As an online entrepreneur, you are wearing many hats. If you’re running a one (wo)man show, you are a marketer, content creator, accountant, or even a graphic designer, taking care of everything by yourself. It’s challenging to be really good at all the things (or should I say impossible?) if, for instance, the marketing part is the core service you offer.
Luckily, there are many tools and programs that can make your life easier without being a pro, and Canva is definitely one of them. Now, let’s just be honest, not everyone has an eye or time for designing beautiful social media graphics, but that’s where Canva comes into play and helps you save your brainpower. Let’s chat about this life-saving tool that you have to know about if you own a small business.
What is Canva?
Canva is online design software that can be used for creating beautiful graphics. If you would want to compare it to something, it does the job of Illustrator even though it’s not as powerful and it has limited features to use. BUT if you are a small business owner and you’re not a graphic designer, all you need is Canva. It’s affordable, it comes with hundreds of templates, and it’s very easy to use. Some basic functions of this program are drag-and-drop functionality that allows you to design and edit your images within few simple clicks and you can choose from hundreds of free stock photos in the library.
Canva can be very useful for business considering you can create different types of images and files like presentations, infographics, social media posts, or even posters without having to hire a graphic designer. The wide range of formats and templates makes this platform very likable and easy to use.
Features and Why it’s so Popular
Canva has a lot of features but here are some of the best ones:
- Canva has already perfectly sized graphics ready for you, meaning you don’t have to keep up with what size should the Instagram photo or Facebook cover be. You just pick what piece of content you need and it’s automatically sized correctly, so no cropping or adjusting needed.
- Even with a free version, you’re getting access to hundreds of templates, icons, stock photos, fonts, and many other elements that you can combine and work your magic.
- You can duplicate your design with only one simple click. If you are creating pins for your Pinterest and want to create templates that you can re-use and adjust later, it’s easy to just duplicate the design in the same editor and adjust the text or color without having to start from scratch.
- You can design your brand kit that features your logo, brand colors, and fonts. This saves you time, having to upload your logo and look for the specific brand color every time you need to edit something.
- One of the fairly new features is a content calendar that can be used for over viewing and inputting content for your social media.
- Lock feature prevents making unintentional changes to your design by locking the specific elements that you don’t want moving around while editing.
- Link sharing allows you to share a link to your design, and the other person can either access it as a viewer or editor. It’s great for sharing designs with your team.
Free version vs Pro account
Let’s talk about differences in tools from the free and pro versions.
The paid version comes with more templates, more elements, and just more tools to experiment with. Some of the main features that the pro version has are the ability to erase photo background, download images without the background, and re-sizing images. The re-sizing tool is very helpful, and it converts to different sizes automatically without having to copy design elements manually.
The brand kit is also part of the paid account, which makes branding easier. Overall, all the features on the paid version are really worth it! It costs $12/month which is very affordable considering all the features and even though you might not be an expert in graphics design, Canva will make it easy for you.
Conclusion
Canva is one of those tools that can be a game-changer for your small business, and if you want to save time and energy on creating graphics, it’s your go-to tool to use. I would recommend starting with a free version, trying it out, and if you like using it, jump into the paid version to unlock more features.
What’s your favorite Canva feature?
