If you’re searching for a easy tool for your graphic design needs like presentations, business cars, logo, social media or video Canva is the perfect solution for you. You can use Canva for your personal needs or for your business.
So, what is Canva? What to do with Canva? How to use Canva? What does the Canva app do? The answer to these and similar questions is in our detailed Canva Review.
Canva is a graphic design tool website founded in 2012. It uses a drag and drop format and provides access to over a million photos, graphics, and fonts. It is used by professionals as well as designers. The tools can be used for both web and print media design and graphics. Canva is a web-based visual design application that brings together professional quality infographics, posters, facebook covers and more. Moreover, you do not need to know graphics editing programs to use them. This site has a large archive of templates, backgrounds, fonts and images, all of which allows you to create good looking graphics to publish great articles. Using Canva, you can easily prepare high quality images that you can use in your lessons and download them for free.
Canva History
The company was founded by Melanie Perkins in Sydney, Australia on January 1, 2012. He previously founded Fusion Books, Australia’s largest annual publisher. Canva had more than 750,000 users in its first year. Social Media and Technology expert Guy Kawasaki joined the company in April 2014 as Chief Executive. In 2015, Canva for Work was launched, where the company acquired a tool for marketing material production.
In the 2016/17 fiscal year, revenue increased from $ 6.8 million to $ 23.5 million and was $ 3.3 million. In 2017, it gained profitability and had 294,000 paying customers. In 2018, it has 200 employees with offices in Australia and San Francisco. In January 2018, Perkins announced that it had earned $ 40 million worth $ 1 billion from Sequoia Capital, Blackbird Ventures and Felicis Ventures.
In June 2018, Canva announced that it would partner with Dropbox to integrate its designs and images into the platform.
What is Canva?
After going through its history, let’s come to our main question, what is Canva?
Canva is another free online graphics tool that is extremely simple to use and offers a set of templates that can help you. It had to be a quick and easy way to create visual design and assist the unskilled in the magic of graphic design.
Canva is a free graphic design tool with a simple drag and drop interface. The ability to quickly and efficiently produce professional images is the bread and butter of this program. Even those with minimal graphic design experience will find it easy to create beautiful designs.
Since its launch in 2012, Canva has collected more than 10 million users and it’s easy to understand why. Users can create almost any type of visual content, including:
What are the visual types that can be prepared in practice?
Blogs and e-books (album covers, banners, book covers, comics and cartoons, infographics, magazine covers, photo collages, wallpapers)
Documents (Certificates, letterheads, newsletters, presentations, resumes)
Education (syllabus, school yearbook program)
Events (Cards, event programs, ID cards, invitation cards, postcards, seating plans, tickets, wedding invitations)
Inspirational designs (Mood boards, cut albums, film strips)
Marketing materials (brochures, business cards, flyers, gift certificates, labels, logos, posters, restaurant menu, zoom virtual background)
Planners and schedules (Calendars, weekly planners)
Social media and email headers (Etsy design, facebook cover, youtube thumbnail, youtube channel image)
Social media posts (snapchat filters, social media graphic)
Try Canva Tools
- Logo Maker
- Business Card Maker
- Flyer Maker
- Resume Maker
- Poster Maker
- Infographics Maker
- Background Remover
Signing up for an account on Canva gives you instant access to pre-made templates, images and icons (thousands are completely free and others cost $ 1 / fee) and hundreds of fonts.
Everything you need to create great visuals for your small business is at your fingertips.
Is Canva Free?
Yes there is a Free version of Canva. And there is a paid Canva Pro version This is where a little differentiator between free and paying users comes in.
For those using the free version, Canva has slightly more limited templates to choose from and limit your collaborating team to 10 members. More importantly, it doesn’t offer you any images. Any images you want to use must be your own or licensed for you to use. Some Canva Free abilities:
Two folders for organizing designs
1 GB of storage for photos and assets
Access to over 8,000 templates
Upload your own images
Access to millions of photos starting at $ 1 each
Those who opt for a paid business class account will receive a 30-member team account and also a database of 300,000 images for what Canva claims. Also, it can help you resize your designs. Other highlights include the acceptance of custom fonts, the ability to save color palettes and templates.
You heard we were talking about the “free” version of the program, so you might be wondering what you missed with the paid plan.
The biggest difference in the paid version of the program is that you can:
Canva Pro includes all of the Canva Free features plus:
Unlimited number of folders for your designs
Functions for teams
100 GB of storage for photos and assets
Exclusive access to 4 million free photos, illustrations and icons
Resize your designs in one click
Upload custom fonts for your brand
Set color palettes for your brand
Save templates for yourself and your team
Organize your photos and designs with folders
Find your designs easily with the search feature
Resize your designs to custom sizes
Download designs with transparent background
Export designs as animated GIFs
Priority support
Canva for Enterprise ($ 30 per month)
Canva for Enterprise includes everything in Canva Pro plus:
Unlimited storage for photos and assets
Ensuring brand consistency by controlling colors, fonts, assets and logos
Review, approve and comment on designs
Multiple Brand Kits
Lock items to keep templates on brand
Team area with customizable title
Multiple Sign-In support
Service Level Agreement with 99.5% uptime
Enterprise support
6 Canva tools to improve your designs
Try the grid tool shortcut
The grid tool helps to perfectly align your text, icons or other elements in your design. “Command / control” plus “;” on your keyboard to show the grid. Press the keys.
Add a box to your text
If you want your text to stand out a little more, try adding a box. Use the keyboard shortcut “option” plus “shift” plus “b”.
Use font and color matching tools
The font and color options you will use in your designs are important. Take advantage of the font and color matching tool to help you choose options that work together. These are especially useful when you are starting a design over.
Font Matching Tool
Color Combination Chart
Crop your images
Resize and scale your photo and help transform your design with cropping tool. Not sure how to deliver products in Canva? It’s easy and there is even a great tutorial online.
Enroll in free design school
If you want inspiration or want to continue learning how to use the program more efficiently and effectively, check out Canva School of Design. This school offers a growing collection of articles, tutorials and tips, and is free to access. There’s even a library of design courses to choose from.
Try the application!
If you need to create a quick graphic on the go, download the iOS-based app. You have the same design features in the Canva application you made in the desktop version. You can create great designs whenever (and wherever) it works with your program.
Result
The few people I checked out and talked to Canva gave me a very interesting perspective. One of them was a teacher and said it was great to create simple visuals to teach children. My designer friend had nothing great to say except for one thing – it wasn’t consuming huge resources Photoshop did.
From my point of view, for most of my professional career, I was a writer or editor and even though I wasn’t producing it myself, I had some experience with layout and graphics. So I started getting tired of walking around in small circles with Canva.
Although very easy to use, I proved to be very simple for the type of output I wanted in printing. On the other hand, it’s great for creating snapshots, but unless you mind that you’ll want to share the templates with thousands of people.
Now that you’ve read here, you might be wondering:
… Canva is a great free design tool used by millions around the world. Does it make sense to give money for the Pro version (ie “Canva for Business”)?
After reading this review you will find out exactly what Canva Pro is; In particular, we’ll cover the following popular questions:
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST BENEFIT OF PRO?
💵 What is the cost of CANVA PRO?
How is it according to its ALTERNATIVES?
Should you upgrade your VERSION TO CANVA PRO?
Before we get into the differences between Canva and Canva Pro, it would be wise to take a sneak peek at the product:
What is Canva? A brief glance
At its core, Canva is an online platform that simplifies the process of designing any visual material in various key categories:
Social media: this is arguably the most widely used set of templates on Canva – on your Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest accounts, including all kinds of images and graphics for posts (eg thumbnails) and profiles (background images). everything will happen.
Identity: While it doesn’t position itself as a logo maker, Canva has all the tools needed to quickly create a logo for your brand and comes with thousands of pre-made images that you can use as a starting point.
Job: This includes numerous templates with presentation, invoice, quotes, certificates, resumes and anything else imaginable about the job.
Informative: Canva simplifies the process of creating professional looking posters and infographics – templates help you structure your message and present data in a clear and understandable way.
Printable: other than digital images, invitations, flyers, brochures, menus, etc. There are also ready-made templates for physical items. The best part? You can order printed materials from within Canva and have them delivered to your door within a week!
Everyday: Canva was also very useful outside the office for situations where you want to create beautiful designs for yourself and your loved ones, such as calendars, postcards and photo collages.
And yes, all of the above are available in the free version of Canva. So what’s the point of paying for Canva Pro?
Canva Pro vs Canva Free Comparison
While creating a design with Canva, you may have noticed that some templates have images covered in diagonal lines –
To get rid of them, you need to select the image and click the “remove watermarks” button in the lower right corner:
It will reveal a side screen showing the cost to unlock the premium image… which brings us to the first big part of the Canva Pro offer:
For a fixed monthly fee, Canva Pro gives you access to the entire library of 60+ million premium images at no additional cost, both within templates and as standalone images.
If you use Canva regularly, it’s cheaper (and easier) than paying each time you need to remove watermarks.
Of course, this isn’t the only feature of Canva Pro – it’s just the most obvious.
So what are the other advantages? Firstly,
Apart from images, Pro also unlocks all premium design elements, including images, icons, backgrounds, music and videos.
This is a very useful thing again, but it’s just a bit bigger than what we mentioned earlier. Branding features that really allow Canva Pro to increase your productivity are:
Using the Brand Kit, you can organize your company’s logos, colors, and fonts in a single space, making them automatically available for every new design you create:
Canva Brand Kit
This feature can be a serious time saver if you regularly create branded posts for one or several social channels, or if you will be using all the other design types we listed in the previous section of this guide.
Unlimited folders (folder limit is 2 maximum in free version) and 100 times more space (1 Gb in free version) add even more flexibility to Brand Kit.
Finally, there is a third set of features in Canva Pro that we can call the “magic wand” –
Premium editing tools allow you to automatically animate, resize and even create PNG images with transparent backgrounds.
Auto resizer offers the most tangible utility, but our favorite is the animator, which lets you instantly turn your images into eye-catching videos or GIFs:
Canva Pro animations
Ok, let’s sum up –
Canva Pro offers three feature sets that can be categorized as top-notch design elements, productivity enhancements, and advanced tools.
Most of these are pretty useful (and some are obviously cool), but before we can conclude if this is a good proposition, we need to look at the other side of the equation –
How to Design with Canva? – Free
Design is an essential part of print business. For this reason, companies that need printing should prepare their designs or have them prepared outside. However, even if you don’t have an employee who can design and don’t have high-level design knowledge, solutions are still not exhausted. With Canva, the website that revolutionized the design of the world, designing is now much easier than you think!
Canva is an online design platform where you can sign up with one click and make designs as easily as using Facebook. Moreover, almost all of its features are free! In addition, many advantages such as free templates that vary from product to product, drag-and-drop feature, adding a logo, using free icons on the site make Canva number one in its sector. One of the most important features of Canva is that it has a completely Turkish interface. In this way, everyone can easily start designing by following the instructions. So let’s take a closer look at Canva, which shook the entire design world.
Canva Pro Price
They also offer a free 30-day trial that requires you to enter your card details, but of course you won’t be billed until your free month ends:
TRY CANVA PRO FREE FOR 30 DAYS ›
Compared to its nearby alternatives, Canva offers the longest trial period while simultaneously having the lowest monthly payments (we kept all prices in US dollars for better comparability):
TOOL / Pricing / Templates / Photos / Branding kit / Free trial
Canva 12.95$ / 60000+ / 60M / yes / 30 days
Canva Alternatives
PicMonkey $12.99 / 2400+ / 1M / yes / 7 days
Stencil $15 / 1000+ / 2M / no / –
Snappa $15 / 5000+ / 3M / no/ –
– A newer set of tools that distinctly mimics Canva’s features and even the interface
These brands cannot replace the Canva Pro, although we added it to the comparison chart for a fuller picture.
To be fair, the top three contestants don’t look great compared to Canva for a few reasons:
much smaller libraries; the choice of templates, images, videos and other design elements is more limited
fewer features; The absence of a particularly well-defined brand kit and productivity-enhancing tools such as auto animators,
narrower focus; They often focus on photo editing or social media sharing rather than full-scale, multi-channel, brand-centric design and collaboration.
At this point, the answer to our original question already seems pretty obvious – let’s summarize:
Should You Use Canva Pro?
Instead of a superficial “yes”, we took a more systematic approach in this guide and compared the Canva Pro with both its free version and its closest alternatives.
Here’s what we’ve learned:
Canva Pro offers a significant productivity boost compared to the free premium version, and in addition to unlocking a large number of premium design elements, the 30-day free trial makes Canva Pro the most attractive option among other similar tools.
However, the final decision to upgrade to Canva Pro will of course depend on your specific needs:
Paid subscriptions are definitely not a reasonable choice if you only need a one-off design – however, if you enable the free trial you will get a lot more image and template options; Just set a reminder to cancel in time!
The Pro version can be a little redundant, as the basic Canva toolset already has everything you need for simple and / or infrequent designs on a single media channel.
If you are creating branded designs regularly (for example, if you are a professional designer, social media manager, or a small business owner), Canva Pro will save you a lot of time and effort. It will probably be cheaper than buying premium images individually.
For those who manage several social media resources at the same time (such as a Facebook page, an Instagram account and a YouTube channel) the Pro version is a must. Auto resizer alone can cut your design time in half 🚀
If you’re working as a team (such as a marketing agency, a design collective, or a marketing division at a larger company), Canva Pro might actually be a little too simple: we recommend trying Canva Enterprise with additional collaboration tools and dedicated support.
If the above still didn’t help you decide, the easiest way to move forward is to try it yourself – you don’t risk losing any money if you finally decide it’s not worth it:
Canva FAQ:
How to Use Canva for Your Designs
The first thing you need to do to start using Canva is; create a FREE membership by going to Canva.com. While creating your membership, you can complete your membership with one click by using your Facebook account. You will then be presented to a screen where you can choose what kind of work you want to design for. From this screen, you can start working on your business by choosing from numerous design options such as business cards, invitations, labels, social media images and letterheads.
Apart from these options, you can use your own special dimensions to design. Let’s say you order American service from Bidolubaski.com, but you did not find the American service option in Canva. You can start designing by pressing the use custom dimensions button in the upper right corner and entering the American service size of 29.7 x 21.9 cm in mm, that is 297 x 219 mm.
How to Design a Free Business Card with Canva?
Business cards are the most preferred printing product, and therefore one of the printing products that require the most design. In this section, we will explain gradually how to make a business card-specific design through pictures.
Step 1: Choose Business Card Design
After you become a member of Canva, you should click the “Create Design” button on the screen that appears and reach the screen with design types. From this screen, you must select the business card product under the “Marketing Materials” category. It is useful to make a small reminder; If the size of the business card you will print is other than 8.5 x 5 cm, you should click on the “Use Custom Sizes” button on the top right of the screen and enter the dimensions you need in ‘mm’ and proceed.
Step 2: Get Started with Business Card Design
After clicking on the business card section, the interface where you can start to design will open. The main parts of this interface are; top menu, design menu and design area. There are 6 sections in the design menu; Search, Layouts, Components, Text, Background, Downloads. Layouts section is open in the design menu that appears when the page is first opened. You can make your design much faster by choosing ready-made business card drafts from this section. Other parts of the design menu;
You can make visual searches from the ‘Search’ section,
From the ‘Components’ section, you can access components such as pictures, frame shapes,
You can add font types from the ‘Text’ section to your design,
You can choose a patterned or visual background for your design from the ‘Background’ section,
You can add your external images such as logo and icon in the ‘Uploads’ section.
Step 3: Download Your Design
After preparing your design, click the “Download” button on the top right to save your design to your computer in the format you want and download your design by selecting the file type from the window that opens. When choosing a file type for your design, you should make sure that the file type you choose is suitable for printing. If you download your file by selecting the PDF – Print option in the window that opens, you will not have any problems with your printing. Also, if you become a Canva Premium member, you can make your design fully print compatible by checking the ‘Crop marks and overflow’ box under the file type tab.
How to Create Presentation Video with Canva
How to Download Canva Presentation Video
Canva doesn’t allow presentation videos to be downloaded with your explanation video in it. But you can use a screen recorder (Like Quicktime on Mac) and download your video while playing it.
CANVA REVIEW CONCLUSION:
Canva is a fantastic tool for every graphic needs. We recommend to try 30 days for free Canva Pro.
You will definitely find great value for you and your business.
