When the Machine Asked to Dream for Us: Design with Canva and Artificial Intelligence

Before Canva became a platform used around the world, it was a small idea in a living room, where Melanie Perkins watched students struggle with complicated design software and asked why expressing a simple idea should require so much complexity. Her question opens a door into a Ministry of Design where the ideas of teachers, students, small organizations and artists wait in endless lines because their owners do not know design, and she answers that knowing what they want to say should be enough to begin. With Cliff Obrecht she starts from a school yearbook business, Cameron Adams joins them, and the platform opens design to drag and drop, until a new door marked Artificial Intelligence reveals a machine that turns a few words into an image and asks for nothing in return, at first. A child holding an imperfect drawing of his family's home explains that he made his mother's window larger because she waited there for his father every evening, and tells the machine to help him build what he imagines without dreaming in his place. The book closes with practical lessons in visual hierarchy, typefaces, posters and presentations, and with the reminder that technology can fill the world with images while human imagination alone gives an image a reason to remain.