Canva

 Canva

 Basic Information

Create presentations and social media graphics using graphic design tool with drag-and-drop functionality and professional layouts.

Primary Use:

• [General] Create amazing and professional quality graphic designs
• [Faculty] Graphics, Projects, Presentation
• [Students] Photo Editing, Presentation, Projects

Key Features:

• Photo straightener: Keep your photos in line with our photo straightener tool.
• Image cropper: Crop your photos for great framing and masterful composition.
• Add text to photos: Create a narrative for any photo.
• Speech bubble maker: Give your photos a voice with speech bubbles.
• Give your photos a delicate fade with our transparency tool.
• Give your photos a delicate fade with our transparency tool.
• Photo blur: Add artistry to your images with the blur slider.
• Web wireframe: Begin with the basics and create a web wireframe.
• Design grids: Looking for layout inspiration? Try a design grid.

 
Beautiful Design on the iPad — Introducing the Canva App 

Category: Interactive Tool

Keywords: Graphic Design, Creating Media, Photo Editor

 Detailed Information

Full Description:

Canva is a graphic design tool for the web (including Chrome) and for iOS. Users create an account (with an email address or by linking their Google or Facebook account) and then follow a tutorial, which orients them on how to get started and how to use the tool’s many features. Users can upload their own images and create their own layouts or choose from a selection of thousands of built-in images and design templates (some of which are available for in-app purchase). Features abound: You can adjust brightness and contrast, resize images, overlay images with text and colors, and more. Once users have finished creating, their designs are automatically saved to the cloud (so it requires an internet connection) and are accessible from the user’s home page in the app or on the website. Users can then export their creations via email, as Facebook posts, or via Twitter, and they can download their images in JPEG, PNG, or PDF format.

Tool Access

To access the tool online or for a related download link (if available) please see sources below:

• Free but with limited features( 1GB Storage, 2 Folders to organize designs)
• Subscribe with Canva Plans
• Download to your mobile or ipad devices

Advantage/ Disadvantage:

Canva will not magically turn you into a graphic designer or give you a good design sense. However the built-in templates and easy-to-use interface will allow non-designers to make functional pieces and more seasoned graphic designers to quickly design or prototype designs for use. When making graphic, the left toolbar flows logically from selecting a template, adding elements, changing text and background, and adding your own assets to the graphic. The ability to add graphics is very powerful, allowing you to personalize your graphics. Used in conjunction with a graphic designer, graphics can be made quicker while maintaining the quality of work. To make things even easier, Canva allows you to invite others into a team to collaborate right on their website. Many templates exist for common formats, such as Instagram posts, YouTube thumbnails, or Facebook profile pictures and banners. This takes out the guesswork on the size and aspect ratio of graphics. This makes it very quick to prototype a graphic. There are plenty of export options that allow you to directly put up designs to social media, or to download as an offline file for further processing. Many of the assets such as templates and photos are paid items, either on a per item basis or by using Canva subscription. The assets and elements on Canva are mostly static and lack finer granular control. For example, charts can only be a single color and lacks fine control over the axes or appearance. Being able to have finer control, such as with the appearance of an arrow and how thick and long the tail is compared to the point, would add more power internally to Canva. There exist no offline version of this program and the mobile app is comparatively limited compared to the web app of Canva, making that version the definitive version to use. There is no way to export files in a way that preserves the layers of the graphic, making fine tuning a design after export it limited.

Good for Teaching:

For your students, use Canva as your go-to creation tool for class projects: consider having kids use the poster and presentation templates to create their own attractive, original art to enhance their in-class presentations. For your own purposes, use these design tools to bring extra verve and pizzazz to your course documents, class website, or social media presence. There are great graph templates built in, too, which could be great tools to help math and science classes display data; plus, students could use chart templates like the Venn diagram tool to help illustrate what they’ve learned in class. Check out Canva’s teaching materials for more inspiration. One word of caution on the social media front: This tool has great templates built in for social media posts (like templates sized for Facebook and Twitter profile images), and it’s super-easy to use the tool to connect via social media. Keep that in mind and make sure you outline expectations before you dive in with your students.

Good for Learning:

The opening tutorial, which claims it’ll teach you design in 63 seconds, is a winning introduction to Canva. While tutorials are often skippable, make sure to see this one through: there are tons of details to know to use this tool, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the number of features and all of their possibilities. It’s also important for students to understand how “layouts” and “designs” work with each other, as well as how saving works. Without this valuable information, it can be easy to get going on a design only to lose that work. While Canva is great for novices, advanced users might look elsewhere. Canva doesn’t have as many tools or as much flexibility as Photoshop or Illustrator, and users won’t get in-depth instruction about principles of what makes good design. For these reasons, Canva is less for the design-savvy and more for the rest of us. It’s a great way to make something that looks good fast — and it seems like the perfect tool for adding captions to images for simple sharing via social media. The flexible features for creation and for export make this an excellent tool for helping even the most novice designer create and share slick, simple graphic design.

  Reviews [For Future Use]

Public and Internal reviews on the quality of the tool and ease of use to learn/ implement.

 Learning Expectation [For Future Use]

General guidelines of how long it typically takes to learn and be comfortable (basic, advanced, expert levels) with the tool as well as what capabilities users have at each level.

• Level of difficulty to learn/ use for each level:
  • Basic  Use/ substitution: 2-4 hours of use
    • General familiarity with the tool
    • Ability to import documents in from MS Word or Powerpoint
    • Ability to create a simple document and share
  • Advanced Use/ augmentation: 20- 30 hours of use
    • General comfort with the tool
    • Ability to make a presentation from scratch including text, graphics, video, and with basic thoughts on style.
  • Expert use/ transformative (modification / redefinition): 40+ hours of use
    • Complete comfort with the tool
    • Ability to offer advice and guidance to others on the tool
    • Ability to use the tool for various design purposes: presentation, booklet, ePortofolio…
    • Understanding of layout, style (font, colors, themes) to meet end users needs

 Examples

Additional Examples:

• Storytelling Example
• The Secret to Better Content Marketing Example
• See Lessons for more education examples

 Tutorial Guides

 Templates

If you are interested in starting with a template, which often have background, color theme, and fonts, it may save time and highlight new design elements.

• Slide Carnival
• Creative Market
• Staff Generated Templates

 Lesson

 Crowdsource  [For Future Use]

To learn from other faculty or to share your thoughts or resources (e.g. templates) please see below:

• Comments (either blog style or discussion based)
• Upload their examples/ samples (ability to post information in form)
  • Form components: (For future form)
    • Name
  • • Submission type ( Examples, Guides, Lessons, Templates, Reference Link)
  • • Title
  • • Purposes/ Uses
  • • Description (optional)
    • Attachment – Upload or Link
  • Date and Time Uploaded
  • Contact Information (hidden)
  • Download Stats
  • Rating Stats

 Reference

The key resources used to make this resource page. Most all information is public except for specific TCS generated resources. For more examples and resources (e.g. guides, templates, etc) see below:

• Commonsense
• PC World
• Finances Online
• Capterra