Canva Review: A quick, make-shift app for designers

Canva has recently taken the on-the-go designers’ world by storm, with the release of its iOS app. Canva is a quick, easy and make-shift way of putting together simple graphics for your social media. Coming from someone who does a lot of their work on a mobile phone, it has saved me a ton of time and frustration over the past 2 weeks that I’ve been using it. The app lets you chose a format (Instagram post, Facebook banner, Twitter banner etc.) with the correct sizes in by default, and gives you the ability to use your own image, add as much text as you like, in any place on the image, add icons, adjust layouts and a few other bits and pieces. The major advantage that it has is that, within its photo editing tools, it can do pretty much what Instagram filters and VSCO can do, which is pretty powerful when it comes to mobile photography / quick graphic design.

Using Canva is kind of like using a template, as opposed to starting from scratch, although you can get rid of pretty much anything on the template that you don’t like. This is something that I have done; I chose a template that looked more or less like what I wanted, and realised that I can change everything on it from colours, to fonts, which there is a mass to choose from. This would be my tip, if you still want to pull maximum uniqueness out of something like this; ditch the templates, make your own within the app and use that on every image you create, if you are going for continuity which, if you’re running a social media account somewhere, you most likely are, or should be.

The app is also available as a Google Chrome extension which personally, I am less likely to use. If I’m using the laptop, I might as well fire up Photoshop. But on mobile, it works wonders. Canva have their own search engine / database of free to use images for your background however, these leave watermarks right in the middle of your image, which makes this beyond useless, to me anyway. I believe Canva will be growing massively as they progress, update and add feature. I already have one suggestion -let me add my own icon to the icon sets! I would occasionally like to include my logo in the footer of the image, which for the time being, doesn’t look like a possibility. Although there are a few negatives and improvements to be done here and there, it has revolutionised the way I run one of my Instagram accounts, in terms of graphics. Before Canva, I would sit down with Photoshop, pre-produce several images / quotes etc. for the week, and schedule out individually. With Canva, doing so on the go takes several minutes, with me pre-made template, I just need to adjust and re-save. I also don’t have to send these from my laptop to my phone, as they’re already there. Major plus.

Now, Canva is great, Canva is lovely, Canva is a time-saver. But uniqueness is key. The moment I start seeing content that is too similar, and clearly made with Canva -I’m out. See, that’s the thing, as much as it’s a great tool for designers, it’s not really a ‘design app’ — just because you can play a car game on your tablet, doesn’t make you a driver. Saying that Canva is a ‘graphic design’ app, is as ridiculous as saying that Weebly is a ‘Website Development site’ — no, it’s a drag and drop environment that a monkey can manage, with pre-sets and default settings already taken care of.

To sum up, it’s great for easy on-the-go graphics, but I wouldn’t do anything major with it. It’s a ‘it will do’ kind of situation, that exceeded my expectations a little bit. Canva is free on ios and as a chrome extension, so I recommend you go check it out and use it for the small bits.