Welcome to My Canva Review

Thank you for dropping by for another mind-blowing review.

Most marketers or even designers probably know about Canva. If you own online business, I’m sure you might have heard of Canva too.

Canva is a simple yet powerful design tool that has aided me to create visual content throughout my business journey.

I literally use Canva every day to post content on Facebook, use on my blog and to create professionally-designed presentations for my local clients.

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What is Canva? Inside Canva Who is Canva For? The Truth About Canva Things I Like About Canva Is Canva The Ultimate Design Tool for Marketers? How I Start A Small Business Online

However, this awesome design tool is not known by many businesses.

That’s the reasons why I am writing this review so more people can enjoy the benefits of using Canva.

Just for your information, I am an affiliate marketer who works at home to earn a full-time income. Here’s how I start this business, if you are keen to know more.

Despite I promote Canva to earn an affiliate commission, rest assured that I am not just going to share with you the pros of Canva, but rather some of the cons as well so you can decide for yourself whether Canva is the design tool you need.

Now, let’s dig deeper on what is Canva and how this design tool can help you in your business.

CANVA REVIEW SUMMARY

Product Name: Canva

Founder/Owner: Melanie Perkins

Product Type: Simple Online Designing Tool

Price: Canva Free Trial, Canva Pro $12.95/month (pay monthly) or $9.95/month (pay yearly) and customized Enterprise Plan for both plans.

Best For: Marketers or small business owners who have limited designing skill yet need to create powerful visual content to grow their business.

Summary: Canva is a powerful and simple to use web-based designing tool that comes with high quality free images, professionally-designed templates, and additional features such as branding kit, folders and comprehensive designing courses for paid subscribers.

With its simple drag-and-drop feature, a collection of over 1 million images and an awesome designing education, Canva is a must-have tool for all marketers. However, this awesome tool lacks the functions required to create rich infographics.

Rating: 9/10

Recommendation: Yes

What is Canva?

Canva is a powerful, yet simple to use cloud-based design tool that aids marketers and small business owners to create amazing visual content for posting on social networks; use on blogs, emails or eCommerce marketplaces; to print posters, name cards, banners, letterheads, or leaflets; to create magazine covers, ebook covers or resume, and many more.

This tool is created by Melanie Perkins as a result of an idea that emerged during her university studies.

She observed that students were struggling to learn the basics of design, and therefore, with her co-founder Cliff Obrecht, they build Canva and launched it in 2012, attracted more than 750,000 users.

In 2015, Canva introduced more advanced graphic features with introduction of a new pricing plan.

Let’s watch this video to see how Canva works before we discussed further on the pricing.

Canva Price Plan

In general, there are 3 different subscription plans offered by Canva. You can choose to subscribe Canva for Free with no cost at all, Canva Pro at $9.95 per month (if you pay yearly) or opt for Canva Enterprise which the price will be determined based on the quotation.

Canva for Free: Unlike other design tools where you are offered only 7 days free trial, Canva offers you lifetime access to use its editing features.

In this plan, you are given two folders to organize your designs, get access to over 8,000 design templates and opportunity to invite up to 10 team members to work on your project with an internal commenting and collaboration system to improve workflow.

You are given 200,000 free images to use and the option to upload your own images. There is a charge of $1 per image if you want upgraded images found inside Canva. Your storage capacity is capped at 1GB.

Canva Pro at $9.95/month: Canva Pro is an advanced subscription package where subscribers are offered a 30 days free trial period. If you are using free Canva now, then just enter your billing card details and upgrade your package from inside member profile to gain access.

As Canva Pro member, you are given access to whatever is available under Canva for Free with new additional feature to create multiple brand identities in terms of setting color palettes, fonts and logo.

You can also use the free high quality images from Canva or other free images from stock image platforms such as Pixabay and Pexels to do your work.

One unique feature that makes your work easier is the ability to magically resize your designs into the sizes that you required.

For example, if you are currently working on a Facebook post design, with a single click, you’re able to quickly resize all images into Twitter image size. However, this feature can only be accessed using desktop browsers.

Canva Enterprise Based on Quote: You'll get a dedicated account manager and can select an administrator as your design team leader if you subscribed for this plan.

This implies you can enforce brand standards, advanced analytics, set approval workflow, and single sign-on. Similarly, you’ll have access to the entire team’s analytics to determine workflow.

Inside Canva

Canva is an innovation born out necessity, which offers a lot of advanced design features. In this segment, I'm going to explain how you can sign up for Canva and all the important features to aid in your business.

Sign Up for Canva

You can sign up Canva with using your Facebook or Google account, in addition to using an email address.

Once you have entered your details correctly, the subsequent confirmation email will lead you straight to your new Canva account.

Canva will prompt you to choose the type of graphic you’re trying to create, then suggest various template visuals for you so you could start customizing images & text.

Everything is drag-and-drop, and text can be edited just like text boxes in any other graphic design software.

Create & Edit Visuals inside Canva

Canva offers various pre-determined design sizes to meet your design needs.

There are sizes for social network visual content such as Facebook post, YouTube thumbnail, Twitter post, Instagram post; marketing visual content such as email banner, newsletter, ebook cover and  magazine cover, poster, banner and flyers; business operation visual content such as letterheads, namecards and certificates; and many more.

You can easily find all sizes of content that you can ever think of to effortlessly start your designing work.

Here are some features inside its visual editor.

Quick Editing Elements: Canva gives you access to create and customize graphics, edit photos, and print your final images from one editorial page.

All your editing tools are on the left bar. To make edits, a graphic resume template per se, you’ll need to double-click on the spot you want to personalize.

Immediately you do that, a horde of editing elements will pop up, and you can decide to inject any change you want, including color and fonts.

Design Templates: Canva offers over 8,000 designer-made templates for various niche industries such as sports, bakery, beauty, fashion, restaurants and many more.

This means you can turn their professional designed templates into your customized work of art.

One new template introduced by Canva recently is the animated social media design which can be great for social media practitioners to increase your social engagement.

Library of photos, text, elements and backgrounds: As mentioned earlier, there are more than 1 million photos inside Canva dashboard. It’s indeed an encyclopedia of all your design needs.

Apart from photos, there are also patterns, shapes, frames, illustrations, icons, backgrounds, gradients, graphs, charts and emojis you can use as additions to your design.

The graphs and charts feature inside Canva can be created using data input so you can be assured to only get the data-backed charts to show accuracy.

Some of us might not be good with font selection and text placement. Fortunately, Canva does provide text-based templates to ease your work.

However, should you need more for your design aids, then be ready to pay additional of $1 each to gain instant access.  

Graph Maker: Unlike other online graph makers, Canva isn’t complicated or time-consuming. There’s not much learning curve involved.

You’ll get a beautiful graph or diagram that shows real data in minutes, turning simple raw data into something that’s both visually appealing.

To design a graph, you’ll access different categories of the chart, such as:

• Bar chart: Used for comparing data among various categories.

• Area chart: Used for showing different quantities that show over time. Also, showing how various components contribute to a whole.

• Donut chart: For displaying information data.

• Pie chart: For showing different components that make up a whole. But more suitable for showing percentage or fraction at a glance.

• Comparison chart: For the contrast between two options. Can also help compare two product models.

• T-chart: Used for comparison where two opposing perspectives are listed side by side.
  
  

Animator: Currently there’re over 8 billion videos watched on Facebook every day and animated content are shared 3x more than still images.

With all these stats, it’s a clear indication that 2019 is a big year for animated content creators and it’s time you get a share of the cake.

Canva animation style let you choose the template that complements your marketing goals and thereafter download in gif or mp4 format.

Autosaving Inside Canva

With Canva, you’ll never worry that your work will be lost as its automated “file saving” feature is so efficient that even there’s a power cut off, you can be assured that your design will be securely saved.

Customer Support

Just in case you are stuck somewhere in the design process. There are easy ways to reach out to their support.

Canva offers both phone and email support. Likewise, its YouTube channel shares dozens of know-how videos, tips and updates about this awesome tool.

For Canva paid subscribers, you'll also get priority support ahead of the freemium folks.

Who is Canva for?

Canva is a must-have tool for budget-conscious small and medium-size businesses that have plans to grow their social presence, at the same time do not have too high expectation on uniqueness of each design.

It’s also suitable for marketers who place more importance on communicating its marketing message with basic yet professional designs.

For companies that want to stand out creatively from its competitors, then Canva might not be the best option.  

The Truth About Canva

Despite Canva is a useful design tool, it does have some shortcomings that make the platform a second choice, particularly for an advanced graphic designer. And here's why.

Truth #1: No Offline Feature

Canva is a cloud-based designing tool where you must have a good internet connection in order to create visual designs and presentation.

Unlike Adobe Photoshop, whereby users can create unique designs directly from their desktop without any form of internet connectivity, Canva does not provide such an offline feature.

If you're in a location with poor connections, Canva won't be an ideal option.

However, Canva does allow some form of flexibility for users to create simple yet effective marketing design via its mobile app that comes with limited features. This app can be used in both with Android and iOS phone.

Truth #2: Upsell Inside Canva

The essence of paying for Canva Pro is to gain access to more premium features such as professionally designed templates, free images, and branding kit.

However, even as paid users, you still won’t have full access to complete features. Inside Canva, you’ll be offered upsells to pay for better images and templates, that's not available for free.

Furthermore, if your intention is to create rich infographics, then Canva might not be an ideal option as they don’t provide many choices of such templates.

Truth #3: Ineffective Mobile App.

Canva mobile app is not really usable. Despite some of the basic features are available for Android & iOS users, the app is not user-friendly and can be very frustrating when using.

That’s why I never use Canva app with my phone.

Truth #4: Slow Loading Time

To be very frank, despite Canva is an effective tool for marketers to create simple design quickly, however, the page load time can increase as you continue using.

Unless you have a fairly high-processing laptop and great internet speed, otherwise, it can be very frustrating to continuously reload the page you’re working on.

Well, the good news is Canva does provide an automatic saving feature, so most of the time, you can be assured that your designs are always saved.

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Things I Like About Canva

Although Canva does not provide many designing features compared to more advanced designing tool offered in Adobe series, but it’s good enough to create useful marketing content for my business.

I literally use Canva every day to create visual content for my blog, design social media posts and sometimes create presentation slides. Canva is indeed effective and simple enough for any marketer with no designing skill to do their work.

With free images offered to paid members, there’s no need to purchase additional stock images from a third-party provider. However, I seldom use their design templates as nothing really suit my needs.

Is Canva The Ultimate Design Tool For Marketers?

Canva is a trusted, an effective and simple-to-use design tool for businesses and marketers who lack advanced graphic design skill to create aesthetically appealing content.

It’s easy to use, practical, fun and offers a whole lot of new personalization for simple visuals. Canva is definitely an ultimate design tool for marketers in 2019.

I highly recommend Canva for everyone who wishes to consistently produce highly engaging visual content.

How I Start A Small Business Online

I started my small business online by creating a niche website that offers an honest, reliable and unbiased review on online business opportunities and marketing tools, including providing tips and useful resources to help people get started online.

That’s the reason why Canva is so important to help grow my business as it makes my design work quicker and easier, especially in creating visual content for my blog and for sharing on social network.

Just like learning Canva, I started my business following a step-by-step guide. There’s no short cut to achieve success at all.

It’s all about willingness to learn, to put in the effort and to consistently take action in order to see results.

If you too share my thoughts and would like to start a small business online, then I suggest you try My #1 Recommendation that shows you the exact method I use to successfully earn a decent income.

I hope you enjoy reading my Canva Review. If you find it useful, please share in your social networks so more people can make an informed decision.