Canva Files

[EZPower]

Any one running into Canva files? We are seeing more and more customers ditching designers and creating content in Canva. We are experiencing fonts shifting, not to mention bleed and margin issues.

 

[tngcas]

Loads of them. Canva recently introduced a show bleeds feature that you can turn on.
We created a doc a while back that we send to customers showing

1. Bleed Controls: How to turn that on so they can at least see the bleed area.
2. Download: How to download as "pdf for print" with "bleeds and crop marks" box check instead of png or jpgs. The PDF files downloads at higher resolutions. (Unless they've updated it this feature only exists in desktop versions and not in mobile apps.)
3. Margin Settings: Canva doesn't seem to allow for custom margins so you have to create fake margins by manually dragging them in as guidelines which is annoying.

I much prefer Canva over whatever program customers are using that allows them to "easily edit your pdf files" which then only edits the file by using adobe's comment feature to drop "text comments and images" on top of the existing content which then don't print at all since comments aren't printable. The comment "edits" show up in the visible file preview so customers usually have no idea that is what is happening.

 

[NathanD]

There are more and more printers integrating the "Design with Canva" button right into their W2P stores. They have a very easy to integrate API.

One of the largest Australian-based quick copy chains partnered earlier this year.

I wonder if these types of printers face issues, after openly inviting customers to use Canva. Also curious as to how much of a cut Canva takes.

 

[kslight]

The customers using Canva today have replaced the customers using Publisher / PowerPoint / Excel (yes) to “design.”

We have a lot of customers who laid off whatever design staff or freelancers in the past year and now have some poor overworked marketing / social mediaperson struggling through Canva.

Yeah I’ve encountered some goofy file issues and TBH half of our customers that DO use Indesign still can’t figure out how to give us bleeds either, so in the end we make it work.

 

[abc]

The Ghent Workgroup (www.gwg.org) is looking at publishing some recommendations in how to handle Canva files. Some of the members vendors have had issues reported to their support departments, and we think it would be of service to the industry to produce some guidance.

If anybody has any issues with Canva files (and has files they can share that we can analyse) can you PM me please, this would be of immense help.

 

[scotts]

I haven't used Canva, but hopefully once we teach our customers how to properly send us files using it, it will be better than the Microsoft products. Even though, some of the customers using the Microsoft products now are doing a good job.

Hopefully this will be a shorter transition period than before. Looking forward to some industry recommendations on how to handle the files.

 

[EZPower]

The Ghent Workgroup (www.gwg.org) is looking at publishing some recommendations in how to handle Canva files. Some of the members vendors have had issues reported to their support departments, and we think it would be of service to the industry to produce some guidance.

If anybody has any issues with Canva files (and has files they can share that we can analyse) can you PM me please, this would be of immense help.

Biggest problem we found was not being able to convert fonts to outline in PitStop

 

[ThunderGraphics]

Any one running into Canva files? We are seeing more and more customers ditching designers and creating content in Canva. We are experiencing fonts shifting, not to mention bleed and margin issues.

One of our biggest problems is customers sending us artwork that is not properly set up for a bleed, not to size, etc., etc. etc. Canva has a check box that will download artwork with a bleed. (Hurrah) I email customers and tell them to click on the box for a bleed when they download the file. If you look at properties under Adobe Acrobat it will tell you if the file is from Canva. Years ago only business customers and graphic artists walked into a print shop, but these days anyone with an app sends us their files. Even our regular business customers now hire people who have no idea how to properly prep their files for printing. Any suggestions on how to handle this "new generation" of customers?

 

[Magnus59]

Canva was founded by Melanie Perkins who is from right here in Western Australia, after completing her studies at the University of Western Australia she started Fusion Books, which is an online platform for schools to create their yearbooks. Traditionally school yearbooks have been a major headache every year with files supplied in a horrible state, I have traumatic memories of Quark Xpress and Pagemaker files requiring hours of work just to get them somewhere near useable. The schools who got on board with Fusion Books made life much easier.
I have a great deal of respect for Melanie, she has surrounded herself with people who know their stuff, both in the print design field as well as web design.
I had a couple of troublesome Canva files in the early days, but now the only way I know they are from Canva is from the Acrobat creator data.
Sometimes I have to coach customers to get the right results, but it's a whole lot easier than trying to teach a novice who thinks they can do the job with no training how to use Indesign/Photoshop/Illustrator over the phone or by email.

 

[StewartMultitasking]

I've had quite a few and they are terrible, fonts are not embedded, bleeds and crops are you joking.

 

[lantz_xvx]

I once emailed Canva to ask them to please make one simple change: allow the customer to export with bleeds and crops if they so desire (although why tf should they have that, they don't know what they're doing) OR allow them to export with the bleed but no crop marks. They ignored my email, no one got back to me at all. There's no way it can be a difficult thing to implement, they just don't know anything about commercial print shops and so their idea of what a print-ready file is bogus. They will only let you export a file with bleeds and crops, which are difficult to preflight and assess safety margins, or a file with no bleed at all. If I have to choose, I choose the former and manage, but if they want to cater their service to people for print projects, they need to make it so their exported files are not trash.

 

[kslight]

I once emailed Canva to ask them to please make one simple change: allow the customer to export with bleeds and crops if they so desire (although why tf should they have that, they don't know what they're doing) OR allow them to export with the bleed but no crop marks. They ignored my email, no one got back to me at all. There's no way it can be a difficult thing to implement, they just don't know anything about commercial print shops and so their idea of what a print-ready file is bogus. They will only let you export a file with bleeds and crops, which are difficult to preflight and assess safety margins, or a file with no bleed at all. If I have to choose, I choose the former and manage, but if they want to cater their service to people for print projects, they need to make it so their exported files are not trash.

We’ve had some recent changeover in our company and previous owner often refused to request correct files from customers, unless I absolutely could not fix it regardless of time. One of these problematic customers hit me the other day, and I had sales request bleeds from the customer knowing there would no longer be internal pushback…and the customer delivered bleeds, and also some attitude in the email “you’ve never needed bleeds before.”

And they’re using Indesign so I feel like until we can get customers to reliably send print ready files from Adobe products, probably no hope with Canva….

 

[lantz_xvx]

We’ve had some recent changeover in our company and previous owner often refused to request correct files from customers, unless I absolutely could not fix it regardless of time. One of these problematic customers hit me the other day, and I had sales request bleeds from the customer knowing there would no longer be internal pushback…and the customer delivered bleeds, and also some attitude in the email “you’ve never needed bleeds before.”

And they’re using Indesign so I feel like until we can get customers to reliably send print ready files from Adobe products, probably no hope with Canva….

Yep. This is why I am adamant about 1) requesting proper files from clients, and 2) explaining why the issue is. I would say that 98% of the time the client is appreciative and happy to know what the problem is. Generally speaking after that their files are pitch perfect. Every now and again we need an egomaniac of a designer who thinks they're hot sh!t and spends more time pushing back than it would take to fix the file. I'm glad your previous owner is gone, cause...if customers don't know, they can't do the right thing! By not saying anything, we're just making the next printer's life more difficult.

 

[Shawnd]

Canva wants the printing business, why would they make it easier to export out?

 

[lantz_xvx]

Canva wants the printing business, why would they make it easier to export out?

I didn't realize they'd started printing as well. I see your point but don't agree with it. If they really wanted to force people into printing with them, they would only let you export with white margins for using a home printer or something and no crops. The fact that they're even letting people export with bleeds and crop marks means they want their files to be used in a commercial setting. They should go one tiny (so tiny!!) step further and set their customers up for success. Ultimately that's better for their company regardless of where their customers print.

 

[StewartMultitasking]

and worse than Canva there's now Bluebeam Revu to contend with and they are appauling.

 

[chrisio]

The biggest problem we have with canva files is customers using the wrong size eg. US size for UK business cards or a3 instead of a5 etc. It causes loads of niggling little issues that such the life out of us!

 

[Ferran]

[Ghent Workgroup] - REGISTER NOW FOR FREE WEBINAR 'Canva – Creative Cloud Express'

Online creating tools are becoming more and more present in our industry and well worth to investigate. In this webinar, we want to advise the users how to create a useful and reproducible PDF out of Canva and Creative Cloud Express. On top of that, we want to offer (digital) printers a possible solution for the incorrect PDF files.

https://bit.ly/3N4XbK6

 

[wonderings]

Not a fan of Canva files if they need to be fixed. They can be a real nightmare. They have improved over the years, but dread when I get one made by someone who has no clue what they are designing for and I need to fix.