For the longest time, many creatives struggled to find royalty-free and copyright-free images for their blog posts. Services offered paid solutions either per image or per month as a subscription, but none of them offered anything for free.
Sometimes a website like Pexels.com would pop up, but it did not provide video content that wasn’t accessible to others around the world. Photographers donated images to get their name out there, but that was about as accessible as it got.
Until Canva.com, that is.
The Marketer’s Best Friend
Marketers love it. Graphic designers hate it. Why?
It’s free.
Well, Canva.com DOES have a paid option (dubbed “Canva Pro”), but you don’t need to pay the monthly subscription fee to access many of the features that this amazing website offers.
Photos
Canva.com partners with photo services from around the globe to provide literally MILLIONS of images – hell, maybe even billions – to its users.
I personally pay for Canva Pro because I own a marketing agency. It’s like having everything you need in one place, and everyone uses it.
Canva is the Facebook of the marketing world, just only with the cat photos and none of the politics.
Videos
You can now access videos on Canva.com, and if you sign up for Canva Pro you have WAY more options.
Many of the videos I’ve produced use stock footage from Canva, and I’m not ashamed. For someone who has neither the time nor money to obtain footage from rare and third-party sources, Canva is the best option we have today to create meaningful video content without paying more for it.
Graphics
Many of the backgrounds and image coloring you see with different shapes are designable in software apps like Photoshop, but why recreate the wheel?
All of the fonts you could ever want – PLUS fonts that you want to import yourself – are available right in Canva. Every color. Every transparency. Every saturation, contrast, and more available right there.
For FREE.
Audio
Yep, audio. Music, mostly, but audio nonetheless.
Canva partners with different music providers to allow video content to be exported with royalty-free audio tracks.
As a music producer myself, sometimes I just find myself in a crunch and don’t have the time to create my own background tracks (which I obviously prefer to do), so throwing an RF track in the video is fine for the moment.
There’s Nothing To Be Ashamed Of
Let’s face it – Canva has replaced a lot of the work graphic designers can do themselves, which is why many of them are so upset.
They consider it a swear word in normal conversation.
BUT, let’s look at it this way: you can never replace original ideas because they’ve never existed before, so graphic designers (who have literally made Canva what it is today) can actually use Canva and Canva Pro to their advantage.
So here’s my take on Canva.com: if you’re going to use it, get Canva Pro or don’t use it at all. A lot of people have put a lot of time into developing the platform, and for good reason:
It saves all of us a lot of time and money.
