No matter what jobs you do, a project will involve one or more of design-related tasks such as editing photos, creating special presentation slides, creating posters, wallpapers and unique imagery.
If you’re not a designer, you have a few basic options:
- Hire one. It can be expensive; the average freelance designer rate is about $75-$150/hour now.1
- Use tools like Photoshop or InDesign yourself. It’s often complicated and can take many steps to achieve something relatively basic.
In both situations, time, effort, money are expanded.
What if there was a simpler way?
There is, and it’s called Canva
Canva has about 10 million active users. Their basic value proposition is that you can create professional and great designs from scratch in a few minutes. There are default templates to guide you, but customization is also available. It’s all relatively simple and very intuitive, which makes it highly valuable.
I’m going to highlight a few features that will be most useful for your everyday work.
Design Grids

Choose from a number of design grids to create creative layout. All you need to do is drag and drop the images to fill the boxes in the grids.
Photo Editing

From adjusting a photo’s size, to enhancing a photo, to add special effects to it, you can edit any photo easily with a few clicks. Read more about how to make use of all the photo editing features here.
Narrative for Any Photo

Easily customize your message with different font, style and color and insert it in anywhere of a photo.