Product Reviews

Canva: The Easiest Content Marketing Tool for Design

Posted on April 17, 2018March 17, 2023 by Jas0n

17
Apr

If you are looking for a content marketing tool to easily create designs, look no further than Canva. Canva is known by many as the simplest tool to create stunning graphics for any social media platform, flyers, billboards, websites, etc—no graphic design skills required! In fact, they have dozens of pre-made design templates for you. All of your designs get stored on your account and can be accessed on any computer when you sign in (that’s more than Illustrator can say). The way the content marketing tool works is first, you choose your dimensions, then you can select a template or decide to make your content from scratch. After that, you get to customize the graphic as you please. This includes choosing any font, image, decal, or shape to go on the graphic. Some of these elements are free, some cost $1 and some require that you have a premium account to use. You can also upload your own graphics to use. They keep watermarks over the images that cost money so people can’t steal them without paying. This makes it difficult to view what the final graphic will look like. However, once you pay for a graphic and download it, they allow you to make edits and redownload the image for free within 24 hours. That way, if there was a mistake, you have a day to fix it before you have to pay for the graphics again. There are two major problems I have with Canva. The first is the pricing structure. In the past, Canva had lots of free images and lots of $1 images, but there were no premium images. There were many times that I would’ve been willing to pay a couple dollars for images I wanted, but was not willing to get premium. They should be willing to take my money and let me buy the graphic! They should leave it up to the business to decide if premium is a better deal for them than paying per design instead of separating graphics based off premium or not. Instead, they lose business from users like myself because I am forced to find a graphic online that is free and upload it to Canva instead of being able to purchase theirs for $1. My second major issue with Canva is that the base size you choose is not easily changed (that I have found). So Once I pick a size, I am married to it. I have done projects with 15 images where I download them from Canva and crop them on my computer before turning them in because it’s not worth starting my entire design over just to change the dimensions of the graphic. It seems like Canva should have a simpler fix to this issue. Despite my issues with Canva, it is still the easiest design program. How much easier can it get than a drag-and-drop content marketing tool? They also don’t make you pay to have the tool like Adobe does. You only pay for what you use and can have beautiful graphics in minutes for just a couple of dollars and without having any design skills. It’s pretty amazing!