Canva Review: is It the Best Designing Tool?
Do you wish to design pro graphics without being a pro graphic designer? Read this Canva review to know all about the most loved designing tool. No matter whether you are a business or an independent professional, you can easily create amazing and professional quality graphic designs with Canva. Pretty cool, isn’t it? Let’s dig in a little more!
About Canva
Canva is a simple and easy to use photo editor that is designed for transforming simple snaps into posters, invitations, logos, social media posts, and so much more than just a desktop publishing software. This design tool has many powerful features to offer along with a library collection of 1 million+ photos, graphics, and fonts.
It is an ideal tool and content creation platform for those who are not graphically inclined. Canva understands the two important parameters – producing engaging content and producing content consistently – that has proved a challenge to many businesses. And rightly so, as Canva provides all the tools and functionalities that help users create highly-appealing and relevant content, thereby making the process easy and seamless.
Let’s into some of these features and functionalities that set Canva a class apart!
Canva Review
Centralize brand colors, logos, and fonts
Canva helps keep your brand guidelines up-to-date and in one place. You can enable your entire team to access and use your colors, logos, and fonts in all their designs, thereby maintaining the branding.
Save branded templates
You can easily create templates for everything – from social media graphics to photos to presentations. This ensures consistency and empowers your team to create their branded graphics.
Automated resizing
Canva lets you resize a design instantly into any format you need. Once you have created a design, you can always come back to it and repurpose it for a different social media channel or campaign. This is a great feature and comes in quite handy if you need the same media files in different formats suitable to different platforms.
Organize all your assets in folders
All the images and design assets that you download and use for your graphics can easily be stored and sorted into folders. And so, you and your collaborators can easily search all the previously used assets and logos that can be repurposed into other graphics in no time.
Invite teams to collaborate
Whether you are an individual professional or an organization, Canva is perfect for you. It has an internal commenting feature and collaboration system that aims at improving productivity and workflow.
Built-in templates library
Canva offers a wide range of templates, designs, illustrations, shapes, photos, icons, and animations to choose from. Some of these templates include that of flyers, resumes, infographics, posters, wallpapers, social media banners, invitations, business cards, brochures, certificates, etc. Canva customizes your designs and sends across relevant templates recommendations to make your work easier.
Easy navigation
Once an account has been created, the homepage and other elements can be found and navigated through easily. The side panels have everything that you would need to create your designs. You can even use the brand kit to manage color schemes and templates for specific branding.
Design school
What’s really mesmerizing is that Canva has its own Design school in a pilot partnership with platforms like Skillshare and Open Learning. In fact, it is also joining hands with the General Assembly, which is a design, tech, and business school to create a series of workshops. Here are some of the key components of Canva design school –
Interactive online design course
You can take interactive tutorials on branding, fonts, layouts, and more. In addition to this, you can even track your progress and share your results within your network.
Daily design publication
You can get access to great content every day in the Canva design school blogs. You will even find great tips and practices from design experts.
Teacher resources portal and lesson plans
The Canva design school also offers a comprehensive series of workshops and lesson plans that are specially designed for teachers in the classroom.
Save branded templates
You can easily create templates for everything – from social media graphics to photos to presentations. This ensures consistency and empowers your team to create their branded graphics.
Automated resizing
Canva lets you resize a design instantly into any format you need. Once you have created a design, you can always come back to it and repurpose it for a different social media channel or campaign. This is a great feature and comes in quite handy if you need the same media files in different formats suitable to different platforms.
Organize all your assets in folders
All the images and design assets that you download and use for your graphics can easily be stored and sorted into folders. And so, you and your collaborators can easily search all the previously used assets and logos that can be repurposed into other graphics in no time.
Invite teams to collaborate
Whether you are an individual professional or an organization, Canva is perfect for you. It has an internal commenting feature and collaboration system that aims at improving productivity and workflow.
Built-in templates library
Canva offers a wide range of templates, designs, illustrations, shapes, photos, icons, and animations to choose from. Some of these templates include that of flyers, resumes, infographics, posters, wallpapers, social media banners, invitations, business cards, brochures, certificates, etc. Canva customizes your designs and sends across relevant templates recommendations to make your work easier.
Easy navigation
Once an account has been created, the homepage and other elements can be found and navigated through easily. The side panels have everything that you would need to create your designs. You can even use the brand kit to manage color schemes and templates for specific branding.
Awesome Animation Effect
You can animate the way you want with ease with Canva. If you really want to design cool yet branded graphics. Go get it now.
Design school
What’s really mesmerizing is that Canva has its own Design school in a pilot partnership with platforms like Skillshare and Open Learning. In fact, it is also joining hands with the General Assembly, which is a design, tech, and business school to create a series of workshops. Here are some of the key components of Canva design school –
Interactive online design course
You can take interactive tutorials on branding, fonts, layouts, and more. In addition to this, you can even track your progress and share your results within your network.
Daily design publication
You can get access to great content every day in the Canva design school blogs. You will even find great tips and practices from design experts.
Teacher resources portal and lesson plan
The Canva design school also offers a comprehensive series of workshops and lesson plans that are specially designed for teachers in the classroom.
Canva Free Vs Canva Pro
Canva offers a free or a basic plan as well as a pro plan. Let’s discuss each of these in detail.
Canva Basics
- 1 GB storage for photos and assets
- Two folders to organize designs
- Access to 8000+ templates, upload of personal images
- Access to millions of free photos with the option of pay-as-you-go premium content.
- Feature to invite your team members for free via email and admin or member rights.
- Access to animated graphics with different animation styles that are downloadable as GIFs and MP4.
- You can even download your designs with a transparent background.
- The resize feature to instant change your designs into custom dimensions.
- Access to the brand kit to organize and customize elements of your brand like the logo, colors, and fonts.
- Invite your team collaborators and provide them access as admins, members, or the template designer.
- Access to 1000+ premium fonts with an option to upload your own.
- 100 GB storage for uploading your photos and designs.
- Access to 4 million+ premium free photos, illustrations, and icons.
- Create and add unlimited folders to organize your designs and images.
Canva Pricing
Canva offers a free plan and two other priced plans – Pro and Enterprise. Canva’s Free plan is great for individuals and small groups who work on quick projects. The features that come along in the free plan have been discussed above, but here is a small recap of some of the key features.
Free
$ 0
00
- It is great for individuals and small groups who work on quick projects.
- Access to 8000+ free templates.
- 100+ design for social media posts, graphics etc.
- 1000+ free photos and graphics.
Pro
$ 9
95
- It is great for those who need a higher level of personalization.
- Brand Kit & design resize.
- 60 million premium stock images, videos, and graphics
- Can upload your own fonts and logos
Enterprise
$ 30
00
- It is perfect for teams who needs advanced brand and collaboration control.
- Access to control what members can do.
- 24/7 enterprise-level-support.
- Unlimited storage & template locking.
How to get started with Canva Pro? Step By Step Tutorial
If you want to upgrade to Canva Pro, simply follow these easy steps!
Step 1
Head over to canva.com in your browser and click on the ‘Pricing’ tab.
Step 2
Click on the ‘Try for free’ tab and choose your plan by signing up with your Facebook, Google, or email.
Step 3
Now that you have chosen your plan click on the ‘Try it free for 30 days’ tab.
Step 4
Once done, select a monthly or yearly plan and proceed through the payment with a credit card, and you’re ready to go!
Enjoy using your Pro account for a month and switch to basic to stick to the plan as per your usage!
Conclusion
Canva is the recommended tool for those who are not design experts, as it is an easy platform to create graphics. Do let me know your views/experience about the tool in the comment below and keep bestowing your love in the form of likes, shares and comments.
What are you waiting for?
But if you are still unsure, you can try out the free version and, of course, decide for yourself! So head over canva.com and get started today!
