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For those of you that haven't heard of it before, Canva is a free-to-use graphic design tool that creates designs for web or print: blog graphics, presentations, Facebook covers, flyers, posters, invitations and so on. Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (LTHTR) has been using Canva for about a year. The following are two case studies describing how staff at LTHTR have successfully used Canva for very different purposes. We hope you find them useful and they provide some practical suggestions for you to try.
Canva for promotion - Sinead English
I shied away from using Canva for promotional materials at first; I found it to be too constrictive when wanting to change things from their set templates. I was used to using Publisher and Word and the flexibility they gave me when wanting to move things around and formatting them how I wanted. However, after persevering with Canva, I began to see its potential and benefits rather than its limits.
The first promotional material I designed was a poster for 'World Mental Health Day' as we had some books in the Library to promote alongside the campaign. It was very simple to pick a style of design which I liked, but the confusion as to how I alter it to what I want was a stumbling block. However, I looked at it as a challenge and even if it looked terrible at the end, I could press undo and start over. I clicked on the pre-written text, messed around with different fonts until I found a style I liked and then inserted the text I wanted. Then came the fun bit, filters! Being an avid user of Snapchat and Instagram I felt very much at ease with this, and began altering the contrast, blur and picking a filter which fit with the subject I was promoting. Although it was my first attempt using Canva, I was really happy with the results and I definitely caught the Canva bug!
After becoming the sole library assistant in the team who persevered with Canva, I was then given the task of creating a variety of promotional materials for the Library's new book challenge, 'Summer Reading Journey: escape with a book'. I had to create posters, social media...