Canva, according to Rob, has a simple mission: to empower the world to design by making it simple and easy for people to communicate visually, unlock their creativity, and help them achieve their goals.

People use Canva for small, but very meaningful goals, like creating invitations for their children’s birthday parties, or creating a welcome home poster for their loved ones. And then some of the goals that Canva helps people achieve are world-changing because the tool is being used by over 100,000 nonprofit organizations to create their marketing communications, raise funds or draw attention to any critical issues, all for free. And that includes presentations as well. Of course, Canva is being used by many business professionals to tell the story of their products, but also by teachers to help them in class.

Nick and Rob presented collectively about what you can do with Canva as a multi-tool for design.

Starting inspired is easier with the thousands of beautiful templates and the deep content library that Canva has. They don’t just make taking the first step easy, they give you a real head start. And with Canva, you never have to start with a blank page. You start the presentations the way you want to finish them.

Here you can see Nick showing just a few of the available templates. 

You start on the home page by selecting a specific template category. Canva has thought about offering mobile-first presentations, talking presentations, which Nick showed in more detail later in the session, and even brainstorming presentations. They all have a little bit of built-in motion into them, which helps with engagement. So the templates are set up and ready for you to use.

The brainstorm presentations are used especially in a remote kind of working environment as they are great for collaborating as a team, as they come in different variations as mood boards or group cards.

Nick points out three things to look out for in your presentations always – to keep it short and sweet, keep it one point per page, whenever possible, show and don’t tell, and use visuals more than any long blocks of text.

Canva is as user-friendly as possible, so you can also mix and match pages from different templates, where you need to do it. One more good thing is that you never have to worry about saving your progress while you are working because Canva automatically saves it for you.

The brand kit is also something Canva provides. It makes your brand assets easy to maintain and use or apply like fonts and colors to be very easily applied to the whole presentation that you are working on. With one click, you can apply the colors or the fonts.

It is easy to make any template brand-compliant with the Brand Kit integrated. With one click you can change the whole presentation’s colors or fonts.

Moreover, Canva Pro has an easy way to remove the background of images or apply a mockup to the image with just one click. Then another widely used feature of theirs is the rich media integration – embedding things like videos, GIFs, maps, or your Instagram feed. For example, you can just paste the YouTube video link and now you have a video in your presentation.

When you design, you try to get into the flow, which starts with being inspired and continues with the easy-to-use design tools. However, Canva can also empower you to have a fluid group effort by allowing teams to work together frictionlessly. Canva can allow your team to come together swiftly, get or leave feedback, and bring their ideas to life through digital brainstorming.

You can write a comment, tag anyone on it, or assign it to anybody as a task. Then the person can easily join your presentation and start working with you at the same time.

Canva’s live tools are the solution to the “Death by PowerPoint”, in Nick’s opinion. They are tools that help facilitate a two-way conversation by encouraging real-time interaction through comments and reactions.

In the top right corner, when you hit the present button, you enter Canva Live, which allows you to start a new presentation session.

Recording a talking presentation is very easy as well. You go to the Publish menu and choose Present and Record. It brings you to the Canva Talking Presentation Recording Studio. You select your desired camera and microphone to use and simply begin recording.

You may share a link or download it as a video once you record yourself presenting your slides, and then send it to your colleagues. It’s a fantastic option for teams who have to work together asynchronously.