Are you having a hard time coming up with professional and captivating graphic designs to share on your websites, blog, or social media platform? If you’d like to enhance your infographic designing skills, we’ve got you covered.
We’re talking about Canva, a fantastic graphic design tool for web owners.
According to their website, you can use Canva to create any design in a matter of minutes. Whether it is a poster, a logo, a Facebook post, a video, or a business card, Canva has got you covered.
Let’s review some of the things Canva offers.
What is Canva?
Canva is a browser-based graphic design and image editing platform used to create professional branded marketing materials for businesses of all sizes. You can customize your graphics designs from scratch using the in-built templates to enhance your images with shades and effects based on your suitability.
This design platform also offers a wide range of useful features that can assist in your design efforts. Some of these features include:
- an easy-to-use drag-and-drop tool
- a simple logo maker
- a palette generator
- and a vast collection of images
- shapes, fonts, and icons
Canva’s features are free to use compared to other graphic software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator that are expensive. Canva platform allows you to execute most of the design ideas that you would otherwise use Adobe Illustrator to design logos, infographics, and other visual materials for your brand.
If your work doesn’t involve complex photo editing, Canva will easily tackle some creative design issues
including; basic editing’s like cropping, cutting, straightening, and adding effects to your images.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- It has a comfortable, intuitive interface – perfect for beginners.
- Your project and designs are automatically saved on Canva, allowing you to continue working on them anytime you want.
- It has thousands of in-built templates ready for use.
- Can create different graphic designs from logos, Facebook posts to business cards and fliers.
- The free edition has a bunch of great tools that will aid you in getting started.
- Has a social media collaboration tool that enables you to post your designs directly to those platforms.
Cons
- For those that are not familiar with drag-and-drop functionality, it may be a little sloppy.
- You can’t work with it while you’re offline.
- To access some more advanced features like Alpha transparency for PGN images, you will have to upgrade to Canva-pro.
- Hard to use on small screens.
Canva Features
1. Use Photo Effects to Improve your Images
Canva makes it easy for you to spice up your images. You can get crafty with photo effects making your photos look stunning and more appealing. Using the photo effects is pretty easy with Canva.
Whether you are working online or using an android app, the platform has lots of cool photo filters that will give your photos that classy look. Just pick your image and click on the “Filter tab” here. You can scroll through and select any of the beautiful filters available.
If you know your way around graphic designing, you can easily custom-design your filters on the Canva platform.
2. Team Collaboration
With Canva, you can add your friends, colleagues, and other team members and work together on any design concept. With your team on-board, work gets done faster and enables members to create unique design concepts in real-time.
Whether it’s a presentation or a social media design, you can keep your ideas flowing by posting your comments, share your thoughts and ideas, give feedback, and tackle suggestions anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
3. Access to Vast Pool Templates, Videos, and Photos
Canva Pro plan gives you access to millions of stock images and videos and about 400,000 design templates to help you with your design work. Using this feature is relatively easy. Click on the Templates Tab, and Canva displays various templates based on the design concept you chose.
For Images, you can decide to upload your images using the Upload Tab or click on the Photos Tap to choose from the in-built photos.
4. Font Library
Canva offers a vast collection of fonts for your use. To check them out, click the “Text Tab” to see hundreds of fonts and pick the best ones for your Infographics.
When searching for a specific font, Canva displays that particular font and other available fonts that complement it. From there, pick a font and type in your text.
5. Drag-and-Drop Editor
Beginners can easily find their way around this drag-and-drop feature. You should be able to do your designs in minutes, if not seconds. All you have to do is drag-and-drop items on the editor, then play around with the colors and fonts until you have the desired results.
If you are using a template, it becomes more comfortable as you already have the design concept and all you need to do is personalize the artwork to suit your desired product.
6. Social Media Publishing
Like other online image editors, Canva lets you post your photos directly to some of the biggest social networks.
Canva recently added another cool feature, where users can schedule posts to any social media network, including Facebook, LinkedIn pages, Slack, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn profiles.
7. Brand Kit
Canva has a storage area known as the Brand kit where all your brand artworks, including logos, colors, and fonts, are stored. The best thing about the brand kit is the ease of access to your design artworks. You don’t have to upload your logo and colors anytime you want to use them. They are already there. This saves you editing time and also brings out a uniform look for all your designs.
Canva Pricing
According to the Canva website, there are three distinct subscription packages. They include;
- The Free Version – Here, you don’t have to pay anything to use Canva. You can access all the available free designs to create a specialized graphics.
- Canva Pro – For just $ 12.95/month for up to 5 people. You have access to unlimited premium tools.
- Can Enterprise – For just $ 30/month, you and your team can manage your company brand with much ease.
Conclusion
Canva combines a user-friendly photo editing tool with thousands of graphic design materials to make designing easy. Canva is a heavenly tool for small businesses, entrepreneurs, social media influencers as well as bloggers.