What Will You Design Today?: Show the Communication Job Around the Design Tool

Read the campaign story

Canva’s 2022 What Will You Design Today? campaign combined a manifesto film with selected customer and community stories. The company described an initial US rollout followed by other English-speaking markets. Its creator portfolio identifies the in-house creative leadership and external production partners. The source calls it the first global campaign for 2022; this study does not convert that wording into an unsupported claim about the company’s entire advertising history.

A later 2022 iteration continued the same platform with collaborative design activity. These phases and the Design Stories material count once. Canva’s separate recurring Design Challenge programme is already covered elsewhere and is not counted again through a related billboard component. Selected stories are evidence of the campaign’s editorial choices, not a representative sample of users or proof that a tool improves productivity or business results.

Editorial interpretation: a design tool can be framed narrowly as a way to make an attractive image, or more broadly as part of a communication task. Showing the reason for the work, the people involved and the intended output helps explain the latter role. That approach can expand the audience’s understanding without requiring a long catalogue of features. It also makes human judgement visible instead of assigning the whole achievement to the software.

Editorial interpretation: a series of stories offers several entry points into a broad proposition. The examples need not be identical, but each should clarify a common relationship between a need, a decision and an artifact. The risk is allowing exceptional or carefully selected participants to stand in for typical experience. A responsible analysis therefore studies the storytelling structure while leaving claims about adoption, ease and effectiveness to evidence designed to answer those questions.

Begin with the communication need rather than the canvas

Identify what someone needs another person to understand or do, then explain why a particular artifact is suitable. This keeps the product story connected to a practical purpose. A beautiful output can still fail if its audience or message is unclear. Ask a reviewer to describe the intended use before discussing appearance. When the task is legible, the tool’s contribution becomes easier to assess without claiming that it alone created the idea, strategy or result.

Credit the work between the brief and the output

A finished design can hide research, writing, editing, accessibility decisions and negotiation. Make those contributions visible where they matter to the story. Separate the platform’s capabilities from the decisions made by people and from specialist production support. This gives the audience a more useful account of what would be required to attempt a similar task. It also avoids the misleading shortcut of presenting an attractive final artifact as automatic evidence that the process was effortless or equally accessible to everyone.

Use varied examples without implying typical outcomes

Choose stories because they illuminate different tasks, not because their prominence appears to prove universal relevance. Explain why each example belongs and which conditions limit comparison. A series can broaden understanding while still being selective. Keep claims about what happened in the documented case separate from recommendations for another team. Where outcomes are unavailable, focus on the communication decisions that can be inspected rather than filling the gap with speculative growth figures or broad assertions about user success.

A small test for another brief

Proposed adaptation: an adult volunteer group could develop a fictional workshop notice using an original brief, a role map and a paper layout. Compare the finished layout alone with the same layout accompanied by a short account of the communication need and human decisions. No actual event, beneficiary story, customer account or software-performance test is required.

Record whether readers understand the intended audience, message and division of work. Distinguish improved explanation from evidence that a platform saves time, improves quality or produces better attendance.

Stop if the exercise uses an identifiable person’s story without permission, treats a selected example as typical or credits the tool with work that people supplied.

• Use invented event details and original copy.
• Identify writing, review and layout decisions separately.
• Provide a plain-text version with equivalent information.