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Productivity

Become a Professional Designer in a Few Minutes With Canva

Written by Brian Lee
Ex-chief of product management at Lifehack

No matter what jobs you do, a project will involve one or more of design-related tasks such as editing photos, creating special presentation slides, creating posters, wallpapers and unique imagery.

If you’re not a designer, you have a few basic options:

  1. Hire one. It can be expensive; the average freelance designer rate is about $75-$150/hour now.[1]
  2. Use tools like Photoshop or InDesign yourself. It’s often complicated and can take many steps to achieve something relatively basic.

In both situations, time, effort, money are expanded.

What if there was a simpler way?

There is, and it’s called Canva

Canva has about 10 million active users. Their basic value proposition is that you can create professional and great designs from scratch in a few minutes. There are default templates to guide you, but customization is also available. It’s all relatively simple and very intuitive, which makes it highly valuable.

I’m going to highlight a few features that will be most useful for your everyday work.

Design Grids

Choose from a number of design grids to create creative layout. All you need to do is drag and drop the images to fill the boxes in the grids.

Become a Professional Designer in a Few Minutes With Canva

    Photo Editing

    From adjusting a photo’s size, to enhancing a photo, to add special effects to it, you can edit any photo easily with a few clicks. Read more about how to make use of all the photo editing features here.

    Become a Professional Designer in a Few Minutes With Canva

      Narrative for Any Photo

      Easily customize your message with different font, style and color and insert it in anywhere of a photo.

      Become a Professional Designer in a Few Minutes With Canva

        Create Graphs

        Create stunning graphs to go with your reports, presentations and infographics. You can customize the colors and fonts of the graphs to make them engaging for your audience.

        Become a Professional Designer in a Few Minutes With Canva

          Design a Presentation

          With an access to hundreds of beautifully designed layouts, you can create presentations on any topic. All you need to do is choose the right images, fonts and colors to make your presentation inspiring.

          Become a Professional Designer in a Few Minutes With Canva

            Create a Poster

            You can choose from 1 million+ stock images as baselines, add dozens of potential filters, and live-edit the text. The result is a professional outcome at a significantly-reduced cost.

            Become a Professional Designer in a Few Minutes With Canva

              Create Your Professional Design in Minutes

              Design skills throughout history have been in the hands of the few, which makes them highly-coveted, well-compensated specialists. That’s still true, but if your organization can’t afford great design at present, or you’re in a start-up/scaling phase, Canva is a great resource to experiment with logos, branding, and design.

              The Webby Awards actually called Canva

              “the easiest to use design program in the world.”

              What are you waiting for? Visit Canva and start to create your own professional design in minutes.

              Reference