Graphic design is vital in our day-to-day online activities – be it for business, social media, or running a blog.
Unfortunately, not everyone can be a graphic designer. This implies that you will need the service of a graphic designer to smoothly run your online activities. But the Canva design tool has an easy solution for everyone and it’s free.
Hiring a graphic designer may not be a budget problem for big businesses. But this could be a big problem for those operating a small business or blog. This is where a graphic design tool like Canva becomes important.
Canva has both free and premium versions. The free version has tools and templates to create beautiful graphics without any knowledge of graphic design. With the free version, you don’t need a graphic designer to create beautiful designs for your small business or blog. In essence, the free version is good enough to get you started.
You can explore the tool for virtually everything from:
- basic photo editor for designing fascinating social media images
- documents
- flyers
- invitations
- logos
- posters
- Newsletters (to send from your autoresponder.)
Canva doesn’t require any special form of training to get a hang of how to create beautiful designs.
Who Can Use Canva?
Canva is a great tool for small business owners, blog owners, marketers, and online entrepreneurs who want a quick design. The interesting part of Canva is that it is easy to use and doesn’t require any prior knowledge of design skills. It has a drag-and-drop tool that makes the whole design hassle-free.
It’s unlike Photoshop that requires a lot of practice to get familiar with the software in creating sophisticated visuals.
Besides, Photoshop does not perform well at creating multi-page documents for digital and prints. It needs an In-Design tool to do it. This means you will have to spend extra time and money to get this type of work done.
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Price For Pro Plan
Canva does it all in one place and at a minimal price for the Pro Plan is a cost of $17.99 AU monthly ($215.88) or pay yearly at $13.74 AU for $164.99 AU yearly (You save a whopping $50 AU yearly.)
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How to Use Canva
Canva is perfect for small business people or entrepreneurs who want to design materials to load directly onto social media. I use Canva every day to create exciting pins to put on Pinterest. It is so simple and easy.
You just type Pinterest pin into the selection, add a photo from the free photos or download your own and add text. Download the pin to your computer to save and load it directly onto Pinterest, done!
This process works the same for Facebook, Twitter, or any downloadable designs you wish to create to print out.
Interface and Usage
Before using either the free or premium version of Canva, you need to create an account with them. You may use either your Facebook or Google profile to create your account.
It starts with the display of a pop-up screen where you would be asked your purpose of using Canva.
Your account profile will be personalized with the appropriate templates based on the purpose you choose.
When you are on board, you will be prompted to use the free trial of Canva for 30 days. If you decline the free trial, your account will automatically be set on the Forever Free Plan. You will get the occasional prompt to upgrade to Premium but they are not annoying and using the free version is very simple.
In the next phase, which is the final onboarding stage, you will be prompted to add a member. You can skip this part if you want to be the sole user. Now you are ready to start creating stunning and appealing designs for your online tasks.
Storage Space
Just like any online service, free plans have limited storage capacity. Canva also has limited storage for the free plan.
The free plan comes with a maximum storage capacity of 1GB, but the Pro plan has unlimited storage capacity.
Pricing Structure
The following are the pricing plans of Canva:
1. The Forever Free Plan
Just as the name suggests, the plan is free and does not require any payment. You can continue to use it free for life if you so wish. The main features of this plan are:
- You can’t create more than two folders
- 8000+ free templates
- 100+ designs such as presentation, letters social media posts, etc
- Thousands of free photos and graphics
2. The Pro Plan
This plan comes in two different categories. It includes the monthly payment and the yearly payment plan. The monthly payment plan is $13.70 US per month ($164.40 US), while the yearly plan is $125.65 US for a year (saving $38.75).
The main features of the pro plan are:
- Comes with over 60,000 templates
- Easy to resize the design
- It allows you to create custom templates exclusive to you
- Easy to create your brand design using fonts, logos, color with the aid of a feature known as brand kit
- You are entitled to create unlimited folders
- Right to use more than 60 million graphics, images, and videos
- You can add more than one team member
3. The Enterprise Plan
This plan is perfect for corporations and agencies with a lot of team members. It gives you access to design workflow, multiple brand kits, and unlimited storage.
This plan has just one pricing model; subscribers are required to pay $30 monthly for a year. This implies that the subscriber will pay an upfront fee of $360 for the yearly plan. The Enterprise plan permits you to add more than one team member.
The main features of this plan include:
- Unlimited storage capacity
- It has all-pro plan features, but you get access to multiple brand kits rather than the 1 brand kit that comes with the pro plan
- Access to 24/7 enterprise-grade support
- The principal Subscribers can lock the templates to prevent other team members from editing them
- You can selectively permit some team members to get access to created designs and also make uploads on Canva
Pros
- Intuitive and simple to use
- Useful to create different designs like Facebook posts, logo, Instagram posts, invitation, videos, infographics, etc
- The free version is loaded with great features to make stunning designs
- Canva comes with thousands of pre-made templates
- It is compatible with a different browser
- You can connect Canva with your social media accounts
- It is perfect for team partnership
Cons
- It doesn’t support the creation of custom graphics from scratch
- You can only resize your design for different screens upon upgrading to the premium version
- The premade templates and images are somewhat generic
- There is an inconsistency in how it functions on the web and mobile version
- It is strenuous to use on small screens
- The collaboration doesn’t allow added members to work from the inside
Conclusion
Canva is an efficient tool for graphic designs. I recommend it for people who want to make simple designs without spending a penny. I also recommend it to anyone with a small designing budget and for a novice in the design world.
Though Canva has some deficiencies, it is still an efficient and reliable design tool. Canva comes in handy when you need a designing tool – be it for a Facebook post, Pinterest, or infographic design.
Canva is indeed a useful tool in the design world, and a perfect way to get started on a design if you are a small business or entrepreneur.
I hope this has helped, please leave a comment, like, and share. Thank you.
LILY
I just had a read of this article and it gave me a good summary of the Canva program. I’ve been hearing about this quite a few times now and I think I’m going to give it a try and at least try the free version anyway. Thanks for sharing this article as it was something I wanted to find out more about soon, this has cleared a few things up.
Hi, I’m really pleased that you enjoyed reading about Canva. I use the free version every day to create Pinterest pins to promote my articles. I’m sure that you will find it a real winner to grow your business.
Thank you for introducing me to Canva Design – A Logo Design Tool. We are visual beings and this seems to be amazing. Being able to create designs that will keep your readers engaged is a bloggers dream. The free membership sounds just right for me now. As my skill get better I will consider upgrading.
Absolutely Diana. One of the great features of Canva is its forever free membership. This will give you plenty of features to work with while you learn. Wishing you success.
Hi Lily, Canva is a great graphic design publishing tool, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content for your business or website.
It’s a free platform that allows you to create invitations, business cards, flyers, Zoom backgrounds, and more using professionally designed templates.
I’ve been using Canva for years but I was curious what the difference between the regular and pro versions and you cleared that up for me so thank you so much. Much appreciated.
You are very welcome Bushra. The great thing about Canva is that you can do so much promotion with it even free. It is so easy to use and transfer your designs to social platforms.
Canva has one of the best graphic design/template tools you can use. I have a free account with Canva. But I use them sparingly. I’m afraid that if Canva noticed that I’m using the platform more frequently, that I might be hassled to be a paid member. Lol! I do use other free graphic design platforms. I think Canva is getting bigger than ever. I recently saw them in commercials on my local TV stations. It could be that they are expanding. They also have integrated with some social media platforms, which I think will dominate every other graphic design/template company out there.
As for the plans, I’ll stick to the free membership. The other membership plans are not that bad if you have a company that depends on graphic designs/templates to market products. Overall, I think that Canva will be the place to go to and get all the top graphic designs/templates for any business.
Hi John, you are absolutely right. Canva’s free system is awesome and can do a lot for you before you need to upgrade. I’m so pleased that you are finding it as useful as I do. Enjoy!
Great review!
Canva is a huge asset to people that can’t afford graphic designers. I mostly use photoshop but that’s because when I was studying it was mandatory to use it but I have used Canva as well.
Canva might not have all the functions photoshop has but most marketers don’t need a lot more than Canva offers. I’d definitely recommend it to newbie marketers.
You are correct Rogier that Canva doesn’t have all the features of Photoshop for free although you can upgrade to have all the features that are available in Photoshop but much simpler to use. I find Canva more than enough for a new business as I find Photoshop very complicated. You need a degree to use it. Lucky you that you had to learn.
I’ve used Canva for months now and have found it so good to use. It saves me a lot of time and money instead of having to pay a graphic designer and really gets some great traffic to my website. I’m so grateful and enormously appreciative that you shared this information.
I agree with you Herman that this is a great tool and using the free Canva you can make lots of Pinterest and Facebook pins to promote your business. So glad you love it.
Hello Lily,
Great article about Canva design. Very comprehensive and detailed. Having my own website, I can see how this would be a great tool. I like how you have outlined the different plans and provided the cons and pros. Very informative post.
This is definitely a great option for when I’m ready to take the next step when it comes to my business and the website. I really like all the great things that people are saying about it.
You are correct Anna, it’s a great tool and the free version does everything you need when you are just starting out. I hope you start to use it soon and set yourself up for success.