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Canva Pro review: More than just a design platform

The perfect blend between design, collaboration, and stock library

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Creating good designs can be intimidating when you’re not a designer. And finding a designer that will execute your vision within your budget, it’s like winning the lottery; the chances are slim.

Thanks to the rapid growth of technology, Canva appeared with a solution: Quality designs made accessible. Hopefully, good designs won’t be daunting to create anymore. But before we tackle designs, let’s get a refresher on what Canva is all about.

Canva: What can it do?

Canva is a design platform accessible through the web, which allows non-designers to create quick designs quickly. It can do what most designers create in Adobe products easily, but with limitations. For instance, you can do the usual basic photo editing like a cropping system, and applying filters and adjustments.

And when you register, you’re automatically signed to the Free Plan. No purchase required. But if you want to expand the possibilities of creation using Canva, then there’s Canva Pro — which is the whole point of this story.

Made on Canva Pro / GADGETMATCH

So, what are you paying for with Canva Pro?

It’s 2021, and by now, you know most free applications, software, and the like always have a premium subscription plan. They host a plethora of features — most of which are something you’d like to have. That’s the case for Canva Pro.

It’s the premium plan that provides premium content such as photos, templates, illustrative elements along with advanced features that help small businesses, startups, and freelancers thrive.

I’ve had the free plan for a while until I got my hands on Pro version. As a designer, I really don’t need it. But using it made me realize the value Canva really brings.

But first, what can you do with Canva Pro?

A lot. I’m not kidding when I say you can do a lot with Canva Pro. It’s like those limited content suddenly opened up a treasure box full of gems and gold that you can benefit from.

For instance, your access to Canva’s usual content expands through its unlimited, licensed resources. Emphasis on licensed — they’re work that you can use not just for personal purposes, but also for commercial projects. You can choose from an array of content: Over 400,000 templates, more than 75 million photos, videos, and elements consisting of pre-made graphics and illustrations, along with over 3000 fonts. All of which can be downloaded at the quality you prefer.

Made on Canva Pro / GADGETMATCH

You can also utilize perks such as unlimited folders, a hundred gig of cloud storage to store all your designs sans souci, and priority support in case you have troubles using the platform.

Other things you thought you can only do with expensive creative software from certain brands are also available in Canva Pro. I was able to remove the background easily, animate and resize their elements without loss of quality no matter what resolution is, and save transparent images — which made my life handling the news desk a lot easier.

On certain days that I don’t have the time to come up with an accompanying image for breaking news and other urgent stories, I used Canva Pro’s resources so I can create a design within minutes.

Here are some of my works that used Canva Pro whether via the platform or using their resources:

A novice’s tool for content planning

As someone working in a start-up company, I’ve been wearing many hats. My daily grind involves managing multiple platforms, arranging campaigns, and building content while creating digital communication materials in written and visual forms.

The content planner in Canva Pro is quite helpful especially when you’re planning content around your schedule, and you aim for it to look coherent and aesthetically pleasing using your designs made from *drum roll* Canva.

Made on Canva Pro / GADGETMATCH

However, it’s been ages since I started this line of work and I already established my own tools and system; I don’t plan on changing what’s already working. So, no. I’m not going to use the content planner.

But from what I can see, it’s a godsend for those starting with social media management. Especially entrepreneurs flying solo. After all, you can get a preview and even use Canva as a third-party scheduler, so you can publish your content at a specific time.

An easy system between teams

On top of that, I’m also fulfilling the role of Associate Creative Director, leading the team when it comes to branding and visual guidelines. There are only a few designers onboard, and most of them are focused on videos and animations. To make life easier, I created a system for writers and other non-designers.

Made on Canva Pro via Smart Mockups / GADGETMATCH

This is where Canva Pro proved to be helpful, and I wish I met them earlier. It lets you share your designs as templates, and it can be navigated and edited easily by non-designers. For years, I spent a lot of time building templates that would make it easy for our writers and account managers.

I remember coming up with a template design meant to be used for proposals and reports, and I had to create mock designs while also designing an editable presentation on Google Slides. Having the Brand Kit Pro made it easy to create essential visual materials while sticking to your brand’s guidelines, themes, and aesthetic. Plus, you can make it coherent and get it adjusted in real-time.

But more than just the design capabilities, Canva Pro helps create a system for easier workflow between teams. You can create a team in Canva and invite your actual teammates using their Canva account, and get the same premium plan you have. With it, you can design and plan things together using the online whiteboard.

Think: Google Suites but a whiteboard for brainstorming and ideation purposes.

How much are you really saving?

Let’s do a little bit of math here. Canva Pro offers cloud storage, unlimited licensed stock content, a third-party scheduler, and an engineered platform so you can design real-time — all in one premium plan.

On the other hand, you can use separate platforms for everything you need, but all of it comes with respective pricing plans. For instance, subscription plans for cloud storage can be an extra 100GB for Google or 1TB on Microsoft’s OneDrive. You can also use Adobe Stock for royalty-free and licensed premium content, which can set you back for PhP 1,495.00/mo for 10 credits or for PhP 9,970.00/mo for up to 750 credits.

Made on Canva Pro / GADGETMATCH

There’s also dedicated design software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, both of which come with their own price unless you can get a bundled offer for two. For real-time collaboration, Google Suites might be free but a professional platform like Slack also comes with a cost. Even third-party schedulers utilize subscription plans as payment for using their services that make your life convenient.

In essence, you are saving so much by just using Canva Pro. Of course, it will still all depend on your workflow and the money you can shell out. But if you have a limited budget, Canva Pro already sounds like a good deal.

Who will benefit the most?

As a designer, I have received prejudice and judgment from fellow designers who take so much pride in their work. But Canva has real value for designers leading a small team (such as my case) or solopreneurs (solo entrepreneurs), small businesses, startups, and freelancers.

Made on Canva Pro / GADGETMATCH

Limited manpower with a leading designer can help create editable templates that don’t require extensive, technical knowledge of Adobe or other creative software products. Solopreneurs, small businesses, and startups can create designs without outsourcing to designers especially for quick, easily digestible content used on social media.

Freelance creatives can also utilize various resources from Canva Pro to ensure a smooth workflow and faster turnaround. Clients will worry less when it comes to copyrighted materials due to the licensed content applicable for commercial use.

Does this affect the design and creative industry?

Frankly, it’s a game-changer. But the insecurity from fellow designers isn’t needed; they’re not going to be replaced. It’s like fearing that one day, a machine will take over your work. Then, you’ll have no other skill set to offer to live and survive.

Honestly, those are only based on fiction. Design is evolving rapidly, and there are new problems emerging that require quick yet creative solution — and Canva provides it.

Made on Canva Pro / GADGETMATCH

In this ever-growing age of technology, designers are still welcome and needed. Brands and companies will still need designers to do in-depth, studied content that went through different stages of conceptualization. The world will still need creatives to lead a group of non-designers to be self-sufficient. Even though they learn how to create a design, they will still need to follow a foundation and guideline that only designers know based on their theoretical backgrounds and experience.

Moreover, Canva hires actual creatives to create commercial resources. The company creates actual jobs. If a designer is worried about competing with Canva, it’s about time to level up the services they can offer. You can’t be doing the same thing forever.

Is Canva Pro worth it?

Yes. I’d give you a thousand yes. That is if it really suits what you need. Because for me, even as a designer myself, I believe that Canva Pro is worth it. It’s more than just a design platform with a licensed stock library; it’s also a real-time collaboration tool that makes our lives and jobs easier when working remotely. Truly, a solution to a modern-age problem that we faced when the global pandemic started.

Made on Canva Pro / GADGETMATCH

So if you’re still wondering whether you should get it, ask yourself: Do you really need what Canva Pro has to offer? If some part of you said yes, then it’s a resounding yes.

To know more about Canva Pro, visit this link.

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Canva teams up with SB19 to turn A’TIN’s passion into creativity

Campaign lets fans access assets, editable templates, more

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Canva Philippines has joined forces with SB19 and Sony Music Entertainment to launch the “Kaya sa Canva” campaign.

This first-of-its-kind initiative is aimed at transforming the popular Filipino boy band’s fanbase into creators by giving them access to official design assets, exclusive templates, and powerful creative tools.

That’s of course as fans have a way of creating artwork, banners, and more outputs to honor their idols.

As such, the partnership enables the A’TIN (SB19’s fanbase) to access the Canva-exclusive SB19’s Creative Hub.

This dedicated space lets fans access assets, including SB19-inspired sticker packs, custom typography, and editable templates inspired by the group.

Fans around the world will initially have access to templates for photo-booth strips, wallpapers, posters, and videos.

The campaign will then expand with Canva-exclusive assets celebrating the group’s New Era, as well as their latest single, “Lawless”.

Meanwhile, the original song “KAYA” is accompanied with an upbeat music video, doubling as a love letter to A’TIN and a masterclass in Canva’s tools.

Every visual and animation is fan-inspired, a celebration of the creativity, passion, and dedication that’s defined in the community from day one.

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Samsung’s bet on the future of connected health: Less data, more action

Inside Samsung’s plan to close the gap between your wearable and your doctor

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Here’s a paradox worth sitting with: Wearable adoption keeps climbing. A lot of people now walk around with a sensor on their wrist, tracking heart rate, sleep, steps, sometimes ECG. And yet chronic disease rates haven’t moved.

That’s the problem Dr. Hon Pak, Samsung’s Head of Digital Health globally, opened with at a recent panel on the future of connected care. More data hasn’t meant better healthcare. His diagnosis: a first-mile, last-mile issue.

The first mile is that all this wearable data rarely makes it to a doctor in any usable form. The last mile is that even when a doctor says “lose weight, eat better, move more,” that advice tends to dissolve the moment real life takes over.

Picking up kids, caring for parents, getting through a Tuesday, it’s not that people don’t know what to do. It’s that knowing and doing are two different problems.

Samsung’s answer involves three things it says connected care needs to mature: meeting people where they actually are, building enough trust that people rely on the data, and using AI to turn that data into something a person can act on rather than just look at.

The Tuesday evening problem

Karthik Poriya, Head of Product at Samsung Food, framed the everyday failure point clearly. Picture it: long day, you’re tired, staring into the fridge. You’re not reaching for the healthiest option in that moment, you’re reaching for whatever’s fastest and most satisfying.

For years, nutrition tracking has focused on logging what already happened. Poriya’s team wants to intervene right at that decision point instead, pairing Samsung Health’s underlying data (BMI, antioxidant index, glycation markers) with Samsung Food’s recipe index of roughly 40,000 dishes mapped across 34 nutrients, so a health number turns into an actual dinner suggestion rather than another stat to check later.

Dr. Pak backed this with a small, concrete example from his own family: moving leftover cheesecake out of eye-level in the fridge and putting washed, sliced carrots there instead.

Kevin Duffy, CEO of connected fitness company iFit, made a similar point about exercise. The most effective tool for sticking to a fitness plan is a personal trainer, he said, citing roughly 80% higher adherence compared to going it alone.

The problem is cost: US$100 an hour or more in a major city puts that out of reach for most people. iFit’s bet is that AI can deliver something closer to a personal trainer’s precision and motivation at a price that isn’t elitist.

Duffy pointed to three reasons his company partners with Samsung specifically: reach (Samsung hardware is already in people’s homes, on their wrists and TVs), access to the biomarker data needed to build an accurate plan, and the fact that fitness goals don’t exist in isolation from sleep and nutrition data.

Trust has to come before any of this works

None of the behavior-change ambitions matter if people don’t trust the data or the company holding it. Rohit R. L., who heads Samsung’s Technology Innovation Lab in the UK, laid out how his team approaches that.

Privacy comes first: Samsung, he said, treats itself as a custodian of user data rather than an owner of it. On top of that sits clinical validation, meaning published, peer-reviewed evidence that a feature actually works in the real world, not just in a lab.

He gave a specific example: Samsung’s ECG and irregular heart rhythm notifications have been clinically validated and cleared by regulators to detect signs of atrial fibrillation. He was careful with the wording there, detect signs of, not diagnose, since that distinction matters both medically and legally.

A separate study on fall detection for elderly users turned up a more human finding. The detection algorithm worked well in testing, but in real life people don’t wear their watches around the clock, and falls don’t happen on a schedule.

Dr. Pak drew a useful comparison: nobody tells their MRI technician they’re going to fidget through the scan, but with a wearable, you don’t get to control how or when someone wears it. Real-world validation has to account for that.

On the infrastructure side, Rohit described a three-layer privacy approach: on-device protection through Samsung’s Knox security framework, GDPR-compliant data handling, and alignment with the European Health Data Space, including a decentralized clinical trial system where patient identity stays with the hospital rather than moving to Samsung’s side.

Where AI actually comes in

The most technically dense part of the discussion came from Otavio Penatti, who leads Samsung’s Health AI R&D team in Brazil.

His team works on foundation models, the same category of large-scale AI models trained on unlabeled data that underpin most of today’s popular AI systems. Trained once on a huge amount of sensor data, these models can then be fine-tuned for many specific health applications, which tends to make them more accurate than models built for a single narrow task.

Penatti’s team is training these models on wearable sensor data (PPG, ECG, accelerometer) with the goal of getting the model to, as he put it, understand the body’s own signals well enough to translate them into something useful. Longer term, he sees potential in correlating that sensor data with clinical records to flag disease risk before symptoms show up.

Dr. Pak added a striking data point from Stanford research: a foundation model trained on sleep study data was able to look at just a 24-hour window of sleep and predict risk across more than 130 different diseases.

His takeaway was that the signals for a lot of future health problems are already sitting in the data being collected today, we just don’t yet know how to read all of them.

He closed this part with a number worth sitting with. A recent American Medical Association survey found that 97% of physicians have looked at wearable data at some point. Only 15 to 16% actually use it in day-to-day practice.

The top reason cited wasn’t distrust of the data, it was that the data doesn’t plug into existing clinical workflows. That’s part of why Samsung acquired health data platform Xealth, to build a pipeline that gets wellness data into the systems doctors already use.

Five years out

Asked to look five years ahead, each panelist’s answer tracked closely to their own corner of the problem. Poriya described a proactive dietitian in your pocket, one that doesn’t wait to be asked.

Rohit pointed to connected care that clinicians actually trust and patients fully control. Penatti envisioned AI that continuously links everyday behavior to clinical outcomes, catching problems before they start. Duffy’s version was a constant personal wellness coach, sifting through the data noise to tell you exactly what to do next.

The throughline across all four answers is the same: less raw data, more action. Samsung’s panel made the case that the wearable industry has spent the last decade solving for collection, more sensors, more metrics, more dashboards, while the harder problem, turning that information into something a tired person actually does on a Tuesday night, has barely been touched.

Whether foundation models and better clinical integration actually close that gap is still an open question. But it’s clearly the one Samsung is choosing to spend its next five years on.

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Rain or shine, MOVE IT’s new commuter kit has you covered

Now available on GrabMart

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Manila weather is notoriously unpredictable during the rainy season. Clear 7 AM skies easily turn into 5 PM downpours. For motorcycle-taxi commuters, arriving at work dry is a total coin flip.

MOVE IT aims to fix this with Ride-Ready, a line of commuter essentials sold exclusively on GrabMart.

The collection features a packable rain jacket, a helmet liner scarf or cap, and a refresh kit with alcohol spray, cooling wipes, and tissues.

Addressing rider concerns

Motorcycle-taxis are now central to daily commutes. MOVE IT reported a 20% year-over-year jump in monthly active users during the first half of the year. Still, riders consistently voice the same worries: sudden rain, punishing heat, and shared helmet hygiene.

“Filipino commuters have become extraordinarily good at adapting to city life. What they should not have to accept is arriving at a meeting soaked, or starting the afternoon already behind,” says MOVE IT General Manager Wayne Jacinto.

Jacinto calls Ride-Ready a practical fix to help passengers end their ride looking as fresh as when they left home.

Price, availability

MOVE IT didn’t just launch online. From June to July, interactive booths popped up in major business hubs: Makati, BGC, Ortigas, and Cebu City. Commuters could claim items and book rides on-site.

With traffic and bad weather showing no signs of stopping, Ride-Ready offers a simple buffer so riders show up fresh instead of frazzled.

The lineup launched on GrabMart on July 13. Prices start at PhP 275, with mix-and-match savings bundles available. Check MOVE IT’s official social media channels for more details.

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