If Canva isn't part of your day-to-day, then it should be.
What is Canva?
Canva is an enterprise-level design solution, offered on a free and subscription basis. In its simplest form, it lets non-creatives design assets in a quick and efficient way. Its available on a browser and application basis.
What can you create using Canva?
Canva lets you create a wide range of different design asset types. For example:
- Static imagery
- Videos
- Documents
Canva templates
Canva offers thousands upon thousands of templates and elements for you to use within your designs. Everything from social tile templates that you can tweak through to elements (icons, images, video and design assets such as gradients and styles). For those with no design experience, but a passion for good design, there's plenty to go at.
How to protect your brand using Canva
Not only is Canva great for allowing creative freedom, but it also offers brand ambassadors peace of mind. With its brand functionality, organisations can lock down specific colours and fonts, which ensures that any assets created are done so using the correct colours and typography. In-house brand leads simply upload fonts and colours and then lock them in.
In addition, Canva also offers shared projects and designs, so that teams working together can share where they're up to, as well as any approved designs they've created. This is particularly great for busy teams, who need to relieve some of the pressure on design resources. It essentially allows non-creatives to use previously approved artwork, changing imagery and text at scale. This is particularly useful for those in high-volume production environments, i.e., retailers or online gaming businesses.
On top of these brand benefits, Canva offers a range of placeholder frames. These let you drag an image or video into a pre-placed area - particularly useful if your brand has noon square or rectangular shapes.
What we love about Canva
All of the above are excellent features, but here are some of our favourite additional extras:
Remove background
Have you got a busy image, or do you want to crop something out from a background? select the image, click 'edit image' and then select 'remove background'. Take a few deep breaths and wa-lah - your image is ready. And it works nine times out of ten.
Resize an image
Perfect for campaigns where you need to use the same design in multiple formats or sizes. For example, a display PPC campaign where you want to protect the integrity of your brand, without having Google or Bing's AI design, which variants to show to your audience.
Smart mock-ups
How many times have you wanted to show something within a mobile phone or laptop screen? Probably a lot. With Canva, you can mockup your designs in a range of scenarios - screens, bags, mugs and more.