Learn how Canva can level-up your content marketing game
Overview
Canva is a popular online tool for designing creative assets for websites, social media, digital ads, presentations, and much more. Canva’s simple drag-and-drop editor makes it easy for anyone to create beautiful designs in minutes.
Why Canva?
You’re probably wondering why someone would use Canva over other tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, and that would be a fair question to ask. Typically, more sophisticated tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud are much more expensive, have a much steeper learning curve, and often have complex features that most people don’t need for their day-to-day tasks.
In addition to Canva’s ease-of-use and versatility, it also comes packed with loads of predesigned templates and a massive selection of stock design assets that you can use in your own projects.
Canva can perform most common tasks related to designing creative assets, but there are cases where Canva may not be suitable. Despite this fact, I think Canva is a tool that everyone should have in their toolkit, even if you have more sophisticated tools like the Adobe Creative Cloud. The best part about Canva is that they offer a free plan that anyone can use to learn and start designing in minutes. Here are a few screenshots of Canva’s interface.
Features
Canva has loads of features, but in this section I’ll be covering the features that I use most frequently. For a full list of features included in Canva, I encourage you to explore them on Canva’s official website here.
-
Templates & Assets
Canva comes with a ton of stock content to help you save time and produce beautiful designs. Currently, the Canva Pro plan includes access to 100+ million stock photos, videos, audio, graphics, and more. It also comes with design templates for just about any use case including for social media posts. For anyone producing content for social media, Canva can be a game-changer.
-
Image Editor
Canva offers a suite of features for quickly editing images its drag-and-drop editor. In Canva, you can resize, apply filters, change colors, and make adjustments like brightness and vibrance. Among my favourite features is the “Background Remover,” which automatically removes a background from an image leaving only the subject. Additionally, I love that you can use Canva to optimize images for the web. -
Animation
Easily create motion graphics and video clips with Canva’s simple drag and drop editor. Leverage Canva’s massive library of templates and creative stock assets or use your own. Add text effects, transitions, and custom animations in just a few clicks. -
Media Conversion
Canva supports many different media formats. In terms of images, Canva works with JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF, and WEBP. For video, you can use MOV, MP4, GIF, MKV, and WEBM. Canva also enables you to easily convert from one format to another supported format. For example, you can convert a few PNG into an animated GIF.
Pricing
Wondering how much a Canva subscription costs? Well, you’re in luck because Canva offers a Free plan that includes most of the features you’ll need to get started. If you need the more advanced features, you can always upgrade to their Pro plan for a very reasonable $16.99 CAD per month. You can view their pricing page for the most up-to-date plans and pricing.
Next Steps
If you’re interested in getting started, then the best way to do that is to signup for Canva’s Free or Pro plan and start exploring. You can view plans and included features on Canva’s pricing page.
There are plenty of both free and paid resources for learning Canva out there. For example, the video tutorial below provides a step-by-step workflow for creating a social media post in Canva with some great design tips along the way.
I would also encourage you to check out Canva’s own courses here. But why stop there? You can also check out YouTube for more free tutorials or invest into some paid courses from an online learning platform like Udemy.
Conclusion
In this article, we looked at what Canva is, what it can do, and how to get started with using this handy design tool. If you liked this article, please consider supporting me by following my business page on LinkedIn and be sure to turn on notifications. If you have any questions or are interested in hiring me for one of your projects, feel free to get in touch.
