Overview
What is Canva? Canva is an online graphic editing program that provides templates, images, and elements to build any type of graphics. It is one of the most amazing editing tools available, especially considering it is absolutely free to use and browser based – so no downloads are necessary. This tool can help do anything from create invitations for your baby’s birthday bash, to making extremely professional looking business tools like business cards or flyers. One of its best features are the built-in templates, which will give you stunning design elements that you can customize and personalize with your preference of colors, images, and fonts.
Canva has an option for a premium model, which is really targeted towards a workplace where more than 10 people need to share graphics between each other within their Canva account. However, if your company isn’t willing to pay for this you can just manually share downloaded images with each other.
Who Is Canva Good For?
Canva is great for anyone, but especially people who need a quick and easy tool to create beautiful graphics for social media, banner ads, website images, or any graphics for just about any occasion or profession. Small businesses and solopreneurs can take advantage of this tool to create their own images for Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, Business Cards, Posters, Flyers, or any other graphic needs (you can customize the dimensions to use it for any size imaginable). Larger businesses can use this as well if they do not have a design department or contracted designer. Really, this is an amazing tool for anything and anyone, and the best part is you need ZERO expertise in graphic designing to make perfectly usable images.
Canva Pricing Models
- Canva’s standard tool is free.
- Canva offers a Premium Upgrade for $12.95 a month or $9.95 a month if paid annually.
- You might also opt to pay for ad-hoc Canva elements such as stock images or backgrounds that are watermarked/not-royalty-free.
Canva Features
- Gorgeous Templates
- Easy-to-use editing features
- Drag n drop editor
- Pre-sized Social Media templates
- Millions of images to use
- Free icons, backgrounds, and images
- Photo filters for photo styling
- Upload your own images to use within their tool
Video Tutorial
Canva Walkthrough
Creating a Pinterest Pin with Canva
Screenshot Examples
Screenshots of the Canva experience, including the dashboard controls & examples.
Canva Screenshots
Integration Options
- Tailwind
- ShortStack
- WordPress
Benefits You Might Love
- Free Design Templates
- Free Social Media Templates
- Free Icons
- Free Images
- Easy to use Interface
- Drag and Drop functionality
- Customization, resizing, colorizing of all elements
- Photo filters and resize options
- High resolution download options
- Sharing within application and social sharing
Areas For Improvement
Grabbing Elements
It’s hard to really complain about such a wonderful and free tool, but grabbing text and other elements can sometimes be tricky.
Sorting
It can be a little tedious to scroll through pages and pages of templates or images and then try to get back to something you might have passed in the process of scrolling. You will have to rescroll to the spot you were at if you move off of the item without selecting it.
Helpful Negative & Positive Customer Feedback
” One of my only frustrations is that when previewing a template (i.e. clicking on it to open it up), it ends up being saved to my dashboard of templates, even if I was simply wanting to view the template at full-size. I understand this is probably part of the auto-saving Canva does, but there are a lot of times when I want to see a template in a larger size before I decide If I want to use it or not. It seems like once any template is opened Canva assumes I want to save it. It adds an extra step to have to delete the unwanted template out of my dashboard.”
“Canva has demystified design to the point that I’m starting to fear for my job! (Just kidding, but only kind of). Canva has been a lifesaver! So many people on our team wanted to make their work look better, but didn’t have a place to start. They were never going to be able to master the Adobe Creative Suite, and even those who had put time into learning it did not necessarily have an eye or instinct for design. Canva has made it possible for those people to create great looking documents, slide presentations, and graphics with no prior experience. The pre-made templates, color palette suggestions, and embedded assets including photos and icons give you everything you need. All you have to do is drag and drop!”
FAQs
Do I have to be online to use this?
Do I need to add credit card information to use Canva?
Is there an alternative product to Canva?
The Scoop
I can’t say enough about Canva, and while I probably shouldn’t say this, I would easily pay for such an incredible tool – but what’s amazing is, I don’t HAVE to. Canva makes it easy for someone with absolutely no graphic design experience to look like they know what they are doing. This is what technology should be all about, making things easy and fun with the right tools.
For anyone who has a business, check this tool out. If you’re not blown away by it I’d be very surprised. It will make your digital marketing life SO much easier. It also has plenty of options for things you could do in your personal life, like making party invitations or even a calendar. There’s very little from a design perspective that Canva isn’t up to the task to achieve.
