First Post – Technologies and Materials

In order to create a strong Fitness and Lifestyle TikTok account, I can use Canva’s tools and features to produce, edit, and build the necessary branding materials in order to produce a sense of brand voice, brand awareness, and generate engagement.

 

Technology Central to Project

A technology that will be crucial to creating a successful version of my project is Canva. Canva is an online graphic design tool to create social media posts, presentations, logos, flyers, posters, and other documents. Canva also provides a space for users to create any necessary prototyping and mock-up materials that are non-interactive versions of a given concept to fully understand what works and what doesn’t prior to making a more concrete form of content.

 

Reason for Choosing Canva

I have chosen to discuss Canva because it is a platform that will provide me with full creative freedom to build any necessary graphic and branding materials, such as logos, thumbnails, and social media posts. I plan to use Canvas’ color wheel, grids, text-holders, as well as eraser and lasso tools. Strong branding materials are an essential part of this project, as they will provide the account with a brand voice and persona, as well as further support the professionalism element.

 

Proficiency

In order to master Canva as a platform in order to create a professional-level project, it is necessary to learn how to successfully navigate the technology and its abilities, be extremely familiarized with graphic design elements such as templates, texts, images, and components when editing and creating, as well as be able to create an array of logos, graphics, and posts.

I have used Canva in my time with Beautiful Social, creating graphics, logos, and website mockups for the Greater Freedom Think Tank (https://www.beautifulsocial.org/impact/greater-freedom-think-tank), as well as creating Instagram reels and graphics for the Bringing Hope to Widows campaign for Water is Life Kenya (https://www.beautifulsocial.org/impact/wilk).

During my internship with Baker Street Partners, a real estate development company, I helped rebrand their original Instagram account as well as created a separate Instagram account for their property management unit. In order to successfully rebrand both accounts and diversify their look from other real estate development and property management companies, I created unique layouts for apartments now leasing and units available for rent. I no longer work for the company, however I created the layouts in such a way that future employees can easily go in and modify the layout for a new post.

 

Social

Canva is social in the sense that users can create, schedule, publish, as well as collaborate in one space. Canva allows for social media creation amongst various platforms (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn), and also provides a place for documents, whiteboards, presentations, print products, and videos.

Canva also has a scheduling tool that allows users to caption their post, choose a date and time, as well as a particular platform that they want the post to appear on. Scheduling on Canva changes and enhances human behavior in this sense because they no longer have to travel to multiple different technologies to carry out one action; It can be created and scheduled through Canva.

One of Canvas best features is the collaboration aspect. Users can either create Canva Teams, so each user has all of the created designs in the same location, or an individual user can share a design by sending an edit link to others, where they can join and immediately begin editing. In a field where collaboration is crucial to creating successful and engaging graphics, the collaboration feature on Canva has changed and enhanced human behavior; Users no longer need to gather around one person’s laptop in order to collaborate. Canva collaboration allows users to create in a way that showcases a variety of skill sets.

 

Cultural Values

Canva reflects cultural values because it is a unique, human-centric platform that is constantly evolving. Due to the fact that the platform is human-centric, Canva has the ability to reshape human behavior, beliefs, and values. By providing a vast space for a wide range of creation, creativity has never been more accessible. Users can make creations from scratch, or build on from an array of templates and guides that are generated towards a similar niche the user is trying to engage with.

Canvas cultural values remind me of social media’s cultural values in the way that it is completely powered by human interaction and the creativity is up to the interpretation of the individual or group of individuals. Similar to how users can build an account from scratch on social media, users can generate content from scratch on Canva, and similar to how users can gain inspiration from other creators on social media, users can follow pre-made templates by other users on Canva.

 

Affordances

Canva will afford my actions when I use it for my project because it can be used as a prototyping tool before I go and create content, it can be used to generate a design persona prior to content creation to ensure that all future content upholds a similar level of aesthetics and professionalism, and most importantly it provides me with the necessary space to create any graphics and content features.

Canva can be used as a prototyping tool because it can allow me to map out my experimental process using the pen, sticky-note, and whiteboard feature. This grants me infinite space to add to, revise, and generate new content plans.

Working with Water is Life Kenya, last semester my group and I created a mini design kit that we shared with our community partner early in the collaboration that included fonts, colors, graphics, logos. This was an extremely beneficial tool that we often referenced while creating our content for the non-profit organization’s campaign, in order to ensure that all the content stuck to a central theme in order to build and maintain a recognizable brand identity. Implementing this last semester and seeing how useful it was, this is something I would like to use again when it comes to building this personal brand in order to originate a brand identity for myself.

The most crucial way that Canva will afford my actions is its ability to provide me with the space to create. Single handedly, I can build from scratch using Canva’s tools and features. Overall, Canva is a user-friendly space that was built to be easily-adapted and easily-accessible to all. Canva grants the space to create designs that are consistent with branding, yet also grants the space for users to easily revamp and go back to the drawing board.

 

Constraints

Canva can be limiting in the sense that a user cannot access all of its features unless they pay for a Canva subscription. Users always have the option to make graphics with Canva Pro features, however, they will only be able to save those graphics with a water-marked version. Canva offers other great graphics and templates free of charge, however, users cannot use a platform like Photoshop at all unless they have a subscription or use a 7 day free trial. Canva may be limiting in terms of what features are available, but it still provides non-paying users with decent avenues to create attractive graphics.

Going along with Photoshop, Canva can be limiting because it does not offer the more advanced tools, such as image manipulation and vector drawing. To put it simply, Photoshop’s features go beyond basic editing skills, whereas Canva’s features are more beneficial and easily adaptable to a beginner skill set.