Canva The Best App Banner Creator

Creating posters, banners, invitations or greeting cards is now much easier than it was a decade ago.  Nowadays there are a lot of web-based, mobile or desktop application tools available for use.  Some can be used free of charge, others are of premium status for a fee.

One tool that is quite interesting is Canva, which has a relatively new presence in Indonesia.  This Australian startup declared its arrival in Indonesia in 2017 even though its user base was already large. Before we dive into the features of the app, let's dig into Canva's profile first.

What is Canva?

Canva is a graphic design app that bridges its users to easily design various types of creative materials online.  Starting from designing greeting cards, posters, brochures, infographics, to presentations.  Canva is currently available in several versions, web, iPhone, and Android.

Canva's history begins in 2012, on January 1st, which is his birthday.  Canva was founded by Melanie Perkins who previously founded Fusion Books, a leading book publisher in Australia.  In the first year of its debut, Canva took off by posting a record 750,000 users.

Five years on, in 2017 Canva has reached a phase where the company begins to book profits.  At that time they already employed 200 employees spread across the Australian and San Francisco offices.  One of the biggest revenues came from premium users, which amounted to 294,000 users.  As of 2017, Canva has 10 million users with service coverage up to 169 countries.

Canva Review

I've been hearing the name Canva for quite a while, coincidentally one of my friends runs a business in the printing sector and chose Canva as one of their design tools.  By the way, I have also made a web version of Canva tutorials which might be additional reading.

On the Play Store, Canva is free to download and is quite light in size at only 24MB.  So, even entry level devices with 1GB RAM and 8GB of memory should be able to use it.

When I first started Canva greeted me with four posters that briefly showed the features in it.  You can choose to see all of them or skip by tapping the skip option at the bottom left.  Next, you are required to create an account - a standard procedure for most internet services.  Nothing new.  After logging in, you will immediately be greeted by a row of templates grouped by platform, such as Instagram Post, Instagram Story, Facebook Post, Invitations, and so on.

If you're already in the main part, that's Canva's main layout, nothing else.  But I like it, because it's simpler and I can focus more on the design, which is the main function. On this main page, Canva groups ka templates in different categories, as I already mentioned above.  The appearance for each category is also not much different, there is only one blank template added if you want to design new material from scratch.  You will also find a similar layout, for example, if you do a search with certain keywords.  I tried "birthday", the result is shown in this third screenshot.

Still about the interface, on the main page there are only two menus placed at the bottom, namely Create a design and Your designs.  The Create a design menu itself, if tapped, will not give a response, because in fact you are already in the process of making a design, you just have to choose one of the templates that appear.  Meanwhile, the Your designs menu contains a list of poster or banner designs that you have made before.  That means, if you haven't created it at all, it will be empty.

While at the top there is a search column whose function is to help users find specific templates as needed.  As previously exemplified, use the keyword birthday, or for example, workshop, motivation, and so on.

The main feature and what makes millions of people love it is the wide variety of templates available, although some of them are paid.  However, the free option alone is more than enough to be used for various events or purposes.  Simply put, Canva's free options are endless even if they are used for different event poster designs each week.  So, that's more than enough.  It remains how your creativity in designing an attractive poster.

 Font

 

After the template is selected, then the user can change the text including the typeface.  There are hundreds of fonts to choose from, depending on your taste.  I am quite satisfied with the options they present, especially the procedure for using it is straightforward.

 Color

 

 If the letters have been changed, the user can also change the color of the text.  The color options also vary and it looks like Canva tends to suggest popular color options.

Format

Formatting is also supported in Canva, so users can choose to display text in italics, bold or capital.  Then there are also options for alignment, it can be just left, center or right.  Then, Canva also provides the option to adjust the spacing between characters and lines, which is called spacing.

Background

 

Well, this is the part you can't miss.  Canva provides many options to change the appearance of the background, including taking photos from the local memory gallery, images from Canva, solid colors and also sweeteners in the form of filters.

Duplication

This feature helps users accelerate the duplication of text settings, where the user will only have to replace the duplicated text content with new text.

Extra Content

These tools are available by default, making it easy to modify existing templates.  Apart from that, Canva also provides extra tools which include all the features above.  Usually this tool is used for designs that are designed from scratch.

In this tool, Canva provides various inputs, for example adding text, images, graphics and templates.

Share and Download

Share feature to share the poster you just created, and at the same time Canva will also download the poster to local memory.  As with many services, you can share posters with various third party services.

Conclusion

From the interface side, I really like the concept of Canva, where the developer seems to want the user to focus on the design which is their strength.  The layout used also prevents users from unnecessary steps.

As for its main functions, Canva is almost flawless, easy to use especially for beginners, fast and light.  The poster results are also very good.  If you have to give a value, I give it 9 out of 10. However, for users who are familiar with the world of complex graphic design, they may need a more powerful tool.

One thing I complain about is the relatively small canvas size.  Meanwhile, there is an empty space between the menu bar and the plus (+) icon that you can press to make more room for the canvas.

That's the discussion about Canva The Best App Banner Creator, hopefully it's useful.