Canva is arguably the most popular online design tool that is taking the design world by storm. Currently it has over 30 billions users and a $6 billion valuation so it’s no joke, the figures speak for themselves.
While there are many other design tools and softwares around, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and PicMonkey being very well-known ones. Photoshop can be described as heavy duty software, there’s a lot to learn and it can take a while to get familiar with all the software. Canva stands out for how accessible and user-friendly it is. It is a graphic design tool for people who aren’t experienced graphic designers. You can design everything from infographics to PDFs to invoices to flyers to websites to posters to eBooks. You don’t need any special programming skills to use this software. Users can always use images from the image library and other images from sites like google or any other search engine.
Canva is suited for most people and businesses, namely social media influencers, entrepreneurs, marketers and graphic designers who want to make quick designs or even more detailed ones!
So without further ado, here are the features and benefits of Canva:
- It’s free!: We all love free stuff. All you need is to do is create a free account on their website, no card details or trial runs. The most significant feature is that despite being free software, they don’t include any watermark or their logo in the final output of the file. This makes it very easy for you to use the images created using just the website. You can upgrade but the amount of features available on the free version is more than good enough for most.
- Photo Effects: Canva offers loads of photo effects and editing tools for you to edit photos that canva provides and for photos you upload. These settings allow you to: flip photos, crop them, add filters and adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, tint, blur, etc.
- Access to photos, videos, templates: With the free version, you have access to over 8,000 free templates and over a 100 design types. These numbers exponentially grow when upgraded to a Pro account with access to over 420,000 templates, 75 million premium stock photos and videos and customer templates.
- Publish or Schedule: After you’ve created your masterpiece, you have the option to publish content to a social media platform, most of which Canva will suggest or you can choose to schedule your posts to social media sites such as Facebook pages, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc.
- Font Collection: Caava has a massive font library where you can find anything from sophisticated fonts to more abstract fonts. A great feature is that if you search up a font, Canva will also pull up fonts that it thinks will go well together with the one you searched up.
- Create More: As mentioned before, Canva isn’t just for creating images. You can create presentations, eBooks, posters, infographics, business cards, logos, websites, resumes, lesson plans, storyboards, Christmas cards and so much more.
- Content Planner: Canva allows you to plan your content beforehand in a calendar-like space where all your images that you’ve planned/scheduled will appear and wherever you see blanks, you can click the + sign to add content there.
- Brand Kit: Canva’s brand kit is a storage space for your brand assets, such as your fonts, brand colors, and logos. A great benefit of this is that you can easily access it when editing and it saves you a lot of time.
- Animate Feature: You have the option to animate a still image by using Canva’s animate feature that’s usually at the top. Animations include Block, Breathe, Fade, Pan, Drift and Rise.
- Collaborative approach: You can also share direct links to the images so that other people can edit your images. This is very useful if you have a team working on a project together and want other input on an image or help building it out. It’s also great if you want to get a professional designer involved to develop your images further!
So what are you waiting for? Get creating on Canva now!
ABOUT DIGITAL PRACTICE
Led by Marketing expert, Muireann Fitzmaurice, DigitalPractice.ie is a social media agency that create branded social media content for professional practice owners. It is a subscription service that provides physiotherapy-based content to the practice owner on a monthly basis that can be used on all social media channels. Saving you time and headspace each month to concentrate on other areas of the business.
