A little while ago when I was still in the planning stages for My Brand Buddy I wanted to find out more about what petpreneurs needed help with when it comes to marketing.
So I put together a free survey on Survey Monkey and shared it with my friends, who work in the pet industry and I also shared it here on the blog.
Here’s what some of you said:
“What I really find difficult is to put text and images together for signage and flyers for the shop in my vet clinic”.
“I want to create fun MEME’s using photos of our groomed pets for Facebook – but I don’t know how”
“I would love to design my own flyers – but I don’t know how to use Photoshop”
As you can tell there’s a bit of a theme going on there – and I quickly realised a lot of Petpreneurs have lots of great and creative ideas when it comes to marketing, but they don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars buying Photoshop only to then need weeks to learn how to perform the most basic tasks.
I mean, who has time to learn how to be a graphic designer when you have a pet business to run?
Sound familiar?
Introducing Canva
I came across an amazing free graphic design tool on the web some time ago called Canva. I’ve been using it ever since for all my blog images, and Facebook posts, and for some of the free downloads I’ve been offering here on the blog.
It’s really easy to use – you simply choose a template and drag and drop the items (buttons, lines, graphics, photos, frames) around until you’re happy with the result.
Most of the content like buttons, shapes, lines and photo frames are completely free of charge, and some of the premium content (like pet photos) cost as little as $1/each. Of course, if you use your own photos and only the free items like I often do – then the service is completely free!
What else can you do in Canva?
- Use their free templates to create professional looking Facebook & Twitter Headers
- Use their templates to create Facebook MEMEs and blog graphics – it’s easy peasy to add speech bubbles and text to your own photos.
- Create stunning signage and posters for your pet store or grooming salon
- Use the photo filters, and picture frames to improve your iphone pet photos
- You can even create a custom size graphic and download it as a high res PDF with good enough quality for print – meaning, you could design your own flyers, rack cards and business cards right inside Canva!
- Check out this article to see how easy it is to design your very own business cards from scratch in Canva.
Sound interesting? Check out Canva.com – and sign up for your own account. Then perhaps, when you have a little spare time – have a look at their FREE design school, it’s really amazing.
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Thanks for the tip! I’ve been struggling with photoshop for the last few months and this is a great solution.
That’s great – I know you’re gonna love Canva. Have fun! 🙂
This is great. Right now I use a couple of programs to merge photos and text. Canva might help simplify this process.
As far as I’m concerned Canva is the best thing since sliced bread and I hope you’ll find it as useful as I have 🙂