3 Reasons Canva is Our Design Tool of Choice

InDesign, Photoshop, Keynote, Powerpoint & Morpholio… If you’ve been in the interior design world for a hot minute, you may be using one of these on heavy rotation– or maybe even more than one!

But what if we told you there’s a tool that does it all without the learning curve or time suck that go hand-in-hand with the others we just mentioned?

Don’t get us wrong, we understand having an attachment to the tools and methods you’ve stuck with for years. We know you’ve found a rhythm and approach you like with the tech you know like the back of your hand.

Familiarity is important to every workflow, it’s just not THE most important thing.

Familiarity is important to every workflow, it’s just not THE most important thing. Accessibility and efficiency are just as (if not more) important to a growing biz that requires team collaboration on a regular basis.

As easy as it is to stick to the tools and tricks you already know, you could be doing yourself a major disservice by refusing to switch things up. Because you’ve invested big bucks or simply because you don’t have time, it doesn’t really matter. Either way, you risk wasting time, resources, and sometimes even money if you’re dead set on doing things the way they’ve always been done.

This is especially true if you’re working in the fast-paced, ever-evolving industry of interior design.

You want to delegate design to-dos with ease?

To streamline your collaboration process with that new VA you just outsourced work to?

To have your junior designer whip up a new project concept in a flash while you’re kicking it poolside?

Then you’ve GOT to know about the different design tools and options that are available to you.

Enter: Canva!

The powerhouse of cloud-based design tools and our weapon of choice when it comes to sharing client templates, maintaining consistency between branded materials, and whipping up last-minute designs on the fly.

Not to mention that there’s a free version that touts a ton of features you could get away with before investing in the paid option. 

If you’re a design wizard, avid DIYer, or completely new to designing, Canva has got plenty to offer you.

Here are 3 reasons Canva is numero uno in our book.

Accessibility

Gone are the days of frantically digging through your inbox for a missing file.

Or waiting for a team member to finish up with a doc so you can *finally* get your hands on it.

Or needing to install and work with expensive software that slows your computer wayyy down.

With Canva, you’ll have everything you need to access at your fingertips, whenever and wherever you happen to be. 

Unlike Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, Canva is a cloud-based tool that allows you to escape the bottlenecks that tend to form when your team works in a file-based format.

Multiple users can access and work on documents simultaneously, which can streamline your workflow in a way that wasn’t possible even a decade ago. This makes it super easy to share files between team members, outsource work to VAs and contractors, or crank out some designs on the go. (Seriously, Canva’s Autosave and Version History features are a godsend!)

Sure, it’s not capable of heavy design work the way hefty tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign are. And though there will always be a place for those when diving into a custom graphic design project, you don’t need them for every little thing.

For your day-to-day design needs—especially when it comes to creating simple graphics and presentations—you don’t need all the bells and whistles.

The features you do need are most likely available in Canva. That’s what we call “a godsend” around these parts.

Consistency

The next feature we’re about to gush about is only offered with the paid version, but is so worth the investment.

If you work with a team that needs to access your branding assets on the regular, you can house your—or your client’s—logos, brand marks, color palette, and fonts with Canva’s brand kits. 

That way, anyone who has access to your team account will be able to drop whatever brand asset they need into a design without having to reupload or frantically look for a file every single time. 

When it comes to working on moodboards, welcome or exit packets, and presentations for your clients, brand kits tend to come in handy as well. You can save their branding files or project colors for easy access so can customize their documents with ease. It’s also a foolproof way to keep every client project from overlapping in your head or on the page!

If you swing for the paid option, make sure you take advantage of this time-saving feature that makes filesharing painless and easy as pie. It’s a winner, that’s for sure.

User-friendliness

Another reason we’re head over heels for Canva is because its user-friendliness is on ANOTHER LEVEL. We’re talking about the cream of the crop, people.

We’ve already mentioned other big name design tools that do a whole heck of a lot—which is exactly why they’re the industry standard.

But offering a whole slew of design tools is no good if the designer doesn’t know how to use ‘em. 

The thing about Canva is that it is, by far, THE most approachable, affordable, and capable option for your creative needs. It’s crazy intuitive and the learning curve isn’t as steep when compared with other design software since it focuses mainly on the basics of design and image editing.

On top of its game-changing ease of use, it boasts an asset library with countless resizeable and customizable graphics, images, and fonts. Canva also offers an extensive selection of premade designs and templates that can cut your design time in half.

Then there’s the background remover tool, which makes removing distracting or overwhelming backgrounds a piece of cake.

Canva’s the tool of our dreams for many reasons but the ability to edit images, design, and collage together different elements in one space is the clincher for us. 

Seriously, it does what would have taken 3 different tools to accomplish. They are simply *crushing it.*

How We Use Canva

Now that we laid out what Canva can do, we’re thrilled to break down how we make the most of this show-stopping design tool.

At W&J we have our hands in Canva-based design work on a daily basis. Whether we’re crafting branded collateral for clients, building presentations, or creating PDFs, we’ve ALWAYS got this bad boy on deck.  

We’ve also used Canva to create business cards, notecards, brochures, and pretty much everything else you can think of that would come in handy for business. Yes, you can still use Adobe tools to create beautifully branded docs like client welcome and exit guides.

But where InDesign and Photoshop are stiff, Canva is bendy and where Photoshop is complex, Canva is simple. Remember, you want to work smarter, not harder—which is why taking this tool out for a whirl should be your next move. You won’t know how much time and effort you’ll end up saving otherwise.

Trust us, it pays to change things up when you’ve got a good reason to and Canva has a TON of reasons rolled into one powerful tool.

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