Why
After I went broke again in late 2025, I had to cancel a bunch of subscriptions. One of them was GoDaddy Studio, which as far as I know is very similar to Canva. The intended reader of this guide probably uses Canva. In my case, I'd switched to GoDaddy Studio after I stopped my Adobe subscription, and had previously been using Adobe Creative Studio or whatever else they've named it now. Regardless of which app I used, my process was always the same:
- Get an image from the stock image libraries built into the app
- Add text that says the thing I need to say
- Add some graphics from the stock graphics libraries built into the app
- Change the blend modes until something cool happens
It suddenly seemed a bit unnecessary to pay a monthly subscription fee just for the ability to put text on an image. I get that some people use the templates, and once in a while I did give those a go, but I usually found them too generic. And the fact that all of these apps are pushing AI onto users makes me really, really not want to give any of these companies my money. PLUS, the stock image libraries are now adulterated with AI-generated content, so the whole thing feels incredibly gross.
There are so many options when it comes to programs that allow you to put images and text together. I use Inkscape on my laptop - it's free and useful for a lot of different things, so it's worth learning imo. You could just do it directly in Instagram if that's easier.
Whatever program you choose, one difficulty remains: no longer having easy access to image databases. A key goal was to create a library of images that I'm pretty sure I am allowed to use for any purpose, so it's all either public domain or self-made, with good quality attribution info. This is where my background in collections research comes in somewhat useful, in addition to the training I got from Jennifer Booth on markmaking and materials research.
I came up with a list of activities that I felt like doing in order to create a useful image library for myself, and then spent a couple of weeks in September 2026 working through them. I'll share that list with you here, with some videos showing how I went about each activity and what the outcome was like. Your list might be different from mine, so I'll also give some examples of other activities that you might choose to do.