Item: Canva
Rating: 10
Author: Anthony Burke

Overall Satisfaction with Canva

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a digital marketing agency that offers content marketing services, we have great use for creating graphic and visual components to our written content. Our writers and social media people all use Canva as an easy way to create header images and infographics. Words are more compelling when accompanied by visuals, and Canva is one of the programs we use to create those.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Creating visuals that combine text and graphic elements.
Is full-featured enough to work for a number of projects while being much simpler to use than PhotoShop.
I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to graphic design, but Canva makes me feel more capable than I probably am.
Canva is well organized and makes it easy to store revised and original versions.
Canva has many project templates available which make it easy to tailor a graphic to Facebook, Instagram, Blogs, etc.

Cons

For better and worse, Canva is simpler than Photoshop/InDesign. Canva is less powerful and stripped down in comparison, which means, occasionally, you might have projects that require a more sophisticated program.
The selection of stock elements available for free is not always tremendous, which occasionally means paying a small premium for some elements.

Return on Investment

Canva is a pretty quick and easy design program for our team to use, which spares us from frequent use of more expensive programs.
Canva can be used on the cheap, with many options available at little to no cost. To get the most out of Canva you must be willing to spend $1 or so on individual elements that make your designs less generic.
Overall a very cost-effective way to create business-quality graphics.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator CC

Adobe products are more reobust and give you a greater degree of control over the smallest of details. They are much better for sophisticated designers who need that control. Canva is a stripped down version that still allows you to create excellent graphics, and without much financial commitment. As a web app, Canva makes it easy to drag and drop, save using different file types, and download your files.

Other Software Used

Dropbox, Adobe Photoshop, Google Analytics

Likelihood to Recommend

We write a lot of blog posts, for our company and for clients. Canva is one of our go-to programs for creating header images to accompany the blogs that display well within WordPress sites. With its many templates, it also works well for creating social media posts, reports, booklets, and even infographics. Good graphic designers can do amazing things with Canva, and mediocre graphic designers (like myself) can do very good things. Some more detailed projects that require the utmost attention paid to the most minute of details will be better off designed in PhotoShop of InDesign.

Comments

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Canva is a great resource for our content marketing team