Canva aspires to be your one-stop shop for all things graphic design — it aims to help you achieve the greatest outcomes for the time and effort you put in, and as a consequence, it’s a good fit for people who find the premium options intimidating.
Whether you need to add text and stickers to a photo or totally overhaul the look of a brochure, the app covers an incredible amount of use cases and comes packed with an impressive number of capabilities. Continue reading for our complete Canva review.
Canva is a tool for graphics that you may use create brochures, flyers, posters, social media graphics, invites, calendars, videos, presentations, cards, logos, infographics, labels, letterheads, resumes, menus, and more in your browser or as an app for Android and iOS. You have the option of using a template or starting from scratch.
The platform also provides a robust set of editing and layout tools, with options ranging from picture cropping to blur effects to background removal. Objects in a project may be simply organised and layered, and adding extras like text subtitles or amusing stickers on top of whatever you’re creating is simple.
Canva provides itself on being easy to use for anybody, regardless of graphic design expertise, and the templates and straightforward tools ensure that you can rapidly produce something professional-looking. Canva isn’t only for novices; seasoned design experts may benefit from it as well, as long as they don’t want too much specific control over what appears on the website.
We’ll go through the price options in more detail later, but both free and paid users have access to hundreds of different templates in over 100 categories to get their ideas started. Those who pay for a membership, on the other hand, get access to millions of stock images, movies, and design components to experiment with.
Canva can do nearly anything in the realm of image editing and graphic design, from adjusting your pet photographs to putting together a comprehensive social media campaign. There is no software to instal on Windows, macOS, or Linux, so you may start using it right away.
One of Canva’s most enticing aspects is how simple it is to use, and everything is really well put out and structured. Simply tell Canva what you’re attempting to create, and you’ll be presented with a variety of designs and layouts. choices – one of Canva’s benefits is the sheer amount of templates available, which number in the thousands even before you pay for a monthly membership. Putting pieces together is simple once you have a template or a blank page in front of you.
You may change the complete subject of a design with only a few clicks – colours, fonts, and background pictures – so it won’t take long to start customising the basic template to match your brand image or whatever you’re searching for. Canva is a tad more restricted than the top-tier when it comes to layouts. Professional apps — you have complete control over where everything is in a design, but the amount of pixel-by-pixel editing isn’t nearly as deep.
Canva, on the other hand, does an excellent job of keeping things easy for novices while yet providing lots of tools for more advanced designers. As you move components about the page, helpful guidelines emerge to help you keep everything aligned and consistent, and you can switch out pieces of a design (like an image) with a few mouse clicks. Whatever you want to do, whether it’s adding a new backdrop or integrating a video, Canva makes it simple and painless.
The same approach is visible in the mobile applications: while managing and adapting designs on a smartphone screen is obviously more difficult, the Android and iOS apps are just as user-friendly as the main online page. You might be amazed at the level of work you can do on your phone, which is another another tribute to Canva’s well-designed and strong capabilities. Canva is entirely free to use, which is a wonderful way to get a feel for the service and see whether it’s right for you: you have access to over 8,000 templates, over 100 different sorts of design projects, and most of the essential layout and editing tools you’ll need on the web and on mobile.
If you have the funds, $12.95 / £10.99 a month (or $9.95 / £8.99 per month if you pay for a year in advance) offers you roughly 50x as many templates, as well as access to millions of stock photos and interesting utilities like the automatic background remover.
Enterprise – $30 / £24 a month, paid yearly – provides capabilities for teams, including the ability to control access for numerous users. When comparing Canva to Adobe Creative Cloud, the degree of intricacy and quantity of features is nowhere near as high, but not everyone is searching for everything Adobe CC has to offer, and some individuals will prefer a simpler solution. While experienced users may desire more capability and flexibility, there’s no denying the quality of the output that Canva can produce — the software is capable of generating some very professional-looking designs with far less work than you might expect.
