Canva – Best Free Online Design Platform

If you are just getting started with graphic design, you might be searching for a tool that can help you create your first design. In this article you’ll discover why we wholeheartedly recommend you to discover Canva.com as the go-to online graphic design program for your casual designs. Perfect for social media images, infographics, curriculum, presentations, business cards, logos, and more!

What is Canva?

Canva is a unique online graphic design tool that allows anyone to easily create stunning visual materials for all kinds of occasions. 

Canva.com is the perfect choice to get started designing your curriculum, an infographic, logo, or images for your social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and more. With plenty of free design templates, stock images, and other visual attributes available, it is a fun process to create your own design from scratch or easily tweak an existing template to your preferences.

While an online tool like Canva might not compete with a high-precision graphic designer toolkit like what you can find in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, Canva has quickly become our favorite platform when it comes to day-to-day productivity for casual designs. 

 Canva is an ideal free platform for students, teachers, digital art hobbyists, and professional and non-professional graphic designers looking for speed and creativity on the go. 

What are some of the main advantages of using Canva for your designs?

Canva Free version is actually useful

While free software is oftentimes extremely limited in the functions available compared to the premium version, Canva’s Free version is actually very useful and more than enough for most people to get started with their first personal designs. This makes Canva very attractive for students, teachers, and hobbyists looking to quickly whip up a nice design. From school presentations to flyers, posters, business cards, infographics, social media banners, and images, Canva’s templates got you covered.

At the same time, if you are a power user, the Premium version is a no-brainer. The available images, Icons, and ease of use are ideal for boosting your productivity!

Extremely Intuitive – Fast learning curve

Canva is incredibly intuitive to use and has achieved creating a one-stop-shop for most digital design purposes. While digital design professionals will still require advanced tools like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator in their toolkit to edit photos, Canva has found the sweet spot in providing the masses with an easy-to-use design tool for most use cases.

Stunning FREE design templates

If you are just getting started with designing, or you are a seasoned graphic designer, the variety of template styles available makes it a breeze to get your creative juices flowing. All templates allow you to simply replace, tweak or drag and drop, any design element you want. 

The platform is packed with hundreds of design templates for all kinds of uses. Presentation, Curriculum, Poster, Social media, Logo, Infographic, Business cards, and so on

Hundreds of thousands of Free stock photos are available

While you can search the web and find other websites which provide royalty-free stock photos, it is very helpful to have those stock photos preloaded at the tip of your fingers when you are focused on the creative process of your design. With over xxx stock images available in the free version and over xxx in the Canva PRO version, it will be hard not to find a suitable image for your needs.

Large library of fonts, icons, and other visual elements

Designing becomes fun when you can easily customize your design by switching and tweaking fonts, Icons, drag and drop images, and other visual elements.

Canva Highligthed Features

• Canva allows you to create teams so that you can easily collaborate with your peers.

• You can organize your designs and images by saving them in dedicated folders, and easily duplicate and resize your designs to use them for different display purposes

• Download in different formats and qualities – JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG, MP4, 

• Canva is available online or offline as an app for Mac, Windows, Android, or IOS

• Generate your own QR codes

• Create Product mockups for t-shirts, mugs, and so on.

• Photo editing tools like; automatic background remover, a set of photo coloring tools, and coloring presets

• Brand Kit – allowing you to save font and color presets for a design style or specific brand.

• Social media post scheduling tool for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Tumblr

What is Canva not ideal for?

While we love what Canva has done when it comes to making casual design easy and intuïtive for the masses, a professional photo editor will need far more advanced tools to work on professional designs. 

Specialized photo editors like Adobe Photoshop – while having a much steeper learning curve – will allow graphic designers to work with Layers, create specialized photo edit automation settings, and have access to a specialized suite of tools allowing for image repair, image correction, color manipulation, blending models, masking, and more. Photoshop however does NOT have a free version – You can find the adobe photoshop current price plans here https://www.adobe.com/es/creativecloud/plans.html

How much does Canva cost?

You can use Canva for FREE or upgrade to the Canva PRO version. Canva pricing plans can be found here: https://www.canva.com/pricing/

Main differences between Canva FREE version and Canva PRO version?

Conclusion

If you are looking for the most intuítive tool on the market to get started on your designs, look no further. Canva is hands down the best free and paid designing tool on the market currently. It is truly a one-stop-shop for your casual design needs. The platform is also continuously adding new features and capabilities which has kept Canva the number one choice for many. 

So, if you are looking to create a nice curriculum, business card, wedding invitation, infographic, banner for your social media platforms, and so on, there is no reason not to use Canva. It has all you need at your fingertips.

If you are a professional photo editor, Canva can be a nice addition to a professional tool like Photoshop if you appreciate what Canva can do for your productivity.