Are you using Canva? You should be.

Recently I started hearing all this hype about a new free online design tool called Canva. So I thought I’d check it out.  It’s one of the best decisions I’ve made in awhile.

For those of us who aren’t graphically inclined and cringe from the complications of Photoshop, or want powerful tools, but we’re not sorry to take shortcuts if the results look right. If you need to make beautiful posters, invitations, cards, website graphics, or even multiple-page presentations, Canva is a design service you’re going to want to use.

Still in invitation-only beta, Canva is a design tool that makes designing easing. All you have to do is choose one of the available templates or start from a custom-sized blank canvas. You then use the Layouts and Background tabs to get a rough idea of what you want to design. These tabs are chock-full of options to choose from, whether you want a complete template or just a nice background to build on.

Canva revolves entirely around intuitive controls such as drag-and-drop, so adding, removing, and editing elements on your canvas is almost a no-brainer.

Use the search function to browse an enormous repository of images, and the Text tab to add free text or stylized text with built-in backgrounds. While many Canva elements are completely free to use, most images you’ll see on search results are Premium, and will cost you $1 per image once you download your design. You can, however, easily upload you own photos or graphics, or use ones you have on Facebook, so while Canva’s Premium options are certainly tempting, they’re not a must.  But keep in mind while working with premium images, Canva shows a pretty obtrusive watermark over photos.

Rather than overwhelm with options, Canva gives you just a handful of picks. This is evident in the built-in color picker as well: You can change the color used for text and some of the built-in glyphs, but you’re first only presented with a limited palette of 5-8 colors that fit your general color scheme. If you know the specific hue you’re after, you can click through for a more standard color picker that also lets you feed in a hex color code.

Canva is an amazing tool for the clueless, and can come in handy for professionals too. It makes designing uniformly easy for everyone, but it’s by no means aimed only at amateurs. The simplicity and richness of the tools will get you coming back for more every day, and according to Canva’s developers, the current features are only 1% of what they have in store for us.

As it is now, Canva brings sophisticated design abilities to the masses. We can only hope future features don’t render the service complicated to use. Hurry up and request your beta invite, this is one service you won’t want to miss.

So, are you using Canva….