Design Like a Pro with Canva by Jada Aloisio: A Video Course Review

By Melissa Batai

If you’re a blogger or a small business owner, one of the best things you can do to increase your traffic and sales is to have a Pinterest presence. For some people, designing eye-catching pins comes easily and naturally. For other people, navigating through Canva to create pinnable images is tedious and difficult. If you’re in the latter group, you may want to consider taking the video course, Design Like a Pro with Canva by Jada Aloisio.

What’s Included in the Course

The course can be viewed in about an hour and is broken into seven different segments:

• Introduction and Facebook Group
• Lesson 1 – Mock Ups and Flat Design
• Lesson 2 – Adding Gradients and Shadow Boxes to Your Pins
• Lesson 3 – Fun with Letters and Images
• Lesson 4 – Bringing It All Together
• Canva Goodies
• Bonus Lesson

As part of the course, Aloisio gives you 10 graphic templates to use in Canva as well as a number of elements that you can upload and use regularly when making your Canva designs.
Throughout the course, Aloisio shows you how to utilize the elements to create designs that are less generic than many of the ones that you find on Pinterest. Several of Aloisio’s pins have gone viral, so clearly her strategies work.

The techniques you learn in this class can be used for Pinterest, but they can also be used for opt-in materials to your email list and other places where you may need graphic designs.

Lastly, she also gives you access to her Facebook group, It’s a Blogging Life Y’all, which is a place for bloggers to share ideas and support one another.

My Thoughts on This Course

I enjoyed that the videos are concise and that she demonstrates the concepts as she discusses them. I also appreciated that she showed how to use some techniques such as creating shadow boxes for your pins and letters that I had not realized I could do in Canva. These shadows add depth to the images that make them more sophisticated, pinnable, and shareable.

The graphic templates and elements she created and shares with readers are valuable. I can definitely see myself using the elements in the future, and I appreciate that she shared them. She also gave me the idea to create some new elements for myself and upload them to Canva.

A minor annoyance for me is that in some segments she had a few seconds of chit chat about her weather that day in Louisiana. Frankly, I wish she would have just stayed focused on the course.

Final Thoughts

If you’d like to enhance the images you create in Canva and learn new skills for making more unique images, this course may be perfect for you.

If you are brand new to Canva and don’t have much skill creating designs, this course may be a bit too advanced for you. Perhaps try your hand at Canva for a few weeks and become familiar with the basics before taking this course.