which makes software program to problem Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, and it’s at the moment working to combine this know-how into Canva.
All of that is to say that loads is shifting proper now, and designers merely should be extra versatile concerning the instruments they use than they have been a decade in the past. Toss a dollop of AI into the combo, and there’s by no means been a extra thrilling (or chaotic?) time for graphic design platforms.
This text is a part of Quick Firm’s persevering with protection of the place the design jobs are, together with this yr’s complete evaluation of greater than 170,000 job listings.
