I am not a designer. At all.

Luckily, Canva allows me to compensate for what I lack in design sense. It’s a fairly easy to use tool (even if it is restrictive).

Canva is a graphic design tool that uses a drag and drop UI to allow you to create anything from blog graphics to posters. The essence of it is that you choose a theme, add elements to that theme (like a grid structure, lines, icons and charts) to create an infographic.

Pros: It’s easy to use and it’s sleek. The icons are, for the most part, designed well and you can add your own images to build on what Canva provides.

Cons: If you’re looking to represent percentages that aren’t quartiles in a chart, good luck. Canva, for the most part, provides quartile percentages for its graphs (so stats have to be 25%, 50%, 75% or 100%) and the bar graph sizing isn’t great — you essentially have to guesstimate the proportion of the bars you use.

If you’re willing to forego a perfectly accurate data representation (for the bar graphs) and can live with using a pie / circle chart for quartile percentages only, Canva is a useful tool to display information beautifully. You can even be creative and forego the typical pie chart to display stats in a more innovative format — Canva has several templates that provide decent inspiration like this one:

If you have any questions about using Canva or how I created my graphics for my media diary, let’s chat!