Create Beautiful Digital Signage Content Using Canva

Pickcel’s integration with Canva design tool helps to create awesome digital signage designs seamlessly.

Canva is a hugely popular graphic design tool that allows its users to choose from a myriad of templates and customize them to create professional images and graphics. Most of the attributes of Canva are available for free and are easy to maneuver. This feature particularly helps users with basic to no formal graphic design training to create excellent industry-standard designs for their businesses, blogs, projects, presentations, etc., saving them from the cost burden of hiring professionals.

To make content display through digital signage more fun, user-friendly, and customizable for its clientele, Pickcel has integrated Canva with its digital signage solution. Earlier, Pickcel allowed its customers to only upload saved files (images, videos, etc.) onto the ‘Assets’ section for creating display compositions. But, with the brand new collaboration with Canva’s free graphic design software, Pickcel clients will now enjoy the freedom to design their own contents and directly publish it onto the ‘Assets’ section.

How To Use Canva Design Tool within Pickcel?

While Canva is free software, it can, nevertheless, be an extra hassle for Pickcel clients to sign up separately on Canva, create and download their file and again upload it on the ‘Assets’ section to create a composition.

Let’s say a certain Pickcel client is recruiting for a new start-up business. This is how the client can use Pickcel’s digital signage software’s Canva integration to design his/her own advertisement and showcase it to the public.

Step

1 Log in to the registered account with Pickcel.

2 Within the dashboard, click on the ‘Assets’ tab (Figure: 1).

3 On the top right corner, click on the ‘Design with Canva’ button (Figure: 1).

4 There will be several options to choose from such as ‘Menu’, ‘Brochure’, ‘Logo’, ‘Newsletter’, ‘Announcements’, ‘Infographics’ etc. Click on the desired option (Figure 2). Since in the given example, our client requires to announce a hiring drive, ‘Announcements’ is a good option to go with.

5 Once a category is selected, there are several tools to create an awesome design.

Template

Templates are pre-designed frameworks where everything from texts, pictures, backgrounds, colors, dimensions to alignments can be edited to create a fully customized graphic design. This can be done simply by clicking on the components to be modified. Canva yields tons of cool templates to browse from, many even free of cost. Specific templates can be typed in the search area. For the given example, the client can search by typing ‘Hiring’ (Figure 3).

Photos

Just like templates, relevant photos can also be typed in the search area (Figure 4). Canva offers thousands of free HD images that can be used to design attractive backgrounds through just a simple click or drag-and-drop maneuver.

The images can then be adjusted by dragging the corners.

Text

The text can be changed in three different ways:

By modifying the sample text: The text itself as well as its color, font, size, alignment, and position – everything can be modified by clicking on the text on the template and editing with the tools on the top editing bar.
using the ‘Text’ tab: The sample text(s) can be deleted and completely fresh text can be inserted using the ‘Text’ tab. Custom fonts are also available in form of ‘Heading’, ‘Sub-heading’, and ‘Body text’ options. Further modifications of the text can be made using the top editing bar.
By ready-to-use texts: Specific texts can also be typed on the search area and the results can be inserted.

Background

The ‘Background’ tab offers numerous solid colors as well as high-quality images to be set as background. For example, In Figure 6, the background color is yellow that has been changed to green in Figure 7.

Elements

The ‘Element’ tab contains stickers, vectors, and illustrations of different subjects like charts, symbols, frames, objects, shapes, etc. These elements can be used as desired to create infographics, stories, designs, logos, etc. For instance, in the above example of a client trying to create a recruitment advertisement, the image from Figure 7 can be replaced by a relevant element to give a completely different minimalist look.

Uploads

The ‘Upload’ tab allows the users to add their own pre-existing files and use them as backgrounds, elements, photos, etc.

6 Once the design is ready, it is now time to publish the design onto the Pickcel dashboard. This can be done by clicking on the ‘Publish’ button on the top-right corner. The image name can also be changed in the name area just to the left of the publish button. The users can also take a final look by expanding the image using the ‘Expand’ button at the bottom right corner.

7 Once the image is published, it will be available on the Pickcel dashboard and can be used to create display compositions and broadcasted through Pickcel’s digital signage solution.

Create beautiful digital signage designs with Canva