This excellent design app makes it easy for anyone to craft elegant flyers and invitations, engaging social media stories, compelling presentations and much more.

Here are five tips for maximising your creativity with Canva – no design experience required.

Having over 250,000 templates at your fingertips may seem daunting, but Canva makes it easy to find what you need. Browse by project type (vertical video, 18-by-24-inch poster, logo), or search for a dominant colour or style (such as Lively or Elegant). Canva also lets you get granular. Teachers, for example, can browse templates for specific grade ranges and subjects. To explore, head to the Templates tab and tap the menu on the top left.

Don’t miss: The Canva’s Top Picks section highlights trending templates, like those for music fans, as well as seasonal selections.

Every template has a palette of preset colours and fonts that harmonise beautifully, but feel free to experiment. When you’re in a project, tap Design at the bottom of the screen, then tap Styles at the top. In the Combinations section you’ll find additional colour-and-font pairings. You can also select each individually to mix and match.

Don’t miss: Shuffling! Sometimes you don’t know it until you see it. Keep tapping a palette you’ve selected to see how your design will look with different colours brought to the fore.

When you select a block of text, an array of formatting tools will appear. Use them to change the font and letter spacing as well as tweak opacity and display words in an arc. Making a video or GIF? Try animating text blocks to make them pop.

Don’t miss: Text effects. They add fun flourishes – like a neon glow, drop shadow or contrasting background colour.

No need for a separate photo-editing app. Tap any photo in a project and a toolbar will appear to let you crop and rotate, adjust brightness and colour, and add effects such as duotone and blur.

Don’t miss: Selective editing. Make your subjects pop by applying edits to just the foreground or the background. You’ll see this option as a drop-down when you use Contrast, Tint, Saturation and other tools in the Adjust section.

The AI-powered tools in Magic Studio can instantly remove backgrounds and even replace specific elements in an image. One of the coolest tools is Magic Edit, which lets you add or change almost anything using the brush tool. Remove distractions from a cluttered dining table or add something new, like an artfully arranged stack of glazed doughnuts, all using a text prompt.

Don’t miss: Magic Expand, which extends the background and framing of an image. It’s perfect for making a vertical photo fit a horizontal design.