By Allison Barwacz | Digital Media Content Producer
The perfect design isn’t always easy to create. And it can’t be constructed in five minutes.
When you’re in a time crunch, sometimes you have to prioritize your duties. But that doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice your design.
This is where Canva comes in.
Canva is a graphic design platform. Sure, there are a number of design programs out there, such as Photoshop, but here’s the kicker: It doesn’t require any software. It’s free and requires no previous design experience.
Canva allows you to choose the type of design you want, with preset dimensions for social media sites, as well as a custom dimension option.
Then you’ll be presented with a variety of pre-made layouts, each of which you can configure to meet your own needs — based on font type, color, etc. — or keep the same.
Once you’re finished with your design, you can either directly share your image or download it.
What’s Canva best used for?
Fortunately, Canva isn’t a single-purpose website. However, there are some business-oriented purposes Canva can serve. Here are some ways we’ve used Canva at North Coast Media:
Social media
Canva offers layouts specifically designed for certain social media outlets, including Facebook and Instagram. And visual content on social media — it’s more important than ever.
“A whopping 66 percent of all social media posts are or includes images,” said Neil Patel in an article on Content Marketing Institute. “More than half of all Internet users have posted original video content or reposted visual content.”
Canva’s an excellent outlet for making creative, visually appealing social media content in five minutes or less (see the Steve Jobs quote card I created above). A simple Canva design on your Twitter feed can mean the difference between five clicks or none.
Website posts
Web articles are another way to showcase visual content. Before posting an article without an image, consider how you’ll be able draw your audience in to read it. Without an image, your audience is less likely to read the article.
“Content with images gets 94 percent more views than content sans images,” said Patel in the same article. “It doesn’t matter what industry, topic, niche, or specialty, images matter.”
So, you don’t think you have the time to add visual content to your posts? Think again. More visuals converts to more views. Use Canva to ramp up your images and grow your audience — the five minutes will be worth it.
