It’s not that I’m rubbish at playing Pictionary, more absolutely terrible, which is why my daughters enjoy watching me play it.
I know in my head what my picture should look like but what emerges on the paper when it’s my turn rarely matches the image I’m seeing in my mind.
Take my awful drawing to a digital platform and it gets serious: professional reputations are at stake.
Professional design is crucial in attracting and retaining business. We need to create visual content both to publish as well as establish identity. But what if you don’t have the skills, tools or knowledge to create this visual content adequately? Or the budget to pay someone else to do it?
With neither an in-house design team nor the resources to hire an agency or freelancer, I ended up doing one of two things: either I failed to create the post, marketing literature or graphic I needed, or I used my trusted ‘print screen’ button in combination with Microsoft Paint.
Effective, yes. Masterpieces, no.
The results were occasionally acceptable but sometimes terrible, just like my Pictionary efforts.
I’ve often had ideas for graphics but until I discovered Canva.com I was unable to turn many of them into reality without help. Without the right tools and the skill to use them, creative work becomes much harder. I’ve never used Photoshop and you can only do so much with Paint.
Finding Canva felt like someone had switched the lights on. A whole new world opened up and I’ve since used it to create graphics social media, flyers, a case study, letterheads and cover ideas for a book I wrote for a client.
Canva makes creating all of those very easy. I sometimes use it in conjunction with free images from Pixabay.com (free as in they don’t cost anything and free as in there are no associated copyright restrictions) and it’s become one of the essential tools for my business.
