Build an Online Design Tool Like Canva

What Is Canva?

Canva is a graphic design program built for anybody, not just trained designers. It gives users access to thousands of templates and a drag-and-drop interface for customizing them, for anything from invitations to business cards to social media posts. Signing up is simple, using an email, Google account, or Facebook login, and a free account includes access to thousands of free templates and a large stock photo library.

Thanks to its ease of use, Canva has grown to millions of monthly active users across many countries. Because of that popularity, many merchants want to invest in a similar design-tool website for their own business or audience.

How Printcart Builds a Canva-Like Design Tool: A Case Study

Printcart has helped clients build websites similar to Canva. One of them is Doographics, a graphic design platform that offers templates for Facebook posts and ads, Instagram posts, flyers, Pinterest designs, YouTube thumbnails, and more, with custom dimensions, image cropping, background removal, and a large font library.

The Doographics team found Printcart through its online product designer and wanted a design tool to build a Canva-like platform. Printcart's designer workflow is similar to Canva's: the admin can set up hundreds of templates in the store, create templates one by one or convert them from PSD files, and add fonts, images and clipart, or let visitors upload their own images from their device or social networks.

The designer plugin supported all of Canva's basic features, but didn't fit every one of the client's specific requests out of the box. Printcart's team adjusted the plugin and developed additional features to meet those requirements, since matching everything a site like Canva does usually calls for some custom development.

Custom Features Added to Match Canva's Design Tool

The features below were built by Printcart's developer team on top of Printcart's core product designer, each customized to a specific client's request. Any of them, or others like them, can be requested for a custom build.

Pro Template

Printcart can mark a template as free or "pro" when the admin creates it, the same way Canva separates its templates; only paid accounts can use a pro template.

Upload Video and Export to MP4

The admin can upload videos as templates, shown in a separate video tab in the design tool's sidebar. Users can then make a new video design and download it in MP4, or upload their own (shorter) video to design with.

Background Tab

A background tab gives users three ways to set a design's background: picking a plain color, picking an admin-defined texture image, or uploading their own image.

Pay for Download

With this feature enabled, users can't share or export a design that uses a pro template until they pay for it. The admin can turn this on or off, apply it only to completed orders, and set which file types are allowed for download.

Charging a Design Fee per Download

The admin can also set a price per downloaded design, for example $1 per download. Once a user has paid for a design, they can download it in every available format (SVG, PNG, JPG, PDF) and redownload it for free afterward, modify a paid design without an extra charge, and save an unfinished design to come back to later.

Multiple Fonts, Colors and Sizes in One Text Box

Printcart added the ability to format a single text box with several different colors, fonts or sizes at once, rather than requiring a separate text box for each style. This saves time for users who want a multi-colored or mixed-style line of text without manually positioning several text boxes.

Image Uploads Saved to the User's Account

Originally, images a user uploaded on one device wouldn't carry over when they logged in on another device or closed the browser. Printcart connected uploaded images to the user's account instead, so they stay available in the image upload tab regardless of device, and the admin can see which images each user has uploaded from the backend dashboard.

Add and Delete Page Buttons

On Canva, users can add or remove pages directly from the front end; Printcart's designer originally only let the admin set the number of pages from the backend. Printcart added front-end add/delete page buttons so users can design multiple-page products with no limit on the number of pages, and copy a design from one page to paste onto a new blank page.

Is a Custom Canva-Like Design Tool Right for Your Store?

Apps like Canva are popular with small business owners, social media marketers and graphic designers who want an easy way to produce their own designs. Printcart's core product designer already covers Canva's basic feature set; building out the specific features a client needs, as with the Doographics project above, is handled through Printcart's custom product designer development service.