Look out Canva! There are a ton of new players in town! Well, not in town so much as “probably on their way”. Maybe. We hope.
Basically, the guys behind Gravit, a fantastic web-based image and vector editor, went and built a demo version of a Canva-like web app that they called ProjectX. It really is a demo. It only supports one image size (851 x 315px, the size of a Facebook cover), and really doesn’t have much in the way of features.
What makes it very, very cool is the fact that it was built with around seven hundred lines of code, and is based on the Gravit framework. That’s right, the actual framework behind the Gravit web app is open source, and available for anyone to use. Just about any developer could conceivably build their own web-based image editor with this.
Now, this could mean more Canva clones, or Gravit competitors, but honestly, we can think bigger than that. Consider that you could integrate this fairly advanced image editing software into any CMS. Online printing companies could add a version to their site, allowing people to create and edit designs right there.
Okay, that last one already exists, but I’ve found most of the online design tools (especially for T-shirt printing) to be very lackluster. Integrating the Gravit framework would take this industry to a whole new level.
I find this exciting because it means that the bar for acquiring and using professional design tools is getting lower and lower. People who can’t afford Adobe apps, or even Affinity apps, can go and start designing stuff for free, on hardware as minimal as a Chromebook.
On top of that, as proven by this ProjectX demo, the bar for integrating professional design tools — or even just semi-professional design tools — into just about any web project is getting lower as well. That means more access for everyone.
Speaking of access, developers who are interested in how this all works can see the ProjectX respository here, and here’s the repo for the Gravit framework itself.
