How to Design Your Report for School Projects With Canva's Free Alternative to Photoshop

Canva is the perfect tool for teachers to create class posters, presentations, and update class websites with nice looking graphics, but it's equally as useful for students looking to add that extra design finish to their reports. Marketers and bloggers use Canva to make reports and graphics for the web so there's no reason students shouldn't too. Canva has over 12 million images to choose from, and you have the option to upload your own images and put them in your reports.

After you click the documents icon on your home page to get started, the magic happens. The first thing you are going to want to do is design your cover page. Canva offers you with some predesigned options to the left that are made by Canva designers, but you can also make your own.

Go to the shapes folder under search. Choose a shape with a two tone boarder and center. click the center. Change the color to white. select the boarder. Change the boarder to whatever color you like by selecting the image and clicking the color option to change. You can customize your colors. The boarder adds a sense of polish to your report. You can copy and paste this to new pages for as many pages are in your book report.

Select text. Choose a small size text box. Size it to the page. Copy and paste your report into the page. You will have to monitor how much text you can fit on each page to make sure you are filling the pages with text and graphics. Try to strike a balance between graphics and text on each page.

Use the upload option to customize your report. You can add your own graphics to match what the content of your report is about. If the report is about a book then try to find graphics to upload that match the content of the book, but specifically to match the words on the page you are adding graphics too. If you have a graphic that is too big, it's perfectly common to have one page of the report be just text, and the next page be an image that takes up the entire page. With the 12 million images available on Canva, I'm sure you won't have a hard time finding something that matches what you are looking for.