Let’s see the potential of Canva beyond its popular use as a user-friendly design platform. Canva for professional graphic designers offers strategic tools that can elevate your services, attract clients, and streamline your design process. Here, I want to you all to know about the advanced capabilities of Canva that can enhance your design business.
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While there are many different sites offering a variety of design products and resources, ‘Canva for professional graphic designer’ has all of these tools and resources in one place. Simply put, it’s your one-stop-shop for all your design needs. In addition to providing access to over a million top-notch photos, elements, shapes, icons, and illustrations, you’ll also find easily customizable design templates for almost any design project that instantly give you a professional edge.
Recently, in a survey of 500 small and medium-sized businesses we asked if they had people who weren’t professional graphic designers but were creating customer-facing marketing materials. 78% of companies said “Yes”. How do we make this easy for them? Simple. Canva Pro.
The reality is this: Now more than ever, B2B and B2C marketers are facing increased pressure to create a wide range of visuals to convey their marketing messages. The number of documents now expected to be professionally designed and look on-brand has increased exponentially.
Previously a sales letter could be simply a text heavy document, maybe on the company letterhead. Nowadays, the same salesperson is expected to create visual heavy, custom presentations tailored to every company they pitch to. Marketers are expected to post designs on every social media platform at least once a day and entrepreneurs need pitch decks updated with the latest stats to win investment or clients. No industry is excluded.
In 2015 we officially launched Canva Pro (now Canva Pro), a new platform built specifically for businesses. There are two main ways it will provide opportunities for graphic designers and agencies:
- Businesses using Canva Pro will have a need for professional designers to set up their Brand Kit and create custom templates for their business.
- Canva Pro has been designed to eradicate common communication issues in the design process – making the client/ designer relationship mutually beneficial.
Canva now has over 4.5 million users, with over 200,000 companies on-board with everyone from tiny one-person companies to Fortune 500 companies in the mix. Want to know how you, as a designer, can benefit from this community?
Let’s dive in.
01. Attract new clients: Set up a Brand Kit in Canva (Canva for professional graphic design)
Today, many small businesses and bloggers go to graphic designers when they’re starting out in business — they get a logo created, a business card, maybe even a Facebook cover or a website.
But with most businesses operating online, it’s now important for them to be creating visuals on a daily basis and unfortunately, most don’t have the budget to keep up with the demand. As a result, they never use professional graphic design services again.
Canva Pro empowers users to create beautiful designs from templates and a Brand Kit, which serves the same purpose that a style guide would in professional design.
As a designer, a great service you could offer your clients is a Canva Brand Kit Package. It could include a beautiful well-crafted logo, a set of branded backgrounds, a color palette and font palette which articulates their brand.
For the client, this is a great investment because it sets them up to create on-brand designs on a daily basis.
02. Expand your client network by designing team templates everyone in the organization can use
Even with unlimited resources, it can be challenging to design a presentation at night for a morning conference. High-pressure design deadlines are stressful for both designers and marketers, yet in most workplaces, they happen on a daily basis.
Designing templates your clients or team can edit can help to solve this, freeing you up to work on projects you most care about.
Design templates for your client’s most commonly used visual documents.
For example, you could offer a Presentation Package that includes branded backgrounds, branded cover page templates and several variations for inside pages. Package this up with branding guidelines and you have a beautiful, value-add service to offer. Not only will your clients love it, as their presentations will look professional and on-brand, but you won’t have to worry about going backwards and forwards making endless “minor” text tweaks.
03. Build long-term relationships: conduct design workshops to educate your clients
It’s virtually limitless where users can and should be implementing beautiful, branded graphic design. Every contact point that your client makes with the outside world is essentially an opportunity to convey their brand personality. Here’s some commonly used documents you could focus on in incremental design workshops aimed to improve the skills of your clients:
- Social media covers
- Social media graphics for: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr
- Marketing campaigns
- Slideshare
- Invoices
- Email design
- The “lower third” for Google Hangouts
- the list goes on.
It’s very hard to believe the concept that there is a fixed size pie that designers will be scrambling to win. In fact, I truly believe that it is quite the contrary. With the increased focus and importance on visual content every contact point is an opportunity for design. Educating your clients on what they can do with great graphic content will not only provide more opportunities for you to win more business, but can dramatically help your client’s business to succeed in this new era.
04. Spend less time in copy editing and more time designing
Ever had this problem?
Small mistakes such as a missing apostrophe or a misspelled words can cause hours of wasted time when you need to send JPG files back and forth between you and your client. Canva Pro allows you to spend more time designing and less time copy editing by enabling clients to make these small revisions themselves.
With a platform that’s completely online and collaborative, your clients can access and edit the design through their account or through an editable link. No longer will you be contacted with “urgent requests” as clients will be able to make minor text changes quickly and easily.
05. Use magic resize feature to repurpose your designs for a number of platforms
So much of a designer’s time can be wasted making the constant dimension changes needed to customize a design to suit the various formats it’s needed for. Canva Pro allows you to make these changes instantly, without the hassle of manual dimension variations.
After you’ve created a design for a client with Canva Pro you can select to convert its dimensions individually to fit the format you need, or with the Magic Resize tool you can convert it in bulk to fit a number of different formats (social media posts, documents, marketing materials, etc.) With the Magic Resize tool, all of your newly formatted designs will open up in new web browser tabs for you to save and use.
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Conclusion:
Incorporating Canva into your professional toolkit can be a game-changer for graphic designers. By leveraging its features to attract clients, collaborate efficiently, and save time on repetitive tasks, you can optimize your workflow and expand your creative horizons. Embrace Canva as more than just a design tool – it’s a valuable asset for growing your graphic design business.
