Venngage

What is Venngage app?

Much of what goes into making attractive diagrams and documents can be distilled into a few key features. Spacing and alignment help keeps things clear and easy to read. Careful use of colour is the difference between distraction and effective communication. 

Unfortunately, not everyone has a talent for producing balanced and attractive documents from scratch. Fortunately, with Venngage, this lack is compensated.

Venngage lets you choose templates as starting points. As you add your content, Venngage will keep the layout polished. When you want to add your own touches, the app's easy colour adjustment tools let you modify backgrounds and icons non-destructively. You can try out different looks and return to an earlier one if you prefer it.

Venngage is a web-based app that uses its platform effectively. You can browse through logically categorised templates until you discover the one that will work best with the content you have in mind. These might be in the template section of the app, or you might find it in the app's support section — either way, you can put them to work immediately.

Venngage saves your documents for portability, sharing, and ease of access, but you can export them in a variety of useful formats to incorporate them in other files or to distribute them in physical or digital formats.

If you export your Venngage creations to an image file, such as JPG or PNG, you can use it in Word documents or your favourite interactive whiteboard software. Export them as PDFs to upload your Venngage-created newsletters, invitations, and certificates to your school portal or for emailing to other members of the school community.

Teachers and homeschooling parents will find the app great for creating teaching resources. School staff will find Venngage helpful in many ways, including organisational documents, school newsletters, event invitations, and certificates. Kids who are old enough to use Venngage can enhance projects and organise their thoughts with infographics, mindmaps, and other visually pleasing designs without sacrificing learning time to perfect the presentation.

What we love about Venngage app.

When you first create an account with Venngage, the site asks about the type of documents you want to develop and the styles you like the best. At first, you might think this is market research, but it has a practical purpose for users of Venngage — it helps to show you the most relevant templates.

You can still access all the templates for different documents and styles, but you'll start from those you have indicated you prefer. You'll appreciate this personalisation when looking for inspiration or want to get going quickly.

We found creating attractive and clear documents easy with Venngage. Its templates are varied enough that you'll likely find a layout very close to what you need with a bit of browsing. Building on these templates is straightforward, and the app helps to keep everything aligned and spaced in the best way.

You can easily change your documents' content if you want to update them or use them as the basis for a new one.

What skills does it teach?

Venngage is a productivity app and does not directly teach skills or knowledge. Teachers can use it to add clear visual support to their lessons. Kids can use it to enhance their projects with diagrams and graphics. Some of the app's templates, such as mindmaps, are great ways of producing revision notes.

What age is it appropriate for?

Venngage's privacy policy prohibits children under 13 from registering with the platform. Aside from this age limitation, Venngage's tools are similar to those in many other productivity apps. Kids who can use Word, PowerPoint or similar should have no problem with Venngage.

Is Venngage app easy to use?

The 'Learn' section of Venngage's supporting website is excellent. Many interesting articles teach readers about creating compelling content and the best way to do it with Venngage. Many examples directly link to the relevant template to let the user jump into creating.

If Venngage's tools and their possibilities inspire you, there are webinars, courses and more to develop your mastery of Venngage and understanding of what makes a compelling graphical design. With Venngage and some extra learning, a teacher could become their school's go-to source of visual communications, whether printed or digital.

The app sets out its tools and features logically, and identifying them is visually intuitive. While creating different types of graphical documents during this review of Venngage, we never felt like we were fighting the app to get the results as we wanted them. Quite the reverse; our ideas were polished by the app's layout support.

How will students benefit?

Kids can become sidetracked by aesthetics when they create projects or assignments. While teachers want them to produce clearly readable and logical work, they don't want the visuals to have taken up the majority of the time spent on the assignment.

Venngage lets kids produce visuals that enhance their work and shows their understanding. Its shallow learning curve, intuitive feature set, and ease of editing will let kids do this quickly, ensuring they have more time to spend on the content.

It is the content that gets kids the results they want when their work is marked, so having Venngage do the presentational heavy lifting will help kids keep their priorities in perspective.

How will parents benefit?

Parents who homeschool their kids will often want to create custom resources. These could be specifically designed hint sheets to help kids learn a process or fact sheets to accompany outdoor visits for science or history.

Venngage makes it easy for non-designers to create attractive and easily readable documents. When creators don't have to concentrate on the design, they can focus on making the educational content as good as possible. 

How will teachers benefit?

Not all graphic design platforms consider the types of documents teachers create. This was not the case with Venngage. Through the sheer number and a clear thought into ensuring diversity, there are many that would form the basis of excellent educational resources and school documents. 

The simplicity of tweaking the look and feel of Venngage's documents is a big advantage for teachers. You can adjust the colour theme easily to colour code your resources to reflect the topic or match your school's colours.

Teachers often create a series of similar documents, such as a topic's worksheets. A useful timesaving feature is the templates which let teachers define a look once and then, for future documents, concentrate on the content.

If you or your school chooses a Venngage account with collaboration features, sharing is easy. You can allocate templates to teams so that colleagues can produce similar documents without starting from scratch.

Although it sounds like a corporate feature, the brand options for Venngage will still be useful for teachers as they can ensure that the documents contribute to a unified feel across a subject or even the whole school. Define fonts, colours, and logos for a team, and your collective lesson preparation will have a coherent look and feel.

A coherent approach will feel less disjointed for kids as they use resources produced by different teachers in a single lesson. It also adds an extra level of polish that reflects well on a school if the documents are uploaded to its LMS.

You can even use the ease of colour adjustments for inclusivity, as they are possible with the built-in icons and illustrations. Skin tones, clothing colours and other elements of the visuals are easy to change to match your needs.

Venngage integrates with Unsplash, a source of royalty-free stock images. When teachers use these images to add to their lesson resources, they can be confident that they are not breaching copyright when sharing their resources with other teachers. Just as important, they won't set a bad example to their students regarding digital assets and ownership.

What can Venngage app improve on?

As we've said in this review of Venngage, it comes with lots of templates and resources to populate your documents. However, we'd like to see a few more education-specific ones. We'd like to see some more worksheet-style apps for teachers to create question sheets to hand out.

To help teachers produce lesson resources, we'd also like to see some ready-made elements to make it easier to create commonly used structures, such as fractions or shapes with marked angles.

How much does Venngage app cost?

The free tier of Venngage will let you start creating diagrams and testing out the features of Venngage. Its key limitations are that you can only create up to five documents and upload only six images. As you can access the Venngage icons and widgets, even with the image restriction, you can still create visually pleasing documents in the free tier.

Parents who want to use Venngage for their kids to enhance projects and other school assignments will probably want to use the individual tier.

A classroom option for Venngage uses one instructor to 35 students ratio for each yearly subscription and provides additional features suitable to classroom use. Teachers can access a generous fourteen-day trial to ensure the app will meet their teaching needs.

Choosing a yearly subscription to Venngage will save you 20% annually, so unless you are only going to use the app occasionally, we recommend subscribing for the year.

Is Venngage app safe to use?

Venngage's privacy policy communicates its approach to data collection very clearly as it uses a very easy-to-follow diagram, which is very fitting considering the app's nature. Using this diagram, you can see how and when Venngage collects data.

Although no ads are shown in the premium Venngage accounts, the app's privacy policy allows for targeted ads which may appear when using the free account. 

Overall rating of the app.

Venngage offers a powerful toolset at a good-value price compared to competing products. Students will find it easy to develop proficiency in using Venngage for presenting their schoolwork and projects. Teachers will be able to unlock a new level of polish and visual clarity for their lesson resources.

Whether you are using an alternative graphic design app or not, we recommend trying Venngage to see if it offers a better way of working, a lower price, or features not available on your current apps. Using its free option, you can get a good overview in just a few minutes, and as we consider it a five-star app, there's a good chance it could tempt you to make the switch.