Canva

Comments: I actually use Canva for business purposes. I use it in conjunction with my Cricut machine and it is perfect! I've made price lists, notebook covers, coloring book pages, water bottle labels and I'll probably be using it for so much more. I love it, it's my go-to for everything! If you haven't tried it out yet, you are missing out! I suggest watching some youtube videos as well. Great for Marketing purposes!

Pros: The best part of Canva is the ease of use! I love all of the options and examples they have with the templates. They have so many template sizes for logos, flyers, facebook headers, business cards, and so many more.
-Probably my favorite thing about the program is the autosave feature, which saves changes while your working on a project, you don't understand how much of a lifesaver that really is until you actually lose your work!
- I like that there is an upload section so you can reuse certain images for different projects. The 'uploads' and 'your designs' are two different folders. -I actually just noticed that you can add videos to a project which is a plus for any social media platform. -I use a few different editing/design apps but I love the fact that Canva has both a mobile app and a desktop site. 'Over' doesn't have a desktop site yet and PicMonkey's app doesn't have the same capabilities whereas Canva app does EXACTLY what the desktop site does if not more -Another plus is the custom dimensions when you go to create a new project. Other sites do have that but they don't all have px, cm, mm, and inch options. -The 30-day trash folder is another lifesaver, even when you agree to permanently delete sometimes you don't really mean it lol I just went through every page to make sure I talked about everything if you cant

Cons: -So I'm actually checking it right now because I honestly couldn't think of any cons I used to have an issue searching for free images to use as backgrounds on desktop but it looks like they fixed it! -I know I do hate when I add a background/image to a project and I go to expand it to fit the blank "canvas" the dimensions of the image don't stay and it stretches it and it gets blurry. If I notice anything else I'll come back and add if i'm able to but as of right now my main and only issue is not being able to

Comments: Overall, Canva has been a blessing to our small company. What once took us hours of design work now gets 90% of the way there in less than 10 minutes. This is the definition of business leverage, and I applaud Canva's efforts to make design work easy, fun, and often inspiring. The fact that it's not as flexible as, say, Adobe Illustrator, is admittedly an apples-to-oranges criticism. The iLife comparison above is an apt one, as it empowers the 99% of the population who want to be able to create really nice designs without having to rely on niche industry-specific software. Canva is to design as iMovie was to video editing—it democratizes the field and allows anyone to look like professionals to the average consumer. This is nothing short of magic and Canva is invaluable to our business as a result.

Pros: Simply put, Canva makes anyone look like a design rockstar. In our industry (real estate), it's shocking how ubiquitous Canva has become in less than 5 years, and that is 100% attributable to the fact that it's easy to use and comes stock with hundreds of pieces of design inspiration. It's not often that you can a single piece of software raises the bar for small business advertising and marketing, but Canva definitely fits that bill.

Cons: The flip side of raising the bar is that, well, the bar for quality is now raised and Canva isn't always the best about helping its users rise above this new "average." For instance, the pre-built designs are so good that you see them everywhere now, and you can spot a "Canva-like" design a hundred yards away. This wouldn't be a problem, except that Canva actually makes it hard to customize designs too much. I know that's a strange thing to say since, literally, you can customize any part of a Canva design, but the software seems to fight you every step of the way. I suppose, in a way, this too is by design. Canva takes its inspiration from early Apple iLife suite of software (iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, Garage Band, etc)—you can make some awesome stuff in 5-30 minutes, so long as you're willing to conform your design vision to theirs. Going beyond that surface level of customization, you'll begin wrestling with the software and get diminishing returns.

Comments: Overall, We recommend Canva as a good choice for designing in an effortless away. This program is not only easy to learn but also easy to use and requires no user experience whatsoever. Also, this program offers students a remarkable platform to express their learning skills and design their custom illustrations.

Pros: Designing: Canva is ideal for students as it aids them in designing posters and infographics. It provides an excellent platform for students to show their skills as it helps them express what they've learned. Canva is remarkable in designing class flyers as it helps users to express their imagination and creativity as it provides tons of opportunities for designing in every possible aspect. Customized illustrations: Canva helps its users to design, edit and create images as their preference. Canva is also equipped with templates that can be used as per the requirement for graphic designing. Additionally, designing for different formats comes in handy too with Canva.

Cons: Text: If Canva users wish to add up any sort of text in their designing they won't be able to do so, it is because users are unable to add up any sort of text and they only have to rely on the templates which are quite frustrating for its users. Limited features: Although Canva is a great program, not everything comes for free, In the free version, users are only equipped with limited features. To gain access to all of its features the users have to pay for it. Also, some of their features are to be paid in foreign currency only which can a little frustrating for its users.

Comments: Canva is to my opinion the best software that can be used to create and publish any graphic design on the go. Publishing on social media has never been that easy, no need to calculate the image dimensions (Width x Height) set by different social media platforms... Canva does that automatically for you.

Pros: - Canva is so easy to use with beautiful and instinctive UI design, great user experience too.
- It has a free version with readily available design templates which just needs to be customized according to your liking.
- It's a relatively cheap software compared to others in the same category.
- Canva has mobile applications too where you can create designs on the go and it syncs all your created designs created, irrespective of the platform you used.
- Canva makes it so easy to create our social media posts for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn as well as posters we use to advertise offline as well as presentations during student/faculty training.
- Besides our company, Canva is widely used among content creators (e.g Bloggers, YouTubers to create video thumbnails) hence a large audience uses this which influenced our decision to choose Canva as a photo design software.

Cons: - Repetitive designs might be found across the web as everyone uses the same design templates.

Comments: Canva solves a lot of design requirements problems & helps in in-housing graphic design for simple daily needs like social media and also presentations. Canva saves time, efforts and money for small and medium businesses that are running social media and some marketing all by themselves / small in-house teams with small budgets. Would say a must-have tool for all size of businesses as well as for personal purposes (will come in handy for all those e-invites, kids craftwork, etc).

Pros: 1. Develop almost all of your creatives required - all by yourself & without any need of hiring an expensive professional designer.
2. Easy to use for most of the simple social media creatives.
3. The free version is good enough for most tasks - but the paid version adds a few features that will make it really good.
4. The new presentations feature is good - make a big push to visually appealing presentation decks - but may not be serious competition to Microsoft PowerPoint - but has features that are not there in PowerPoint.
5. Great Editing features from photo editors, logo makers, etc are very useful and take simple designs a long way.
6. The templates available are there for most of your requirements - they make life very easy and makes your designs look professional.

Cons: 1. Good for beginners and intermediate users - the experts will see a lot of missing features - especially when compared to Photoshop (Illustrator and Corel Draw are way above & are for experts only) which has most design features & has a similar price per month as well.
2. Video editing capability is missing - although they have a GIF capability which can be downloaded as a video file, you can't stake stock videos and edit them o add them to your videos. This is a serious feature missing as video content is the mainstay of most businesses & highly in demand by everybody.
3. There is a learning curve here - this may not be to use the software tool - but for design & creativity itself and the resources available on Canva are limited in this aspect.
4. Limited images available - even the paid ones are not that good - not sure why there is no tie-up with a Shutterstock & the ilk.
5. Sizes for banner ads are very limited - like there are so many ad sizes say for Google Ads which can be made standard (there is a custom dimension - but each time you will have to look up the specs and then create your dimensions).