We’ll be honest: we were resistant to hopping on the Canva bandwagon. We saw all these reels and pins about Canva tutorials and would roll our eyes and keep scrolling. But as Stratos has grown, our team has learned to love and appreciate Canva, so much so that we signed up to be an affiliate 🙈
Now that we’ve been using Canva Pro for a little over a year, we pretty much can’t live without some of the pro features. Here’s a round-up of what our designers and content coordinators at Stratos love about designing in Canva.
Brand Kits
I like having the brand colors stored. With brand kits, it’s easy to redesign a template from one brand to another. Because we design for multiple clients, this helps our whole team keep brands consistent without having to look up HEX codes and typefaces when switching between clients.
Brand kits are also a great way for our Stratosphere clients to easily update graphics templates to their brand colors and fonts. Having the brand kit saved allows you to click once to change the fonts and again to change the colors, and voila! You have a branded graphic!
Julia Block, CEO
Elements
Although I generally prefer the flexibility of designing within Adobe products, there is one feature in Canva that tops any other program I’ve used, and that is the pre-loaded design elements.
When I design in Illustrator or photoshop, each and every piece of a design needs to be made from scratch. Not only is the very time-consuming, but it’s also often limited by my drawing abilities.
With Canva, there are hundreds of thousands of pre-loaded images, icons, shapes, transparent elements, and illustrations. It saves me so much time and increases the quality of illustrations that would otherwise be difficult to draw.
Savannah Guthrie, Graphic Designer
Collaboration
The fact that we can collaborate is KEY. Canva is so wonderful for collaboration between our team and our clients. I don’t have Adobe products, but I still need to make and edit graphics often. Canva helps me do both.
- I can make easy text edits when the designer does not have time and get them to the client in a shorter time frame.
- I can get a design to place with all the content, and my design team can make it look GORGEOUS.
- I can share templates with clients in a pinch if they need them.
Ryann Marlar, Senior Content Coordinator
Templates
Of course, you have access to some templates with the free version of Canva, but in Canva Pro, you have a seemingly never-ending supply of starting points for your next social media graphic. Whether I’m throwing together a quick tips graphic, a carousel post, a quote graphic, or even our year-in-review post, there’s a template that will save me time and brain power.
Kat Combs, Operations Manager
Brand Templates
As someone who is not a graphic designer and, to be honest, only knows a little bit about how to design in Canva, it’s so comprehensible! Our designer has been able to create templates from elements that make it so easy for me to plug and play my content. Instead of staring at a blank screen, wondering how to start, I can pull up one of the brand templates Savannah has put together for me. The client gets gorgeous graphics without me needing to know anything about graphic design.
Kelsey Potter, Content Coordinator
Are you sold? Try Canva Pro for yourself and let us know what your favorite features are.
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About the Author
Kat helps our staff stay on task by managing the inner workings of Stratos. She works behind the scenes to ensure our staff has everything they need to get the job done, and our clients are proud of the work we are producing.
Julia Block is the CEO of Stratos Creative Marketing, helping business owners make sure their marketing strategies all work together to produce results and revenue.
Savannah serves our clients by creating beautiful designs for their branding and websites. With a cohesive and polished look, they are able to attract new clients with their marketing materials and websites.
Ryann manages social media accounts and email marketing for our clients so they can focus on work while their social media and emails build their brand, develop customer relationships, and attract new leads.
Kelsey uses her love for writing to craft content for our clients' social media channels and email marketing so that our clients can focus on their sweet spots while we help them nurture their relationships with their customers.
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