Graphic design is a skill essential to business. Between logo to product labels, business cards to flyers, graphic design is necessary for many applications, and the growth of digital marketing has only emphasized the need.

Working with a graphic designer on all of these needs may be beyond your budget, and if you need a social media post designed in a pinch, your designer’s turn-around time may not be in line with your timeline.

That’s why it’s helpful to learn how to be your own graphic designer! And it’s way easier than you think.

There are many free design platforms that are cloud-based, intuitive to use, and come with a variety of templates to get you started. The most popular – and my favorite! – is Canva.

It’s easy to find tutorials and courses on how to use Canva, as well as basic design tips. (You can find my free Canva tutorials here.)

My Top Graphic Design Tips

1. When designing your own print and digital marketing graphics, it’s essential to adhere to your brand. Not only will you maintain a cohesive, professional look, adhering to your brand builds brand awareness, so when someone sees one of your designs, they’ll likely associate it with your brand before seeing your business’ name.

2. While it may be tempting to keep the pretty font and beautiful color a template comes with, always adapt it to adhere to your brand. This also prevents your social media feeds from looking like a jumbled mess of various colors and font styles.

Canva has a section where you can upload your brand colors and fonts, making it easy to customize the look of templates.

Ready to get started? The tutorial below will guide you through the set-up of a free Canva account.

Ready for a Canva deep dive? Check out my Create With Canva online mini course. It provides a tour of the backend, how to set-up your Canva account to save you time when designing, all the design functions included with Canva, and more.

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