Running a blog is challenging and building a strong social media presence can be very daunting. In this modern “Visual” era of information overload, people are in need of graphics in order to consume data easier and faster. They need to be informed but entertained at the same time. There are online design tools you can use to create beautiful images and banners for all your campaigns.
Canva Review
Website: Canva
Story
Melanie Perkins partnered with Cliff Obrecht to launch Fusion Books, an online tool to help teachers and students create their own yearbooks. When they realized that they could use their technology broadly decided to get in business with a new co-founder Cameron Adams. So this is how Canva was born.
Their main slogan…“Empowering the world to design”.. is absolutely true and I will explain why while uncovering the tool features.
How it Works
Before we get to the features let’s see how this works. When you enter their homepage there is an option to create a design choosing from an extended list and categories (when you hover your mouse over these categories the dimensions are displayed on the bottom of every image)…A new tab will be opened to access the application. Inside every category there are some ready-made images.
There is a variety of topics to choose and the quality is just awesome to ensure satisfaction even for the most demanding individual. Most of these images are Free but there are some designs you will need to pay in order to use them. Don’t worry, the usual price is set to $1.
Additionally, you can import images that you own or royalty-free images you downloaded on the web using any of the photo stock sites.
Search
There is a search function to crawl over their database quickly and when you do that some sub-categories are opened to help you with the process. You can find
Grids, frames, shapes, lines, illustrations, icons, photos, charts and more…
Layout
The layout tab is the one containing the pre maid images for the category you use.
Text
The text is for adding letters but in a creative way. This feature is what sets Canva apart from other applications as the pre-made texts come as patterns with shapes (like ribbons, triangles, circles) and on different sizes. If you don’t like any of these ready styles you can create anything on your own.
Background
A huge variety of ready images to choose from.
Uploads
This is where you upload your own images.
At the end of every project there are some options.You can download , share or make the project public.All the designs you will be creating are automatically being saved to the Canva website and whenever you revisit the tool , these projects are waiting for you.
Enough With the Words, We Need Some “Visual” Action
Social Media Banners & Headers
Twitter Post (1024 x 512 px) – Social media, Pinterest graphic, Instagram post, Facebook post, Tumblr graphic, Facebook app. I will proceed with the Twitter post as an example.
Documents
US letter (8.5 x 11 in) – Presentation – A4 – Letterhead – Magazine – Resume.I will create a a Resume (816 x 1056 px)
Blogging & E-books
E-book – desktop wallpaper – Kindle cover – Blog title – Blog graphic – Album cover – Infographic. I want the Blog title (560 x 315 px).
Marketing Materials
Real estate flyer – Poster – Foor & drink menu – Business Card – Flyer – Gift Certificate…The business card is calling me (8.5 x 5 cm)
Social Media & Email Headers
Facebook event cover – YouTube thumbnail – Tumblr Banner – YouTube channel art – Twitter Header – Google+ photo, Facebook cover – Email header – Etsy Banner…I think the YouTube Thumbnail (1280 x 720 px) is appealing.
Events
Postcard – Wedding invitation – Invitation portrait – Card – Photo collage. I choose the latter (25 x 20 cm).
Ads
Facebook ad – Wide skyscraper – Medium rectangle – Leaderboard – Large rectangle…I will go with my usual for social media banners, the large rectangle (336 x 280 px).
The Design Stream
On the homepage, there is a feature called design stream where you can get inspiration by viewing other people’s creations with Canva…An entertaining process that can give you a ton of ideas
What Else is in Canva? – Design School
A lot more, Canva is not a design application only.
The Blog section
…inside the Canva design school is a goldmine of inspiration and knowledge. Topics like
- Digital Marketing tools to try
- How to Stay Current on Social Media Marketing
- How to design your own book cover
- How to create custom thumbnails for your videos using Canva
- Canva makes you a graphic designer in no time
will expand your skills and boost your creativity
You can even browse by category
- Flyer design
- Email design
- Designer trends
- Fonts
- Infographics
- Typography
- Social Media Marketing
- Design Resources
and many many more…
Design Essentials – Tutorials
You can take lessons on design with their tutorial series, it is absolutely free.
- Beginners challenge
- Essential Canva tools
- Less is more
- Choosing the right font
- Font pairing basics
- Tips for titles
- Colour relationships
- Grids
- Enhancing images
- Photo filters
are some of their topics. Right now there are 30 learning parts, but there are new courses coming up.
The Workshops
It can be used for live instruction and through their topics you can access knowledge that ranges from the fundamentals of graphic or web design to practical everyday business projects.
The Lesson Plans are resources for teachers looking to inspire their students to think and express themselves creatively through visual design
Among others
- Visual Poetry
- Presidential Report Card
- Market a product
- Extreme graph makeover
- Time travel adventure
- Math vocabulary wizard
- Food chain – make connections
- Comic book creation
- Character analysis – creating a web
- All about a poster
- Historical infographic
- Author innovation through social media
- Social change through persuasion
- Mathematical modeling with Candy
- Discovering the periodic table
- Puzzle it out
- Put your stamp on history
- Fantastic fables
William Ferriter, Vicki Davis, Terri Eichholz, Steven Anderson, Paul Hamilton, Monica Burns and John Spencer are among the authors of this sub-department.
Photographers & Illustrators
Canva can help professionals and passionate artists to make money and reach a wider audience. The application has been used by more than 1 million people. Users are creating 460K designs every week.
You can contribute your high-quality images, illustrations, and vectors to Canva. All the images are licensed under a $1 one time use license. You earn 35% royalty every time someone uses them.
How This Works
You read the contributor’s guide, submit your online portfolio, you contribute via FTP using your Canva account.
Canva Careers
A new slogan appears …“Join us as we Transform the World of Design”…There is a working space if you are interested. The office has been designed with workspaces for every mood with a full-service bar where at 1 pm an amazing chef spoils the personnel with his “Delicious” creations.
Current Positions – Sydney
- Java engineer
- Front end engineer
- Fullstack engineer
- UI / UX designer
- Digital designer
Current Positions – Manila
- Customer Happiness in English
- Customer happiness in Spanish
- Content Marketing specialist
There is a registration form you can complete. I believe they are expanding really fast as a company, I can congratulate them and I hope they succeed in their goals.
Canva Button
This feature is amazing and lets your visitors create images with Canva on your website. When they finish the image will be stored on your site, on the page they created the design.
Unfortunately, there is a high volume of requests for API keys so at this time the function is unavailable.
iPad application
You can get this app here and create designs on your favorite device.
Canva Support
Topics included
- Getting started
- Using Canva
- Account settings
- Billing & payments
- Sharing & publishing
- Private, security and policy
- Contributors and partners
- Canva for work
Canva News-Press
This section brings interesting topics related to the industry concerning the company, the founders’ actions or progress.
A very interesting topic related to the Aussie start-up, the brainchild of Melanie Perkins, Cliff Orbecht and Cameron Adams can be found here. Two famous actors, Owen Wilson, and Woody Harrelson invested in Canva.
Canva for Work
This department aims to simplify the process of creating online designs, beautiful on-brand marketing materials, presentations and social media graphics for every organization.
It is ideal for companies, designing teams or individuals that need a more flexible way to create their artwork faster using extended features with a huge variety of graphics and images.
There are thousands of layouts (documents and designs) to choose while the normal Canva application has way less material. You can create and save templates, logos, fonts and share them with your Team Stream and share photo folders. A ready-made designing environment.
The professional application ensures consistency across your documents.
Among their clients, you can find Huffington Post, Hub Spot or Yelp and even social media teams like Donna Moritz’s.
Pricing
There is an introductory special that gives you Free access for 30 days.
- It costs $9.95 per month for an annual membership.
- or $12.95 per month on a monthly basis contract.
Resume – Final Take.
Canva is a fast tool, easy to use, accurate and the variety of images and texts makes it a precious ally on my everyday endeavors. I create banners, headers, images for social media and that application saves me a lot of time. There are more apps that I use for my graphics, one of them is the Online Logo Maker that I analyzed in a previous post
Of course, the Logo maker can be used with Canva as both applications can import data.
Related Resources
Other Free Design Tools
- DaButtonFactory
- Fotojet – Create Beautiful Collages
- BeFunky
- SmartGraphicCreator
- E-book cover creator
- Chartico
- Cooltext
- Picture Quote Maker
- Ribbet
- Snappa
- Online Logo Maker
I hope you enjoyed another article , here on Web Market Support. I am waiting for your comments and thoughts. Are you using Canva and want to share your experience? Till next time.
I remember using Canva a while back to develop some logos for one of my brands. One of the problems I had with it was it was a little bit annoying how you kept having to pay for the images if you wanted to use the better quality ones. I’m just wondering if they’ve changed this to a one time fee or monthly fee rather than paying per image since then? Also I was wondering if they have a mobile version just yet? Sorry – one last question! I was also wondering whether you know if the resolution is good quality with the images? I use Wordswag for a lot of stuff now and I’ve noticed that the resolution can be quite poor when you go to the full size image
Hi there Martina
I would not recommend Canva for creating logos but as a tool to produce images for the web in general. The quality is just fine, I never had any problem. And the price for premium images is only set to $1.
Good luck with your brands and projects
I once created an Infographic from Canva. I think it is great if you can create your own images as it will make you stand out from the crowd.
I know that one can benefit from it especially with Facebook ads because the higher your CTR, the less you will pay per click.
That is nice to hear Viljoen.With Canva you can create awesome designs in no time.And yes , this is a reson to stand out as you add your personal touch.Are you having great results with Facebook advertising?
Thank you for this visit and for sharing your thoughts.
Wow this is a very comprehensive guide! I do a lot of events and write a lot of articles and I need to know how to make my own custom designs. My sister’s wedding is coming up and I definitely need to try and impress her with a custom design wedding invitation card. Definitely trying Canva, those visuals look pretty awesome. Hope I can make designs as cool as that, wish me luck!
Welcome Riaz , I know how busy you are and I believe that Canva can really help you with this great idea for your sister’s wedding cards.
Thank you for another kind visit and for taking the time to discuss it with me.Good luck with your project and all my best wishes for your sister and the wedding.Great news.
Another awesome tool to consider for my website!! I’ve heard of canvas before but did not really look into it deeply and I always felt just using free images from a few websites limiting my creativity. This tool seems like an ideal to further my step on developing my website. Also it seems pretty fun. Thank you for providing a great information!
Welcome back Joon , go on and use Canva , you definitely don’t want to stop your creativity by simply adding images you find online.People want more than that.
Thank you for this visit and your participation.
I like the information on the website! I feel like you organized it well and it seems like you know a lot about your topic that you are talking about! I think you are doing a fine job at getting your website prepared for and I wish you well in your future! Good job and good luck!
Welcome Tempest , you are very kind , thank you for these compliments.Good luck to you too.
The Canva product appears to be a very versatile program with many applications. Is it truly as easy to use as you make it sound? I am a novice myself at designing and rely heavily on presets and images available for reuse. Is the program fairly user friendly for people such as me? Are there any drawbacks and limitations to usage? You say that all images are automatically saved. Does this make them available to everyone that uses Canva? You indicated that we are paid every time someone uses our design. How does this process work exactly?
Welcome David and thank you for your questions.
It is very easy to use , has so many presets and ready made images , text , banners that will help you along the way.
There is no limitation on the Free resources inside , but some of them are paid options.You can simply use the free as much as you want.
Although the images are stored inside and are visible to the community , I believe no one has the right to use them.Only the creator of an image.They are visible for inspirational purposes.
If you are a designer you can make money with Canva.You offer your artwork and get paid a commission whenever someone buys the paid version.At this time they have set the price to 1 dollar.But this way you can earn commissions multiple times from the same image , as long it is being used.
I hope this helps and if you need further help to use the tool don’t hesitate to ask me.I will be more than happy to assist you.But on the other hand I believe I have to create a video showing exactly how this works.Thank you for this visit , your excellent comments and I wish you good luck.
I have always thought graphics was too hard and had no idea how to start until I read your post. It has really opened the door for me. Canva is terrific and you have explained it in a way that is easy to follow and understand. I really like the way you have broken up your post into bite sized bits that make it easy to read.
Is there a way to upload what you create straight to Google Plus and Linkedin?
Welcome Margaret , creating graphics is not a an easy task but with tools like Canva anyone can make miracles.Additionally they offer so much information for free and their courses and blog will boost your knowledge and creativity.
You can not upload directly yo G+ or LinkedIn but you can on Facebook and Twitter.If you are looking for a multi purpose social media automation tool I would point you to check Hootsuite.
Thank you visiting my blog , your participation and your very kind words.
I’m really glad I stumbled upon this article. I’ve heard of Canva before but never had a chance to learn about how it works. I’ve been thinking about publishing an Ebook and I believe Canva just might be the best way to get started. Sounds pretty easy and simple to do. Thanks for writing this post, you provided a very clear picture of how the application works. I will try it out for myself.
Welcome to my blog Kelara , Canva might be the solution for your project and not only , you will have the chance to create beautiful artwork in no time for any campaign.
Thank you for this visit , your kind comments and I wish you good luck with this e-book.Cheers.
Very nice review of Canva. I’ve not used it but have read information online as I was considering it.
This is a well rounded product with some pretty cool features. I can see why you consider it to be your favorite tool for creating images.
I guess I need to take a closer look again. It might come in handy to use for creating ebooks and banners.
Thank you for an information article. I like how you laid it out and made it easy to understand.
Angela
Welcome Angela , there are so many features inside that could really help you and save you valuable time and money.Especially for banners is the ideal tool.You should check it out again.
Thank you for visiting my blog and for participating in the conversation.
Going by what I have read in your article, I can say that canva is one of the best sites for image design.The most captivating feature is the saving of created images to canva website, Another area I love is the design stream which is very appealing and inspirational and also the blog section is superb and will actually boast creativity, Actually, canva is a school of design and will settle for it.Thanks for the wonderful job,looking forward for more write up, All the best, God bless you.
Welcome Peter , this is exactly why I love Canva , because is not only a site to create images.The design school can help anyone get a basic knowledge on design principles and there are more advanced training courses.As you said , a school open for students , teachers , photographers , designers and technical teams.I am eager to watch their progress in this modern era.They are very promising.
Thank you for this visit and your kind comments.
Hi Tasos, I visited your site today, and I was reading your blog on Why Canva Is One Of My Favorite Tools To Create Images Online, and I was very inspired by all of the different features included in this program. Some of it seems over my expertise, but then I see the training that is offered. I really like the fact that you can receive royalties off of your creation if someone decides to use it. How long has Canva been around? Do you have to be knowledgeable about design or is it simple? I shall check back for your reply. Thank you for a great experience.
With Kind Regards,
Linda
Welcome Linda , indeed there are a lot of features on Canva and the training will help you out during your early steps.Photographers and designers can make money out of their platform.Design is just another skill , as long as you practise you are getting better but no , it is not simple I guess.This website is been around since 2012.
Than you for visiting my blog and for your kind participation.