Canva’s cultural playbook for its 4th-largest market

By Pune Media On Jun 2, 2025

In a nation where creative expression of festivals and special occasions varies dramatically from state to state, Canva has found itself managing what might be the world’s most colourful design challenge.

India has emerged as Canva’s fourth-largest global market, recording 666 million designs in 2024 alone (that is, 1.8 million designs a day). Yet behind these figures lies a more intriguing story: how a design platform navigates a country where a wedding invitation in Jaipur bears little resemblance to one in Shillong and where minimalism looks decidedly different than it does elsewhere.

Mehek Malhotra, Canva’s creative lead for India, frames the challenge succinctly: “India is not just a market; it’s a creative universe. What drew Canva to India was the vibrancy in the culture and the visuals that we have literally—the hand-painted signs and the wedding cards and even the forwards that you get every morning; they are just full of joy and expression.”

The ‘Dil Se, Design Tak’ approach

Recognising this complexity, Canva launched its first Indian brand campaign last year, ‘Dil Se, Design Tak’, which connected with over 100 million active internet users. The campaign’s central premise, that everyone possesses innate design capability, resonated in a country already predisposed to visual expression, from intricate rangoli patterns to elaborate truck art.

Rather than positioning itself as a tool for professional designers, the campaign acknowledged India’s existing creative culture while offering digital amplification. Without restricting itself to the professional use cases of the platform, the campaign revisited regular daily use of its templates.

How India stands out

The numbers tell a compelling story of growth and engagement for the platform in the country. Canva more than doubled its Indian user base in 2023, with the platform now supporting over 240,000 freelancers and 11,000 teachers through dedicated Facebook communities.

The daily output includes 139 million presentations, 165 million social media posts annually, and 17 million whiteboards created as of April 2025.

The raw statistics only provide a glimpse of Indian user behaviour. In contrast to their global counterparts, who may only make minimal customisations to templates, Indian users engage with designers as active collaborators rather than passive consumers.

“Indian users aren’t passive consumers. They are basically very active. They remix, they reinvent and repurpose the designs that we have,” Malhotra observes.

“After using Canva in India, users highly customise the final product to suit their individual preferences.”

Users’ inclination towards customisation has influenced the adoption of features across the platform.

The Photo Background Remover feature ranks as India’s most-used AI feature—a telling indicator of users’ desire to personalise content. India also claims second place globally for translation feature usage and third for Magic Media (an AI tool that lets you create images, graphics, and videos from text descriptions) adoption, suggesting a user base that actively transforms rather than merely consumes content.

The philosophy

Canva’s strategic outlook regarding India is centred on what Malhotra refers to as “designing for many Indias”, recognising that the country cannot be approached with a singular perspective.

“When you look at creativity in India, it’s not just a singular expression; it’s a constellation of expressions. Our idea is that when we design for many people in India, we must recognise that a wedding invitation will look starkly different for a wedding in Jaipur compared to one in Shillong or Chennai,” she explains.

This philosophy is evident in practical terms through significant localisation efforts. Magic Studio tools now support eleven Indian languages, including Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, and Telugu.

A Hindi website is set to be launched in 2025, specifically designed to accommodate Indian user interaction patterns. This initiative recognises that digital behaviour can differ significantly along with linguistic preferences.

The template development process involves over 120 Indian creators working within carefully constructed cultural guidelines. Content ranges from region-specific festivals to life events such as Griha Pravesh ceremonies—occasions that might seem niche to global markets but represent meaningful moments for Indian users.

“We don’t just translate existing templates. We’re looking to reimagine them based on how people celebrate these festivals. The people who make these templates are designers who are also the people who celebrate these festivals as well,” Malhotra notes.

Canva India has implemented a multi-channel strategy aimed at maximising user reach, with a particular emphasis on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, which are key channels for engaging younger, digitally native audiences, as per the brand.

Given the visual nature of Canva’s product, social media has been central to its India-focused marketing efforts.

Mobile-first in a mobile nation

With over one billion mobile users in India, Canva has necessarily embraced mobile-first design principles.

“Designing for India means designing for mobile first because you have to make sure that something is easy to change, customise, and adapt to the needs of a user based on a small screen that you have in your hand,” Malhotra explains.

This goes beyond just responsive design; it involves rethinking user workflows in situations where someone might edit a professional presentation while travelling in an Uber or customise a birthday invitation during their commute.

Templates must function seamlessly on mobile devices while remaining scalable for desktop use.

Challenges and strategic outlook

Malhotra identifies “scaling without sameness” as the primary ongoing challenge—maintaining cultural authenticity while expanding reach across India’s diverse regions and communities.

“India’s complexity keeps me very sharp. My job is to listen, to advocate and to keep the team grounded in empathy and to ensure that whatever we put out into the world feels like a celebration and not a broadcast,” she says.

The company continues expanding its creator network and template library while maintaining what it describes as cultural checkpoints in content development.

Guidelines address representation across languages, ethnicities, occupations, age groups, and geographic regions—a comprehensive approach that acknowledges India’s multifaceted identity.

This attention to nuance becomes more critical as Canva scales globally. The platform currently boasts 230 million monthly active users globally, with annualised revenues exceeding $2.5 billion and a total of 20 billion designs created.

With AI tools used 10 billion times globally, India’s lessons in cultural adaptation may prove valuable across other diverse markets.

For Malhotra, the India strategy represents both professional achievement and personal connection.

“In 2022, I was forwarded an invitation to my neighbour’s daughter’s fifth birthday, and I recognised that we had created it the previous year. This made me feel very pleased. The feeling of being able to touch someone’s life who has no idea about it—there’s a sense of belonging that comes there,” she reflects.

In a country where creativity has always been democratised through traditional mediums, Canva has simply provided digital infrastructure for existing cultural impulses. The art, as always, remains distinctly Indian. Though now it’s being created 1.8 million times daily.

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