MY HONEST Opinion About Canva Print
You guys know how much I love Canva but it's extremely important for me to be honest about the tools that I demo on this channel. In this post, I'm going to give you my honest opinion about Canva Print. It's a great platform to design with but is the print service high quality enough to pay for. That's the topic for today and I think you're going to be surprised what I have to say. Without further ado, Let’s hop in.
Hi, I'm LaShonda and welcome to Bootstrap Biz Advice where I teach you how to grow a biz without breaking the bank. One of the best ways you can save money in your business is to use my link if you plan on giving Canva Pro a try. Go to lashondabrown.com/canva45 to get access to tools like background remover, 600,000 plus templates and 100 million premium stock photos, video, audio and graphics free for 45 days, which is the longest free trial Canva has to offer.
You can design a ton of things in Canva but you can also pay Canva to print your designs when you're done. Some of the most popular things to print are tote bags, wearables like sweatshirts, hoodies, t-shirts, and marketing materials like brochures and business cards. If you click on templates, and then print products, you can browse through everything that is currently available. However, some designs can not be printed in certain countries. There is a page on Canva’s website called what we print and I highly recommend you check out this page before investing your time into designing. Not only does this page tell you generally what regions they service, it lists out the specifications as well. Now here's one important thing to take note of, you can always leverage a local printer for your Canva designs. You don't have to use Canva’s print services, but they do offer them as a convenience to you. I was actually shocked at the shipping speed for my recent order of business cards. They arrived in beautiful packaging, which was a lovely surprise in my mailbox and they even included some stickers which I loved.
When I recertified as a Canva Expert, I decided to create a business card that put all my info on one card. I designed it to be double-sided and ordered 500 on premium paper with, a matte finish. The total cost was $60. I’ve used Moo.com and Vista Print in the past to print business cards. Moo is definitely the most expensive option. And Vista Print is the cheapest however, as soon as you decide to print on both sides of the card, VistaPrint will increase in price regardless of promo codes or coupons.
I thought the quality of Canva’s printing was really good. It can handle the gradient on the front of the card and my photo cut out on the back did not appear pixelated. My only complaint with my business card was where my cut out stopped. If I was designing for web, I would have had my body go all the way to the bottom but with print you want to leave room so things don’t get cut off. I'm super used to the seamless look so initially I was taken off guard but I definitely think it’s fine. You also want to play around with your font weights because business cards are super small. Varying your font weights will create hierarchy and drive attention to the information you want to emphasize without having to use italics or underlines. I also changed my hair since I designed these cards so I'm going to tweak the design a bit, replace the headshot and order another run. I also had Canva print a t-shirt for me with the Canva Expert logo on it for workshops and I was very pleased with the quality of the shirt and the quality of the print.
Overall, I recommend Canva for paper products and small runs of promotional products like t-shirts. Most promotional product companies will give you price breaks when they order larger quantities so that will probably save you money. Using a local printer may also save you on shipping so before you place your order on Canva, just run a price check and see what works best for you.
I hope you enjoyed this post. Be sure to subscribe to my channel for more tutorials and feel free to reach out if you would like for me to train your team or community on how to get more out of your Canva subscription.