Canva Makes Designer’s Lives Easier

Maddie Haley

If you are new to web design, you’ve got to check out Canva. Canva is, in my opinion, one of the best web design tools out there. It’s very user friendly and easy to navigate with many different customizable style options. I became more familiar with Canva and the many tools they offer during a PRCM 4020 course I took at Auburn, and I would love to share what I’ve learned.

One of my favorite tools on the website is the circle frame tool, located under “Frames” in the navigation bar. This tool allows you to crop any image into a circle, and many aren’t too familiar with it. All you have to do is select the tool to add it to your page, drag your photo into the frame, and viola! You have a circular shaped image.

I like this tool in particular because before I discovered it, I went through a long process of finding a website to do the cropping job for me and importing and exporting photos. Being able to do it all in one place has saved me tons of time and I have found it to be super convenient.

Next up, my second favorite tool: the customizable color wheel. If you’re a designer, you understand how important it is to have color consistency in your web

designs. Located on the top left corner of Canva’s webpage is the color tool, and if you click it, it takes you to a fully customizable color wheel. This wheel gives designers full creative freedom to design their document with any color of their choice.

This tool is one of my favorites because many websites for design only have pre-selected colors to choose from, or they have a color wheel without a color code input option. Canva stands out from the rest because on the color wheel, you can type in the color code of the exact color you are trying to find.

When designing, I often use this website: https://imagecolorpicker.com/en to select a specific color from an image I am editing. Say I am overlaying text on the image and want to match it to a specific color from the image. I go to imagecolorpicker.com, use the drop tool to pinpoint which color I am trying to find, and it gives me the color code for that color. Then, I head over to Canva, type in the color code, and match the color of the text to my image.

Without the color code input option on Canva’s color wheel, I would have to go through a process of comparing the colors instead of being certain I had an identical match.

Both the circle cropping tool and color wheel are just two of the many amazing design tools offered on Canva’s website. Yet their attention to usability and what tools could make designers’ processes easier prove that Canva is the ultimate design website. I’ve used many websites for design before, and Canva remains my #1 because of their user friendliness.

If you’re working on starting a company, chances are you want to know how to create a branding suite. A branding suite can include anything from your company logo to the font you plan on using on your website. Creating a branding suite is essential in organizing your brand’s aesthetic in a congruent and harmonious way.

Although some business owners may choose to go the route of hiring a designer when it comes to making a branding suite, with the right design tools you can easily do it on your own. This way, you save money and have the ability to customize the branding to your personal liking without having to communicate back and forth with a designer.

To create a business logo, you must first ask yourself what vibe you want your company to have. Fonts play a major role in setting the overall tone of your brand, so it’s important to pick the right one. For example, if you want your brand to have a home-style feel to it, you may choose a calligraphy font. If you want something more modern, choosing a font like Helvetica could give your brand a classic feel.

Fonts are just as important in other aspects of your branding as they are in your logo, so remember that. Once you select a main font that represents your brand’s identity and personality for your logo, you can begin the search for complimentary fonts to include in other aspects of your branding suite such as your business cards and envelopes.

One website that has come in handy for me numerous times is WhatTheFont on MyFonts.com (https://www.myfonts.com/pages/whatthefont).

This AI-powered font finder can help you discover similar fonts that are available to download or purchase from scanning a photo of a font you like. If you find a font you like online, yet are unable to find its name to download it for your design, simply upload an image of it to WhatTheFont. With this tool, you can find what the font’s name is, and download it from there.

It’s also very important to choose a color palette that matches your brand’s aesthetic feel. There are many websites, such as https://coolors.co, that can help generate color palettes based on their positions on the color wheel. Canva also has one built into their website.

How do you choose what colors to make your brand? Think about the feeling each color gives off. For example, red is cautionary and used for things like stop signs or traffic lights, so it gives off a bold feel. Green is the color of nature, but also can be seen in a monetary light. Keep how your audience will perceive different colors in mind when creating your branding suite, because it does play a huge subliminal role.

Lastly, have fun with it. Get creative! My recommendations for places to create a branding suite are Canva and Adobe Indesign, but there are a ton of other free design websites online. If you are having trouble, do your research or watch a few educational tutorials on YouTube. But at the end of the day, your brand is what you make it and design should be fun, so remember to enjoy the process. Happy designing!