Today’s work: crafting Canva microsites to replace old PDF decks

Oddly, with all of our collective design experience, Klim (Creative Director at Bigshot) and I are both currently favoring a tool targeted towards design beginners: Canva!

One of our favorite joint projects is working on Canva’s simple and effective microsites together - we can log on and work live with each other on each site, adding new photos and videos, writing new copy and moving elements around on pages simultaneously.

It is a tremendously effective and efficient way to work together on a design project. As we both get familiar with how the Canva websites function, we know what can and cannot be done within the context of the format, and we start to really jam in a creative flow.

We are using this tool frequently as we work more with agencies and organizations that require a lot of background info: having a website link to share with a prospective client is smoother, cleaner and faster than asking them to download a PDF deck, or worse yet, attaching a PDF to an email. Yuck!

We have started replacing our 8-year-old PDF decks that run through our capabilities, our portfolios and our process with fancy microsites. The sites are mobile optimized (I find myself designing all the pages and content mobile-first as 65-80% of our traffic these days is on a mobile device) so they look great when a prospective client gets an email from us with the link to the site

One each site is cooked, we publish it and incorporate it right into our website’s nav menu and contact page.

The first such website (deck? I guess they are not decks anymore!) we completed is geared towards new contacts at ad agencies. Account Directors and Account Managers tend to rotate in and out frequently so they usually don’t know what Bigshot can do for their clients and for their campaigns. So we need an easy way of showing them. Voila! https://bigshottoyworks.my.canva.site/agency-deck

We’ve also put up microsites that detail some of our in house IP like Here There Bear prior to launching the Kickstarter, and we plan on outright dropping standalone website for some older IPs that would just work better as Canva microsites.

Efficiency in 2026!