Canva & Why We Use it
By Jordan Nicholson
At In Plain Sight Marketing, we are constantly designing and creating graphic assets for our clients. While we have a wonderful graphic designer on our team who does incredible work for us, having her design every asset we need for every client would give her a mountain of workload that never ends. The thing is, not everything you create for your business needs to be made by a designer in Adobe Suite.
What is Canva and Why do We Use it?
Canva is an online tool for easy, quick, and simple graphic design. Anything print or digital you can think of you can create in Canva. With their templates that give you the dimensions, you need in the program, starting a design is simple and easy.
As a remote team, we need files to be easily accessible to everyone on the team. Having one account as a team allows us to see all the designs in one place and have access to every design we’ve created. By sorting clients’ designs into client folders, nothing gets lost or out of place. If someone needs a design that they didn’t create, it’s very simple to go into the program and easily find the file you are looking for.
We love Canva because it’s SO easy to use! Their user-friendly navigation and toolbar let’s anyone create amazing work. Graphic design seems so out of reach sometimes when you look at other people’s work and think you couldn’t possibly create something like that, but you can. Here are our favorite tips and tricks for using Canva for your business.
4 things you should know about Canva
- Brand Kits- Brand kits come with a pro subscription to Canva and are really helpful if you are using your Canva account for a business. Brand kits allow you to input your logo, color scheme, and fonts into the system, so as you are designing your assets are always available to you. This makes designing for multiple clients quick and easy and keeps their branding consistent throughout your designs.
- Templates- When you create a design, you can easily get stuck staring at a blank space with no inspiration. That’s where templates become your new best friend. They are a good foundation when starting a design to draw inspiration and elements from. We love taking elements from two or more templates to combine them together and really make them your own. Our golden rule with all our template designs is changing the design by at least 80%. Anyone can pick a template and change the text, so what can you do to get creative and make it your own?
For example, I liked the elements of the first template and the chart from the second template. When I combined them, I changed the colors, font type, and added a logo and my own coffee cup. The final result is a unique graphic that you might not be able to tell came from these two templates!
- Elements- This section of your toolbar is full of design elements that you can easily grab and use for your designs. Some of my favorite elements are unique photo frames and collages and the ability to easily search graphics to find what design elements you are looking for. Canva always has suggested graphics based on recently chosen templates and stickers to make searching easier and more unique to what you are looking for. Explore this section to create your own vision from scratch or to add extra elements to an already existing image or design.
- Background Remover Tool- This is a specific tool that will make your life so much easier if you need to cut the background out of an image. Have you ever spent hours in Photoshop erasing the background around your subject, painstakingly zooming in so far you can see each individual pixel of your image? With this tool, you simply choose or import your image, click it, and wait for it to load for less than a minute. It’s a lifesaver and one of my favorite image tools!
With their new launch of new tools including Canva Whiteboards, Documents, Websites, and many more amazing features, Canva is a tool to look out for. With constant improvements and innovations, there’s no question why Canva just hit 100 million designers!
Plain Talk About Marketing- Canva and Why We Use It Downloadable PDF