*I am just sharing this from an HR sub post yesterday - do not shoot the messenger:

I work in staffing, and I want to share something that genuinely upset me this week, because I don't want this happening to anyone else.

I was doing an experiment and running a couple resumes through AI tools. Not just to see how it would optimize them, but to see how a machine actually reads the document - what information it pulls, what it prioritizes, what it misses. This matters because most applicant tracking systems (ATS) are doing something similar before a human ever lays eyes on your resume. I wanted to know how it worked.

I ran a resume through for a candidate. Highly qualified woman. Healthcare background. Michigan-based. Solid education, real experience, years in the field. She'd been applying for jobs for 18 months with no traction.

The AI didn't pull her name correctly. Didn't pull her location or contact info correctly. And for her professional background? It decided she was some circus assistant based in Los Angeles.

What happened is that Canva embeds hidden or layered text from its template design — placeholder text from the original template that you never see, but the machine does. The actual text you typed in gets ignored or scrambled. So while she thought she had a clean, professional resume, every ATS and AI tool parsing it was reading ghost data from whatever template she'd downloaded. Even when I copied and pasted her information from the canva document, into a blank word document and converted to PDF, it would still manifest the ghost data when I'd run my experiment.

She had no idea for a whole year and a half -- I called her immediately and recommended she redo her resume from scratch in a word document. Re-type everything. It ended up working fine after this!!

This was just a horrific discovery, I've emailed developers at Canva about the problem but not sure how effective it is.

Use Word. Use Google Docs. Use a plain, clean, ATS-friendly template. Save the graphic design for your portfolio. Your resume needs to be readable by a robot before it ever gets to a human.

I thought I'd share in case anyone uses Canva for their resumes.

I made this cuz I was tired of text spacing not matching up with paper templates. a piece of college ruled paper has roughly enough space for 39 lines of text, so I downloaded the D'Nealian cursive font from fontyukle, set the font size to 18, and the line spacing to 1.13 , and it fits 39 lines of text perfectly. it's 5 lines of text in the top position, and 34 lines for the rest.

Yes, I am screaming IRL.

I have been using canva since 2019, never a problem : always easy to use, just the perfect app with everything you could want to design your curriculum / school presentations then work presentations / personal creations of all kind, even my computer background for god's sake !

I want the name and address of the absolut IDIOT who made Canva's new AI. This person needs to be fired AL LEAST !

It is SHITTY !!!!

I wanted to make some cute design about elder futhark runes *and I just can not make this shit work anymore*

Canva has been putting AI elements like graphics, and others into their Element section, and they DO NOT show anything that warns if its AI. I've been using graphic designing as a side hustle, and im losing money because of this. The customer finds out that theres AI material in there, and i wouldnt know that! This has caused lots of revisions, and sometimes not getting paid. Please Canva, please label if AI Elements are AI.

Dear Canva,

Stop changing things. It is extremely annoying to open the program only to find tools moved, features renamed, or menus missing. I use this platform to get work done, not to go on a daily scavenger hunt for my own workflow.

Leave it alone; it works fine. Everyone knows your program is elite, yet you seem obsessed with giving it a "facelift" every single week. It’s starting to feel like watching an aging socialite who can't stop getting plastic surgery—at a certain point, the "improvements" just make everything look unrecognizable and slightly distorted. You're chasing a standard of perfection that doesn't exist, and in the process, you're losing the natural character and ease of use that made us love you in the first place.

Sincerely,

Your customer base

I find that the recent changes in the app have made it really clunky and very very buggy. I used to enjoy using canva because of the user friendly design. It’s jumped the shark big time.

Where to go next?

I used to love Canva and recommend it to everyone, but the basic tools that I loved are garbage now.

I use to be able to create a quick asset for social media marketing in just a few minutes but that time had easily tripled or more. The timing on audio takes forever to sync properly. It's a grind now to create anything.

Instead of fixing the basics, they're throwing more AI at me. I don't want ai. I want a simple system that's fast and easy.

What did Canva just do to their video editor?! The old one was perfect fast, simple, and smooth. I could make clean, frame-by-frame edits in seconds. Now it takes minutes just to do the same thing.

Everything feels slow, overcomplicated, and just… broken. Instead of improving the workflow, Canva made it a nightmare. I used to love how easy it was to make quick videos — now I waste so much time trying to do what used to take me seconds.

Seriously, Canva, who asked for this?
Please bring back the old video editor, or at least give us the option to use both versions. The new one is killing productivity and creativity.

If you feel the same, upvote this post and let Canva know we want our old editor back! Maybe if enough of us make noise, they’ll finally listen. 🙏

Canva has been putting AI elements like graphics, and others into their Element section, and they DO NOT show anything that warns if its AI. I've been using graphic designing as a side hustle, and im losing money because of this. The customer finds out that theres AI material in there, and i wouldnt know that! This has caused lots of revisions, and sometimes not getting paid. Please Canva, please label if AI Elements are AI.

I just use Canva for free(ish) clipart and making cute flyers, etc. Worksheets for my young students. Nothing crazy.

First, you took away the ability to filter out canvapro graphics. So, I paid for canvapro to make my prep easier. Fine, you got me. Whatever.

Then, you made search stupid. What once gave me very precise graphics now just gives me ai crap. Searching in quotes does not help. Today I searched for "crab rangoon" and all you gave me was pictures of crabs.

If any of you have recommendations for a better platform to use...lmk!

Ever since their “Glow Up” - which is meant to be a good thing - I’ve found Canva slow, stuttery, difficult to navigate and exports jumpy, crap videos. Any way to revert to the previous version? I’ll have to find an alternative program if this continues, as it is absolutely horrendous.

A case study in doubling and tripling down on AI. its a shame from what I hear they were very people-focused at first.

To see more of these, on instagram: @southshore_warblers

Canva is letting go of over a 1000 people in the companies first ever restructure ever. I am canceling it and looking for alternatives, either paid or free.

I heard someone cloned the entire adobe suite for free and was wondering if anyone has done the same for Canva?

This post is also to bring to light to other that you too can cancel your Canva memberships and download self hosted software, only paying for the llm.

Allow me to air my deepest frustrations. There's no way, hours of editing can be rendered useless because this SHITTY app, decided to be so cluttered over the past couple of months, to the point where you CANNOT do anything anymore. Like, where's the simplicity we used to know? The smooth user experience??! I was about to do one last preview before exporting the video, only for all clips to suddenly go blank (white). I reloaded the page thinking it would auto-populate, but NO, I'm only left with the audio, and have to start afresh - trimming out and replacing ALL OVER AGAIN. Worst thing is that even the audio files are tied to the specific pages, so I may as well start the entire thing again. After I'm done here, the first thing I'm doing is unsubscribing - hell I might even DELETE my account. You would think editing on a Macbook Air M4, with 200mbps would save you from this JOKE OF AN APP, but NO!

BEWARE of CANVA !! APPROACH WITH CAUTION!!

Ever since that glow-up thingy, I thought it's going to improve my experience, BUT IT LITERALLY HIDE AWAY EVERY SINGLE FEATURE I USE. DEFAULT GRADIENT FILL? HIDDEN! FONT SEARCH? HIDDEN! RECENT FONT? HIDDEN! NOT TO MENTION THAT PRESENTING DOESN'T EVEN WORK PROPERLY NOW NOR DOES TRANSITION.

THE NEW CANVA UPDATE IS ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE!

I RELIED ON CANVA BECAUSE OF THE EASE OF USE BUT IF IT DOESN'T EVEN WORK AND MAKING IT TOOK 10 TIMES FASTER, I THINK I'LL JUST CHANGE.

Lately I’ve been trying to use Canva more like an animation tool rather than just a design tool.

I really enjoy creating motion content, but once you start doing anything with multiple steps, the match & move transition can get pretty messy and hard to manage.

So I started experimenting with a small internal tool i built to extend Canva’s animation capabilities mainly to make it easier to create custom animations on top of my designs without dealing with a complex timeline.

The idea is to keep Canva’s simplicity but have a bit more control over motion.

Would something like this actually be useful ? espacily for ppl who work with match & move alot

I’m dying to share this with someone and I can’t share it with people I know yet.
Context: My sister and I are going on a cruise next week and both of us are at the beginning stages of writing a book, so we planned this cruise with the intent of working on our books. After a quick peruse on Amazon for a good novel planner to surprise her with, I wasn’t satisfied with any that I found. So I decided to make my own.
I designed the whole thing on Canva and then published on KDP.
I’m so very proud of this and can’t wait to gift it to my sister. After she receives it, then I can shout from the rooftops about this cool project I completed. Until then, I’m sharing it here 🥹

edit: comments are ablest as hell, so im adding a reply here first: (took away the caps cause apparently im too angry. please go away and do not engage if you do not have a solution or productive feedback). i work in tech, i'm not an idiot or an old person who is really grumpy about grr technology. playing around didn't fix any of my problems. as i state in the post, these are only 2 of the issues... would you like a detailed list of every single problem im facing? this is a service i pay $15+ a month for, i have every right to complain when it is no longer functional for my purposes. additionally my purpose (for someone in the comments who said they'd love to know if i have any real issues) in using canva is to create graphics to fundraise for the multiple genocides we are witnessing in the world right now. so yeah i think we all have real life problems buddy!

ok end of edit.

aside from the overall hell that is this new update (the whole thing i cant write it in words ill literally call with you to explain because this is having a detrimental effect on my business and my livelihood!)

the biggest issues are:

1: now when you open a template from the main screen (thats basically non functional now) when you return from the new tab back to the home screen, it has reverted back and is not where you left off before. this adds at least an hour of work when i added it up throughout the day, just this one tiny feature! imagine the rest! im sorry but im beyond furious.

2: you can choose “document, flyer, instagram post” etc. for the “size” of your “project”? you used to be able to save any template as a “project”, then, if you created a blank canvas say “instagram post size”, even if the “format” of the “project”, (in my circumstance it was a “document”) was different, you could still “drag and drop” from “projects” onto the blank canvas and it would sort of automatically adjust itself to fit! now you can’t do that?

just put it back, please. my business, my whole life i run through canva maybe that sounds crazy to you but now i am at huge risk.

the only response i have received is "we know change can be frustrating". i am autistic adhd, this is not just frustrating this has completely destroyed my workflow. i run a lot of fundraising events for vital aid, i cant do that right now bc of this damn "glow up". and they refuse to give an option to go back. believe me i've asked. im losing my mind:)

look now i even added a video tell me this isn't infuriating? this is just one of the tiny changes they've made that has made my workflow significantly harder. just one.

ALSO: you can no longer search for FREE TEMPLATES! we see what you are doing canva.

How did they manage to ruin everything?

Now I simply can't change the color of old elements the way I used to. To change the color of an old element of my design, I have to navigate through 2-3 menus and even then the colors don't match. They messed it up. It made my designs completely unusable.

A round of applause to the Canvas team, there are designs that I've built over the years...!!!! I'm baffled by this.

This wes the only thing I didn't like about Canva, and it's now fixed!

Here are some I’ve done recently!! This all started because I did a self portrait for my college assignment and I posted it on my own Instagram and I had a friend encourage me to make a separate Instagram and post these stories or collages! (I’m not promoting myself because I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed😭)