I started using Canva to create materials for our Facebook ads around March 6th this year. It has been more than a month now, and to be honest, the results have exceeded our expectations. First of all, it solves the problem of timeliness. When our design team cannot keep up with our design needs, Canva can take over. Secondly, the images or videos designed by Canva are very attractive to our target users, which effectively helps improve our ad’s ROAS.
Due to my limited experience using Canva, I will share my thoughts on the user interface and usability, as well as the features and functions of the platform. I mainly use Canva on my MacBook Pro, although Canva has a mobile app version, I haven’t installed it.
User Interface and Usability
When you first arrive at Canva’s homepage, the top navigation, search box, and left navigation make it easy to find your design needs. I simply typed “Facebook Ad” in the search box and saw a large number of templates. Then I selected one that caught my eye and clicked “Customize this template” in the pop-up box to enter the Design page.
On the Design page, you can upload your original product images or videos by clicking on the “Uploads” button on the left sidebar. Once uploaded, you can drag and drop them directly into the template. After some dragging and dropping, you may find that your work doesn’t look as good as the original template due to changes in color and layout. Don’t be discouraged. You need to edit and fine-tune your images, videos, or text.
Selecting an image will bring up options like “Color,” “Edit image” (including brightness/contrast/saturation, filters, photogenic, smart mockups, shadows, etc.), “Crop,” “Flip,” “Animation,” “Position,” and “Transparency.” Selecting a video will bring up options like “Edit Video” (including filters, white balance/light/color/texture), “Cut,” “Playback,” “Crop,” “Flip,” “Animation,” “Position,” and “Transparency.” Selecting a line of text will bring up options like “Font family,” “Font size,” “Font color,” “Alignment,” “Spacing,” “Effects,” “Animation,” “Position,” and “Transparency.” These editing and fine-tuning options can help you optimize your work to your ideal style, but it requires some time and patience.
When you are satisfied with your work, click the Share button in the upper right corner, and then click the Download button. After selecting the File Type and Size for output, you can download it to your local computer. Canva supports 7 output formats: JPG, PNG, PDF Standard, PDF Print, SVG, MP4 Video, and GIF.
Features and Functions
In terms of features, the ones I have used the most are Canva’s layout and design tools to create custom Facebook ad materials, website banners, social media posts, and so on. However, it actually has many other features, such as:
- The brand tools in Brand Hub can help you create and manage custom brand elements such as color palettes, fonts, and logos to ensure design consistency;
- Access to millions of high-quality photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, including many free options and professional photo libraries;
- Canva integrates many external apps that can provide additional functionality and efficiency for your designs, such as an AI image generation app that can generate images based on the text you input;
- Canva’s team collaboration tools allow you to share and edit your designs with other users;
- Use Canva’s animation tools to create dynamic and interactive designs;
- Use Canva’s print design options to customize printed products such as business cards, posters, and flyers.
But I haven’t used these features much yet, so I can’t give a review. As I continue to use Canva more and more, I will update my experience on those features.
In summary, Canva has a clear and user-friendly interface that can be quickly learned. It took me about 2 days to grasp the logic and create some excellent Facebook ad images and videos. Additionally, Canva offers a wealth of templates, images, and design elements, which is very useful for me as I frequently need to update ad materials, although I personally feel that the new template updates are not very fast. The monthly subscription price of $12.99 is acceptable for me as a frequent Canva user. If you have a team that needs to collaborate on designs, you can subscribe to the Team version for $14.99, which allows up to 5 people to work together online.
Furthermore, there are also some aspects of Canva that I am not satisfied with. One is that it does not provide a lot of stock videos. Sometimes, I need to create YouTube videos with a lot of copyright-free video materials, which Canva obviously cannot help me achieve. Another is that it does not support exporting PSD format, which makes it difficult for me to further refine my work using Photoshop. I hope Canva will improve on these two points in the future.
Canva: https://www.canva.com/