For most of us, design has never come easy. Unfortunately this means that we can at times neglect the visual aspect of our online presence. Australian online startup Canva has jumped to our aid with their new brilliantly simple online design platform.
Canva is an online design service, which allows you to create beautiful web or print graphics on the fly. The service allows you to choose from hundreds of existing templates or create your own. You can then customize the graphic by searching for and dragging various elements onto the page. Canva have a huge library of fonts, shapes and images for you to pick from, or you can upload your own images.
The service is free to use, however, some premium design elements come at a small cost ($1 per element).
How can you take advantage of Canva?
- Select a Facebook cover template and regularly swap out image and text elements to keep your page fresh
- Create a blog post image template so you can swap out images and text for each post ensuring that all your post feature images have the same look and feel
- Create call to action graphics using your brand colours and fonts and maintain the same template for all call to actions on your site.
- Select from existing templates to create beautiful documents and reports quickly.
Here is an example of a simple post badge template I have created. It took me approximately 20 minutes to create three badges and a reusable template. In the future all I would have to do to create a new badge would be: log into the site, open the template, swap out the image and text and finally export the image.
