Canva as Your Canvas

Week Eight

This week I explored the many functionalities of Canva, a cloud-based application. Canva touts that you can “Collaborate and Create Amazing Graphic Design for Free”. An account can be easily created via your Gmail. When signing up, one can decide what their role will be as a user and designate a user group for collaboration. There are a wide variety of design templates to choose from that span from creating presentations, posters, flyers, resumes, menus, print covers, to social media graphics for just about any account one could think of. This is a one-design-fits-all kind of application, where most of the design work has been prefabricated for the user.

I decided to use the program to design an Infographic on the benefit of using 3D printing in education. There are a wide variety of styles of templates to choose from. Another beneficial feature is that there are many choices of art or infographics at your fingertips. The applications was very easy to use with a drag and drop, point and click response. As an art teacher, I could envision using this application for creating course content or presentations. Students could use the program to collaborate on presentations and projects with their peers, much like many of the Google products. The added bonus is that there are many more prefabricated functionalities which take the beginner guesswork out of designing. There is no need to know the Elements or Principles of Design, when the templates already come prepopulated. This allows the rudimentary designer to focus on the content and come away with a great visual. The slogan should be “Collaborate and Create Amazing Things for Free”, as there is no need to design. This plug and chug application requires no skills. The price is right for students and teachers alike. There are no down sides except the device you will need to use it.