ABU DHABI, 10th December, 2025 (WAM) -- Duncan Clark, Head of Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) at Canva, one of the world's fastest-growing technology companies, said BRIDGE Summit brings together every part of society, creating a vital space for collaboration across corporates, governments, not-for-profits and SMEs.
“BRIDGE Summit is an example of one of those big tent-pole moments where lots of different parts of society come together, corporates, not-for-profits, organisations, governments, SMEs," Clark said in an interview with the Emirates News Agency (WAM) on the sidelines of the BRIDGE Summit at the ADNEC Centre in Abu Dhabi.
He added that for Canva, which serves all of these audiences, “being right in the middle, the hub in that wheel, is really important so that we can speak to all these people and crash all those different ideas together."
“BRIDGE is an ideal platform for us to communicate with all different types of stakeholders, from major companies to smaller ones, through to not-for-profits and government departments," he further stated. Clark said data visualisation is “an absolutely core part of how we communicate these days," driven by major trends such as AI and the rise of visual communication. “Everything is becoming more data driven," he said. “So it’s really important not only that we have access to data and that we can analyze it, it’s also really important that we can tell a story with it so that we can turn the data insights into action and actually make change happen."
He explained that “everything is becoming more visual," and that “we now live in a visual economy." Although the trend feels new, he said it reflects how people naturally process information. “We are hardwired in our brains to be visual first, and now the technology and the culture is catching up with that."
“These days, if you’re not communicating with design and graphics and visual content, you’re probably losing the audience," he said. “And the more complex the things you’re trying to articulate, the more important it is to recognise this visual content trend."
Clark said Canva set out to create “a consolidated design tool that brings all the different parts of the ecosystem into one place, but crucially, also to make it really, really easy to use."
“We’ve got one million active users every month in schools and among teachers, and that’s a reflection of how easy we’ve made the tool to use," he said. “Accessibility and democratisation of design is absolutely essential."
Since launching in 2013, Canva has reached over 260 million monthly users and surpassed US$3 billion in annual revenue, with more than 45 billion designs created globally.