Canva is a great, free online drawing program with lots of powerful features and royalty-free content you can embed.
You can use it to help you create images and illustrations for your course lessons or course resource materials.
It’s super easy and not overly complex like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Inkscape.
Finally, it’s totally free for most of the essential features and sample content.
Video Overview
Lesson Graphics
If you use PowerPoint or Google Sheets decks to teach your course, you know that your diagrams are limited to what you can make from a couple of basic shapes and lines.
If this is your case, you can start using external tools like Canva to create powerful graphics that you drop into your lesson decks.
Also, if you teach primarily using 1:1 videos, Canva can help you create supporting full-screen graphics, sidebar information, or overlay graphics.
Resource Materials
Canva lets you make full multi-page guides and checklist documents.
I prefer to create my vertical PDFs using tools like Google Sheets and Word, and then I add custom graphics that I made in a design program like Canva, Photoshop/Paint.net, or Illustrator/InkScape.
These extra visuals could be content for a title page, a cute footer, or informative support graphics for the main text on a page.
When to Use Canva
I like to use Canva when I have a design that may be too difficult for me to do in a high-end graphics application, but also too complex for a simple shapes tool in Google Sheets or Word doc.
It’s smart with lots of great defaults and only has the most essential options. Unlike other programs that might have six or more settings per feature, this software keeps things simple. It avoids the confusion of too many choices, where it’s often unclear which options to use.
Canva is my Goldilocks, the perfect tool when I need to create an intermediate picture that is not too simple and not too hard.
Key Tools
The key tools in Canva are made up of:
- Template – an example layout with a bunch of elements that you can modify
- Background – A background picture for your layout
- Text – Text that you can style and position anywhere
- Elements – A giant library of pictures and shapes that you can put
- Uploads – Your assets like your logo and custom backgrounds
- Toolbar – Tools to modify the current item like color, font, position, delete
The app also offers cool drag and drop placement and positioning features. When you move an item, dynamic grid lines appear to help you place it precisely whether centered aligned with padding on the left or perfectly in line with other elements.
Pro Stuff
Just so you know, there is a pro version of Canva. If you’ve tried free Canva and it works for you, and need the extra features, it’s very affordable.
Here are some of the things in the pro version:
- More pre-made templates
- More image resources that you can drop in
- Output PNG files with transparent backgrounds
- Better resizing of outputs
- Customize and add your own brand fonts
Oh, and the pro features include better team support for sharing and collaborating on designs.
Wrap Up
Canva is free, powerful, smart, and has a bunch of royalty-free layouts and content that can help you create a stylish supporting graphic in about 15 minutes.
I didn’t even mention a whole bunch of video features since I wanted to focus on creating helper images for course content.
Next time you need to make a quick illustration, take 30 seconds to think about the actual job that needs to get done. If it’s mid-level complexity and you are at low/mid-level design skills, then start with Canva.
Get Canva
To start using Canva to create your course illustrations, visit Canva.com to create a free account and start mocking up designs in minutes.
You should be a little more smarter now. Thanks for hanging out!
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