In an agency that manages several digital marketing accounts, time is so very valuable. Each of us spend a large portion of our workday creating content that is tailored to the individual client. It’s crucial to have a grasp of each client’s desired voice so that their digital presence stays on-brand. Part of staying on-brand in content creation are the graphics we create for our clients.
But how do you go about creating these graphics if you don’t hold a degree in graphic design? We have an easy solution for you.
Meet Canva. Their tagline sums up their mission, “Canva makes design simple for everyone.” So whether you’re creating a blog graphic or updating your brand’s cover photo, we think Canva might just become your go-to.
Here are a few tips to help get your Canva designs started:
Refer to your brand’s style guide before creating a design.
Once your click Create a Design, you can choose to do a number of different things. First, I suggest uploading your logo. Then, to make sure you remain on-brand with your design, match whatever shapes, backgrounds or fonts to your brand’s colors. You can just copy and paste the color code into the color selector if you already know it. If you aren’t quite sure what exact color your brand uses, use this HTML Color Code Matcher to figure it out.
To help you out even further, Canva for Work might be worth the $12.95 a month because it stores your logos, your brand colors and even allows you to resize your design no matter what format you are currently making it in.
Find the right design dimensions.
Unless you need a design with specific dimensions (if you are creating something that does have specific dimension, click Use Custom Dimensions), Canva has an entire list of preselected design dimensions you can choose from. It’s pretty self explanatory, so once you get into Canva and start exploring, things will start making sense. If you are just wanting to create a graphic to use on Instagram for an upcoming holiday, select Social Media. If you are wanting to create an event cover for your business’ grand opening on Facebook, select Facebook Event Cover. The breakdown of design dimensions are that specific.
Customize your design.
Let’s say you are creating a new Facebook cover photo for your burger joint. If you have photos from a photoshoot that you want to use, select Upload Your Own Images and pull which photos you want to incorporate in your design from your computer. If you don’t have any images from your business yet, Canva actually has a large selection of both free and inexpensive stock photos that you can choose from.
Once you’ve decided on a photo to use, or if you have decided to not use a photo, you can continue customizing your design. Customization includes overlays, illustrations, shapes, text and more.
P.S. Canva also has tons of pre-existing design templates that you can further customize if you like the look of one of their designs.
Download your design.
After you have perfected your design, it’s time to download so that you can start using it! Depending on where you plan on using your design should determine what format you download it in. Most of the time, I would recommend downloading it as a PNG. But if you are uploading a menu to a website, a PDF might make more sense. A lot of times, the place you are uploading your image suggests what format, so take a look there too.
Our team uses branded graphics on the majority of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest but these graphics are also great to use on blogs and e-blasts. Using branded graphics across the board can only help to solidify your digital presence.
If your business already has a to-do list that is a mile long, learning a new program might not be for you. That’s where we come in. Everyone here at The Modern Connection would love to give your brand the digital presence it deserves!
