Canva: The Shortcut to Quick Digital Content Creation

The rise of internet availability has led to millions of active users on various social media sites. This gave marketers an opportunity to leverage the user base for promoting their products and services on the digital platform thus giving rise to a phenomenon called social media marketing.

Social media marketing provides companies with a way to reach new customers and engage with existing customers. This enabled them to enhance their relationship and promote better understanding of products and services.

Social media sites endorsed more of graphical content thus promoting marketers to come up with digital marketing efforts. Introduction of softwares like Photoshop and CorelDraw enabled the creation of graphical content. However using these softwares requires in-depth training and is time-consuming. Startups and freelancers with limited media budget cannot afford to hire professionals with the know-how of such softwares.

To aid such small-scale companies and freelancers in digital content creation various tools were made available. One such tool is Canva.

What is Canva?

Canva is an online graphic design tool with a simple drag and drop interface empowering non-designers to create professional quality content for sharing on various social media sites. Canva provides users with customizable features like templates, fonts, icons, photo editing tools, graphs and almost everything one may require for creating professional digital content.

How Canva Helps in your Digital Needs?

Templates

Canva provides you with ready to use templates for various purposes like social media, presentation, poster, card, blog graphic etc. The user can select the desired template without having to worry about the compatibility of the image. Users can also create a custom dimension template. Simply click on the custom dimensions tab and specify the dimensions to create a custom template.

Layouts

Layouts are pre-designed images available to the user. These layouts are ready to use images to help users save time and get an idea about content architecture. In case the user is confused with the alignment or structure of the content in his image, they can use any of the layouts available from the Canva library. There are hundreds of layouts to suit almost all digital content needs. Users can select any layout and edit the elements as per their requirement.

Elements

Adding visual elements always helps to create a greater impact and aids in communicating the message more effectively. Elements adds a sense of fun and brings life to the content.  It is important to support the message of the content with necessary visual elements which is just what Canva lets users do. Canva has a plethora of offers for adding elements to your image consisting of grids, frames, shapes, charts and icons to support the underlying objective of the image being created.

Text

The text option in Canva works just like on a standard word editor. Users can choose fonts from the font gallery to  communicate the message and improve the visual appeal. The text can be edited to suit the design needs.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds are the backdrops of the design. Users can choose solid colors, textures or images as backgrounds for their design. Canva’s background library has content to fulfill all needs. Also if there are any white spaces that the user wishes to fill, appropriate backgrounds can be added to cover those white spaces.

Uploads

Canva offers users to upload their own images in case they wish to work upon them. Users can upload pictures from their computer and even use pictures from their Facebook account if needed.

Brand Kits

To help brands create a standardized look and feel of their content, Canva provides an option of creating Brand Kits. It gives designers an option to define brand assets like colors, font style and logo. Creating brand kits ensures that any designer working on a particular project does not waste time creating the brand format and helps standardize the format.

Team Templates

It may happen that a certain project needs to be worked upon again and again for future use. For example, a boutique may have to send out frequent brochures informing about various sales. Creating team templates helps in using the previously created designs to make the required changes thus saving the time and effort to recreate the entire design again.

Canva Animator

Increasing competition has cause a clutter in the digital space. Social media marketing now requires content that is unique enough to catch the eye of the audience. Canva Animator helps you take your designs to another level by adding life to your content. There are several animation options available to make your content come to life. Users registered for a Canva for work account can download designs as GIF or a movie.

Ready  Tutorials

Canva provides tutorials on the website for first time users to get acquainted with the interface and features. There are in-depth tutorials about each and every feature that is available on Canva. Even the most basic things like colors and fonts have been covered to make the already easy tool even easier for the user. One can simply click on the learn to design tab and start creating professional quality content in no time.

You can check the video below to get a quick hands-on.

https://youtu.be/XqYti78riU8

Thus it is evident that Canva has a host of features which makes it comparable to professional softwares like Photoshop and Corel Draw. Even a beginner can use Canva for his graphic needs and create professional looking content. Canva not only helps non-designers create great content but also designers to lessen the time and effort put into projects.

Canva is also available in app format for both ios and android which is a cherry on the cake. Users can update and edit their content on the go while traveling thus increasing convenience.

So what are you waiting for? Click here to login to Canva and start creating professional looking content for all your social media marketing needs.