When it comes to social media marketing, the design is an important part of an overall content marketing strategy. No matter how great the narrative is, no one will notice it unless it’s accompanied with eye-catching visuals to grab the user’s attention in the middle of scrolling.
Today you don’t have to have years’ experience to create your own design assets. Adobe Photoshop and Canva are both design editing software.
Canva is meant for a non-designer, while Photoshop is a professional level software that can take a while to get used to. If you’re a complete newbie, with no design skills, Canva would probably be a better option for you.
Canva makes design amazingly simple, quick (and fun)!
Key Canva Features
1. Easy to use
It’s almost like a drag and drop graphic designer.
2. Alignment
To ensure all your design elements are aligned. When you move your elements around your design in Canva, a dotted line will appear when they line up with one another. This is extremely useful when making sure your design is pleasing to the eye and beautifully aligned with consistent margins and line spacing.
3. Templates
Canva provides many free templates for all kinds of graphic creation: social media graphics, logos, posters and t-shirts. Templates for social media are also provided in the correct sizes.
4. Images & Videos and more
Canva’s library provides thousands of videos, stickers, elements, sounds, images, background and textures that you can use. You can also upload your own images to a template.
5. Fonts
Confused by what fonts to use? Canva has taken the pain away by putting together great font combos for your designs.
6. Grids
Grids are Canva’s answer to putting multiple photos into unique shapes. When you click on a Grids, you can then go to “Photos” and drag a photo over into the frame.
7. Animate
To use the Canva Animator, you simply create your design and click “Animate”. From there, you can choose an animation style and download it as a gif or mp3.
8. Share with your friends
You can easily share designs with your friends or team. This makes it so much easier for other people to conduct edits to your design and give you feedback.
9. Saving
Canva automatically saves all your designs.
Canva Pro
For just £10.99 a month you also get a few advanced features…
1. Brand Kit
Building a brand kit is the first step to create consistent and awesome designs for brand. Lay the foundations for your brand and set your logo, colours and fonts in your brand kit.
2. Extended Image Library
There are plenty of free images available on Canva, but It’s worth paying for the premium just for the extended library, which would have costed you a lot more if you were to use something like, Shutterstock.
3. Magic resizes
Instead of starting from scratch, Canva can magically resize your design. This is useful when designing your social marketing creatives and resizing from Facebook to Twitter etc. Click on Resize in the top menu, select or search for your required size and then click Copy & Resize.
4. Background remover
This is a great tool for when you are unsure of the current background or would like to add a different background image or colour behind your object. Simply: Upload your own image or choose one from our image library. Click on the Effects button on the top corner of your toolbar. Next, select ‘Background Remover.
5. Sharing your designs
Retain control over who can view and edit your design: In Canva, as the owner of a design, you are able to share files with users that will either allow them to view and edit, without breaking your designs.
6. Schedule social media content to 7 platforms
Design, draft and schedule your social media posts in Canva. To schedule, pick a specified date and time, add your design and caption and Canva will post for you.
Our Rockstar Top Tips
1. I would recommend doubling the size of your Canva design to get a less blurry image. The only caution I have on this is doubling the size in Canva will also increase the file size of your image, affecting its website friendliness. The goal is to get the smallest file size while retaining the best quality.
2. Canva offers two ways to access your designs – an app or web browser. Accessing the Canva on a laptop with a compatible browser will give you the best overall experience.
3. Th ‘Lock’ feature is a great way to organise a busy design and make sure you don’t edit elements you are happy with.
4. Elements, text and images can all sit in front or behind one of another creating an invisible layer. This can get tricky if you are trying to select a specific object and it feels like it is locked. It is most likely trapped behind an object. To adjust these layers, you can go to the position tool and send the object to the back with the behind tool or forward with the forward tool.
5. When uploading your own images, make sure to name them correctly. This way you can easily find them again via search.
Stay Safe,
Stacey & Negin
#realfaces #stickingtogether
