In this episode, Angie and April are talking about how they use Canva to save time while working with the design aspect of their TpT stores. Join in on the conversation in our mastermind group at www.growwithusmastermind.com.
In the last podcast episode, we talked all about hiring for your TpT store. It was a pretty serious topic and covered a lot of information. This time, we’re jumping into a fun topic—playing around in Canva!
We’re going to share with you the ways that we use Canva for our TpT stores, but we’d love for you to get in the Mastermind group and share how you’re using it. We’re always looking for new ideas.
All about Canva
If you’ve never heard of Canva, it’s a graphic design platform you can use to create pretty much any type of image you need. In the past, we used Photoshop or PowerPoint to create all our images, but it could be complicated and took a lot of work to make it look just right. Canva makes it simple and easy.
I tried Canva when it first came out and didn’t like it. They had some templates but it was very limited and you had to pay to use their images. I quit using it, but they made updates to it over time and people started talking about it a lot. The platform had advanced a lot and when I came back to it, it was so easy to figure out.
Is the paid Canva plan worth the investment?
This is a question we get asked a lot from TpTers. There is a lot that comes with the free plan. You have access to some of the templates and images on the platform. There are also some options for collaborating with teams. But the paid account is so awesome and we think everyone should be using it.
There are a lot of things we pay for and this is one of the things that we use almost every single day. It’s so cheap. The current pricing is around $120/year and that allows you to include five people on your account. April has her whole team in Canva which makes it really easy to work together on projects.
What we love about Canva
Folders
We love the way the Canva paid account allows us to store images and graphics in folders. You can create folders for product launches that include all your templates for social media, slide decks for webinars and mini-trainings. Then, when you launch again next year, you have everything you need in one place. It’s all there and organized.
Templates
Templates help make the entire graphic design fast and easy. I love that you can make a template, put a placeholder in it and then easily drop an image in it when you’re ready. It saves a lot of time not having to recreate the template over and over again. All you need to do is switch the images.
I can switch whole product lines in less than an hour with templates for social images, previews, thumbnails, pins, and the teacher manuals in my resources.
You can create your own templates to save and share with the paid plan, but there are also tons of pre-designed templates you can use.
Canva also has templates that make it easy to create mockups of your resources. They have templates with tablets and computer screens you can drop your resource photos into. You can even search “mockups” in the templates to see the templates they already have created.
You can also search templates by your brand color codes. This makes it really easy to find pre-created templates that are already using your colors. You’ll probably still need to do some tweaking, but it can speed the process up. To search by color, you just use hit the filter image by the search box.
Branding
With the paid Canva account, you can store all of your brand colors, fonts, and logos. This saves a lot of time when you’re creating images and resources. It also makes it easy to collaborate with your team because they have access to everything at their fingertips.
Resizing
This is actually the feature that made both April and I commit to the paid Canva plan. Once you have one image created you can resize it without having to recreate it. For example, you can create a Facebook image and then resize it to a pin. Then, all you have to do is make a few tweaks, and all of a sudden, you have images for two different platforms.
Canva also allows you to highlight text or multiple parts of an image and resize them all at once. You don’t have to worry about font size; you can simply drag the text to a bigger or smaller size.
Collaborating with contractors
You can share your images and templates with others without having to add them to your team. They just need to have their own Canva account and it doesn’t need to be the paid plan. This is an affordable way to collaborate compared to other software options that require you to pay for each person.
Scheduling
Canva also allows you to connect your social media accounts and schedule posts directly from their platform. This saves you the steps of downloading the images to upload them on the social platform. We haven’t used this option before, so if you’ve used it, jump into the Mastermind Group and share your experience.
Why we love Canva for our TpT stores
Canva helps us stay on brand with our graphics and stick with a cohesive look. It’s also faster to create images and templates which means we can create images more consistently. We use it for everything from social media posts to blog graphics to images for our resources.
The platform includes pre-sized images that are designed for all the different graphics you want to create. But if there is a unique sized graphic you need, it’s really easy to create custom designs as well.
If you want to save time and keep your brand consistent, Canva is the best investment you can make. If you’re just getting started or want to eliminate paying for so many subscriptions, you can use it in place of PowerPoint or PhotoShop.
If there are additional ways that you use Canva in your TpT store, we want to hear about them. Share your ideas along with images or your favorite Canva tutorials in the Grow with Us Mastermind Group.