Canva is a creative tool used for a huge variety of materials like marketing and comms resources, resumes, video, gif and meme files and, of course, presentations to name but a few. The drag-and-drop interface allows you to put together a fancy looking slide in no time. What’s more, everything you create is customisable, printable and sharable.  

Wanna make your social media visuals within 30 minutes? You got this. Wanna convert a .mov file to .mp4? Say no more, Canva does that in a few seconds. Are you suffering from a creative block, but you must hand in a project asap? Canva is full of thousands of templates and stock imagery to support you along the way. 

Canva has a massive pool of free assets which you can download, print and share with your team without paying a cent. You can invite as many people as you like to your team and decide how to share your ideas with them.  

However, if you want to have access to unlimited content and do cool things like removing the background of an image or infinitely resize designs, you can go with Canva Pro ($120 per year). It also has more cloud storage (1 TB), more content planning and team management options. To top that, if you’re a nonprofit, you can apply for the Pro subscription and potentially have it for free. Cool, right! 

Literally everybody can use it, it’s so straightforward that people from all levels of expertise can make fantastic pieces of content. You can start straight away. No previous experience required, just you and your white canvas. No, you don’t have to be a designer. 

You only need an email (or a Facebook account) to sign up and start exploring the endless possibilities the platform offers. There are two main directions to take from the Dashboard – choose one of the thousands of templates or work on a project basis (super handy if you’re a student). You can also upload your own visual materials and adjust, crop or apply filters later. If you want to design something from scratch, simply click on the Create a design button. 

1. Canva is a collaborative tool. You can create teams and invite up to 10 people to join, you can tag them, send each other links to projects and give each other feedback. 

2. Canva is open. It allows for many media files to be uploaded and shared, and then accessed from any device. 

3. Canva auto-saves. No need to click anywhere to save your edits.  

1. No offline access. If the app is down, you won’t be able to access your work. Imagine you’re in the middle of presentation making and suddenly the website crashes. Do you think your work will be there when you refresh? Because we can tell you some really scary stories… 

2. The templates may be overused. Since they are so modern-looking and people just love them, the in-app templates might be too popular for your taste. What better reason to unleash your own creativity though? 

3. The mobile app doesn’t offer the full set of features. You can still create mobile-first presentations though! 

We hope we’ve managed to answer most of your questions regarding Canva. It’s a fantastic tool that enables users to make their first steps in graphic design and offers accessible design solutions to those who want to raise their productivity by saving up time for the tasks they’re best at. No fees, no complicated interface, just you and your creativity. 

If you need more tips on presentation making software packages, follow our blog where you can take a deep dive into each of them.