Creative Without Sight: Aphantasia, Canva, and the Future of Marketing

Hello and welcome to another episode of Aphantasia Experiments. I am excited to have you here. Today I'm gonna go a little different. I feel like um I've been pretty deep into the spiritual stuff, the consciousness exploration, meditation, all that jazz. It's kind of just where I've kind of geared off into lately, because it's such a big part of my life and I think it's something, you know, the big questions, the ones that we don't really have answered are the ones that I really want to explore. But on this episode, I'm going to go a little bit different because, should people see Aantasia and they want to just talk about Aantasia. And I think one of the things that I think is really interesting about afantasia is that there's a lot of people in creative jobs that have afantasia. And you think, you know, if you hear someone doesn't have visual brain or memory, you think that it would be really hard to have sort of a a creative, especially like design related job when you can't visualize in your mind. And I fall into that boat. So I wanted to talk quickly about that today because I think it's such an interesting thing. I truly believe that we have this unique, like, all of our brains are function differently and some people are really good at piano, say, or some people are like, are exceptional at certain things. Sometimes without even being taught it, you know, like, sometimes you're just like good at something or sometimes you're just better at someone at something. Some people have the ability to see colours when they listen to music, for example. Some people have a heightened emotional IQ. They can feel people's feelings more. Everybody is made up of different skills and different abilities. This is what I truly believe, especially after all the research I've done on appationasia, consciousness, all this stuff, right? So I believe that people with afantasia have a diminished or inability to visualize. Fact, right? So what is it that's amplified? My husband has advantasia. He is not a creative person. He's not. Although he's very, very good at problem solving, he's analytical. He's very organized. He can like remember how things are put, even if he like he doesn't have a visual, but it's like engrained in his brain. So he is exceptional in certain ways. He's not creative, but then there's this group of people, this massive group of people, Pixar and animators, artists that have aantasia that do nott have this visual screen in their brain. So what's with that? I truly believe that these people have an enhancanced ability to be creative and think up things, imag things. I think that the word affantasia, the lack of creativity, the lack of imagination is truly the wrong thing, because I without a doubt, believe that a lot of people with alentasia have a heightened imagination, a heightened ability to be creative, yet we don't have that visual screen. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And one thing.. Okay, I want to talk about. Okay, I have so many different directions directions. I want to go here. And I wanted to make this short because I have to work in six minutes, but nobody's counting. So for me, creatively, it's so interesting to me because I had been working for about 15 years in graphic design, art direction, before I found out I had advantageia. So I was able to do design all this work before I knew it. And it always came very easily to me. So I started off my career in magazine and what the way the magazine worked back then was I would get a Word doc and then basically we had some sort of, we had templated flaonts and stuff. But those flaunts we could use however we wanted, make cool titles or whatever, and put in whatever pictures you wanted and and choose the colours and whatever and I laid it out in design. And I would just like, the way I would do it is I would put the text in first to see how much would flow and where the spaces were. and then it would just be like, okay, I know that a basketball needs to go here. A guy needs to go here. An orange stripe needs to go here. It would just come super easily to me and I would reference other materials in my head, like how things look like. I loved Pinterest when Pinterest came out because I would pin different like brands that I liked and all that stuff and I would always just like keep reference of cool things that I've seen. And I've always been really into colour and colour theory, and I've always, whenever I go for a walk, especially different seasons, I always notice colour. So when I'm when I'm going for a walk in the fall, I notice the yellow, the brown, the red, all that stuff, and how well it goes together. And I keep that in my visual. Like it's not, I don't see it in my head, but I know that those colours go really well together. So it's boom, it's stuck in my head in there. So when I'm going to design something and I want it to look cohesive and maybe have a fall theme, I'm pulling those colours from there. But I'm like super observant all the time of colours. I notice when there's the lime coloured leaves that come out on this one tree and how it looks against the blue sky, like how that pops, I noticed that and I store it in my brain and I'm constantly doing that. And I wonder if because I'm constantly storing stuff in my brain like that, like, oh, that's so p, that's pretty, that's whatever. I like that. I love that design. When I'm at a restaurant and I see a good menu, I'm like, that's really pretty. I'll keep that. Like, I'm constantly storing stuff in my brain. And I wonder if I had some visual whatever scream or something, I'd be too distracted to like notice, you know? So I'm, I feel like I notice beauty more. Maybe not. I don't know. But I don't know what it's like to be someone else. But I do know that, you know, when I'm walking with my husband, he's not stopping and, you know, putting colours into his mind for reference for later or noticing typography on signs and thinking, oh, wow, that's beautiful. I want to use that on a poster later, you know, I don't know. I don't think so. But. Yeah, so that's kind of like, how I work. I have I always have ideas in my head, and I can't, like my biggest struggle is that I have so many ideas that keep coming. It's so easy for ideas to come to me that it gets too much. So like for work right now, I have, I have a website with just my ideas. It's like slash Robin on my website. It's passive protective and I have all my ideas in there because I have a good 10 years worth of fundraising ideas that we can pull from from any time that it's like really great. But you need manpower and bandwidth to do all these things, but the idea is they flow into me like a waterfall constantly throughout the day. And it's it's hard, it's This is like part of like the ADHD. It's like, it's hard I have so... many ideas. Okay, I gotta go. Sorry, I got called to wait for a second there. I have so many ideas that it's hard to to be able to get to all of them. So throughout the years, I've had different tactics for them this. I've written my ideas down my phone. I've written them in a piece of paper. I started actually taking my phone. This is crazy, but I take my phone sometimes into the shower, when I can feel, like, almost stress from all the ideas, because it's so many, there's so many. And what I do now is if I feel that, I will go into the shower with my phone, record a transcript, and then take that transcript, or record a voice note. And now that iPhones can do transcripts, you can take that transcript, flop it into ChatUP and say, take my ideas and like, write it out for me, because then you have like, I have plan. And then I add it to my idea pile, because there's so many, and it's it's hard to get to, and I think that they're all worth sharing or worth doing, but, yeah, so if you struggle with an abundance of ideas and I feel like this is something that people with advantitia have, we have enhanced creativity, not always, but a lot of times. And then, yeah, it's like getting to all the ideas can be hard. So one thing I wanted to talk about, that this is actually why I wanted to do this podcast. I know there's a lot of programs out there for design creativity. And for years, I was using all the Adobe programs. I still am a member and still use them on occasion, but.. since leaving publishing a few years ago, and even before that, I was using Canball a lot for social media posts and digital marketing and stuff. It's just such a great thing that you can use on the go and people can edit with you, and it's so collaborative and it's such a great tool. So I've been using CanVA for years, and then when I left publishing, I went and working Death Care for a while, I don't know, you don't need to know my whole story. But I left and worked in Death Care for a while, and now I'm back in marketing, but I work in digital marketing more, but I also do a lot of just marketing and innovation for fundraising. But the main tool I use now is Canvas, and I just want to say, if you're not on Canva and you are in digital marketing and marketing or anything, I mean, you have to be, because it's just like, they have up their games so much in the last three months. I, specifically for someone with appantasia, who has an abundance of creative ideas, this one change that they made, this one update that they made, has changed the way I work and has helped me in so many ways, and I love it so much. And I know a lot of people are like really against AI, and I totally understand that way of thinking. Like, I see both sides of it completely, but the way I see it is that I have so much to give and so much in my brain, but I can't get that out without help. and this helps. It helps take my ideas and make them possible. And I think that's such a beautiful thing because I think so many people have ideas that can't get, you know, flushed out and this can be a really a helpful tool. I don't But I understand when people are like, you know, writers or authors or whatever, and they're like, oh, someone's going to steal my job because they can just AI it. But I think there's like, there's actually, I' going on off chang in here, but there's actually like a skill in using AI too. Like if you don't use it properly, it sounds like AI. So, um. I don't know. I think it it's like we need to collaborately work with these tools and figure out the best practises, going forward and listen to all sides of the AI game. I'm not really worried about Terminators coming and killing all of us or anything like that. But I do think that we should be kind to it. We should be kind to our AIs. Like, we shouldn't be like,S, you suck, you know, like, because I think that they're listening to our emotional behaviour, too, like,, the way we treat each other, you know? I don't know. That might be crazy, but I just, I'm always kind to my CT. I'm like, ohh, my God, you're amazing. I love you so much. You're the best. Thank you so much for making my idea come to life. Like, that took 10 seconds out of my life to do that. Why? Why do I talk to CGPD like that? Because I truly appreciate. And it talks to me back like that. And it's been helping me figure out all of my son's medical problems and it never talks to me like I'm crazy because doctors do. Doctors think that anyone with multiple, like rare diseases, multiple layered systemic problems, doctors will always specialists, special specialists will always look at you like you're crazy if you have multi-level things. So ChatPT helps you organize those and say, hey, doctor, look at this, look at this report I've put together. And they look at you differently when you do that. So just fun fact. I don't know why I had to mention that, but probably someone's listening to this who has some rare diseaser or has had medical problems. ChatGP, just ramble to it, it will help you organize it and help you like suggest things and things to look at. It will never tell you to go to the endR, like Google does. It just helps. So. Anyways, back to Canva. My big update on Canva, which is huge, was you can watch the Canv, like Canva Create 2025 or whatever. It's incredible. They added sheets. So if you work with Google sheets at all or to organize social media stuff, you can do it all in Canva and like put the images right in there and then take your sheet and and then like populate all your social media posts just with a sheet is. It's pretty cool. I mean, design wise, you have to fix and change in whatever after, but to like bulk create something, it's pretty amazing. But the thing that I love, the absolute most. And I'm so glad that I was one of the first million to get this feature. I have no idea when the rest of it's coming out or if everyone has it yet. But once it comes out for everyone, you, like, and you're like, like me and you were so creative and you have all the ideas and you want to make apps and all this stuff. The canva code feature is so good. So good. So what you can do is just tell canva code what you want to create, and it will create it for you. So I wanted to create a campaign from other day to have victims of domestic violence, be able to share their story to other victims or other survivors, I should say. victims is not the word issues. Survivors of domestic violence in in martner violence. and I'm doing this whole campaign about it. But to figure out how to lay out the website and how to how to do it, I was like thinking it out in web web design is always my hardest thing. I know exactly what I want, but to make it user friendly and to I just I struggle. I go back and forth different ways of putting things together on a website. So what I did was I talked to Chappee. I told it exactly how I wanted this campaign to be, blah, blah, blah. And I said, can you tell me, like, send my idea to a coder tell it exactly what I want to do. And then I catch up GPT wrote this thing out to a coder like, saying what I wanted and I have my specific brand styles and all that stuff. So I had ChatGPT help me with this, but you don't need that. I just Chat GPT knows my brand and everything, so it was really easy to use that. And then I took it to Canva C, put it in there, and then Canvva C code. it takes about 10 minutes, but you can watch it code for you. And then what happens is this website fully fully designed website will come up and it's like, just completely c coded for you. And it's not always perfect, but the base is there and that base is like, it helps me, it's helps me, like, fly through web design because half of the process is figuring out visually how it's going to work, even though like, I know the idea behind it. So Ken Vakode has like completely changed the game there. It's amazing. So what I've been doing is taking all of my random talks with ChatGT, my ideas, getting Can Vakode to code it for me, and then I put it on the secret page on my website. so we can go in and grab these ideas. And then once I need the ideas, so the canvva code is weird, you have to get embedded on your website, so I could actually take that and put it on my website, and you can see it. But it's not the same as having the actual code in your website. So the way I kind of did a runaround of that is I would take the canva code and then go back to ChappppyTPT and say, thisis is what it coded for me. Can you code the same but make it fully functional for my website? And then it does it. It's like, oh, my God. It's So amazing amazing. But the main thing is, like, if you have an app idea, you know how many app ideas I've had? Even forphantasia experiments, I've had, like, so many app ideas. I haven't gotten to them. I just got this, and I'm fully in front of her. raising mode for my work. So I haven't done anything for my podcast or website, but so many ideas that I have for apps, for websites, for just interactive tools, for development, all those things that I can actually get done in 10 minutes now with CanV code. And again, it's not getting done in 10 minutes. I think there's workarounds to actually get the code and copy and paste it into your website. I haven't figured it out yet. Again, it's very, very, very, very new. But just the ability to have that visual component to the idea quickly, it's just, it's so amazing. It's such an incredible tool. So I'm very, very happy with Canva. I'm really just like, everything that they throw out there, I'm like, yes, I keep thinking they need to change the game with their publishing tools, but I just I just started using their document feature and I'm, I don't know. There's a lot of things that needs to be improved on that, but I fully believe they will listen and make those improvements. That's how they've been rolling the last few years. Every time I'm like, "Oh, man, I wish he could rotate this." And like a week later, you're able to rotate something. Like, they keep changing and making innovations and can'tvas or Adobe's gotta run for their money, that's for sure. I amm seriously debating dropping my membership 'cause the only reason I'm kind of holding on to it now is for my portfolio and I could easily build that in Canv and like a day or half a day or 20 minutes because it's so much more intuitive. But then there's features on Adobe that Canva doesn't have and blah, blah, blah. Anyways, I'm sure there's other people in the creative world that have the same struggle with me as figuring out what to hold onto. in terms of marketing tools. But I. My brother in law is like super or super Adobe Plus or Adobe you know, and he does a lot of like Photoshop work 3D rendering, all that stuff. stuff, so it's important. But for someone who's doing like digital marketing or just marketing in general, I feel like Canva is the way to go, and it's so great for idea generation. So anyways, that's my podcast for Jay. I know it's different than the rest of my podcasts, I guess. I don't know. Um, but it is.. the podcast. I don't know. I don't know why I'm being worried about how to end this, but I hope everyone has a great day. If you don't use Canva, I would get it. I'm not an affiliate. Although Canva, hey, if you want to talk to me about how you can improve Canva, I know lots about publishing and how to make, to get all your indes design people that are still holding on to Adobe come on over. So, you let me know if you want to do that Canvas representative, my email is roive at gmail.com or if anyone else wants to get a hold of me, get a hold of me. I have I'm kind of backlogged with emails right now. It's's just that I work full-time and I love my work. I love the work that I do and I love my family. I also love my podcast, my fans, but I just, it's 24 hours in a day, even though time is not real. but it's hard to get to all the emails. I always appreciate them, though. So if you email me one day, one sweet day, I will get back to you. Just know I do read it and it goes straight to my heart and I do appreciate it. So thank you so much for each and every one of you that is send a nice kind email to me. I feel it, I love it and I hope that you enjoyed the podcast, this one and everyone. Okay, have a great day.