Canva always comes through!

Who might Canva appeal to?

Lots of people need a quick banner for a party or a photo to turn into a birthday card or some branding for a new venture or hobby.

Canva transformed the landscape of this from where us normal humans had to pay designers or companies vast amounts to do this for us. It brought simple and professional design to the masses, and I'm here for it - I love it!

How do you start?

Simply head over to www.canva.com and sign-up - you do this with email or other authenticated signups like Google. Hang fire on Canva Pro - it's not vastly expensive and you get a free trial period but have a lay first - especially if it's just you using it rather than your whole team. They keep offering the chance to try it and it has great tools like brand kits which are really slick and professional looking.

It's super-quick and you're straight into the templates - the optimised templates for different uses so you don't even need to think about sizes or resizing.

There are templates for 'normal' graphics like posters , resumes, newsletters on the top. Along the left side you can look at examples to inspire and to amend to fit your project. These can be very easily customised by colours, fonts, added 'elements' as Canva calls them - shapes, pictures, and even animated pictures. The ones I love the most are placeholders in a variety of shapes that you can 'drop' photos into to look professional.

You can create a one-off design, and even go back if you spot a spelling mistake after finishing.

Reader, this happens to me all the time! Imagine how expensive that would be with professional designers. You can iterate it or even go back ages later and rehash.

There are templates as starting points for social media posts of virtually every variety you can think of already optimally sized including thumbnails, banners and posts.

Try it - you won't go back!

You'll look so slick!

Ps: let me know what you think of my logo designs - I love the colours