Canva is a free visual design tool that lets you use professionally designed templates to make invites, business cards, brochures, lesson plans, Zoom backgrounds, and more.
You can also upload your own photographs and use a drag-and-drop interface to add them to Canva’s layouts.
It’s similar to having a free basic version of Photoshop that doesn’t require substantial photo editing knowledge to use. Everything you need to know about using it is right here.
What is Canva?
Canva is a platform with so many simple features and functionality that anyone can generate a wide range of engaging content that gets shared.
It is a graphic design platform based in Australia that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents, and other visual content. The software contains templates that users can use.
The platform is free to use, however paid memberships such as Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise are available for enhanced features. It will release a video editing feature in 2021. Users can even pay to have real things produced and mailed to them.
It raised A$60 million in June 2020 at a valuation of A$6 billion, nearly tripling its 2019 valuation. Canva raised $200 million in September 2021 and announced a valuation of $40 billion.
The site is free to use, however paid memberships such as Canva Pro and Canva for Education are available for enhanced capabilities.
- Canva Presentations – Create high-quality, modern presentations that will impress any audience.
- Marketing Media – Design bespoke brochures, posters, and business cards to effectively represent your company. Create your print media and receive free shipping.
- Infographics – Create visually appealing infographics for social media, to explain facts, or to convey the story of your research.
Elegant infographic designs make it simple to get started.
- Social Media Editor – Create visually appealing designs for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
What is a Canvas Print?
A canvas photo is a personalized image that has been printed on canvas and stretched over a frame.
Canvas prints are ideal for exhibiting a personal memory on a wall.
These prints are designed to look like original oil or acrylic paintings on stretched canvas.
Canvas used for picture reproduction is typically a cotton/poly blend that is around 0.017″ thick and weighs between 320 and 340 GSM (grams per square meter).
A printable gesso layer is included in the material to produce a lovely matte surface and to improve ink receptivity while giving a wide color spectrum.
In order to retain great image quality, canvas material frequently has a slight roughness. Canvas photos are printed at our stores on big format Epson inkjet printers. These printers print directly onto canvas rolls and offer print speed choices to achieve the best print quality possible.
How Does Canva work?
It is simple to sign up for, requiring only an email address, a Google account, or a Facebook account. Once you’ve made a free account, you can choose whether you want to use it as a teacher, student, or anything else. This will personalize the experience for you, making it easier to search.
Teaching students how to utilize it can be the subject of a class aimed at broadening their digital skills.
However, because this is so simple to use, it will most likely take very little time.
Allowing kids to experiment with different possibilities allows for greater learning and creativity to thrive.
It provides a plethora of virtual templates for students to work with and customize.
This allows them to concentrate on the topic at hand rather than waste time or energy learning how to use the technology.
Making a poster, for example, will begin with templates on the left, followed by the primary picture on the right that you can customize.
When you click inside this, a toolbar with editing options appears; this reacting as you work maintains things minimal and obvious throughout.
You can add your own photographs and movies, which is useful when using the app version on a smartphone. Once completed, you may download the file, share it via various social media platforms, or send it to a professional print shop to have it printed.
What are the best Canva features?
Canva is jam-packed with features, but many of them are educational in nature. Before we get into it, it’s important mentioning that Canva automatically saves. This is a fantastic feature for both teachers and students because it eliminates the need to worry about losing work, something many people have been accustomed to as a result of Google’s ecosystem of tools.
While the templates are wonderful for adding emphasis to any presentation, poster, or image, there are also powerful sub-tools. The graph templates, for example, are an excellent method to assist students in math and science classes by displaying specific data in a clear visual and entertaining manner.
Canva for Education is a useful feature of this service since it allows teachers to create a virtual classroom, invite students, and have them work together on a project.
This might be utilized in the classroom or remotely, using a video chat platform.
You can, in fact, connect Zoom and then present screen to show the slides with the class as you go.
Comment additions with @ options are useful for sending alerts to the teacher.
This allows students to inquire about their work as they progress, giving them confidence that they are on the correct track. A useful tool, especially in this creative setting where students are allowed a lot of leeway and might often feel a little disoriented, especially when working remotely.
It offers free online classes to help you learn.
There is a Canva for the Classroom course available to help instructors understand the best methods to use the program.
How Much Does Canva Cost?
Canva is available for personal and classroom usage at no cost.
While that does provide a plethora of tools and features, there are many more available with a paid Canva Pro or Enterprise subscription.
Canva Free includes over 250,000 templates, 100 design kinds, hundreds of thousands of pictures and graphics, collaboration, and 5GB of cloud storage.
Canva Pro costs $119.99 per year and includes all of the free features as well as brand kit upload options, one-click Magic Resize for images, over 420,000 templates, 75 million images, videos, and graphics, design saving for team use, 100GB of cloud storage, and social media scheduling across seven platforms.
It Enterprise costs $30 per person per month and includes everything in Pro plus more brand-focused capabilities that are unlikely to be used in education.
Canva Best Tips and Tricks
Plan lessons
Canva may be used to graphically set out the lesson for yourself as a teacher, but it can also be shared with students so they know what to anticipate and can plan accordingly.
Build student profiles
Make learning portfolios for students so they can see how they’re progressing throughout the year; this can also be a useful revision and review tool.
Collaborate
With up to ten participants in a project, have groups of students collaborate in class and online to create a finished body of work.
Chart Graphics
Canva, which is ideal for math and science, can be used to display data in rich charts and graphs to make presenting experiments and other information visually entertaining.
Create Many Types of Content
Canva, as shown below, provides a wide range of content formats.
You’ll discover practically anything you need, from pre-sized social media picture and header templates to marketing materials, documents, presentations, invitations, and adverts.
If you don’t have one, you can always make one.
Even better, Canva’s content types library is always expanding. They recently, for example, released templates for both eBooks and resumes.
Drag-and-Drop
Canva, like the majority of these options, supports drag-and-drop. When used with search, this function makes it simple to find and integrate picture elements that you like.
Tons of Images and Fonts to Use
Canva is an easy-to-use photo editor where you can change the look of your image using options such as filters, hue, brightness, and more, whether you use a free or premium photo, or even one you upload yourself.
Canva has hundreds of fonts from which to choose.
It’s difficult to quit playing with all those options!
Collaboration
Canva allows you to collaborate on designs in two ways: ask for feedback and open to edit.
Both kinds of sharing begin by clicking the “Share” button in the editor and then entering one or more email addresses into the email box:
If you do not click the box shown by the red arrow, you are sharing your project in order to receive feedback.
If you click that option, you’re allowing colleagues to edit your project.
In any case, an email is sent to those you’ve shared your information with:
When a user selects the “See the entire design” button:
- If you’ve invited people to review your design and provide feedback, they’ll see this screen where they can do so:
- If you’ve invited recipients to review and amend your design, they’ll see this screen (as you can see, we were able to change the font in this case):
iPad App
If you prefer to work on the fly, Canva has an iPad app that is just as feature-rich and simple to use as the web version:
Price
It is the most affordable option because it is completely free!
That’s correct, you may use any Canva template for free.
The only time you’ll have to pay is if you utilize one or more of the premium photographs, which they sell for a cheap fee of $1 per image.
Do you refuse to pay? Not a problem!
They also provide a plethora of free photos for use.
How Do You Use Canva for Business?
Canva for business is mostly used to develop and distribute interesting content that will attract your targeted prospects both online and offline.
To get you started, here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a picture for a Facebook update.
These kinds of photographs can quickly go viral, especially if they’re hilarious or useful.
1. The first step is to choose a template.
We’re going to use the Facebook Post template, as shown by the red arrow, and all we have to do is click on it.
2. The following screen is where the magic happens.
There are a lot of things crammed into this area, so here’s a quick rundown to get you started:
- Search tab – This is where you may locate photos, icons, charts, and other useful resources.
- Layouts tab – Canva provides a number of ready-to-use picture layouts.
- This saves a lot of time, especially if you need to move rapidly.
- Text tab – This is where you’ll discover the text components, including pre-formatted styles as well as text in images like speech balloons and more.
- Background tab – If you aren’t utilizing a layout and are beginning from scratch, you can select one of the various background colors and images available here.
- Uploads tab – You may upload and use your own materials, such as photographs and logos, in Canva.
- Zoom Control – Use this to enlarge or reduce the size of your work area.
- Search form – This search form is always available for use;
- Canvas – This is where your artwork will be created.
- Add a new page – Many types of material can have multiple pages, and this is where you create them.
- Page controls – If you have many pages, utilize this area to browse between them, copy them, delete them, and, of course, know which page you’re on.
- Design Name – Here you can change the name of your design.
- Share button – As previously explained, use this to share your design.
- Download button – Use this to save your image.
- Make Public – Use this button to publish your design to Canva’s “stream”;
- Help tab – Support is available with a searchable knowledge base that you can access and use while still working on your design.
3. It’s now time to make an image!
We’ll begin with the search tab, which, as you can see, allows you to search by keyword or element category:
We’ll choose the “Charts” category and then add an icon:
4. Next, we’ll use the upload tab to add a picture.
Once it’s there, all we have to do is click on it to add it to our image:
5. It’s now time to add some additional text, so go to the Text tab.
We liked this ready-to-use text element and decided to use it in our image:
6. Next, we’ll change the appearance of the text element as well as what it says.
Canva’s contextual menus make this simple:
7. To make the chart indicator overlap our text element, simply click “Back” while the text element is selected:
8. We’re about there!
In this stage, we finished altering the text element, added a heart image (through the search form), and then adjusted the size and position of each element to make it seem right:
9. Then, to the Background tab, to, well, add a background.
To complete our design, we used a crinkled paper image:
10. It’s finally time to download our finished design.
First, we press the Download button:
Because our image was made entirely of free parts, we received the following notification during the download:
If we had used one or more of the $1 premium photos, the following screen would have appeared throughout the download process:
11. Now that we’ve downloaded our design, we can share it on Facebook and watch it go viral:
Best Canva Alternatives for Graphic Design
Looking for an alternative?
Visme, Adobe Spark, Design Wizard, Easil, Snappa, Crello, Stencil, and PicMonkey are eight Canva alternatives (both premium and free) that help you create eye-catching graphics.
Let’s take a look at each of these tools to discover which one is the greatest graphic design solution for you.
- Visme
- Adobe Spark
- Design Wizard
- Easil
- Snappa
- Crello
- Stencil
- PicMonkey
How do I Create a Project in Canva?
1. Choose the right dimensions for your design
To begin, go to the Canva site and select a design type.
These are optimized for each graphic, whether it’s a social media post, a flyer, or something else.
Custom dimensions can also be found by searching for “custom size.”
You have the option of using pixels, millimetres, or inches.
2. Choose a background
Colors for the background
Design tip: Various colors convey different messages.
Purple is associated with individualism, orange with energy, and green with nature.
Consider which colors will best suit your needs.
Using our color palette tool, you may find a decent color combination.
You can incorporate background or feature photos into your design.
3. Add your elements
Design Tip: Make use of negative space.
Negative space, commonly known as white space, is any region inside a design that is devoid of text, images, or embellishments (it does not have to be white). Designers like it because it can aid with grouping, emphasis, and legibility.
4. Choose the right fonts
Design tip: Typographic hierarchy determines the relative importance of various design elements. You may radically alter the way your message is received by using varied fonts, colors, and scale.
To be good at design, you do not need to study for hundreds of hours. But, like with most things in life, practice makes perfect, so don’t be discouraged if your initial design isn’t flawless. Instead, continue to practice and create.
You’ll be producing stunning, polished photographs in no time.
Canva has more than 50,000 templates to choose from
Canva has thousands of free, professionally designed templates that can be altered with a few clicks thanks to its drag and drop interface.
Simply upload your photographs to it, place them into your preferred template, and save the file to your computer.
Canva offers dozens of template options.
Zoom backdrops, posters, presentations, flyers, cards, infographics, business cards, Instagram posts, resumes, invitations, book covers, menus, letterheads, newsletters, photo collages, tickets, bookmarks, invoices, recipe cards, and more are among their template categories.
Canva’s extensive suite of features helps your photos pop.
Its beginner-friendly tools make photo editing straightforward, from basic cropping and straightening to adding textures and color correction. You may add a textured background to your photo to give it more dimension, input text to make your own meme, make a photo grid, blur your shot, and many other things.
It allows you to upload your own photographs and create personalized designs.
Canva offers free video tutorials
If you’re new to graphic design and want to learn about branding or how to use it in the virtual classroom, their website offers free video courses.
With so many layouts and options available on it, it might be difficult to know where to begin.
Their Design School, which contains free video lectures on a variety of themes, is a wonderful place to start.
There’s a “Getting Started with Canva” lesson that gives you a brief overview of everything you can do on the platform, a “Canva for Education” course that helps teachers set up their virtual classroom, and a “Canva Pro” course that highlights Pro capabilities and how to use them. Canva Pro is a paid premium version of Canva that includes more features.
FAQs
Can I download Canva on my computer?
Go to canva.com/download and click the ‘Start Download’ button to download Canva on your computer. When the download is complete, navigate to your ‘Downloads’ folder and double-click the ‘Canva Setup.exe’ file.
Is Canva download free?
Yes, everyone can use Canva for free. You can design alone or in collaboration with others.
What is Canva project?
It is a free online graphic design and publishing platform that enables users to generate high-quality content. It has a variety of themes and features to help you get started, whether you need to make a presentation for work or sell your items with social media graphics.
What is Canva app use for?
The app, which is available for iPhones, iPads, and Android phones and tablets, allows you to create professional-looking graphics in seconds and makes it even easier to share your creations on social media sites.
Is Canva app safe?
It has ISO 27001 certification. This certification indicates that we have the people, procedures, and systems in place to effectively identify, assess, treat, and monitor our information security threats as an organization.
Is Canva resume acceptable?
For example, while using resume bots, it is critical to use a clear resume design. This means no complicated designs or unique formats; application tracking systems struggle to read these. It is also critical to avoid the use of any graphics or charts.
Are Canva resumes free?
Applying for your dream job is simple and quick using its free resume creator. Choose from hundreds of free, designer-made templates and personalize them in a matter of seconds. Forget about wasting time editing your CV or selecting complementary typefaces for your cover letter.
How does Canva make money?
It generates revenue through monthly subscriptions, print items, course sales, and marketplace fees.
The company’s business model is freemium.
It was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
The company’s current valuation is $15 billion.
Conclusion
Creating content that engages your targeted prospects is frequently the most difficult aspect of a successful content marketing strategy.
It allows you to generate that content fast and effortlessly, even if you have no or little graphic design experience.
Whether you utilize your Canva designs online or offline, you’ll be able to generate a wide range of interesting material that will attract your targeted prospects; after all, isn’t that what marketing is all about?
