Free and Pro — What You Actually Need

Your practice client: Zawadi Bakes

Every assignment serves Zawadi Bakes, a fictional home bakery in Kilimani, Nairobi. Grace Njeri bakes celebration cakes to order and sells banana bread and cookies to three nearby cafés. She takes orders on WhatsApp and Instagram, delivers within Nairobi, and has no printed material at all.

What she needs by the end of this course: a consistent look, a price list customers can read on a phone, a set of social posts, an A5 flyer for the cafés, a business card and a simple order form.

Grace approves all prices, claims and anything published. The business, its prices and its customers are invented. Never use a real client's photographs, logo or price list for an assignment without their written permission.

What the free tier does and does not give you

The free tier is a complete design tool. You can produce every item in this course on it. What the paid tier mainly adds is the Brand Kit (saved colours, fonts and logos applied in one click), the background remover, instant resizing between formats, the premium element and photo library, and larger storage.

Prices are set in US dollars, change regularly, and there is usually a free trial. Check Canva's own pricing page for the current figure rather than trusting any number quoted in a tutorial, including this one, and work out the shilling cost at the day's rate plus your bank's foreign transaction charge.

The honest test for a freelancer: Pro's time savings only matter once you are producing for several clients. One business can be served well on the free tier. Three clients with different brand kits cannot — the manual colour-matching will cost you more than the subscription.

The licence question, up front

This matters more than any design tip, and most Canva tutorials never mention it.

You may use Canva's stock photos, graphics and fonts inside designs you create, including designs you are paid to make for a client. That is what the licence is for.

You may not resell Canva's stock content on its own, or sell a template that is substantially Canva's template with the text changed. And — the one that catches people — Canva's content licence does not permit you to register a trademark for a logo whose main element is Canva stock content. If a client wants a registered trademark, the mark must be original artwork, not an assembled stock icon.

Canva's fonts are licensed for use within Canva. You cannot extract the font file and install it elsewhere or hand it to a printer.

Licence terms change. Read the current Content Licence Agreement on Canva's own site before you sell anything, and tell a client honestly when their request needs an original designer instead.