More than three-fifths of business leaders expect their employees in non-design roles to have “extensive design knowledge” including the ability to create visual assets and presentations and to edit others’ designs with ease.
However, almost two-thirds of those 1,600 leaders say that they provide training to those not in graphic design roles.
A third of global business leaders want to increase their visual communication and almost 30 per cent want to use quick-to-consume visuals when interacting at work. What’s more, 85 per cent of those leaders say that visual communication tools carry more authority and 89 per cent say that visual comms tools have a positive return on investment.
Visual communication tools have also boosted sales with 85 per cent of business leaders saying that visual content is generally more digestible, leading to more responsive prospects that stay engaged throughout the sales process.
“As business leaders navigate a changing economic environment, visual communication can help brands get ahead. From helping win new customers, to attracting and retaining talent, to marketing in a way that breaks through, visual communication has never been more critical to unlocking better communication, collaboration and creativity,” said Zach Kitschke, CMO of Canva.
“Today, capturing anyone’s attention can be fleeting so great design can be make or break for organizations who strive to stand out in this new visual era.”
Canva’s research also found that the growing number of content platforms and a feeling of information overload negatively impact attention spans, making quick-to-digest visual content more important than ever.
“Canva has been a valuable tool to speed up and streamline our creative team’s processes. It helped our creative team shift their time from one-off bespoke requests to high-leverage brand systems and programs. We’ve saved over 21,000 hours of design time in just six months after the internal adoption of Canva,” said Roxy Young, Reddit’s chief marketing officer.
The research also found, perhaps to no one’s surprise, that Gen Z is more agile and creative than older workers and embraces visual communication tools more openly than previous generations.
