What Does Canva Do?
Canva is an online graphic design tool that makes it easy for non-designers to create beautiful images.
We use Canva almost daily at Avalon to create YouTube thumbnails, images for our blog, social media posts, short videos and lots of other things.
The program works completely online so you don’t need to install anything and it’s simple to collaborate on projects with your team.
Why We Love Canva
We’re accountants and not designers, but Canva provides templates and common elements that we use to create really cool stuff.
The program shows you when items line up properly and allows you to make sure you have uniform spacing between elements in your design.
I find this to be super helpful compared to some other programs I’ve used. I don’t need to worry if I’ve sized things properly or lined them up accurately because Canva shows me with helpful guidelines and tool tips.
Canva is also great for collaborating on designs with the team. We can all access our library of projects and make edits as needed.
Canva comes with presets for different social media platforms so it’s easy for me to get the right size for Instagram posts or YouTube thumbnails.
Use Cases for Canva
Canva is a pretty robust platform so there are a lot of different use cases for it.
We’re an accounting firm and we’ve used Canva for:
- Creating YouTube thumbnails
- Designing graphics for blog posts
- Creating graphics for company announcements
- Editing and creating images for social media posts
- Creating animated videos to insert into YouTube
- Birthday cards
- Process documents to show our client onboarding process
- TikTok thumbnails
- Infographics
- Welcome cards to be sent to our new clients
For most small businesses, Canva will help you design most htings that you can think up.
Canva isn’t Photoshop, though, so there are some limitations. However, it’s that simplicity that also makes it so easy and useful for non-designers.
Canva Pricing
With Canva’s pricing, there is a free plan, a “Pro” plan and a “Canva for Teams” plan.
Canva Free Plan
The free plan is perfect to get started with because you can still design pretty much anything with it.
There is a 5GB storage limit and some elements and templates don’t come with the free plan, but you still get a good set of tools.
Canva Pro Plan - $150 CAD per year
The pro plan adds some additional elements, templates and storage that you can use. The cloud storage also increases to 1TB with the Pro plan.
The 100+ million premium stock photos, videos, audio and graphics is a pretty amazing resource when making your designs.
Canva for Teams Plan - $200 CAD per year for up to 5 users
Canva for teams allows teams of all sizes to collaborate within Canva. It gives you everything in the Pro plan and gives you a few more users to collaborate with.
You also get to set permissions for users and view team reports and insights.
