Pretty much every business, large and small, would benefit from a little graphic design help. While nothing beats an in-house graphic designer, that’s not always an option. Luckily, there are programs even non-designers can use to create inviting and engaging designs with ease. Canva is one of the popular design tools that can help.
It’s a one-stop shop for anyone looking to up their graphic design game and, most importantly, do it easily. From photos and logos to book covers and video editing, Canva can help with a suite of projects.
Here’s how to get started using Canva for your business needs.
What is Canva?
Canva is a graphic designplatform that allows users to create a wide range of visual content. That includes social mediagraphics, presentations, posters, documents, and other visuals for social channels, websites, and marketing materials.
Canva features a drag-and-drop interface that’s easy to use with or without a graphic design background. After logging in, choose the type of project you want to create and then select from thousands of customizable templates. You can also upload custom graphics and your own images so your new assets will stay consistent with your brand.
How much does Canva cost?
Canva offers many freefeatures with more features as you upgrade your plan. Here’s an overview of costs and features:
Canva Free
Canva’sfree version offers access to a huge library of customizable templates for various types of content, including social media posts, presentations, fliers, invitations, and more. You can also access more than three million stock photos and other design elements to make creating custom designs easy, plus the free video editor.
Additionally, it includes basic photo editingtools like cropping, resizing, and filter applications. It offers five gigabytes of cloud storage for saving and organizing designs, which can be downloaded in multiple formats. You can also access tutorials, blogs, and courses to help you improve your design skills.
Canva Pro
Canva Pro costs $120 per year, or $15 per month for a single user. It comes with all the same features as Canva Free, plus a million more templates. You also gain access to almost 130 million stock photos, graphics, fonts, videos, and audio files.
Storage options also range from five gigabytes to one terabyte. Perhaps the most significant difference is Pro users have access to brand features allowing them to do more custom work. With Pro, you can create multiple brand kits and save designs as templates for easy editing access down the line.
Additionally, Pro includes a content planner, enabling social media managers to schedule social media posts directly from the platform. You can also downloadimages in a wider variety of formats and with transparent backgrounds.
CanvaTeams
CanvaTeams starts at a minimum of $300 per year for three users, with the ability to grow and scale from there as your business does. CanvaTeams facilitates collaboration and streamlines the design process for groups, whether they are small teams, large organizations, or businesses.
CanvaTeams includes all the same features above, with the added ability to create and share brand kits across the team to ensure consistent branding. You can also set up approval workflows for design projects and create reusable team-specific templates.
If you need more features, Canva Enterprise is available for large-scale business operations and pricing is available upon request.
🌟Looking for more options? Here’s an overview of some more free design software and seven tips for choosing the best free graphic design tool for your business.
Features of Canva
Canva has lots of worthwhile features. These are some of the ones most applicable to your business:
- The Brand Kit. As anyone who’s ever worked with brand guidelines knows, keeping things consistent is way easier said than done. Canva’s Brand Kit allows businesses to store brand colors, fonts, and logos in one easily accessible place, making it easier to ensure consistency across flyers, professional videos, graphics, and other brand assets.
- The Content Planner. After creating custom designs in Canva, you can use the Content Planner to post your designs across Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn.
- The Template Library. The template library has a few million examples to help you start creating Instagram grid posts, Reels, product brochures, presentations, and more.
- Magic Resize. The Magic Resize feature can turn an Instagram post into a Facebook cover photo or a Facebook cover photo into a custom image for a blog.
Elevate your design process with Canva Connect, an app that effortlessly links your Shopify store to Canva.
Instantly access and drag your product images and videos into your designs, saving you time and simplifying your design efforts.
Ways to use Canva for your business
When it comes to things like marketing, design, branding, pitch decks, and social media, there are a number of ways to make Canva work for you:
- Make website and blog graphics. Whether you’re using the Free or Pro version, Canva’s graphic design capabilities operate similarly to Photoshop. Retouch product photos, resize images for blog posts, create infographics, and more.
- For presentation and pitch decks. Use Canva templates to create sales presentations and pitch decks.
- Social media marketing. Use Canva to create social assets and then schedule those assets to appear on a variety of social platforms.
What is Canva FAQ
What is Canva mainly used for?
Although Canva has many uses across a variety of different specializations and functional areas, its primary use is as a graphic design platform. You can use Canva to edit photos and videos, design custom graphics, and create or modify other image-, text-, and video-based projects.
Is Canva actually free?
Yes, Canva is free. There are paid versions with a more robust set of features, but the free version of Canva also has many useful tools.
What are the benefits of Canva?
You can use the platform to create custom graphics, posters, videos, presentations—the list goes on. Canva is also a powerhouse when it comes to team collaboration. Your organization can create, edit, and approve all in one place. You can also use it to create social posts and post them across channels, all from one platform.
