Canva.com is an online graphic design platform that offers free access to a wide assortment of design tools and options, as well as premium options for paying customers.

Need a custom graphic for your blog or social media page? Canva is a drag-and-drop tool with millions of images and hundreds of fonts. Over ten million users have created over 100 million designs with the help of Canva’s user-friendly interface. While nothing will replace the instinct and creativity of a trained graphic designer, Canva offers a tool for simple, creative designs. Fortunately, it’s easy to sign up for Canva and take their free version for a test drive.

Drag-and-Drop

Like most of these solutions, Canva offers drag-and-drop functionality. Combined with search, this feature makes it easy to discover image elements and to include the ones you like.

Tons of Images and Fonts to Use

Whether you use a free or paid photo, or even one you upload yourself, Canva provides and easy-to-use photo editor where you can change the look of your image using settings that include filters, tint, brightness, and more. As for fonts, Canva offers hundreds from which to choose. It’s hard to stop playing with all those choices!

Price

When it comes to price, you can’t go wrong with Canva because it’s free! You read that right, you can use every Canva template for free.

How Do You Use Canva for Business?

The primary way to use Canva for business is to create and publish engaging content that will attract your targeted prospects both online and off. To help you get started, here’s a walk-through of the process to create an image to use as a Facebook update. These types of images can go viral easily; especially if they’re funny or useful.

Step 1

The first step is to select your template. We’re using the Facebook Post template as indicated by the red arrow and to do so, all we need to do is click on it.

Step 2

The next screen is where all the magic happens. There are a lot of features stuffed into this area, so here’s a quick overview to orient you:

1. Search tab – This is where you can find images, icons, charts and more to use;
2. Layouts tab – Canva offers a number of ready-to-use layouts for your image. This is a huge time-saver, especially if you want to move quickly;
3. Text tab – Here’s where you’ll find the text elements, both pre-formatted styles and text in images such as speech balloons and more;
4. Background tab – If you’re not using a layout (i.e. starting from scratch), you can use one of the many background colors and images found here;
5. Uploads tab – Canva allows you to upload and use your own elements such as images and logos;
6. Zoom Control – Use this to make your work area larger or smaller;
7. Search form – You can always access search using this search form;
8. Canvas – This is where you’ll create your masterpiece;
9. Add a new page – Many types of content can contain multiple pages, this is where you add them;
10. Page controls – If you have more than one page, use this area to navigate between then copy them, delete them and of course, know which page you’re currently on;
11. Design Name – Change the name of your design here;
12. Share button – Use this to share your design as discussed above;
13. Download button – Use this to download your image;
14. Make Public button – Use this to share your design in Canva’s “stream”;
15. Help tab – Support is only a click away with a searchable knowledge base that you can access and use while still working on your design.

Step 3

Now it’s time to create an image! We’re going to start on the search tab which, as you can see, enables you to search by keyword or by element category:

We’re going to select the “Charts” category and then add an icon:

Step 4

Next, we’re going to upload an image using the upload tab. Once it’s in there, we simply need to click on it to add it to our image:

Step 5

Now it’s time to add some more text so it’s off to the Text tab. We liked this ready-to-use text element so we clicked on it to include it in our image:

Step 6

Next, we’ll edit the look of the text element as well as what it says. Canva makes this easy with its contextual menus:

Step 7

To make the chart icon overlap our text element like we wanted, we just need to click “Back” while the text element is selected:

Step 8

We’re almost there! In this step, we finish editing the text element, added a heart image (using the search form) and then played around with the size and position of each element so it looked right:

Step 9

Next, it’s off to the Background tab to well, add a background. We chose a crinkled paper image to finish off our image: