“I’m excited to announce Microsoft Designer, a graphic design app in Microsoft 365 that helps you create stunning social media posts, invitations, digital postcards, graphics, and more, all in a flash”, expressed Liat Ben-Zur, Microsoft Corporate Vice President. She added that Microsoft Designer is powered by AI technology, including DALL-E 2. The AI company OpenAI – which Microsoft supports – created the latter. What does it mean?
You enter your ideas – using text or images – and Designer takes care of the rest. No need to rummage through different pre-made templates, the app is here to free up your time. Using the “start from scratch” feature, Designer enables you for instance to simply describe an image you want to see, and it magically creates a design based on your initial idea. It proves that this Microsoft software definitely comes up for any profiles, with or without design skills.
“For anyone who is trying to create a brand for themselves on social media or simply wanting to create a birthday party invitation for family and friends, we aimed to solve a few key challenges with creating and sharing content”
This makes clear that Microsoft is looking to outcompete the $40B-company Canva, initially built by Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht – to curve sophisticated Adobe Suite and other similar graphic tools. Nevertheless, it will be far from being an easy task to dethrone Canva’s success. Following Microsoft’s announcement, Canva disclosed new features, part of the Visual Worksuite – notably the Docs to Decks one which enables you to transform a document into a polished presentation within a few clicks.
The competition is now on between these two! For now, Microsoft Designer is in closed beta yet users can join a waitlist so as to access a preview version of the app. Later on, Microsoft aims to integrate it into both Microsoft 365 Personal and Home packages.
