Canva Versus Adobe Illustrator
Canva versus Adobe Illustrator is like choosing between ease of use and capabilities. But, in reality, both applications are great at what they are designed for.
Canva versus Adobe Illustrator always reminds me of the famous contest between ease of use and capabilities. Spoiler alert! It's not what you may think that one application is better or worse than the other. As so often in life, it depends on what you use them for.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is the heavy-weight among the vector-based drawing programs and made its debut in 1987 initially for the Apple Macintosh.
Adobe Illustrator is made for professionals, and it takes time to learn how to correctly draw — or rather construct — your illustration. But once you master the skill, the proverbial sky is the limit. Adobe Illustrator's main advantage is that your drawing entirely consists of vectors.
Vector graphics use points, lines, curves, angles, and shapes to create stunning artwork.
The power of vector-based images is particularly evident when you need to scale them to however large or small you want them to be. There is no loss in quality. You can scale a vector graphic from the size of a thumbnail to the size of a billboard and then back to the size of a thumbnail with no loss in quality. The thumbnail-sized image contains the same information as the giant billboard-sized picture. And it retains it even when you shrink it.
The endless scalability makes Adobe Illustrator an excellent tool for logos, icons, illustrations, and poster art — anything you might need to scale later to make them fit a website, flyer, yard sign, or banner. You can also easily convert these files into a Scalable Vector Graphic, or SVG for short, and use them as icons on your website.
Canva
Canva is a popular intuitive web-based application focused on ease of use and fast results. Canva is made for do-it-yourselfers who do not want to rely on pricy graphic designers for an Instagram post. It offers countless professionally designed templates for all kinds of purposes. Whether you are looking for a birthday invitation, a pin on Pinterest, or a post on Facebook or Instagram, you can be sure that Canva offers a great-looking template in the correct dimensions that can give you a head start. You can also import your vectorized logo from Adobe Illustrator or export your Canva artwork as an SVG or PDF.
But Canva shows some limits due to its web interface, available typefaces, and overall functionality when you need to design a complex graphic or submit a print-ready file to a commercial printer whose staff will review your file using Adobe Illustrator as many do.
Canva vs. Adobe Illustrator — My Take
Canva versus Adobe Illustrator is not one or the other. We use both, depending on the client, the circumstances of the project, and which application gives us the fastest results. Since we use Adobe Illustrator exclusively for logos, icons, business cards, and flyers, Adobe Illustrator often saves us time because we can easily reuse logos and icons already created with this application.
However, if you do not want to spend countless hours learning Adobe Illustrator or paying a graphic designer, Canva will save you a lot of time and money. Canva is intuitive, easy to understand, and gives you access to a wealth of professionally designed templates and stock photos at a reasonable subscription price, so you can get amazing results fast.
