Canva is a website that is very user-friendly when it comes to creating graphic designs. You don’t have to have any pre-existing experience or knowledge to get your creativity out! All you need is just basic computer skills and the desire to create designs. If you are reading this article, you got all the skills you need already. Through this application, you can make designs for personal use, a business, education, etc. Any design that is created is yours and can be showcased in any way possible.
Step 1: Create an account
In order to use Canva, you have to set up an account. You will need an account to save your designs and be able to edit them in the future! Good thing is that you can also create an account with your Facebook or Twitter account too. It’ll save you some time from filling out their form!
Step 2: Figure out what you want to create
Canva offers many templates that best suits your needs! Make poppin’ Instagram posts or a beautiful design for a T-shirt. They really make it easy for you with these preset templates and sizes.
Step 3: Take your time and check out what they’re giving you to work with
Canva has thousands of features and it can all be overwhelming at first.
- Thousands of designs that you can browse through and use or get inspiration
- Hundreds of color schemes that you can test out and see what fits best
- Thousands of stock photos you can use or you have the option to upload your own photos
- Thousands of different shapes, stickers, and other decorations you can choose to create unique designs
- Hundreds of font examples along with hundreds of other fonts to choose from
- The option to also upload your own font
- Add music, animation, and make videos!
They offer a lot of features that really expand your creativity!
Step 4: Design!
In the photo above, all I did was a search for a “circle” and picked one of the font combinations that they had available! But this looks really plain. Let’s go to the “Element” tab and search for some fun stickers!
Ta-da! I just put together three things and it’s looking great (to me)!
The great thing about Canva is that you can access your design anywhere. They have a mobile app where you can edit your designs on the go! You don’t have to save your design to a flash drive or be restricted to only using a certain computer.
Step 5: Share and Collaborate
Canva has an easy to share option. If you are working with a team and you want to send a design you are working on to another person, Canva has that option. It’s as easy as entering in email addresses and sending it. Canva allows you to share designs with a thousand people before you have to pay. This makes it so much easier for people to conduct edits to your design if needed and give you feedback.
You can also save your design in a variety of ways:
- PNG (also gives you the option if you want your design to have a transparent background)
- JPG
- SVG (Sharp Vector Graphics) *PRO
- MP4 Video
- GIF
Step 6: Canva PRO?
This website is free to use, but they do offer a PRO version for $12.95/month. I personally don’t think it’s necessary to jump right into pro. The free version gives you A LOT to offer already. I recommend just playing around and seeing if you like the interface before charging your card.
The downfall of Canva:
If you have experience with advanced photoshop and other design programs such as Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Lightroom, you might think Canva is too simple and limits your creativity. There aren’t any advanced tools such as the Erase tool, Selection tool, Remove Background Tool, Color Hunt tool, Stroke tool, etc. Canva is a gateway program to the more advanced programs.
As Canva becomes more popular, originality is effected, which defeats the purpose of marketing. This either kicks in your creativity levels to the max or leads you astray. By using Canva, businesses may start creating designs and color schemes that are similar to other businesses without them even realizing it! The whole point of marketing is setting a business apart from others.
* Pro Tip:
You can use GIFs in your design! Go to GIPHY.com. Type in whatever you desire but instead of looking at GIFs, click on their Stickers.
Simply right-click, save the image, and then upload the GIFs to Canva and use them!
Go get creative and happy designing!
