What do people think of Crello?
Yes Yes Yes to free animated design templates @liudmylan haha! Thanks very much for sharing this easy-to-use and effective graphic design software. Can't wait for more templates. Congrats! 💯👍👍👍
Go use the original tool that pioneered this space and is still constantly adding new features these people are no doubt scrambling to copy.
So a quick browse of Crello got me intrigued to sign up and I did right away and got down to business.
In short: please do not see this as a scathing review. I actually quite like the interface and it's very promising. I want it to succeed so I will mention as quickly as possible the very small things that add up to a decision between your product and another one that's out there.
So, these are the issues that need to be rectified before many working pros can use it for focused, continuous work:
1. Undo/Redo. I should not have to deselect all my objects before I can undo an action. No regular image editing software acts like this, and your new users will come with the expectations that the microinteractions will be the same.
2. Moving text with the keyboard arrows is not possible. Why?
3. Similarly, Shift + Arrows in any direction to make an object jump by multiple pixels doesn't work - another thing that users are accustomed to. It really slows down my progress and creates unnecessary busywork (and way more undo history steps than is necessary)
4. Sliders as the only available font controls also really slow down working with fonts. Allowing text input helps me get to 32 pt font quicker. It also matters that I have to scroll through the entire list of google fonts to find the fonts that I want to use - not being able to type in the name of the font and have it autocomplete for me is another thing that slows one down way more than you can realize until it's actually happening.
5. Rotation - shift or ctrl + rotation doesn't give me snapping to predictable angles. I even was motivated to try because one of your templates had text rotated 90 degrees. When rotating it, the angles turned into a number between 1 and 360 degrees, where it was skipping angle #360 and going straight between 1 and 359. Took me a few tries to turn it into 360 degrees... and when I did... it was crooked by about 2 degrees.
6. Colour picking - I don't really understand what 'special colors' are for, and I'm still looking for help on that. I love that selecting one of your main colours gives me a group of tonal shifts below it, but if I choose a custom colour I'm gonna have to decide that choosing a different colour for the same object makes that custom colour lost to me until I manually type it in again.
When Canva first came out, it had all these issues, and now, most of them are rectified. While it appears that your business model is quite definitely inspired by them, I know you will succeed if you don't too closely follow in their footsteps (and missteps).
I'll be keeping my account so I can create some more images and observe Crello's growth. Loving the style quite a lot. Looking forward to using it!
I love that once you log in, it feels like a little party. You got templates here and there and the inspiration section below which I rarely use but I like that it’s there.
