Item: Canva
Rating: 10
Author: Adeline Garman BA (Hons) DipM MCIM

Overall Satisfaction with Canva

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Both my Creative Director and I use Canva to make beautiful bespoke graphics to use on social media. We also use it to create professional looking graphics and infographics. It enables us to design great looking marketing materials quickly and efficiently, at a fraction of the cost or time it might take a design agency to do.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It's simple to use, very intuitive, and has some great functionality. It's a great alternative to InDesign for someone who has minimal or no design experience.
It's a very cost-effective solution, particularly if you source your own graphics rather than using any of Canva's paid for images.
There is a huge selection of layout designs, templates and images available - I've been able to create everything from social media graphics and book covers to logos and infographics.

Cons

Canva print is way too expensive. It would be great if it was cheaper as the tool really would be a 'one stop shop'.
Hate the way it deals (or doesn't!) with images on a transparent background. An image can look fantastic on screen but when it goes for print it comes back with a halo, very disappointing.
If you want to create something that is perfectly aligned it can be very very time consuming as you can't create margins etc and use a 'snap to grid' function. If you have multiple items you need aligned you need to do each manually, which is both laborious and painful.

Return on Investment

Canva has saved us a significant amount of time and money in terms of producing our own collateral. We are quickly and inexpensively able to produce collateral including fliers and posters.
We are able to provide a better, higher quality service to our clients because we can produce professional quality graphics in-house.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Indesign and Microsoft Paint

The only other design tools I have used that could be vaguely compared to Canva are InDesign and Paint. The former is far too compex to 'dabble' with and produce great results quickly and efficiently (not to mention the price tag!) whilst the latter is far too primitive. I have yet to come across a solution comparable to Canva.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, Constant Contact, MailChimp

Likelihood to Recommend

I really really like Canva and in most basic to intermediate design situations, it's fantastic. That said, nothing beats using a professional designer if you want a really expensive looking, professional product.

Canva is intuitive and easy to use for the most part. As a marketer, Canva has lots of great features that I find useful for putting together graphics for blogs or website materials. Being able to create designs and download them as PDFs is very useful for creating ebooks/white papers. Overall a very convenient tool that does what you expect it to.

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Top notch graphics tool for novices