There are a lot of different programs available to use for social media posts, t-shirt designs, wall art, stickers, printables, documents, and so much more. I have used many different programs and have found Canva to be my absolute favorite above all others for my day-to-day designing needs. Whether you are a professional designer, a social media influencer, content creator, or homemaker, Canva is an incredible tool that can truly help simplify the design process and save you time and money.
Canva Pro versus Canva Free
I have used several graphic design programs over the years, both are free and paid. First of all, this program is much more than just a graphic design tool. Both the paid and the free versions of Canva are wonderful and easy to use. You can use the free version for all kinds of great designs without having to buy the subscription, purchase individual elements within the library, and also order products with your designs on them straight through Canva.
The free version of Canva comes with:
250,000+ templates that are easily custumizable
100+ design types for social posts, presentations, documents, resumes, planners, and more
Thousands of stock photos and different graphic elements to use in your projects
Collaboration tools to have a team help with your designs
5GB of storage on the cloud
The paid version of Canva includes:
The paid version, of course, has much more to offer than the free version. It is one of the only premium design programs I have used that I find worth paying for. I am a big advocate for lifetime upgrades, and I am extremely picky about annual or monthly subscription-based programs, but Canva takes the cake for me with their subscription features.
Everything in the free plan
100+ million stock photos, videos, audios, and graphic elements
610,000+ custumizable templates for all kinds of projects
Upload and apply your own fonts, logos, branding, colors and brand kits
Image background remover
Instantly resize your images with intuituive tool for minimal manual resizing
Save your designs as templates to share with your team or sell
100GB cloud storage with ability to organize in lots of folders
Canva Pro is $119.99 per year or $12.99 per month. The annual plan saves you $35.89 per year which is extremely generous and I am all for the savings if you can afford to invest $119.99 at one time. It is a yearly investment worth making for your business, but also for many personal uses!
Compare Canva Free and Canva Pro:
How I use Canva Pro for my Christian business
For businesses, Canva Pro has a whole suite of options that I absolutely love. Whether you are designing blog images, product designs, social media posts, logos, or even content planners and to-do lists, Canva has you covered! I use Canva for the following business tasks, and more, on a regular basis and it has helped me get organized and work more efficiently on my various ideas whether on the go or at home.
Featured images for my blog
Social medial images for blog posts
Designing and scheduling Bible verse graphics for social media
Designing banners and branded materials for shops and sites
Designing website graphics and materials
There are many things I use Canva for, both on their awesome and highly rated App or online on my desktop or laptop, and it has so much potential for your business. Canva allows me to create my products, design graphics, organize projects, and easily schedule posts on my social media accounts all in one service. Some additional reasons I love to use this graphic design program are:
Templates
Premium images
Mockup images
Instant resizing
Saving brand kits
Uploading fonts
Uploading graphic elements from my computer
Sharing projects for others to help design
Selling and sharing template versions of designs
There are countless graphics, elements, fonts, and stock images to use right in the program, but you can also upload your own that you bought or created, such as from programs like Affinity, CorelDraw, or Adobe. Sometimes I create part of an element in a vector design program then bring it into Canva to include in bigger designs and projects. This saves me lots of time and streamlines so much of the design process with the easy-to-use editor and available elements, branding, color pallets, and more. The fact that all of my designs are saved on the cloud is a huge bonus as well!
How I use Canva Pro for personal and household designs
I also love to use Canva for many personal projects. As a mom, wife, homemaker, crafter, and so much more I have been able to create many items for my home with ease, such as:
Designing matching family tshirts to make with my Cricut Easypress
Designing SVG for car decals and stickers
I absolutely love to plaster Bible verses around my home and any piece of clothing my family will let me print on. I desire for anyone coming into my home to be encouraged by the gospel, and I want my home to be a place of worship. I love to craft and I love for my home to be orderly and organized. I am NOT super talented at graphic design, though, (or interior decorating for that matter) so Canva helps me combine all of this in a convenient way that lets me focus more on worship while I work, design, plan, and organize my life, home, and family.
Conclusion
I am all for practical, and the fact that I can use this incredible graphic design program for so many of my professional AND personal projects is huge for me. I appreciate that I don't need to be experienced with graphic design to use Canva. I am able to spend less time designing my projects here than I do in so many other programs. This means I have more time for the more important tasks. I am able to use this program for both my business and my personal needs, and it helps me draw others to God, organize my home and family, and even worship the Lord as I spend time designing in Canva.
I highly recommend using Canva whether you are a business owner, stay-at-home or work-from-home mom, homemaker, housewife, college student, influencer, or if you just want to make some awesome designs with minimal effort and a lot of fun. As a Christian woman, Canva is a wonderful graphic design program to help me focus on glorifying God in the design process and draw others to Him through my creations.
If you are anything like me you have a difficult time coming up with Christmas gift ideas for the people in your life. We all know that Christmas is not about the gifts, but is about Christ. Christ is the ultimate giver, and we are called to imitate Him. Giving is a generous sacrifice and it is still such a blessing to get to be generous to the people in our lives.
Again, Christmas is not about stuff or gifts, but I encourage you to prayerfully consider how you can be generous and bless those in your life this year. I have come up with some fun gift ideas to help inspire generosity and encourage you to bless your loved ones this year in some way.
35 In every way I’ve shown you that it is necessary to help the weak by laboring like this and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, because he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
I would love to hear what you plan to get or even make for your loved ones this year! Share with us in the comments how you will give generously to the people in your life.
I never in my life thought I would be called to design planners, but over the last couple of years, God has taken me through the creative and faith process of prayerfully designing a planner for Christians that encourages us to live orderly lives that are centered on Him. Enter, Orderly Life Christian Planner.
I have loved planners for a long time, but I have always found the different options on the market overwhelming, or just flat out not right for me. They either have too much or not enough, are too crowded or too blank. Not to say they're bad planners, but none I have found have pinpointed what I was looking for. I wanted a planner that would help me bring my faith into every aspect of my life, and help strengthen my faith and relationship with God.
After designing, trying, scrapping, redesigning, retrying...rinse and repeat a few times...the Orderly Life Christian Planner is now a balanced planner designed for Christians who want to realistically plan and bring their faith and relationship with God into the center focus of it all.
What is the Orderly Life Christian Planner?
The Orderly Life Christian Planner is designed to help believers establish a habit of aligning plans, preparations, task lists, to-dos, and all the in-betweens with our Heavenly Father and letting Him establish each step. Scripture teaches us that we are to do all things “decently and in order” (1 Cor. 14:40) and as followers of Jesus we should “conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:27).
But everything is to be done decently and in order.
The Orderly Life Christian Planner targets this mission and strives to make it easier for Christians to realistically focus on growing in faith every day in the midst of the busyness of life. We achieve this by flowing prayer and Bible study into every week's pages. It is incorporated into the design in ways that make it convenient and realistic to plan out your Bible studies and record your prayers every day. Offering this Christian planner in a printable format also allows you to print as many pages as you need, giving your planner some flexibility and less overwhelm.
With the Orderly Life Christian Planner, you can easily bring prayer, scripture, and planning together to help you focus on God first and foremost in all you do, prayerfully, intentionally, decently and orderly. Each week's prayer pages include prompts to guide you into deeper relationships and stronger communication with God.
These prompts have been helping and guiding me to pray more comfortably, consistently and confidently within my relationship with God and have really helped strengthen my overall faith and prayer life because they are helping me to pray deeply, to address more specific areas of life and the world in my prayers, and to reflect also on where God has been working and answering prayers, or leading me in different ways.
Designed to bring planning, daily tasks, Bible study, prayer, and health and wellness into one strategically designed space to help Christians live an orderly life and keep God at the center of it all.
The Orderly Life Christian Planner is designed for easy double-sided printing to be used in your favorite method of binding, such as Happy Planner, Cinch spiral binding, and more, as well as in digital planners and annotated digital planners where PDFs can be used.
1 page month overview for important reminders and tasks
2 page month calendar spread with space for notes
1 page for word of the month and space for art, journaling, or verses
2 page weekly spread with room for notes, to-do lists, Bible reading plan, and nutrition plan + goals
2 page weekly spread for specific and intentional prayer
1 page weekly Bible study notes
Each month includes 3 strategic pages to organize your calendar, tasks, goals, reminders, and other notes. Each week includes 6 pages to track and plan your tasks, meals, exercise, Bible studies, scripture readings, and record prayers.
How do you use the Orderly Life Christian Planner?
I absolutely love the freedom and flexibility of a DIY planner and journal. For me, this was one of the most important aspects because I hate wasting paper, but appreciate being able to switch things up as needed. The planners I have used in the past were not helpful to keep me coming back. With this planner that doubles as my prayer journal and Bible study planner, I am in it every day for those reasons and therefore am planning my day-to-day better, and more prayerfully as well.
For each month, I like to take a look back at my past month and figure out what I didn't end up getting done, carry it over to the new month's overview, and start from there. This helps me to get a real feel for what I can get done in a month. Filling out my monthly overview sets the priorities up for the month and guides my weekly planning as well.
Every week on Monday morning, sometimes on Fridays before the weekend, I begin my week by getting my planner set up. I begin each week by recording the following on my weekly overview page:
What are my priority tasks for this week?
What do I want to get done throughout this week?
What passage has been placed on my heart this week?
Notes & reminders for the week
After this, I flip over to the daily planner pages. I plan my content and blog tasks, family to-dos, community lists, as well as my personal items in this space. The space is strategically designed to discourage overloading a given day with unrealistically long to-do lists (but sometimes I do add a nice sticky note if I need some more space).
I plan my daily to-dos based on what I put on my overviews, scheduling those tasks for a given day depending on when it needs to get done. I add in my family schedule, things like meal planning and grocery shopping, and of course, I plan out my studies for the week. One aspect I am really glad to have as well as the nutrition planner.
This may seem silly to make so prominent, but in today's culture, it is too easy to get so caught up in the to-do lists that we forget to take care of our bodies that are the temple of God. Part of what God has convicted me of in leading an orderly life is to create space to properly care for my health and wellness as well, as a normal aspect of each day. So, I plan my and my family's meals every week, and I plan for exercise as well, again striving for realistic goals.
I begin every day in the prayer journal pages and then jump into scripture. I use Bible reading plans as a launching point and let the Lord take me through His Word wherever He leads me that day, but having a starting point helps me get going and so often I find that it was exactly where I needed to be that day. When I need more space or I am doing deeper studies I also like to use pages from my Study Through the Word Journal.
I have tried many methods of DIY planners and journals and by far my favorite has been disc binding. With disc binding, you can fully customize your planner or journal on the fly. The disc binding doesn't restrict you like traditional book-binding or spiral-binding does.
You can move, add or remove pages with ease at any moment. This is a huge factor for me as life is always evolving and my needs change, plus then I don't have to keep bulky pages from past months if I don't want to and I can arrange it exactly how works best for me.
I use a thicker 28 lb paper Hammermill paper that has been my absolute favorite. I don't have any issues with bleeding through pages, the printer ink doesn't show through much on the other side either. This brand is also Climate Pledge Friendly!
Happy Planner offers a whole disc binding system that I have fallen in love with. The discs come in all kinds of colors and a couple of different materials, and you can grab your own disc-binding punch as well. This is well worth the investment as they can be used long-term, reused, and you can switch up colors depending on the season or just because you feel like a little change!
I also really love this beautiful pack of faith-based scrapbook paper, which I cut and punch to make covers and dividers. It is important to note that the Happy Planner punch is not made to punch through laminated scrapbook paper, but unlaminated paper has been holding up really well in my used-daily planner and journal.
Amazing and colorful pilot pens that are fun for notes and art journaling
Sticky notes and lined sticky notes for extended notes to save in my Bible. Margins can only fit so much! And great for when I go back and study something again. Add a sticky note with your new notes on it!
I gravitate to these tools to use with my Orderly Life Christian Planner as well as my Pray Through the Word Prayer Journal. I use them for Bible Study, journaling, and planning collectively. Having the right tools for each occasion is really important to me and these have been tested and used and repurchased many times over now.
I'd love to invite you to grab your own Orderly Life Christian Planner and see how it can help and encourage you to live an orderly life, focused first and foremost on the Lord. This planner has helped me immensely and I truly hope and pray it is a blessing and help to you as well.
Welcome!
I am a wife, mom, writer, crafter, and above all, a Child of God. I love to study the Bible, fellowship with other Christians, and serve God. I am thrilled to invite you to join me in seeking to satisfy our thirsty souls with the Living Water of Christ, which is what Water On Thirsty Land is here to do.
