Canva Is No Longer Alone

Canva continues to be a very popular tool for designers, creatives and businesses as it provides free (and paid) access to thousands of pre-built templates for any sort of visual design need.

The free version alone allows you to access the templates and completely edit them with custom images, AI images, logos, colours fonts and so on. It’s honestly an incredible tool, and I recommend jumping into it.

However, with the rise of AI comes with new competitors. As Canva starts to dive into this space, a couple other alternatives have also appeared.

AI Tool Of The Week

🪄 Merlin places the power of ChatGPT on your Chromium Browser with a simple extension.

The free version gives you 51 prompts a day for a huge range of tasks.

Whether it is general searches and questions/chats, Merlin AI also can do the following:

• Directly read and analyze PDF documents

• Help you respond to social media posts and even write your own (LinkedIn and Twitter)

• YouTube video summaries as well, as it dives into the subtitles to give you an overview

It’s a great tool, and I recommend diving into the free version to see if it works for you.

My favorite part of it is that you can access Merlin at any time by pressing CMD-M, giving it so much access.

Adobe Express

🤩 Adobe’s launch into the AI world has been absolutely phenomenal with generative AI leading the way through their Firefly tool.

From adding Gen-AI tools directly into Premiere Pro and Photoshop, we have truly entered a new age for content creators, filmmakers and designers.

Adobe Express brings everything together into a purposefully consumer-friendly model, very similar to Canva.

Check this out:

📖 Access to thousands of templates, including animations

🖥️ The ability to upload your Photoshop files to edit

👯‍♂️ Live editing with colleagues for easy collaborations

🎥 Basic video editing, animations, colours

🎇 Access to the full Adobe Firefly Suite

Along with all these incredible features, Adobe Express has a bunch of other practical uses such as the ability to split/merge PDFs and convert files which would normally have required to use alternative ‘sketchy’ websites to do.

Adobe Express may not give you the full power of the Adobe Suite, but for most creators it is exactly what is required.

Microsoft Designer

Just look at how simple this looks: