As a Marketing major, I have had to take social media courses that teach digital marketing in addition to learning how to create social media graphics. Because of this, I have extensively used Canva for multiple courses and for various platforms like flyers (printed and digital), social media posts, etc. For this assignment, I found that all of the design “rules” I have learned in this course combined with the functional applications on Canva I have previously learned which allowed me to efficiently create a “successful” ad design. Because of the numerous templates on Canva, it is easy to create a simplistic and effective design; however, the templates can be repetitive and bland if you choose not to change aspects of the design. The template I chose focuses more on emphasizing the text rather than placing an aesthetic focus on visuals/images. For the content of this ad, I think the template works effectively, but the overall aesthetics for visuals is not the most enticing. This aspect of the template actually helped me create a “bad” design. There are so many options for types of texts and colors, that I left the template mostly the same while breaking the design rules. To break design rules, I used bad color combinations, a hard-to-read font, ineffective sizing, etc. As someone who nitpicks over the smallest details of designs, Canva helps make a lot of decisions for me so that I can focus on content and design equally.
Although Canva, in my opinion, is a very efficient platform for designing flyers and social media posts, it would not be the best platform if editing images or creating completely unique designs is your goal. For projects that require detailed editing of photographs, Canva does not have the functions to provide high-grade editing tools. Additionally, because Canva is central to creating designs from prebuilt templates, unique designs can be restricted by the template structures provided.
Discussion: As a student, do you prefer platforms such as Canva that have prebuilt templates or do you prefer personalized graphic design platforms such as InDesign and Publisher ? This question more than likely depends on the project (and other factors), but there may be a preference for efficiency over unique creativity.
Intro to Digital Texts and Media 
I want to start by saying that I was completely taken aback by that font, I think we all know which one. Who created that? Why did they think it was a good idea? Who would use that seriously? Anyways… as an amateur, I prefer Canva. I do think, however, once I have some more design experience under my belt, I’d rather just take inspiration from Canva and create my own designs in something like inDesign. I use Pages as of now, and sometimes I can tell that there is probably a more efficient way of achieving something than the way I am trying. Things like that are lessons that come with experience.
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