Canva's Tom Carey on why imperfection might be your greatest creative weapon

Here's a thought that should make you think. Chess grandmasters, the finest strategic minds in the world, have started making deliberately imperfect moves. Not because they have lost their touch, but because perfect play has become the machine's territory. To beat AI at chess, you have to stop playing like one.

Tom Carey, creative director at Canva, came across this idea in a recent Bloomberg article, and it has clearly lodged itself somewhere important.

"I think the best work isn't 'perfect': it's different, it's awkward, and it makes you think differently," he says. "Producing work that doesn't feel perfect, it feels unusual, different and wonderfully weird."

How to differentiate yourself

Tom believes the same logic is heading straight for the creative industry, and that those who grasp it earliest will be the ones who pull ahead. And if you think about it, this makes perfect sense.

For decades, creatives have competed largely on technical polish: craft, execution, outputs. Now that AI can produce technically competent work at an industrial scale, polish alone is becoming table stakes. The differentiator is something stranger and harder to systematise: instinct, character, the fingerprints of a specific human mind.

The floor has risen. Now raise the ceiling.

Tom is, as you'd expect, a cheerful evangelist for tools that make design more accessible. Canva's mission, "empower the world to design", is one he describes with the kind of conviction that sounds genuine rather than scripted. "As a designer, it connects to a belief in my soul that everything can and should be well designed," he says. "Good design just makes the world better, more helpful, more beautiful and more enjoyable."

He's equally candid, though, about what that democratisation means for those who design professionally. "Just because more people can design doesn't mean everyone's at the same level," he reasons. "Yes, the floor has been raised, which is a good thing, but for professional creatives, the challenge and opportunity is in raising the ceiling."

And these aren't just idle words: the company he works for is putting meat on those bones too. For instance, Canva's acquisition of Affinity and, more recently, the animation software Cavalry both represent a deliberate bet that serious creative professionals need serious creative tools, not a simplified alternative to them.

Making Affinity free for everyone last October, in Tom's view, was a direct expression of the company's values in practice. "For a freelancer in Lagos or a student in São Paulo, free access to genuinely professional tools is the difference between being able to pursue a creative career or not," he argues.

He is also clear about what Canva itself is becoming. "We're no longer just a design platform with AI features," he maintains. "We're an AI platform where design, creativity and imagination live at the centre."

The human in the loop

If there is a central argument running through Tom's thinking, it is this: AI handles the repetitive, the scalable, and the technically demanding, but taste, judgment, and human experience remain stubbornly irreplaceable.

He's not dismissive of the anxiety many creatives feel. "I understand the uncertainty, I've felt it too," he stresses. But he pushes back on the idea that the right response is to resist or retreat.

"What AI actually creates is an opportunity to work more efficiently, more productively, but more importantly, produce things we wouldn't have arrived at on our own and that the world has never seen before," he says. "That's not a threat to creativity. It's fuel for it."

As evidence, he points to Canva's "Make the logo bigger" billboard, which went viral not because of technical execution but because it tapped into something every designer has felt. "Human thinking and great tools, working together to make something that actually spoke to real people", is how he describes it.

Location, location, liberation

One of the more unexpected threads in our conversation is geography. Tom has worked in London, Melbourne, Sydney and San Francisco, and now operates from Shrewsbury, which he cheerfully brackets as "equally as glamorous". His point is not about lifestyle, but about talent.

"For too long, creatives have felt pressure to live in specific cities just to access the best opportunities," he says. "But some of the most talented people I know are based everywhere from a small island in Scotland to the mountains of Switzerland." He's built Canva's European creative team on that principle, selecting for attitude and ability rather than postcode. He argues it has produced a richer, more genuinely diverse set of perspectives than proximity to a capital city ever could.

This matters more than it might seem. If the creative industry's next phase is defined by taste, instinct and originality rather than technical execution alone, then the arbitrary narrowing of the talent pool by geography becomes not just unfair but strategically stupid.

What the grandmasters know

Finally, we return to those chess players and their imperfect moves. In a world saturated with AI-generated content, work that feels frictionless, seamless and technically immaculate may actually start to read as machine-made, and therefore forgettable. The things that snag attention will increasingly be the ones with texture, personality, and a hint of the handmade. As Tom puts it: "In a world full of AI, the things that really stand out are the ones that are deeply human and full of character and soul."

Overall, then, Tom's message is less about survival and more about redirection. You don't need to out-automate the machines. You need to out-human them. Lean into the strange, the specific, the stubbornly personal.

The grandmasters are not losing their grip on the game; they are changing how it is played.