Stink Studios, recently appointed as Canva’s creative agency for the UK, has taken Canva to the streets.
The special build OOH campaign has taken over all 14 billboards at London’s Waterloo gallery, transforming the space into an unignorable live demonstration of Canva’s design capabilities – with flourishes of humour.
Each billboard, constructed by Talon and Grand Visual, spotlights one of Canva’s core workplace tools exaggerated in form:
Make the Logo Bigger – supersized: Answering the age-old creative request with flair, one billboard features an oversised Canva logo breaking out of its frame.
Magic Resize in Action: A landscape-format ad squeezed into a portrait space vividly demonstrates how Canva’s Magic Resize adapts content for different formats in a single click.
Drag-and-Drop: A 3D replica of a Forest e-bike appears to have been dragged onto a billboard, physically showcasing Canva’s famously intuitive interface.
Background Remover – Erasing the Ordinary (and the Billboard): A special build styled like a whiteboard brainstorm appears to erase parts of the billboard itself, revealing the structure underneath. A second execution mimics the wall texture behind it, highlighting Canva’s precise background removal capabilities.
The Creative Journey Visualised: One ad charts the often-messy path from “brief lands” to “humbly accept standing ovation”.
The campaign is the result of a close collaboration between Stink Studios and Canva’s in-house marketing team. Together, they developed a design language that flexes across formats, physical and digital, while staying true to Canva’s accessible, witty voice. The Waterloo takeover is also supported by a wider digital rollout across YouTube and LinkedIn throughout the summer. Media was handled by OMD.
The Waterloo campaign follows a broader London-wide OOH campaign launched in May which included a notable installation at Old Street featuring a giant Canva-themed display animated with hundreds of collaborative cursors, highlighting the platform’s real-time design functionality.
Images by Simon Knox
