How Zoom saved over 230 hours of design time with Canva in three months

About Zoom

Zoom⁠(opens in a new tab or window) helps people stay connected so they can get more done together. From meetings, chat, phone, and webinars to conference room systems and online events, Zoom powers all communication needs. Zoom’s secure, reliable video platform offers a high-quality experience that is easy to manage, use, and customize.

The Challenge

Zoom operated with close to 2,400 employees at the start of 2020. Once global adoption started skyrocketing, the organization’s need to hire and scale operations quickly, while maintaining brand consistency, were critical factors for the rapidly growing business.

“We grew really fast and keeping control of everything was a challenge for us,” says Brandon Realmonte, Zoom’s global Brand Creative Manager.

As Zoom began scaling, Brandon, who oversees brand design across the company, needed a seamless system that would safeguard the brand.

He knew it was crucial to empower staff to create and collaborate across designs more autonomously, and simultaneously streamline the high volume of design requests that fell to his creative team.

The solution

After discovering Canva through a colleague, Brandon quickly saw how Canva could enable his design team to scale their work, reduce design tickets, and alleviate internal bottlenecks.

He pitched Canva Enterprise⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to his executive leadership team – it was a no-brainer.

“When I proposed Canva to my CMO and executives it was an easy sell. I said, ‘My team can handle either 500 designs and that's going to take us five hours, or we can do five designs with Canva and let the rest of the company scale their work from there’,” he says.

The Canva rollout started with Brandon’s creative team and quickly evolved as a platform to support teams across the entire company, including Social, Marketing, Sales, Digital and Comms.

“We now have someone from every department of the company using Canva,” he says.

Safeguarding the Zoom brand

With such rapid growth, Canva gives Brandon’s team the power – and peace of mind – to ensure all internal and external assets shared by staff will stay true to the brand.

“Canva helped us in knowing that whoever is designing, it's going to be consistent with the range of templates and guidelines that we've set as a brand.”

With Canva, Brandon’s team can make branded templates available to multiple departments across the company, from Zoom backgrounds, to social media assets, and documents for Sales teams. Staff have easy access to the Zoom Brand Kit within Canva too, making it simple to drag and drop the correct logos and brand colors into documents so they can move much faster.

“My team sets the standards for the entire brand. Globally, we manage hundreds, if not thousands of design templates. Canva’s been really efficient and allows us to scale easily.”

Giving back precious time

Canva’s self-serve set-up has dramatically shrunk the number of design requests that were previously falling to Brandon’s team each month and choking internal workflows.

“We were designing virtual backgrounds for 12 people for an event, but there could be about 20 of those events a month. So you're looking at creating hundreds of designs,” he says.

Instead, the creative team makes templatized content available within Canva which staff can easily access and update as needed, unlocking precious time and more autonomy.

“We’d create five backgrounds in Canva and staff can do the rest,” he says.

The biggest benefit of this grab-and-go set-up? It gave back Brandon’s creative team the time and resources needed to complete higher-impact design work.

“Canva has really allowed my team more time and freedom to focus on the larger company projects, such as marketing campaigns and bigger initiatives for the brand.”

Supporting teams to collaborate

With teams located across the globe and within different time zones, Canva empowers Zoom staff to stay connected and collaborate on creating highly visual content with ease.

“Canva has allowed us to scale globally and enabled Zoom employees, whether they’re a designer or non-designer, to collaborate on one platform and stay consistent,” Brandon says.

He adds, Canva also enables the creative team to connect with non-designers and seamlessly comment, edit, or approve suggestions within one document, upskilling staff in the process.

“Canva really presents a unique opportunity for professional designers and creatives to collaborate with people that may not have design experience. It's really an in-between design tool that offers a lot of capabilities that other tools don't,” he says.

Content sponsored by Canva. Zoom has not received any financial compensation in exchange for its endorsement.