Canva’s templates are taking over the world one flyer at a time

Love the post by Joan Westenberg here addressing a concern that many hold over the widespread use of templates, specifically Canva’s templates.

As design becomes far more accessible than ever, millions of people with little design skills or lacking access to professional designers, guided by their sense of aesthetics, are able to churn pleasing or professional-looking designs for their needs.

At the same time, the reliance on popular templates is beginning to resemble what’s happening to cafes around the world that sport similar aesthetics to attract customers who want to share photos to Instagram, or homes that resemble IKEA showrooms.

She wrote:

But while Canva has unlocked design for the masses, an unintended consequence has been the dulling of creativity into a uniform “Canva aesthetic.” Because the app makes it so easy to create competent designs, much of its 55 million-strong user base simply relies on the platform’s most popular templates and elements. The result is a visual sameness wherever Canva designs show up, as if the world has been blanketed by an army of aspiring graphic designers who all graduated from the same school.

You can’t blame individuals for taking the path of least resistance. Creating a Canva design takes minutes and requires no skill. It’s fast, cheap and gets the job done for cash-strapped small businesses, students, nonprofits and others who can’t afford a professional designer. An original design carefully crafted from scratch is always going to look better. But why go to the effort when Canva lets you churn out something nearly as good that’s based on best practices?

For Canva’s millions of happy users, that’s clearly a worthwhile tradeoff. The question is whether it’s good for design and creativity writ large. Like the McDonald’s-ization of cuisine or the Ikea-fication of home decor, Canva’s templated approach is pushing visual communication towards a more accessible, but ever more generic mean.

If it sounds like it’s bad, it depends on your perspective. With so many people sporting similar, identifiable visual design, our world may end up looking aesthetically bland and generic but as with design trends over time, that is not a new thing, not by a country mile.

At one point, buildings resembled the Roman architecture with prominent columns and symmetrical forms. Then there was a gothic period in the 19th century before Art Deco became the rage in the early 20th century. We also had a modernism movement with bold, flat, minimalistic designs with steel and glass for much of the 20th century that in many parts remain in fashion today.

On the digital side, we had to endure the terrible period of PowerPoint templates and bullet points jammed on our faces for a while before Garr Reynolds began advocating for what he calls Presentation Zen and Mac users started to rebel and adopted Apple’s design sensibilities through Keynote. Today, perhaps ironically, corporate decks are beginning to adopt the Apple product summary style thanks to Figma templates.

And I haven’t even talked about the dynamic visual design trends of the 80s and 90s. Or how generic looking homes have always been a thing to the point where you can often tell from what period or decade it came from.

Like Joan said, you can’t blame people for taking the path of least resistance. At least more things look nicer today (from our current aesthetics sense) thanks to Canva templates.

Challenging Jakob Nielsen’s claim on accessibility

Renowned user experience guru Jakob Nielsen published a post offering generative AI as an alternative to accessibility measures which he claimed to have failed to make computers usable for disabled users. He’s been criticized for the way he offered his thoughts which can easily be taken as dismissing accessibility altogether.

Nielsen claims that he sees all computer users equally, not making distinctions based on their ability to use them so user and interface experience designers:

Where I have always differed from the accessibility movement is that I consider users with disabilities to be simply users. This means that usability and task performance are the goals. It’s not a goal to adhere to particular design standards promulgated by a special interest group that has failed to achieve its mission.

He then offers two reasons why he thinks accessibility has failed. The first is that “accessibility is too expensive for most companies” so instead of making an effort to meet the needs of disabled users, companies either forego accessibility altogether or follow a checklist of items without verifying the results with actual disabled people. That last point actually contravenes the evaluation steps on accessibility work in the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Involving actual disabled users is one of the final steps towards compliance with WAI.

The second reason is, “accessibility is doomed to create a substandard user experience” and then continues to dismiss the present approach to auditory interface because it poorly translates a two dimensional visual user interface designed for sighted people.

At the end of his argument he offers generative AI as the core of interface generator which will present a visual interface for sighted users and auditory interface not based on the visual version, for blind users.

He may well be correct in how AI in the future may play a substantial role in presenting computing interfaces based on the user’s conditions but that day has yet to arrive and it may take some time.

The current accessibility solutions for disabled users based on W3C standards are indeed interpretive of the visual interface instead of being fully designed for non sighted users, which makes them less ideal, but for such a renowned leader in experience design to dismiss the efforts entirely may lead to companies taking his advice on face value and use that as an excuse to not make the effort and investment towards accessibility and assistive technologies at all. That’s harmful.

Per Axbom, the Swedish designer and thought leader on human centered design, has a much more comprehensive breakdown of his objections over Nielsen’s proposal. Worth reading in its entirety. The crux of his argument is Nielsen is advocating for radically customized individual interfaces, not just general interface approaches for certain groups of people with different abilities. He said distinct experiences for individuals “is an extreme take with very little foundation in feasibility or desirability”.

Update 7 March:

I just came across several more reactions and responses to Nielsen’s ignorant claims about digital accessibility and they are livid.

Designer and accessibility advocate Eric W. Bailey called Nielsen “an asshole” in a very short post, but he also included links to a handful of other people’s thoughts about the matter that you might be interested to read.

A much more diplomatic response came from Léonie Watson, a board member at the W3C, telling Nielsen to rethink his views on accessibility, based on her own disability and how she’s managed to experience and contribute to the development of the web as a blind person.

In fact, just a couple of weeks prior to Nielsen’s post, she wrote a post about how the leading AI tools would present misinformation or incomplete info, skip rules and guidelines, and even fail when tasked with delivering “all the code that I need to create a set of accessible tabs for a website”.

So just like with any information delivered by AI, we still need to verify their validity, whether they’re factual, whether they work, whether they’re applicable, etc. Maybe one day that won’t be as urgent, but for now, especially in delivering universal digital experience, AI still needs human supervision and oversight to minimize mistakes. Which is ironic because we rely on digital tools to minimize our own.

iPhone Design Chief Joins Jony Ive’s LoveFrom

Losing 20 designers to Jony Ive must be a significant blow to Apple but it’s certainly a testament to Ive’s leadership as a design executive. And now the tech giant loses another senior design executive.

What Ive and his team built at Apple are unquestionably iconic, from the groundbreaking original iMac and its weird puck mouse to the oddly designed Magic Mouse and Lightning Apple Pencil, but with Ive’s and his former team members’ departures, Apple has to rebuilt the design team with new leadership and direction.

With almost none of Ive’s former charges left in the company, Apple’s award winning Ive era is over and if they want to return to that level, it’s going to take a lot of work.

It’s unfortunate that Apple is no longer a design focused company the way it used to be in the 90s to the 2010s having reorganized the team under Operations instead of its own vertical under the CEO but they’ve decided to take this path following Ive’s departure.

This is already a new era at Apple where product design is more iterative and functional than inspirational and if they aim to reclaim their crown as one of the most iconic industrial design companies, it will require a new batch of outstanding designers and design leadership.

If Twitter is the backchannel of life, Path is the backchannel of Twitter

I’ve been so hooked on Path, it has managed to replace Twitter as my go to app every morning.

I love the private sharing feature it imposes on its members and I have no qualms rejecting sharing requests from people I know simply to limit my spread of updates. It’s not like I’ve left Twitter. My primary presence is still on Twitter but for a lot of personal updates, Path really is the place. Twitter is the public plaza where you seek out general news and other info.

Google+ would have been it though if the mobile app wasn’t so shit in the first place. Despite the focus on design Google has taken in recent months, its mobile app developers haven’t seem to be able to grasp how important a well-designed interface is when it comes to applications. The team has some serious issues to address.

Perhaps I’m part of an elite snob whose view on mobile apps have been so skewed by Apple’s near-meticulous designs, that I place a stronger emphasis on interface design in delivering functions, although Apple’s own apps are beginning to look ridiculous themselves lately.

Honestly there’s little to differentiate between Path and Facebook on mobile but Path isn’t full of people whose updates I don’t give a shit about. I mean yeah, I added those people on Facebook because I used to know them or I just met them but the kinds of things they share on Facebook are either duplicates of what they said on Twitter or that I’m so far removed from them these days that whatever they posted just fails to catch my interest anymore.

I set up this blog for Jakarta’s early Twitter adopters and as it turns out, Path is taking over the role what Twitter used to be back in the days of 2007-2008.

Twitter is now like the mall and Path is that street corner cafe where you and your closest friends hang out. This is a funny analogy because back in 2008, Facebook was the mall and Twitter was the corner cafe. So what is Facebook now? I have no idea, I couldn’t care less and I only use it for messaging.

The other day I said that if Twitter is the backchannel of life, Path is the backchannel of Twitter.

SAY: Clean Campaign from SAY Media on Vimeo.

Clutter is killing media

BlackBerry 2012: “Charming, Whimsical, and Fun”

Todd Wood, SVP Industrial Design, Research in Motion:

Giving us a glimpse at what is to come, Wood tells us where the latest design workshop for 2012s models was held. This time, rather than the classic scenery of Italy, the design workshop session was in Malmo, Sweden. The latest words for the experience? “Charming, whimsical, and fun” according to Wood suggesting a very different direction from the company.

BlackBerry 2012: “Charming, Whimsical, and Fun”