Technology History | University of Western Australia — A Semester Spent Learning Where the Buttons Were

Melanie Perkins was nineteen, enrolled at this university, and tutoring other students in Photoshop and InDesign. Her students spent most of a semester learning where the buttons were before they designed anything worth keeping. She has given the same account of it for a decade, and it is the whole thesis of the company she went on to build: the difficulty sat in the tool rather than in the person using it. In 2007 she and Cliff Obrecht went at the problem sideways, starting a company called Fusion Books. Neither of them could code and neither had run a business, so they took the narrowest market they understood and built a browser-based drag-and-drop editor with a template library for it: school yearbooks. The market came from home. Perkins' mother taught high school and had spent nights fighting desktop publishing software to lay out the school yearbook. Fusion Books was run from that same living room in Perth, which is a private house, so this memory pins the campus instead. It sold to schools around Australia and later operated in New Zealand and France, and it kept trading through the years Perkins spent being turned down by investors for the larger idea. Canva's stated founding date is 1 January 2013, and its address is Sydney. Forbes dates the start of the work to 2007 in a Perth living room, which is the more useful date, because the yearbook company was the proof that a template plus a browser could replace a semester of training. Perkins left the degree at nineteen and never finished it. The building in the photographs is Winthrop Hall, the clock tower and reflection pool at the northern end of the Crawley campus. It is the university's landmark rather than the room she taught in, because no source names that room. Photo: Orderinchaos, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons