How to Use Canva
An essential graphic design tool for the busy marketer.
Today’s marketers need to build and scale their campaigns at lightning speed. Gone are the days where you took weeks to create one piece of collateral and months to launch a single campaign. That’s why having the right tools and knowing how to use them is incredibly important and absolutely vital to the modern marketer.
In this article, we’re going to talk about Canva — what it is, the capabilities it offers and what we as marketers can gain from learning to use it in our campaigns.
What is Canva?
Canva is a browser-based design application that’s free and easy-to-use. It offers a gateway into graphic design for marketers who are new to it as well as a faster way to create a large volume of graphics for seasoned ones. The chief power of Canva lies in its simplicity — you can build, tweak and duplicate images instantly, without having to endure a steep learning curve. This is what makes using Canva extremely beneficial, as we’re able to build sophisticated graphics without spending too much time doing it.
Here’s a short list of what you can build in Canva:
-Social media posts
-Cover & profile images for your company pages
-PowerPoint presentations
-Video thumbnails
-PDFs
-Posters
-Business Cards
How Does Canva Work?
Canva gives you a blank canvas onto which you can upload and add photos, text, icons, gradients and other visual assets. You can control the ordering and opacity of the layers as well as the size and positioning of each element. Moreover, the best part of Canva is that you can duplicate designs instantly, within the same file. This means that you can have multiple designs in one page and compare and tweak all of them in one place.
To put this into perspective — you can create one template for your product brochures and replicate them multiple times while being able to compare them next to each other, all in one place.
Here’s a snapshot of how designing in Canva works:
What Makes Canva So Advantageous
-Browser-based: You don’t need to have a desktop with a large RAM to operate it.
-It offers a huge library of icons, shapes, gradients, images and visualizations that’s built-in: Canva Pro does give you more options but even the free tier offers a lot.
-Pre-set sizes for common images: Canva already has pre-set sizes for graphics such as social media posts, A4 documents and presentations. You don’t need to voraciously know the sizes of everything you create, which saves time.
-All stored in one place: One of the biggest headaches of being a marketer who designs is having to organize and figure out how to store your files. Canva automatically aggregates all your designs in one place and gives you the ability to put things in folders, from your browser. Also, because each Canva file can contain multiple designs, you don’t need to move away from the original design to create similar ones.
-Easy to share and work with your Team: Whether you are the only marketer or one of many marketers at your company, it’s hard to keep track of all your designs offline. Opening a Canva account will allow your entire team to keep their designs in one place and easily share and review designs together. Seriously — you can share any design in Canva with one click, no sign-in required. Designers can replicate each other’s designs in one simple step.
Why You Need to Try Canva Today, Even if You’re a Seasoned Graphic Designer
It’s So Damn Easy and Fun
Even if you’re a die-hard Adobe power-user, you need to try Canva just to experience it. You can easily sign up for free and try it out. I guarantee that you’re going to enjoy it. It’s so refreshing to be able to have fun with a ton of images, icons and pre-built typography.
It Will Save You Time
This is huge, especially if you’re a freelancer with a ton of clients or work in a smaller marketing team. Once you build a template, you can clone it, share it and essentially use it infinitely. Yes, this still applies to Adobe Photoshop or InDesign files, but they’re a lot more complex and often tailored to the designer who created the file (layers, pre-sets etc).
It Allows You to Collaborate So Much Faster
In Canva, you can find relevant images, icons and colors in a snap of a finger. This is perfect when you’re in the ideation stage of a marketing campaign and want to make a quick mock-up or vision for the end product. It’s also a great tool to make diagrams, thought-diagrams and visual plans for your team.
It’s Extremely Cost-Effective for the Price
So what you saw above is Canva Pro, the ultimate OG version of Canva. How much does it cost per month? A whopping $16.99 CAD ($12.99 USD) per user, per month! This is an absolute steal when you consider that a single Adobe CC application begins at around $20+ USD.
Final Thought — Is Canva a Replacement for Adobe Creative Cloud?
Absolutely not. Canva is not a replacement for Adobe applications. I actually think that it’s important to have both — one for simpler, easy-to-replicate designs that you can build and export quickly (Canva) and another for more complex, precision-requiring visuals (Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator). One does not cancel out the other — they actually complement each other in your marketer’s toolkit.
Make sure to follow our publication, Marketers for Marketers to learn more about essential tools that help you succeed as a marketer.
