Guy Kawasaki, who held the chief evangelist title at Apple during late nineties, is joining Australian design startup Canva, making a comeback into the role after nearly two decades of advising entrepreneurs and founding Alltop in 2008.
“Macintosh democratized computers; Google democratized information; and eBay democratized commerce. In the same way, Canva democratizes design,” Kawasaki said in a statement. “You don’t get many chances to democratize an industry, so I seized the opportunity to work for Canva.”
Guy will help Canva expand globally, the company said. Canva added that it’s seeing 100,000 new designs created every week by more than 330,000 users.
Founded in 2012, Canva raised $3 million in seed funding last year from Matrix Partners, InterWest Partners, 500 Startups, and angels, including Google Maps founder Lars Rassmusen, Bill Tai (Charles River Ventures), and Ken Goldman (CFO of Yahoo). The online graphic design startup now has 320, 000 users who have created over 1 million designs on the platform.
As Sarah Perez of TechCrunch wrote last year, Canva wants to become the default tool people use to create and collaborate on design online by offering easy to use drag-and-drop interface, and access to over a million photographs, graphics and fonts.
“In seven months, people have created more than 1.5 million designs using Canva. We’re incredibly excited to welcome Guy onboard as Canva’s Chief Evangelist,” Canva CEO Melanie Perkins said. “It’s an amazing endorsement of the Canva vision to have someone of his caliber join our team.”
Canva is among a growing breed of SaaS design startups (apart from Adobe’s Creative Cloud of course) beginning to make an impact in the creative software space.

Photo by Flickr user Ted Murphy under a CC by 2.0 license
