In a world filled with catchy ads, captivating Facebook posts, vibrant flyers, and captivating posters, it’s natural to wonder how these visually stunning marketing materials come to life. But here’s the exciting part: You don’t have to be a seasoned graphic designer or a Photoshop expert anymore to make your own creative masterpieces. The landscape has evolved, and with the rise of online design programs like Canva, the power to create visually appealing content is now within reach for practically anyone.

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at Canva and see how it can open a world of endless possibilities.

What is Canva?

Canva is a cloud-based graphic design platform used by businesses of all sizes to produce on-brand marketing content, sales presentations, training videos, and more. Its goal is to allow users to create visual products without requiring substantial graphic design skills.

To better understand why it was created, let’s take a trip back in time to Sydney, Australia, in January 2012. Melanie Perkins, a passionate graphic design teacher watched her students struggle to navigate the complexities of software like Adobe Photoshop. She envisioned a tool that would make design accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise.

With the help of Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, the simple idea came into reality and turned out to be revolutionary. In its first year alone, over 750,000 users flocked to this innovative platform. From that point on, Canva’s growth has been nothing short of remarkable.

In 2019, the German stock photo provider – Pexels, recognized its immense potential and acquired the company. This leads the platform to an even closer collaboration with another prominent player in the industry, and that is Pixabay. And today, Canva stands as a formidable competitor that is going head-to-head with the market leader – Adobe.

Main Features and Benefits of Using Canva

Canva continually introduces exciting new features that push the boundaries of design. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key features that make Canva a standout platform:

Intuitive Drag-and-Drop Interface

Canva’s user-friendly interface makes bringing your design ideas to life effortless. With a simple drag-and-drop functionality, you can easily arrange elements, resize images, and customize every aspect of your design.

Extensive Template Library

Canva offers an extensive collection of professionally designed templates for various purposes. Whether you need a social media post, a business card, a presentation slide, or even an event invitation, you’ll find a template that suits your needs. Each template is created with several use cases in mind. Furthermore, these templates are completely customizable, which means you may change each design element and incorporate your brand’s personality. This saves you time from manually creating a post from a blank canvas.

Vast Media Library

Using an image from the internet might have a variety of implications, especially if it is not royalty-free. With Canva’s vast media library, you have access to millions of high-quality images, illustrations, icons, and fonts to enhance your designs. You can use these to create and export your content without worrying about the legal implications of the music, photos, and videos. Please keep in mind that the free edition has limited access to these, but you can still examine each image without difficulty.

Integration and Post Scheduling

Canva, like other online design tools, allows you to post your design to various social networking channels directly from the app. You may share your design on Facebook, Twitter, Slack, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and other social media platforms. The scheduling option lets you create designs in your spare time and directly schedule your designs for different social media networks. When you schedule your designs, they will be posted on your preferred social media network on the specified day and time. Furthermore, Canva has an event planner where you can see all your scheduled posts through the calendar. You have the flexibility to modify your calendar by either adding or removing content. You can promptly create a design and incorporate it into the calendar, or you can upload one from your collection of preexisting designs.

Multiple Photo Effect

After you’ve added your image, you can add effects, modify it, crop it, or flip it. You can play with artsy photo effects and try color mixing, pixelating, adding shadows, and more.

Canva’s most popular effect is the backdrop removal tool. You can erase any backdrop from your image by selecting the main focus. Another striking effect is the auto enhance where you can fix dark lighting or correct brightness, auto-focus, remove photo shake, and anything that will give you a high-quality photo.

Tailored Functionalities Designed for Business Purposes

Canva elevates your business experience with specialized features crafted for business users. Business features empower you to take your team collaborations, brand and content management, productivity, and security to new heights. With team templates, you and your colleagues can seamlessly design content together within the same dashboard, fostering a collaborative environment.

In-built Video Editor

No discussion of Canva’s features would be complete without highlighting its remarkable video editor. This comprehensive tool serves as an all-in-one solution, offering a wide array of pre-made templates tailored for YouTube, social media, invitations, posters, and more. These templates provide you with a solid foundation to craft visually captivating videos. Moreover, Canva’s video editor provides built-in editing tools that grant you full control to customize every aspect of your video according to your preferences. From creating thumbnails to designing each element from the beginning to the end of your video, you have the creative freedom to shape your video precisely the way you envision it.

Text to Image

Text-to-image is one of the new features of Canva that works similarly to an AI art generator. This feature creates an image based on your description. To obtain the image, simply add a description to the description box and select your style. You can choose from drawing, 3D picture, painting, and photo. If you are unclear about the style you desire, you can leave it up to Canva.

User Experience with Canva

With Canva, creating designs is at your fingertips. The user experience is carefully crafted to ensure that even those with little to no design background can navigate the platform with ease and confidence.

From the moment you sign up, Canva greets you with a clean and intuitive interface. The layout is thoughtfully organized, allowing you to quickly locate the tools and features you need. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned designer, the user-friendly design makes it a breeze to dive right into creating.

Furthermore, Canva has in-depth detailed guides and plenty of resources to get solutions should you encounter any technical difficulties. You can visit their resource center, which contains hundreds of blogs and articles. You may also take classes from their design school if you want to study Canva to its full potential, these courses allow you to go over each element in depth.

Pricing Structure

Canva offers a lifelong free version that allows you to design to your heart’s content without spending a dime. However, please note that the free version comes with some limitations on the features available.

For those seeking to unlock additional functionalities, upgrading to the premium version is an option worth considering. The premium plan provides access to an expanded range of features in Canva.

When it comes to pricing, Canva offers premium plans for both individuals and teams. The cost of the premium plan varies depending on the number of users. While you have the flexibility to choose a monthly subscription, opting for the annual pricing can lead to significant savings of up to 16%.

Let’s break down the pricing options for Canva:

Canva Pro – 1 person: $12.99 per month or $119.99 per year

Canva for Teams

• 2-5 people: $14.99 per month or $149.90 per year
• 6-25 people: $290 per month or $2900 per year

If you have a larger team of more than 25 individuals, you may request a customized plan from Canva’s support team.