Canva
Canva lets users quickly produce graphics and images for online and offline media. It features an array of starter designs in categories that are preset to popular sites' measurements. Thus, users can easily add graphics, text or photos to a design formatted for Facebook's cover or Twitter's header, for example. For offline purposes, users can peruse designs set to standard sizes for posters, flyers, book covers and other applications. Canva offers more than 60,000 templates that you can search by keyword. The templates are themed around holidays and event types. You can use a few hundred of the templates for free, and you can purchase any of the rest for one-time use. Alternatively, you can sign up for a membership, if you expect to frequently use the app's premium templates and elements. With Canva, you can create your finished product within several minutes. Once you complete a design, you can download it as a PNG file, or you can share it via your phone's messaging, social media and other apps that use images.
- Nimble interface
- Starter designs tailored to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media sites
- More than 60,000 templates
- Dozens of free fonts
- External-font upload
- External-image upload
- Resize, rotate and color-change functions
- Saves free designs for later editing
- Canva is user friendly.
- It offers dozens of social-media-ready designs.
- You can choose templates and elements with one tap.
- Drag-to-customize functionality lets you quickly put your stamp on a template.
- The app renders a PNG file in several seconds.
- This mobile app offers fewer features than its web-based counterpart.
- While the web-based app renders images to three formats, the mobile version offers only one.
- It lacks a Save As function, which makes file-renaming clunky.
Canva began as a web-based app in 2012. The mobile version was finally released in late 2017. By taking its time, the company developed a mobile app that stuck to its ideal of creating graphic design tools that are exceptionally simple to use. New users can adapt to Canva in minutes. While competing apps plod, Canva flows effortlessly. Its uncluttered interface helps graphic design novices quickly gain confidence. Though Canva's more-dazzling templates and design elements cost money, you can create quality images with its free features. Canva is a worthwhile app to download.