Graphic design is not one of my talents. My logo (or at least the peacock portion of it)? A gift from a talented friend. I can set up WordPress sites, write nearly unlimited amounts of content, or troubleshoot tech catastrophes, but when it comes to making something pretty: I ain’t an artist.
I stumbled upon Canva earlier today when I needed to create a logo ASAP. And in about five minutes, I had the name-tag logo you see above. Is it one-of-a-kind? Is it mind-blowing? No. But it is good-looking, simple, and quick. And Canva lets you do a lot more.
Edit on 6/2/15: Looks like they’re releasing something called Canva for Work. I hope it’s as awesome as the main version. The waitlist can be found here.
Free Features
Canva comes with a ton of fonts, layouts, and sample images. It’s basically a super dumbed-down publishing tool that allows you to create online graphics, logos, infographics, promotional materials, business cards — any of the publishing stuff that you’d pay a graphic designer lots of money to do for you.
The easiest way to create something is to start with one of their layouts and then upload some of your own images or content (such as your own picture or logo).
Did I mention it’s free? Well, mostly.
Premium Features
There is a ton of free content. There are also a lot of premium tidbits — clip art images, layouts, etc. — that cost $1 per use. (You can also upload your own images which means, theoretically, you could use their platform and never pay a cent.)
How This Works for Lawyers
The obvious uses: logos and business cards. But where this would really shine is if you want to create flyers for offline marketing or shareable online infographics.
This took fifteen minutes while watching an episode of past-its-prime Grey’s Anatomy:
Not bad, huh? I love the pre-made layouts, free icons, and how the design elements snap into alignment with each other. And the transparency feature is flawless. Also, it had no issues with my transparent .PNG peacock logo that Vistaprint and other sites choked on.
To sum it all up: free graphic design and publishing tool that has almost no learning curve. It’s definitely on my bookmarks list.
