Is Canva the right fit for you? Let's find out!
In the world today with small businesses, side hustles, and simply a need for a creative outlet, everyone is looking for more economical tools to help express themselves, their products, or their business. Canva has become one of the #1 leading tools for creating anything, from eye catching social media posts, to high quality newsletters. And the best part about it is, they give you tools to help get you started.
Like any program, it’s nice to know the basics before committing, which is why I’m here to give you the lowdown on everything Canva.
1. Pricing
So unlike most programs, Canva is completely free for individuals. All you have to do is create an account and bam! You can now start creating your amazing designs. There are some limitations to the free version that only allow you access to around 1 million stock photos, templates, and elements, as well as not being able to work as a team. However, for only $12.99, you can upgrade to Canva Pro and gain access to over 60 million stock photos, templates, and elements, as well as gain access to creating teams and much more! So for me, this is by far the most economical product out there to help you start making progress on your graphic design goals!
2. Features
Canva excels in how user friendly it is for “non-experienced” creators. Through helpful elements and templates, anyone can get started creating. Let’s go through my favorites.
Templates
This goes without saying, most people (myself included) have a hard time getting inspired for a design. Need an eye catching social media post for a new product, or a quick and easy moving checklist for your clients as a real estate agent? Well, look no further than the template page. Just type in what you’re looking for and scroll through the results till something speaks to you. You’ll have to tweak the photos, text, and colors to fit your brand and goals, but it’s a good start to a finished product!
Elements
The elements section is so much more than it sounds. This section includes shapes, graphics, stickers, stock photos and videos, sound clips, and much more. It’s super helpful in giving you tools to quickly carry out your designs. Just type in the toolbar what you’re looking for, from photos of a house, to a chart for showcasing your company's monthly sales results for the past year, and watch your options appear below.
Apps
Like most programs, Canva offers app integrations to help make designing easier for beginners. Apps like Google Maps and Pixton can be used to help you seamlessly add a google map to your design, or find funny illustrated comic characters to bring your graphic to life. It helps save time and frustration when it comes to creating your vision.
3. Branding Capabilities
This is probably one of my favorite things about Canva because it makes it so easy for small businesses to create their branding on their own. Canva’s Brand tool has a few features that makes creating designs quick and easy.
Brand Kit
Needless to say, this is basically your “brand bag.” What I mean by that is, this is where all the components of your brand design are stored. All you have to do is upload your logo, colors, and fonts, then it’s seamlessly integrated into your elements. This is especially helpful when working with teams as well. Just invite someone to your team and voila! They now have access to your brand guide, making it extremely easy to collaborate on any design project.
Brand Templates
This is the golden ticket my friends. The brand templates page lets you save any of your designs as a template to used for a future purpose. For example, why would you want to create a design to announce your new blog on social media every time you have a new blog post launch? The answer is, you don’t. This is where brand templates come along. Create one, save it as a template, then each time you’re ready for a new launch, just tweak the information and you’re ready to go! It really is that simple, AND it helps beginners keep a strong and consistent brand across all platforms at any point in time.
Brand Controls
This only applies to people working with teams, but it’s still a nice feature. Just like with the brand kit, you invite your team members and they have access to your brand guide. However, everyone gets carried away sometimes and may or may not stray from the original guidelines if there’s no reinforcement. Brand controls help reinforce your guidelines by restricting team members to only using brand colors and fonts, and you can even choose a control that requires approval by a certain person prior to being published.
So to wrap it all up, Canva has some very noticeable pros such as the pricing, its features, and its branding capabilities. Would I say it’s the #1 graphic design program out there, probably not. But, for beginners and small to mid-sized businesses, Canva encompasses everything someone would need to help get them started turning their visions into a design.
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