Canva gives organizations, businesses and individuals a simple designing platform that lets them create some expert and amazing quality graphic designs.
This online design solution provides you with a host of effective features that include drag-and-drop design tool and a huge collection of more than 1 million photographs, fonts and graphics.
Canva – Create Amazing Graphic Design for Free
With this editing software tool, everyone can get a user-friendly and reliable designing tool that will make it easy to turn an idea into an impressive design, whether in print or online. Canva can be implemented for creating professional designs for all sorts of reasons.
Would you like to need graphics for all your presentations? Or would you like to create posters for your promotional campaigns? Do you need some visual charts that would match your blog content? For any purpose, Canva has you covered.
Overview of the Benefits of Canva
Canva provides, both novice and professional graphic artists, an easy yet strong platform for online designing that can turn the idea into impressive graphics and designs pretty fast.
This is deemed to be one of the best platforms for content creation and ideal designing tool for all those users who aren’t inclined graphically.
With this editing software, both organizations and companies can address the common issues that plague your content marketing efforts – ‘producing engaging content’ and ‘producing content consistently’.
Canva also has the best tools and functionalities that let users create appealing and awesome content. The entire process is also made seamless and easy.
The drag and drop editor of Canva is pretty powerful with its varied selection of fonts, images and templates. This makes it extremely easy for the users to build designs and documents from the scratch.
Users also get the option to create custom templates and designs that contain messages on their brand and company. The designs and templates are easy to edit and hence Canva makes sure there’s consistency of themes through your documents.
Documents, templates and designs can be easily configured so that the others can introduce and edit changes. The users can even comment on their work and this enhances collaboration and communication.
As Canva offers user-friendly applications, over several fonts and images and price rates that are budget-friendly, you can never go wrong with Canva.
Our Verdict
In case you’re someone who is looking for a full-fledged photo editing software for your browser, then you might be better off with an editor like Pixlr X.
However, if you want to create social media posts, posters that are stylish and that invite more viewers, Canva is definitely a good choice. You just have to keep in mind that you’ll have to pay in order to unlock several elements. Here are the pros and cons of this software.
THE PROS
- Has the best collection of templates.
- Easy-to-use.
- Stores all photos for future use.
THE CONS
- Most of the elements are for premium users only.
- Limited tools for photo editing.
Though you’re allowed to use Canva as a free photo editor, it is mostly used for changing simple snaps into poster, logo, invitation card or into a social media post. There are different membership tiers for Canva.
The free level provides you with a nice selection of templates and tools for transforming and optimising your pictures. However, the majority of locked and you have to buy in order to use the features.
User Experience
Before you get started, you have to create a Canva account using an email address or sign with a Google or Facebook account. This is definitely an added step but this also means at the same time that your projects will be saved and hence you can return to your previous work and keep working on it later.
Once you’re done with this, they will ask you which type of user you are, whether a teacher or a student or non-profit or a personal business. Canva says that this software is to recommend the right type of business.
Canva is mainly based around templates. Choose a category and you will soon be presented with a wide range of options to select from.
You will have to notice that, even though you have chose ‘personal’, there will be many templates that have a business angle. You can edit the graphics and text to your heart’s content. Make sure you choose something that appeal to you.
Immediately, it won’t be apparent which templates are available for the free members and which are assigned for premium users only.
You’ll need to move the pointer of your mouse over the chosen design and watch out for the label ‘Free’ at the right hand side of the thumbnail. This is something that is not preferred as there are tools like Fotor that make distinction pretty obvious.
One of the best features of Canva is their extensive range of free stock photography. However, if you’d rather work with one of your images, click ‘Uploads’ and you can either search for a picture or drag and drop it from your desktop. The uploaded images can be saved to the account and hence you can use them later.
In case you get stuck in the middle of something, you will always get help through the purple button at the bottom right. It is indeed great to see that support is not restricted to the premium membership tiers.
Canva is pretty intuitive as the social media templates are especially impressive. This is indeed a better choice for the small business organizations that have an aim of standing out in the crowd rather than individuals who are looking for a photo editor.
Though Canva is exceptionally easy to use, there are many who found that the type of result that they required for print proved to be extremely simplistic.
It is perfect for creating instant visuals as long as you don’t mind in sharing same templates with thousands of other people. From a personal and small business point of view, this is definitely a tool or a software to look forward to.