Preview - Microsoft Designer (Canva Alternative)

MicrosoftDesign

Apr 11

Have you ever used Canva? I have countless times! Including my original logo for this blog site! I have also used Canva on other personal projects as well, invitations, announcements, and many other use cases. You can get by using the free version and it’s quite flexible. However, to use extended functionality, you will have to purchase the Pro plan.

For years, I find Canva has been the go-to tool for many businesses when it comes to graphic design. I’ve even seen the same templates used on LinkedIn posts. With its user-friendly interface and extensive library of templates, fonts, and images, it’s no wonder that Canva has become such a popular choice. But now, Microsoft Designer is quickly emerging as a powerful alternative that offers expanded features and flexibility for businesses.

Microsoft Designer is a powerful, AI-driven graphic design tool integrated into Microsoft 365 applications, including PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook. With it’s intelligent design sugguestions and vast library of templates, Microsoft Design enables users to create professional-looking designs quickly and easily. It is a versatile graphic design tool that offers many of the common features as Canva, with added benefits of seamless integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem with AI backend. It certainly is a great alternative.

Below are some examples of designs that you can do and I do believe Microsoft Designer still has some work to do to get where it needs to be but I am sure that won’t take long.

One of the cool things it has is an Image Generator with DALL-E backend. So you can add your own images OR generate an image from text.

Microsoft Designer: Generate Image powered-by DALL-E 2

So I have decided to create a poster that will promote my AI-Generated logo from DALL-E 2 and my travel to Directions North America. Let’s see how this goes.

First, I’ll need an AI-Generated image powered-by DALL-E 2 and my prompt will be, “OpenAI’s Brain in the universe, electrical lightning, Ultra Detail”. It provided me three (3) options. I think I’m going to use the second option.

Microsoft Designer: Image Generator powered-by DALL-E 2

Now, I will need to create a prompt regarding Directions North America conference. So my prompt is: “A poster promoting AI at a conference. The overall aesthetic should be modern, clean, and professional. See you at the Conference!”. This is where it will provide you countless options including the size of the image. To keep it simple, I’ll leave it as ‘Square’ for now since this will be a social media post. Once I choose the starting design, I can then customize the design further.

The design I chose could be enough and I can be done. The cool thing is that you can further expand the design. It will also provide you additional ideas as well. Additional tools like “Inspire Me” and the powerful flexibility is incredible!