From students to working professionals, from inexperienced individuals to trained digital designers – everyone has used Canva at least once in their lives.

With its easy-to-use features, you can easily make it look like you’re a master of graphic design (even if you have no idea what you’re doing).

When Canva decided to involve us in shaping their sound, we took it as an opportunity to bring the creativity and impactfulness they needed.

Our mission was to design a sonic world for Canva. This meant creating music for advertisement as well as an effective sonic logo and in-product sounds.

While the eyes would feast on the graphic design and aesthetically pleasing user interface, our aim was for the ears to enjoy a sound experience that wrapped everything together.

As a company, Canvas promotes creativity, limitless potential, and a fun-to-use approach to design: we knew that our musical take had to reflect all of those elements. So our team hit the whiteboards – and the studio – to come up with the perfect touch.

To harness their essence in sound, we started collaborating with the founders and creative team of Canva to uncover what the core energy and style of the company was.

Their brand values? ‘Human, Inspiring and Empowering’, a simple set of words that form the Canva experience. By the people for the people, the tool is meant to feel accessible and enjoyable, without sacrificing results. Thankfully, this is also how we would describe music.

Using sonic moodboards and workshops, we narrowed down the styles and genres and landed on a modern, fun variation of gospel, with a certain energetic flair.

The brand anthem features a choir at the forefront to highlight the human element of the brand and to give a certain personality. The ‘Canva Choir’ became the key branding asset that we strategically weaved throughout all of Canva’s communication: a little ear candy to remind you who they are.

In addition, funky freestyle drums, a groovy uplifting bass, and soulful brass bring everything together to create a recognisable musical mark.

Canva CMO Zach Kitschke was on the same wavelength as us: “We were really keen to bring to life the humanity of our users, and put together something uplifting, inspiring and natural that could work across many countries and a range of formats. MassiveMusic Sydney helped guide us through the process of creating our sonic brand and we couldn’t be more happy with the result.”

When Canva asked ‘what are you creating today?’, we took it to heart and delivered a sonic branding result that still just manages to make you snap along.

“The Sound of Canva” won 🥇 GOLD 🥇 at 2022 Transform Awards ANZ in the ‘Best Use of Audio Branding’ category.