Create captivating content: 3 favorite Canva features to elevate your designs

Whether you’re creating a party invitation, an Instagram story or a company logo, all people can benefit from a design platform that is both user-friendly and inventive to help bring their artistic visions to life. Canva, a free-to-use online graphic design tool, is likely bookmarked on nearly every creator’s computer. As marketers tasked with creating engaging and exciting graphics, it is one of our favorite design platforms to use at Pierce PR. 

Canva stands out among other platforms because of the diversification of its services and templates and its seamless approach to teamwork. Unlike other software, Canva offers thousands of design templates right on its homepage and truly commits to its mission “to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere.” In fact, it’s used by more than just high-skilled and professional designers: over 8 million teachers and students also use Canva every month. 

As a leading strategic communications firm offering content creation, social media and design services, we are constantly producing new graphics and documents for our clients, and Canva is always our go-to platform. With Canva’s continuous addition of new tools and features, we’re sharing three of our recent favorites that help enhance users’ designs and elevate final products below. 

Duotone: to turn any photo into your company colors

Providing the ability to change the color of any image, object or logo, the Duotone tool is one of our favorites! When designing materials for our clients, we often come across the issue of a logo blending in or being completely mismatched with the background, and that’s when we turn to Duotone for assistance. After selecting the image and clicking “edit photo,” Duotone pops up in the effects section. From there, you can choose from the listed color options or create your own custom color pairing. Pro tip: make both color swatches the same code to get a singular hue. This is especially useful when converting a logo to a solid color, like white or black, or matching our clients’ branding by adding their specific color code to the design. 

Background remover: to seamlessly place photos within a design 

This tool is simple, yet effective, and is used by our team frequently. It does exactly what its name says: removes the background of images. This comes in handy when needing a logo or photo to have a transparent background to look cohesive with the rest of the design and is especially useful when removing headshot backgrounds and inserting them directly into the design. To start, select the photo, click “edit photo” in the top left corner and choose “Background Remover” from the drop-down menu. From there, your image’s background will instantly disappear! You can also use the brush feature to restore or erase anything that may be needed or left behind. 

Magic expand: extend a background to fit your graphic

Canva recently released Magic Studio, a compilation of AI-powered design tools that aim to make editing effortless. Among these tools, we have found Magic Expand to be one of the most useful features for our design needs. With just the click of a button, this tool expands the background of any photo with matching scenery, allowing you to resize a photo to fit within your design without cutting anything off. Thanks to this tool, no one should have to be cut out of a group photo due to sizing restrictions ever again! 

While these are only our current top three favorite tools, there are several other great features that make Canva our preferred graphic design platform. Working on design projects can feel overwhelming at certain points, especially when using a tricky platform, but Canva never fails to help us deliver high-quality results that exceed our clients’ expectations and position them for continued success. We will continue to monitor the latest and greatest Canva trends and share our new favorites along the way as the platform unveils game-changing products in the future. 

Olivia Toliver is an account coordinator at Pierce PR