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Heeelloo Canva! And thank you from all the content marketers of the world

So I just discovered my new start-up fixation of the week. Canva.com. Usually these fixations last about a week, but who can say? Canva is really awesome. It’s invite only, right now, but scroll below the break and I’ll tell you how to get an invite.

If you’re like me you create a lot of content but you’re not a graphic designer. Stop the presses! What did you say? You’re not a Photoshop guy?

No, not really. Because, who has time for that? I do enjoy a good Pixlr sit-down, and can get down with Photoshop, but I’m always looking for quick-fix alternatives. Canva provides that for me. Simple, elegant, fast. Hitting all my pain-points right in the feels.

As a content marketer / social media guy (geek), I need to be able to create a lot of content fast, and sometimes you just want it to be simple, but elegant. Good design plays a huge part in my career and is a tool I need to keep sharp.  That’s where Canva comes in. Canva provides a ton of templates and bajillions of images, etc. for you to start wysywig’ing away. Just pick a template, choose a background, start customizing text, and boom:

New front-page image in about 5 minutes

mainpic_with_designbubble

 

Want to get started with Canva? I have 4 invitations left, hit me on Twitter or Google+.

There’s one more thing I’d like to mention about Canva, before I turn this discussion over to you. Their customer service is freaking awesome. I built the image you see above pretty quickly (5 minutes maybe), then went to save it and… fizzle. The app wouldn’t save the image and told me that the elves weren’t doing their jobs, or something equally snarky.

Snark level: Silicon Valley.

I submitted a ticket, and within an hour, one of their rep’s sent me a reply with the image above in PNG and JPG format to my email. Good golly, SV has a lot to learn from these guys. Seriously, this is #CustServ done right.

634fd0b979324909be0804a14cd3283c

Now over to you guys

The question of the day is: How important do you think Graphic Design is in a Social Media Manager / Content Marketers bag of tricks? Do you think that should all be silo-ed off in the design department, or do you agree that it’s important for social media managers and content strategists to be able to quickly make good visual stuff on the fly? What are some quick tools that you use to just get stuff done?

Tell me stuff in the comments.

— Sam

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About Sam

I'm Sam. I'm a writer, content marketer, social media geek, growth-hacker. I'm a little bit country, and a little bit metal. But first and foremost I'm a dad. I like Fantasy and Sci-Fi books, Townes Van Zandt and Black Sabbath, and spending time with my Kiddo. I live in Seattle. What about you?