Librarian Design Share

We receive a lot of different design submissions made with everything from markers and glue to Adobe Illustrator, but lately we can’t help but notice that Canva seems to be the design software (app? website?) of choice for busy librarians in need of attractive publicity materials. When we saw that our latest three submissions were all created with Canva, a love letter seemed to be in order.

Dearest Canva,

Would that we could adequately express the deep love and affection our hearts possess for your fetching layouts, amiable fonts, and extensive pattern library! Erin Lorandos of the Mesa Public Library gives voice to a thought we all possess:

“My favorite thing about our world right now is how a complete design novice like me can use tools like Canva and come out with something pretty sharp-looking!”

Sharp-looking indeed, Erin.

As you can see from her stunning War Ink advertisement to her fanciest of Fancy Nancy parties invitation to her disabled veterans event poster, Erin is completely under your spell, Canva.

And then, THEN! there is your ability to create perfectly sized advertisements for social media with pre-sized templates for blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Sunny Purdin, Publicity Librarian at Rowlett Public Library in Texas has used you to share general literacy posts with her library’s Facebook followers:

“I start with a great image, add some text about it being a great season for reading and then try to match the text to one of the colors in the photo [using Colorzilla].”

Sunny’s beautiful collaborations with you can be found on Pinterest. Take a look at just two of her designs below.

Lest you think only public librarians adore you, Canva, fear not, for you have won the hearts of academic librarians across our nation. Megan Mac Gregor of the Nesbitt Library at Penn State University Wilkes-Barre used your ability to upload artwork to create customized textbook reserve posters:

“We recently started having all required textbooks for classes on our campus on course reserve at the library. Because this was a new service, I created these posters with the textbooks covers. I did subject based ones, like this one for the English textbooks, and class specific ones; for example I did one for the Graphic Novel class of all their text covers. I hung them up all over campus, and put copies of the class specific posters in the mailboxes of the professors teaching the class, with a note to please hang it somewhere their class would see it. It was a good way to alert the professor that we had their texts as well as the students.”

Although there are things about you, Canva, that we wish we could change, such as Megan’s frustration that your cropping functionality is limited, you’ve still managed to steal our hearts.

Love,
Design-minded librarians everywhere

For substantially less drama and more design, you can see all of the posters, flyers, and Facebook images featured in this post on the Librarian Design Share Google Drive. Thank you, Erin, Sunny, and Megan for your wonderful submissions!