Want To Become A Graphic Designer Without Using Photoshop?
By Bethany Morris
Photoshop can be extremely daunting the first time you use it. There are so many buttons to click and terminology like “Rasterize” “Clipping Masks” and “Layers”, that you don’t really know where to start. But what if you could create amazing, professional looking designs, without even having to think about Photoshop… or any adobe programme for that matter.
Introducing, the free, woman-founded company and Australia’s one and only start-up unicorn, Canva.
Canva is a free, online graphic design software, for web and print media design. This clever tool is super easy to use and is perfect for those who want to create professional looking adverts, infographics, business cards, social graphics etc, but don’t necessarily have the skills.
The online software boils down design to a mixture of pre-made templates and modern and fresh stock art, both free and paid for, which allows you to create beautiful designs, suited to your audience’s tastes, in minutes.
This is something I created for work, but I thought it’s wasn’t worth using Photoshop or InDesign etc so I thought I would quickly knock something up on Canva, using my own image and a plethora of fonts, colours, illustrations and shapes that are available, free of charge.
Canva also has a really nifty option to “create a team”. By doing this, it allows users to share their designs with their team, centralise all of their assets, and oversee a brand’s image by providing re-mixable templates, images and design assets that other teams can use to create on-brand graphics. When creating a team, you’re able to add up to 10 members for free. To add more, you must upgrade your account.
This online tool is used and loved all over the globe. To date there are over 10 million users that have created over 100 million designs.
Apparently, according to Canva, the best way to understand the software it to use it and only takes 23 seconds to learn… so go ahead and try it for yourself!
