Today, you can create any presentable, professional-looking design you want on Canva, but you can also do a lot more with a Canva Pro membership. It’s a pretty sweet deal.
I’ve been using Canva Pro for more than 2 years now. It is always my go-to graphic editor. for my websites, youtube channels & other personal stuff. So, in my opinion, if you’re serious about growing your brand with powerful, visually-stimulating images then this is an absolute must. I also can honestly say that Canva Pro has made my life much easier as I am not a designer.
In addition, the Canva team is constantly improving the app and it’s one of the best value-for-money apps available out there. So, for anyone that is thinking about investing in a tool like this, I will highly recommend Canva Pro.
So in this article, I am going to walk you through my favorite design tool of all time: Canva. It’s quick, easy, affordable, and you can use it on a smartphone, tablet, or computer.
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Why Canva Is My Favorite Design Tool For Non-Designers
If you’re an entrepreneur or marketing manager or a non-designer like myself trying to convey your brand message, banner design in your website, design, and inbound marketing, you may not have the time or resources to engage a good designer to help you with that.
When I started creating websites for myself, one of the biggest frustrations and challenges I encountered was that I didn’t know how to start to design. So after using Canva. It’s a free popular online tool and also does have paid options like Pro or Enterprise version with more features that allow adding team members for easy collaboration and anyone—whether they are designers or not—to create beautiful, professional images with ease, simply just to click and drag!
How to Use Canva
In case you didn’t already know Canva is a free online tool to help you create amazing images for your blog posts, websites, emails, and social media.
The best part? It’s very easy to use. All you need to do is type in your text and add images from anywhere on the internet. Once you’ve finished creating your design, you can download your image and share it on all of your favorite social media platforms. I will be going through a short run-through below with screenshots and hope can give you better ideas.
Canva Main Page Overview & Create A New Design
Here is the main page after you signed in to Canva, I believe it will be the same for Canva Pro and Free versions. You can start off with the button on the top right called Create a design or search something from the textbox.
In this example, I will create an infographic.
Select The Suitable Templates for Your Design
As you can see there are different types of templates for you to select.
Editing & Save Your Design
The options are similar to using Word, Powerpoint documents, you can simply add a new textbox, drag, and resize the textbox easily. As for changing the font type, size, colors, background, alignment, spacing, adding of effects, etc is located on the above toolbar.
You also can search Photo which can be found at the left sidebar. Simply just type what photo you looking for. For example, I typed happy kids and it will show all the photos related to happy kids.
All this can be simply done within Canva which I feel saves you a lot of trouble and time instead of going Unsplash, Pexels to look for copyright-free images. I also want to highlight that they are paid photos as well for Canva Pro and that’s one of the reasons why I signed up for the Pro version since they are more variety of photos I can use for the Pro version.
Besides adding a new photo to your design, you can do the following from the left menu bar options:
Templates & Photos – I have already covered earlier
Elements – You can add grids, shapes, graphics, charts to your graphics easily.
Uploads – You can upload media photos and video from your laptop for your design
Texts – Different headings, fancy texts for you to enhance your designs
Audio – Add audio like background music especially you are doing some simple videos.
Logos – Add your business or brand logo easily from this option
Saving Your Work and Download
After all the editing is complete, you can share it on different social media platforms and other tools too. Popular social media Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. Most importantly online tools like Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack, and more where you can easily work with other team members and archive all the designs to your storage drive.
Alternatively, you also choose to download directly to your machine. It allows you to choose the size, quality, and different file types like MP4, JPG, PNG, GIF etc.
As for PNG, you can see in the screenshot below that there are options for the PRO version to download with a transparent background which is one of my often-used options, and compress the file.
Canva Free vs Pro Version
Canva’s free version has all of the basic editing tools you need to create amazing graphics without having to invest hundreds of dollars.
However, if you want a more advanced set of tools, the Pro version offers even more to enhance your photos. Some of the highlights of the paid version include more cloud storage, options like magic resize, download with transparent background, over 600,000 premium, and new templates are updated regularly. For the most updated comparison, you can refer to Canva’s page here.
Here are some key features in the Pro version that I actually love it
Premium Photos, Videos & Audios
You will be having access to hundreds of thousands of photos with the Free version but with the Pro version, you can enjoy over 100 million assets of photos, videos, and audios to offer you more selection while enhancing your designs.
Premium Professional Looking Templates
Do you spend hours hunting for the right template for your design? Instead of wasting time, access 600,000+ professional-level templates compared to the free version which is about 200,000+ templates that helps you to produce beautiful designs quickly.
Different types of templates for different purposes
Magic Resize
It is one of the easy-to-use features just by clicking and selecting which allows you to resize your design easily to the custom dimension that you need.
Furthermore, you can also resize to various different social media platforms at one go which a few clicks. All these do really help me save lots of time and trouble.
Team Members & Collaboration
The Canva Pro plan also allows inviting a minimum of 5 team users with collaboration features. It will be able to improve your process workflow if your business can work directly on Canva like sharing of design templates etc.
Brand Kit
With Brand Kit, you can easily set up your business logo, color, and fonts in Canva and share across with your team members in order for them to build designs that suits and align with your branding.
You can refer to this video below to find out more:
Animator Pro
You can easily turn your static design into different simple animated styles in the library available.
Canva Pro Pricing
Canva offers 3 different plans, Free, Pro, and Enterprise versions. As you can see, Canva’s Pro subscription plans are affordable for any small business or individual like me.
Although with the Canva Free plan, you can use all of the apps to create a variety of graphics from the photos & templates library (access to more premium photos and templates).
The Pro plan starts from $17.98 SGD monthly
Find Out More About Canva Pricing Here
Canva Pros and Cons
Here is an short overview of what are the pros and cons of this graphic design tool
Canva Pros and Cons
Pros
- Good & Responsive Support
- Easy To Use Interface
- Affordable & Reasonable Pricing Plan which offers free 30 days trial
- Easily Accessible From Your Laptop, Mobile, and Tablets
Cons
- Not easy to do editing while on a smaller screen like a mobile phone
- Unable to work in offline mode
Conclusion
In conclusion, you can edit and manipulate images to create any number of design elements, including custom logos, headers, and backgrounds. There are many different ways to use Canva, but in this guide, we’ll cover the basics features of how to create a banner image for your business using the Canva app.
In case you are not aware, this article post’s feature image is also created using Canva.
