Links to all mentioned software in the ‘Software Mentioned’ section to the right.
In this modern day and age of social media, digital publishing and multimedia everyone wishes they could be the jack of all trades. A popular siutation for this is presenting marketing or thumbnails when the best graphic design you could pull was drawing a weird S shaped symbol onto your exercise book or the desk in school.
Enter Canva every non artist’s dream and every designers “huh, that’ll save me some time on the layout!” tool. This free to use modern browser based webapp allows you to design various online and desktop publishing media and store it in the cloud until you need it.
Through the use of hundreds of preconfigured dimensions (with the ability to set custom ones too), predesigned layouts, blank frameworks and drag & droppable assets (inlcuding your own images should you choose to upload them). Many of these built in assets can be tweaked to suit your needs, from 3 predefined styles of text that can be customised from a huge library of fonts, formatting, size, colour, position and rotation to illustrations that can have custom colours (any in the hexable RGB spectrum) to suit your needs in addtion to the above tools.
Once you’re done it’s as simple as hitting “Download” and choosing either a PDF or picture format. In the latter’s case your image will actually download at the same dimensions as your canvas (none of this “preview” rubbish).
Not bad for free eh? But what about sharing? Creative Cloud, Google Drive and Dropbox’s solutions surely fare better? If you fancy paying a bit more, you can get this magic for your whole team with Canva for Work. The paid upgrade gets you resizable canvasses, the ability to have shared project folders where you can download each other’s assets, Custom fonts and brand colours and more.
If you wonder where today’s featured image came from or indeed any of the cool themed ones on sister site Noodle & Bean, well, now you know the secret!
So why not give it a whirl, throw some shapes and paint your layered town of house images red with it!
If you’ve used Canva before, what are your experiences of it? Would you try it out as a team (or perhaps you’re in one already?) Please feel free to leave any comments down below and keep the discussion going.
Mike
