Save Time and Create Your Images with Canva

Saturday, August 08, 2015 canva , featured , image tools 0 Comments

DESIGN CAN BE SIMPLE!

I love to discover new tools that will save me heaps of time!  I've just discovered Canva and absolutely love the simplicity of it. The program was designed specifically for people without any design skills whatsoever to create beautiful images for their website or blog.

I use Photoshop and have picked up many skills over the years but find myself using Canva more and more lately, because it's simply much more efficient and creates far better results than I can acheive.

IT'S IMPORTANT TO CREATE STUNNING IMAGES


In today's world which has become so visual-centric it's more important than ever to create stunning, high-quality images to attract people on social media or to give your website a high level of professionalism.

If you're a blogger I'm sure you know of lots of  tools to help you give your images a professional touch, probably the most well known go to image creators are PicMonkey and Pixlr.  I've come across a few programs and apps since I started blogging but find they require too much time in getting to grips with them or the images available are just not good enough.  Or they only assist in part of the process so you'll need another tool to complete your image.

With so many tools to choose from for both your desktop and plenty of apps available for your mobile, the hardest decision you have is to find one which will work best for you. With Canva, I think it ticks all the boxes.

JUST GRAB A PRE-DESIGNED GRAPHIC


The best thing about Canva is that it offers so many pre-designed graphics which allows for complete customisation in a clean, drag and drop interface. So you haven't got to think about the sizes needed for Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest, it's all done for you.

From the easy to use design-selector menu, you can select your layout, search for images, purchase stock photos, add effects to your image and customise the look and feel to match your brand or colour palette.

Yes, I did mention "purchase" stock photos!  However, they are only $1!  Quite often I might find just the image I'm looking for on Shutterstock but they charge £6 so it's a no brainer to use Canva to purchase the image, at that price it's pretty hard to beat. And it's quicker as you won't need to search for an image, save it and upload it.

AMAZING RESULTS IN SUCH A SHORT SPACE OF TIME


Canva has only been available for a relatively short space of time, just under 2 years and already they have over 3 million using it.

Canva was set up by Melanie Perkins, who teaches design programs at University level. Realising that for beginners it can take months to be able to create something that looked good, she had a vision to make design accessible and fun to everyone.  And, to bring design online and make it easy to learn and achieve great results immediately.

This, I think she has achevied. I can create an image for Facebook within minutes and sit back and think, wow that looks amazing!