If you haven’t heard, Canva is THE platform for helping laypeople fake it as pro designers when it comes to creating digital graphics, documents, and marketing materials. It’s perfect for allowing people with a creative eye to translate their visions into reality without the time investment that goes with learning the ins and outs of Adobe Creative Suite, and it helps the utterly uncreative produce some pretty nifty images.
If you’re worried we’re giving away the farm by sharing this (pretty easy to find) design secret, fret not. Just like SquareSpace hasn’t replaced web developers, Canva won’t replace graphic designers. It simply makes design skills and tools available to those who wouldn’t have them otherwise — like small business owners or bloggers.
Pick Your Poison
Canva offers tons of pre-designed templates they refer to as “layouts” in a variety of dimensions. To make it easy to create exactly what you need, the dimensions are split into sections like social media posts, documents, marketing materials, and ads. The social media posts sections contains dimensions for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram posts, cover photos, and even Facebook ads. The one social media dimension it’s missing is a Facebook event cover photo. Event cover photos aren’t the same size as a regular cover photo, so it’s difficult to make a graphic that perfectly fits on Facebook event pages. This is a major drawback for users like me, since most of the graphics I make are for Facebook events (mostly pyramid schemes and “Lost my phone, give me your number”-based events).
Image may be NSFW.
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There is also the elusive “social media” dimension. It fits on Facebook and also works on Twitter (as a cropped image until users click on it), so there doesn’t seem to be an obvious reason for choosing the generic social media dimension over the other, more specific options.
Bonus Tip: Check the bottom right corner of your layout, photo, icon, etc. before you use it. It will either say “free” or have a dollar sign. If you don’t have a budget, try to ignore those layouts that look perfect, but aren’t free.
Don’t Forget Your Brand
When you browse the layouts on Canva, you’ll likely feel overwhelmed with inspiration and want to use every single one. Don’t. Each brand has a certain look and feel to it, so some of the layouts — in their original states — won’t match your brand. Don’t confuse your audience by moving between glitzy, modern, and boho graphic stylings. Just pick one and explore it. This is where a good design sense will come into play. You can change your photo, colors, and font to better match the feel of your brand, but make sure the graphic still looks cohesive.
Bonus Tip: Canva for Work is launching soon. Organizations interested in using the new “pro” version of the site can enjoy additional features designed specifically for businesses and teams. You can sign up now.
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Cure Analysis Paralysis
If you don’t feel overwhelmed with inspiration by the templates, you may feel that none of them are quite what you’re looking for; perhaps they seem off-brand. This is what I’ve run into. Canva is great for everyone’s dream business — gluten-free bakeries, artisan bread, travel bloggers — but not all of us have reached that step of our bucket list yet. If you don’t have a specific product to present, you’ll have to find a more inventive way to showcase your brand when what you’re marketing may not be tangible. Consider creating a list of things that represent your brand. With a list of core elements, you will have a through line that connects everything together. From here, it will be a lot easier to decide which photos, fonts, vectors, and even filters to use.
Bonus Tip: Canva uses image filters in almost every single layout. As the program is loading, you’ll see the original photo, and then the filter will appear. Canva seems to have a thing for dark filters (muted colors = art). If you never use filters on your images, keep an eye on these to teach yourself to find filtering opportunities. You may find that some of the layouts just need a tweak in coloring to get on par with your branding.
Use Their Designer Tips
Check out the “design school” tab on the Canva website. You can watch tutorials or find a blog to help you with your own design deficiencies (like if you’re clueless when it comes to combining fonts), or you can browse through the categories, including fonts, color theory, design inspiration, and design layouts.
Bonus Tip: After you’ve honed your design skills, try using the free grid layouts at the bottom. It takes a bit more inspiration than the pre-designed layouts, but you’ll be able to flex your creative muscles. This, paired with a free stock photos site (like Unsplash or All The Free Stock), will give you a lot of freedom to represent your brand in an innovative way.
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Hurrdat is a Lincoln, Neb. digital marketing agency specializing in social media and content marketing. The company was founded in 2010 and merged with B² Interactive of Omaha, Neb. in 2014 bringing even more digital marketing specialties to both firms’ clients. Together they provide a full range of social media, SEO, and website development services to both national brands and local clients. The companies employ more than 75 people in Nebraska and have won multiple awards for their business efforts, company culture, and clients’ campaigns.
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