Create in Crello is a free WordPress plugin that integrates the Crello graphic design software into your WordPress site. By doing so, it gives you instant access to Crello’s graphics editor, photographs, design elements, and thousands of free templates—all without the need to leave your website.
Whether using Crello’s many resources or designing from scratch, Create in Crello lets you create blog images, social media graphics, advertisements, header images, , animated GIFs, and much more.
In this review, we’ll take a look at how well the plugin works with WordPress, and what it has to offer WordPress users.
Create in Crello’s Main Features
Create in Crello is a free WordPress plugin that’s aimed at making it quick and easy for WordPress users to create web images for their site and business.
Here’s a list of Crello’s main features:
• Integrates a free graphics editor with your WordPress site
• 12,000+ templates designed by graphics professionals
• 240 fonts
• Thousands of high-resolution photographs, illustrations, icons, frames, stickers, and other design elements
• 30 graphics formats to choose from, including social media, blog images, headers, advertisements, animated GIFs, and many more.
• Animated GIF designs
• Marketing materials
• Event graphics
• Advertising graphics
• Custom format sizes
• Ability to save your own projects and use again
• Inspiration section for graphic design ideas
• Photo effects and filters
• Free and premium design elements
• Ability to upload your own images
Setting Up Create in Crello
Here’s how to install and activate Create in Crello:
1. In your WordPress site, go to Plugins… Add New.
2. In the keyword search field, type in: Crello
3. For the first result, click the Install Now button.
4. After installation, click on the Activate button.
5. On the next screen, you should see a link to Request an API key. If you don’t see that link, click the new Crello settings menu in your WordPress admin sidebar.
6. After clicking the Request an API key link, you’ll go to a different page with a link to contact their support team under the Get a key section.
7. Under Submit a request, fill out your:
Email address
Subject
Description
Even though they don’t ask for it, you’ll need to add the domain name that you want the API key for. Just add in the Description section.
After filling out the information, click the Submit button.
8. Once the people at Crello send you a unique API key to your email address, you’ll need to go to Crello settings back in WordPress.
For Design Type, you’ll want to choose a format for your designs. Don’t worry, you can change your format choice at any time.
The different design formats include:
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr post images
Social media cover, channel, and header art
Blog titles and graphics
Email headers
Social media ads
Leaderboards
Large and medium rectangles
Wide skyscrapers
Posters
Cards
In the API Key field, enter your new API key that you received from Crello. Click Save Changes.
I found the process for getting an API key from Crello to be a bit cumbersome and slow. Instead of just clicking on one link to request an API key, you need to go through a couple of different screens until you get to the API key submit form.
In my case, I waited until the next day and was told that I still needed to submit my domain name, which unfortunately was never indicated through their submit process. This, combined with slow response times through email, delayed my ability to set up the plugin for a few days.
I found this to be a frustrating process that would likely turn away a number of potential users. Undoubtedly, speeding up the process of obtaining an API key would be very beneficial.
Using Create with Crello
After installing and activating Create in Crello, here’s how to use it in WordPress:
Accessing Create in Crello
In WordPress, go to the page or post editor and click on the blue Create in Crello button at the top of the editing window.
Clicking on the button opens the Crello graphics editor window and display its templates, design tools, and canvas.
With Crello, you can create many different design types, including designs for your blog, social media, advertisements, and even print designs.
Note: To use Create in Crello in WordPress, you’ll need to sign in or sign up for a free Crello account.
Crello Templates
The easiest way to get started using the Crello editor is to select one of its templates and then customize it. Crello offers over 12,000 templates to choose from.
The other way to create designs with Crello is to build from scratch either using their available design elements or uploading your own.
Crello templates are grouped by size and categories, making it particularly helpful to create social media and web graphics. It also provides an option for customizable sizes, so you can create any size design you need.
Use Search by Category to find template designs by theme.
Here are some of the themes included with Crello:
Beauty
Fashion & Style
Healthcare & Medical
Food & Drinks
Education & Science
Technology
Industry
Business & Finance
Transportation
Travels & Vacations
Leisure & Entertainment
Holidays & Celebration
Sports & Extreme
Arts & Handcraft
Nature & Wildlife
Pets
Social Activity & Charity
Kids & Parents
Design Elements
Crello offers hundreds of design elements to choose from, and gives you the ability to filter and search for what you need. And in the event they don’t have exactly what you’re looking for, you can also upload your own objects, photos, and fonts.
For your design element options, you can choose from:
Designs
Photos
Backgrounds
Text
Objects
Designs refer to the previously mentioned Crello templates.
Photos offers free and premium ($1 each) photo images. To make it easier to find what you’re looking for, you can filter photos by category.
You can add filter effects to photos in Crello. Some of the filter effects include: Drama, Edge, Festive, Grayscale, Retro, and Selfie. You can make custom filters by adjusting the available photo effect sliders.
Photos can be adjusted by brightness, contrast, saturation, tint, blur, x-process, and vignette. And Crello lets you crop your photos however you wish.
Backgrounds include background choices using photos, patterns, or colors. You can also upload your own backgrounds.
Text includes predesigned elements like badges, logos, seals, and promotional graphics. You can add text for headings, subheadings, and body text. You can even use text as a stencil to reveal an image through. And, as mentioned earlier, you can upload your own fonts if you don’t find what you need from the many font choices that Crello offers.
Objects lets you choose among design elements such as shapes, icons, illustrations, lines, borders, stickers, and frames.
Crello User Interface
The Create in Crello user interface includes design element choices on the left and a canvas area on the right, where the graphic editing is done.
To add design elements to the canvas, you just click on them. Then, once they’re on the canvas, just click on an element to see its corresponding options.
For all design elements, you have options for moving, scaling, transparency, layering, duplicating, and deleting. For text elements, you have options for typeface and size, type color, formatting and alignment, line height, and spacing between characters. And all objects (not including text), can also be flipped horizontally and/or vertically.
The Crello graphics editor also lets you lock elements in place on the canvas, group elements together, and align elements. And of course, you can do the basics such as giving a title to your design, saving it, and publishing it to WordPress.
The Crello editor also has a My Files section that stores your uploaded items, fonts, purchased items, and favorite items.
Saving and Publishing Designs
When you’re done designing and ready to add your image to your WordPress post or page, click the Publish button towards the upper-right of the Create in Crello graphics editor.
After clicking the Publish button, I found that it took a while (up to a minute) for the graphic to appear in the WordPress editor. I’m not sure what the reason was for the delay, but it would be nice to see this time shortened.
Also, because your site is tied into Crello, the WordPress images created with the plugin are saved in the My Projects section of your Crello account. This allows you to go back to your projects later and edit them further, if you wish. Or, you can use them as new templates for similar work.
Crello lets you save your designs in JPEG, PDF, or PNG formats. I’d like to see the option to also save images in GIF format in order to further compress images with predominantly solid colors (i.e., such as logos) and save smaller file sizes.
Support & Documentation
Crello is easy to use. In fact, if you have even rudimentary experience with graphics editors, you’ll probably be able to get up and running with it right away. That said, Crello includes:
• FAQ section
• How-to guide
• Submit a request form
• Video tutorials
• Help bubbles within the user interface
• Inspiration section for getting ideas for your own designs
• Blog with graphic design tips, tutorials, inspiration and more
• Contact support form
Pricing
Create in Crello is a free plugin that’s available from the WordPress plugin repository. It provides WordPress users with its free graphics editor, including all of its filters and effects.
It also offers optional premium design elements ($1 each) within its photos, shapes, patterns, text badges, and stickers.
Once purchased, premium elements are stored in your Crello account and can be used an unlimited number of times at no further cost.
Of course, Crello comes with thousands of free design elements to choose from.
Conclusions & Recommendations
There are plenty of graphic design tools that fit the need for social media, blogging, and other digital image production. Cello is one such option, and it’s aimed at making it easy for anyone to create attractive graphic design—even non-designers.
Create in Crello integrates WordPress with Crello to give you quick access to their graphics editor, along with thousands of photos, design templates, and design elements.
It’s main benefit is that it allows WordPress users to easily create images for their posts and pages without having to leave their site.
With Crello, you can create all kinds of graphics, for blog posts, social media posts, digital ads, animated posts, and more. And if you don’t find exactly what you need, you can upload your own elements and create graphics from scratch.
There’s a lot to like about Crello, and I applaud their team for integrating their service in order to make graphic design more readily available from within the WordPress platform.
That said, I did have some frustrating moments when it came to both the speed of support I received (for API activation), as well as how long it took for Crello images to appear within the WordPress editor after clicking the Publish button. Fixing these issues would go a long way in improving the user experience of the plugin.
Still, if you’re focused on social media, blogging, and promotional graphics, Crello is certainly worth a look. After all, it’s available for free and you can give it a test run to see if it meets your needs.
To find out more about Crello, you can visit their website here. And if you’d like to download the free Create in Crello plugin, you can do so here.
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