Canva has used its first customer event, held in Sydney, to move beyond design templates and into the software people use to run a working day. The Australian company announced a set of products it calls its Visual Worksuite, including a document tool, a whiteboard, a simple website builder and a presenter remote, and said it now has more than 85 million users producing about 180 designs a second.

The suite puts Canva closer to the tools it has long sat beside. Canva Docs turns text into something more visual and can be converted into a presentation with one click; Canva Whiteboards offers an infinite canvas for teams working apart; Canva Websites builds responsive pages without code. Alongside them the company added a way to remove the background from video, an expanded print service, and richer data charts through Flourish, a tool it owns.

From design tool to workplace suite

The claim the company leans on is adoption inside companies. It says more than four million paying customers use Canva for Teams, a number it says tripled in a year, and that firms including Zoom, Salesforce, PayPal and Reddit have replaced older design tools with it. Canva's co-founder and chief executive, Melanie Perkins, describes visual communication as an increasingly critical skill and the suite as a way to bring design to every employee.

Whether that is what customers get is a different matter. A suite of simple tools competes on ease, and the trade-off is depth: the features a professional designer relies on are often the ones a simpler product leaves out. Turning documents, whiteboards and websites into one subscription makes the bundle convenient, and it also puts Canva against Microsoft and Google inside the same budget. Which of those the workplace chooses, and whether visual-first documents replace text ones, is a question the launch asks but does not answer.