Contributor, Benzinga
July 19, 2021
Table of Contents

Canva is an online platform that puts the tools of graphic design in your hands. You don’t need artistic talent to create simple visuals for your social media accounts or design flyers for a big event. 

Learn more about what Canva can offer you in our review.

Canva: At a Glance

Canva is an online design platform geared toward making design easy. The freemium graphics tool is user-friendly, and Canva offers loads of templates from invitations, business cards, social media posts, and more. You can even upload your own photos and add them to Canva's templates using a drag and drop interface. 

Ultimately, Canva is like having a simplified version of Photoshop and doesn't require extensive photo editing knowledge to use. From stickers to professional brochures, stunning videos to workplace presentations, it's never been easier to achieve your design goals.

The Score

Ease of Use: 9/10

Features:  8/10

Pricing:  9/10

Overall:  9/10

The Good

Canva offers many features for beautifully and professionally designed graphics.

  • Makes designing faster: Using Canva can cut design time down. The simple interface and ready-to-go templates mean graphics can be completed in a matter of minutes.
  • Access to photos, videos, and templates: Canva has a big cache of pre-built templates, videos and photos for any kind of design work. In addition, the endless options available can fit any brand or aesthetic.
  • Font library: Canva features a great font selection, including individual fonts and font pairs.
  • Drag-and-drop editor: The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to work with the photos, videos, templates, elements and fonts. Choose what you want to create, and Canva will display all the relevant items.

The Bad

Canvas also has some downfalls. A few of the cons include: 

  • A lot of the great features are paid.
  • You can’t create unique elements.
  • Hard to use on small screens.
  • Not the best editor.

Features

To design sophisticated visuals, a tool such as Photoshop is ideal. But to use it well can take a lot of time to learn, and it is time-consuming to produce great graphics. That’s where a platform like Canva comes in with its simplified features and tools. 

Team Collaboration

After surveying about 500 small- to medium-sized business owners, Canva has recently improved its collaboration features. Now, Canva provides many seamless features to enable efficient team collaboration across the board. From brand kits to intelligent template resizing, working with a team becomes easier when more than 1 person can pitch in.  

Team members have access to the graphics, so everyone can use the same colors and fonts. It allows you to save your branded colors, images, fonts, and logo and then apply them to your templates with just a few clicks. This saves time and keeps your branding consistent.

Free Design and Templates

There’s no doubt Canva offers amazing designs and templates. But you’ll find many beautiful, professionally designed templates are only available with Canva Pro, which is its paid subscription model. 

If you want to have access to their huge archive of designs and templates, it comes at a bargain price of $12.95 per month. Otherwise, you’re left making do with what you have and can defeat the time-saving quality Canva is supposed to provide.

Ease of Use

When it comes to ease of use, this online tool is definitely simplified so even the most inexperienced can use it. Anyone can be a graphic designer with Canva and make adjustments so the templates fit their brand or ideal design. 

From simple visuals to complex designs, the possibilities are endless for all levels of expertise.

Design and Photo Grids

Canva utilizes grid snapping for all the designs. No matter what you’re creating, you can trust that everything is perfectly aligned. 

In addition, with every design, all the elements on the page intelligently align with each other. There are also photo grids that enable you to snap photos and elements in place. 

This ultimately makes the design process faster and ensures everything is in its right place.

Icons and Frames

There are so many ways to add flair with the right frame! Canva’s frames allow you to create placeholders with additional decorative elements. 

This is because frames allow you to crop images and videos to their shape. These elements are attached to the placeholders. Even if you decide to resize or rotate them, the frames will always apply the same transformations.

As for Canva’s icons or elements, there is a wide variety to choose from, including shapes, lines, illustrations, icons, borders, frames, grids, stickers, charts and gradients. 

Tools

The tools provided by Canva allow you to create brochures, flyers, posters, social media graphics, videos, presentations, logos and so much more. 

This online design tool also includes an impressive number of editing and layout tools. Objects can be easily arranged and layered in a project, and it's straightforward to add extras like text captions or fun stickers on top of whatever you're doing. 

Try Canva Today

Canva is an easy-to-use, reliable, and reasonably priced online design tool. Access to so many assets and features is a great value, and the user interface and drag and drop function make designing intuitive and fast. 

Whether you are an expert graphic designer or a complete beginner, Canva is a design tool that offers something for anyone.