The Best Design Tool You Need Right Now!
#16 The best scheduling tool to ensure there are no last minute drop-outs!
*Sigh* This week has been pretty packed on every front. 😫 How are you folks doing? I have wanted to share the below tools for a while now. No time like the present! Almost forgot, I was pleasantly surprised at the age of our subscribers in our last poll on: 5 Fun and Useful Websites You Must Visit. Almost 75% of you are above 60 years! Your passion for technology is amazing and I love it! ❤ On that note here’s another poll to better understand your reading appetite!
With SaaS (Software as a Service) being the new trend now thanks to the internet, several tools have emerged which have addressed the gaps in the software world. For example, you no longer need to pay for an expensive design software licence and have a beefy system to support editing and rendering just to edit a few pictures or create posters/invitations. You can do all of that for free on Canva! There’re paid plans but for 90% of us, the free is more than enough! All the designs I made for this newsletter were done on Canva, every single one of them!
Canva
The below mockup of our Newsletter took me about a minute to make! I’m not kidding! All I did was open it in a browser, “PRINT SCREEN”, choose the mockup I liked, upload and download! Now imagine if I had to do this in Photoshop! Of course, if you are a professional who does edits and designs for a living, you would need something like Photoshop or similar.
Canva has a user-friendly interface which even someone with no design knowledge can get used to pretty quickly. You can create anything that you can think of: Posters, Pamphlets, Business cards, Presentations, Social media content, Resumes, smart mockups etc.
If you are a writer or a developer the smart mockups are a nifty feature to showcase your work professionally with ease. I used the tool to create fun family videos, invitations, photo edits, banners and posters etc. Why don’t you try it and share your work with us? Maybe you could create a cool invitation or video for your kid/grandkid’s birthday and be their favourite parent/grandparent 😉 You also get bragging rights among your circle for being a professional designer! 😎
WhenAvailable
Have you ever been tired of last-minute drop-outs after you carefully planned an event for months? I have had numerous stories to share about this. Let’s not bore you to death, so I’m going to share just one.
I planned a trip to a hill station with office colleagues a few years ago. One by one everybody dropped at the last moment and I was like “Screw this! I’m going to go alone!”. Looking at my motivation, they knew I was serious about the trip and slowly my other colleagues who weren’t initially invited started getting interested. People started joining like crazy and the initial drop-outs had no choice but to join out of fear of being left out when the whole team goes on vacation. In the end, we were 12 people, I booked a huge house on Airbnb and we had an amazing time!
I digressed. Back to the tool, simply create a poll with any number of date and time options for your event. Then send the poll to your guests either by sharing the general link to the poll or by having WhenAvailable send them an email invitation to vote in the poll. That’s it! You can watch the votes come in real-time as your guests enter their preferences. When ready, pick the best date/time for the event directly from the poll. Now you can plan get-togethers, games, trips and events efficiently and for free (up to 20 guests)
I’ve already started my first chat thread so come on over and say hello! 👋🏼
Still here? Why not like and share this with your friends and family? Thank you so much for reading. Keep smiling, stay safe and take care! 😊
~ Nithin