Young people who are not so familiar with the basics of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator for making social media posts and covers often find these tasks quite daunting. But, since the inception of Canva, a user-friendly designing platform, those tasks mentioned above have become easier than ever. Canva is a graphic design platform that allows people to create presentations, social media graphics and many other forms of visual content free of charge.
The Sydney-based company provides a platform for today's youths to create and use designs best suited to their needs-- faster and better. With hundreds of free templates to select from, Canva has superiority in terms of convenience. It also lets users make changes to existing templates according to their own preference and taste.
Significantly popular among university students in Bangladesh, Canva is widely used by this particular demographic to make presentations or infographics for academic purposes. Canva's user friendly interface also facilitates new users to learn more about creating a variety of content. Others who happen to be more familiar with the platform also use it for creating engaging and aesthetically good-looking content for social media to draw more followers. In case users want an even better premium experience with more templates, stock images and icons available at their disposal, they can also subscribe to the paid version- Canva Pro.
One of the key features responsible for Canva's widespread popularity among students is the fact that it allows multiple people to work on the same project. It does not matter whether Canva is being used on laptops or mobile app versions, users can share file links with their friends to work on projects and assignments together.
As the pandemic has limited physical presence, students are growing more dependency to digital platforms for learning. Canva has enabled them to work alongside their peers on the same project resulting in efficient teamwork without the need of physical presence. Sams Uddin Shopnil, a freshman at Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka, said, "I first started using Canva when I joined university. Since, making slides for assignments and business competitions became easier than anything."
Canva is a popular platform to young online business owners and entrepreneurs as well. Higher customer engagement is key when it comes to online businesses. Canva allows owners to create unique, colourful and trendy content that represents their brand identity- that too without any cost. They can select, develop and customise logos, business cards, brochures, posters, social media ads or any other branding elements on their own. Tamanna Mannan, a mathematics student from Independent University Bangladesh (IUB), has been using Canva for the past two years to design posts for her online handicraft business. She said, "I mainly use it for making Instagram and Facebook posts for my pages." This tool is so handy for social media contents that even professional ad-makers-- for example, Scratchboard, an advertising agency based in Dhaka-- are using Canva to create social media content for clients.
However, Canva still has its own quirks. While editing offline the number of features available is very limited so the use of the internet is almost necessary. A strong internet connection is also needed to ensure that all the progress is being saved automatically. Another frequent complaint people have with the platform is that two or more people face problems while editing the same project at a given time.
Over the years, Canva's users increased from 750,000 to almost 15 million globally. It happened mainly because the company prioritised the user's convenience; they made their platform easier to navigate and the overall process of working with graphic design related content less complicated for average users. Hence, the pros of using Canva outweigh the cons by a large margin.
The writer is a freshman at IBA, DU. She can be reached at [email protected]
