Canva Free offers a great introduction to graphic design without needing prior knowledge. Depending on the type of designs you plan on making, Canva Free may be all you will ever need. Canva Pro (paid) is $119.00 per year subscription. With Canva Pro, you are given more in-depth tools to create your designs. Canva Pro makes designing even easier and saves time.
Canva Free
I love Canva Free and used it for the first two months when starting Salty Inspirations, however, I quickly grew out of it. Canva Free is a great way to get your feet wet when starting your self-publishing business. It offers thousands of templates and design sizes, over a million free photos and graphics, and 5GB of cloud storage. I was able to design several books with beautiful pages using Canva Free. Its drag-and-drop style of design is very easy to use. Canva really gives you a lot of stuff in the free version. I made this planner using only the free version.
What I do not like about Canva Free is there is no way to resize your design. That’s fine if you pay very close attention to the page count, sizes, and margins that KDP or any other publisher requires. You can not search for free only graphics and photos. You must scroll through pages and pages of graphics, watching for the free ones to pop up. You can not remove backgrounds on photos, Pixlr E is a great workaround for this, but it’s another free tool you need to use and more time spent on the project. We will talk about Pixlr E in another post. Canva Free reduces the quality of your project when you download it. The only way to get high-quality images is with the Pro.
Tip: My semi-fix for Canva’s quality reduction is to always download and re-upload your images. Never screen clip them, screen clipping also reduces image quality.
Canva Free Vs. Canva Pro -Quick Look
Canva Pro
As you can see in the chart above there are several advantages to Canva Pro. I chose to upgrade to Pro because of the download quality and time-saving tools. When creating books that aren’t just lined paper it takes more time. Scrolling through pages of images looking, for a free one that I liked sometimes took hours. Strategically layering or cropping pictures because I did not have access to the background remover would also take more time.
Several low-content publishers use Canva Free, and I didn’t want my stuff to look like theirs. There are only so many ways you can make a cartoon cat look different. 😉 I would have a design in my head but didn’t have access to the images or tools I needed to create it.
The downgrading of image quality in Canva Free isn’t something that is talked about. I found out after I had spent hours creating my design. This is a huge one for me.
Canva Pro is well worth the upgrade.
“The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs, one step at a time.” — Joe Girard
As always, thanks for stopping by for some Salty Inspirations!
