What’s Canva

Canva is an online design platform that allows anyone to create professional-quality designs. It has a simple drag-and-drop interface that makes design easy for even the most non-design-savvy person. Canva is free to use, and it offers paid subscriptions for those who want access to more design features. Canva is a great tool for small businesses and entrepreneurs who want to create their own marketing materials but don’t have the budget to hire a professional designer.

With Canva, you can create stunning designs for your website, social media, business cards, and more – all without breaking the bank. In addition to being a budget-friendly design solution, Canva is also a time-saver. With its drag-and-drop interface and built-in templates, you can create a professional-looking design in minutes – even if you’ve never designed anything before. So, if you’re looking for an easy-to-use, budget-friendly design solution, Canva is the perfect platform for you.

How does Canva work?

Canva’s drag-and-drop interface makes design easy for even the most non-design-savvy person.

With its built-in templates and easy-to-use tools, you can create a professional-looking design in minutes. Here’s a step-by-step guide to using Canva:

1. Choose a template: Canva offers a wide variety of templates for all sorts of design projects, from social media posts to business cards. Simply select the template that you want to use and the drag-and-drop interface will take care of the rest.

2. Add your content: Once you’ve selected a template, you can start adding your content. Canva’s drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to add text, photos, and other elements to your design.

3. Save and share: When you’re done with your design, simply save it and share it with the world. and it’s offers a variety of export options, so you can share your design on social media, print it out, or download it for later use.

Canva features

Canva offers a wide variety of features to its users. Some of the most popular features include:

• A library of over 1+ million stock photos, illustrations, and icons
• Over 100,000 templates for every type of design, from social media posts to business cards
• Over 250,000 Photos and Graphics
• A simple drag-and-drop interface
• A built-in photo editor
• A wide range of export options
• Wide range of printable products to design and get delivered to your door
• Editing Videos
• Cloud Storage

Let’s start with the first module, the thing you’re probably interested in the most – Editing Photos With Canva.

Editing Photos With Canva

Canva’s photo editor is simple to use and offers a wide range of features. With the photo editor, you can crop, rotate, and resize photos, as well as add filters, texts, and graphics. The photo editor also offers a wide range of export options, so you can share your photos on social media, print them out, or download them for later use.

To start with your first design, simply click on the “Create a Design” on the right top corner and then you can create your custom size image or edit an existing image as shown below.

To access the photo editor, simply click on the “Photos” tab in the Canva dashboard and select the “Edit” button. Adding Text to Photos With Canva Adding text to photos is a great way to create stunning, attention-grabbing designs.

This offers you access to a set of basic controls that let you change the appearance of that image in a number of different ways. There are sliders to change the brightness, contrast, and saturation, and you can also apply Instagram-like filters.

There’s also a comes with “background remover” tool that lets you remove/replace the background from photographs. This is particularly useful for making headshot photos for websites, or thumbnails for YouTube videos.

The image editing controls in Canva are very much of a “cut-down” type, like most other features. However, they include the tools that are arguably the most important to most users.

Editing videos in Canva

Canva’s video editor makes it easy to add text, images, and other elements to your video. You can also crop, rotate, and resize videos, as well as add filters, and transitions. The video editor also offers a wide range of export options, so you can share your videos on social media, print them out, or download them for later use. To access the video editor, simply click on the “Videos” tab in the Canva dashboard and select the “Edit” button.

Creating charts in Canva

Canva offers several incredibly helpful (and frequently disregarded) capabilities for making charts and graphs as well, despite being frequently thought of as the go-to tool for creating social media visuals.

With Canva, you can make up to 11 various types of charts, such as bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, and histograms.

The feature is quite simple to use; all you have to do is enter your data into the table on the left side of the Canva interface, and the platform will create a chart or graph for you (see screenshot below).

These can either be integrated on websites using a code snippet or exported in a variety of file formats (the latter method of presentation gives you a way to update your data in Canva and show the most up-to-date graphs on your site automatically).

This is the tool’s most notable feature in my opinion because it makes it incredibly easy to present facts in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and consistent with your brand.

You can learn more about creating charts with Canva here.

Exporting your projects

As we’ve seen, one of Canva’s advantages is that it offers a wide range of export options for your designs.

You can download your designs as image files (JPG or PNG), PDFs, or even GIFs. You can also share your designs on social media or embed them on your website. To export a design, simply click on the “Download” button in the top right corner of the Canva interface. You can then select the file format that you want to export your design as.

It’s important to note that you cannot export to Adobe Photoshop’s PSD format, so you are out of luck if you want to start a design in Canva and then send it to a qualified graphic designer for improvement. (There are clumsy workarounds for this problem that involve converting files to PDF and utilizing third-party software to separate layers.)

Additionally, MP4 is the sole video export format offered (with no options provided to adjust its size or quality).

To be fair, Canva’s output formats do cover the essentials, and many of its users won’t actually need a ton of extra ones since the main goal of the product is to enable quick creation and straightforward export. The variety of export formats will work nicely for the majority of applications (especially if you’re using Canva to generate material that will be viewed online).

Building a website with Canva

Canva not only lets you make graphic assets, but it also lets you design websites.

With Canva’s website builder, you can create a website in minutes, without having to learn to code. The website builder is simple to use and offers a wide range of features, such as a drag-and-drop interface, free templates, and a wide range of export options.

Apps and integrations

Canva also offers a wide range of apps and integrations, such as the Canva for Work app, which gives you access to features such as team collaboration and templates. There is also the Canva for Education app, which gives educators and students access to features such as templates and a library of free photos, illustrations, and videos. To access the apps and integrations, simply click on the “Apps” tab in the Canva dashboard.

The “Smartmockups” software will be very helpful for many people. This serves as a built-in substitute for the related “PlaceIt” mockup generator and enables you to see how your design will seem in the context of the “real world”—for example, on a book cover, in a picture frame, in a smartphone, etc.

It’s also important to highlight a Microsoft Powerpoint software that makes it simple to export your Canva work in PPT format; many Microsoft 365 customers will find this to be helpful.

Strangely, I couldn’t locate any Canva apps for popular website builders like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress. These are all services that might gain from Canva integration because of how effective it is at creating blog banners and web graphics.

However, support for Mailchimp, an email marketing provider, is provided.

If the available apps aren’t sufficient for you, you could always think about developing your own; a developer’s platform for Canva gives you access to the platform’s API and enables you to make your own “content extensions,” which help you combine Canva with other tools in a variety of ways. (Obviously, to do this, you’ll require development skills.)

Canva on mobile phones

Canva is also available on mobile phones, both as an app and through the mobile website. With the mobile app, you can access all the features of Canva, such as templates, the library of photos, and the ability to create designs. With the mobile website, you can access a limited number of features, such as templates and the ability to create designs. To access the mobile app, simply download it from the App Store or the Google Play Store. To access the mobile website, simply go to the Canva website on your mobile phone.

The scores for these are the highest I’ve ever seen for a mobile app for a SaaS product that we’ve assessed, coming in at 4.9 and 4.8 on the Apple and Google Play app stores, respectively.

And now that I’ve played around with Canva on iOS, I can see why the mobile apps are so well-liked by their users. The mobile version I tested had a UI that was very similar to the desktop one in nature (albeit slightly condensed! ), and it was really simple to use.

And this is not a scaled-down version of the software; Canva allows you to complete important tasks on a smartphone.

However, I would still prefer to utilize the browser-based or desktop version of Canva whenever feasible because I don’t particularly love editing pictures and videos on a phone.

However, Canva’s mobile apps are a great choice for folks who are on the go and want to quickly put together a professional-looking video for social media sites.

Canva review conclusion

In conclusion, Canva is a great tool for anyone who wants to create designs, whether for personal or professional use. It offers a wide range of features, such as templates, a library of photos, and the ability to create designs. It is also simple to use and offers a wide range of export options.