Canva design tutorial

hey guys it's Maria Saracen from Maria Saracen calm and today as promised we're going to be going through canva and how to design your opt-in gift using this awesome free design tool online now I've been using Photoshop for years and years and I love Photoshop it you can do a lot of really awesome things with it and certainly canva is not nearly as intense but there is nothing easier than hopping on canva which we will go to right now and creating a design from a ton of inspiring material that's already on there and as you can see once you sign up for canva your home page will look like this and you can create a design with pre-designed templates so for example if you want to do a report or a cheat sheet or something like that you'd want to use a us letter size you can do Facebook post social media posts presentations posters Facebook covers you name it and then I'll just show you some of the options you have marketing materials you can do Flyers posters menus even so it's really cool what they have for you to use and you can also use custom dimensions so if there's anything that is a little bit out of the norm if you want to do specific website graphics or anything that you might want to do custom you can certainly put in your own dimensions right there so I'm going to show you how I made some of my opt-in gifts just so that you can find it easy to make yours what I have for offer on my page is an e-guide a resources guide which is basically all my the tools that I use it's cold steel my secrets for the tools I use for my business and then this is an editable planner daily planner for people who like to get organized and know what on earth are supposed to be doing that day which is what I need because otherwise I forget and then I go and do something like braid my hair or no I'm kidding but I get off-track and I don't like that so I use that daily planner so very quickly let's pretend that we are designing an opt-in gift that's a PDF download so I would use us letter size click on that and I already have it started and this is what it would come up with a blank page on the left you have all these layouts and as you can see some of them are free and some of them are paid which is indicated by this little dollar sign there are some fantastic free ones so don't think that you have to pay in order to get a great design and you know this is a great place to start if you're if you have no idea of what you want to do and you're looking for inspiration click on something that's free and then start designing from what you've got and pretty soon you'll have a really beautiful looking document or whatever it is an opt-in gift that you're making you can certainly also start from scratch so I'm going to add a new page and generally if you want to start from scratch they have all these categories that you can choose from to get started you have grids which basically are tons and tons of different layouts you can click on any of these and then you just insert any images that you've uploaded and just for the heck of it I'll do that that obviously this isn't the one I would normally choose but as you can see it just it makes it look very professional and it's so easy it's a matter of drag and drop so that's the grids and you can see you've you've just got tons and tons of options there are also frames and frames are a little bit different than grids because most of these are just single image frames and basically again you just choose whichever one you want I'm going to delete that you choose whatever you want you pop it in there and you are good to go you just drag your photo in there if you don't want to use a photo let's say you want to use a custom graphic you can make that custom graphic in canva in a separate document download it and then upload it and then just pop it in like that unfortunately you can't just go to your other designs and like drag and drop them but you can just download save and then re-upload and that will work just fine so we have frames there then we have shapes now let's say I wanted to change the background color of this there is already a a shape that comes with this template that I have if I wanted to add a new page you can see that's just blank I could put this just a good old square and then you change the side by clicking and dragging on the corners of the image or the shape and then you pick any color you want from this color palette and in a few seconds I'm going to show you how you can add your custom colors if you know the color code number you just very easily put it in for example 5 3 C ECC is one of my colors so I just remember that off by heart but if you don't know the specific color number the of the color you want to use I'll show you how you can very easily find out what it is and then once you've put a color into this palette for the document you will have it so the rest of the document so it's really nice you don't have to keep putting in the the color code number so that shapes and again tons of very cool free shapes you have some very nice gradients you can use and for example here you can also change the transparency of your gradients this one also already has a lot of transparency but let's say you wanted to put this in and you just change the transparency it's very very easy so that is the shape category then you have lines and which is very self-explanatory a ton of different lines um they're teeny tiny in this window unfortunately but you just kind of have to squint and see what it is let's say I want it okay there's a line so if I wanted to do that just stretch it out and put it at the top of my page or if I wanted to I could just um make it much smaller and then I just go copy and then you just go like that match it up there we go and voila so you know it's up to you what you want to do and as you can see when I click on it I get the option of changing the colors it's just so ridiculously easy all the colors or most of the colors in the graphics you get in canva are very customizable okay then we have illustrations tons of free really cute illustrations you have icons okay lots and lots of free stuff and it's awesome that the free stuff usually comes at the top of these categories so that's really nice of them to show us the free stuff first and then lastly let me just close this fabulous you can just click on the icon again to close the the palette you can there photos which canva has tons and tons and tons of free photographs so I mean how awesome is that whoops I put it on below the page but just lots of beautiful stuff that you can use that's free also lots of paid stuff but the paid stuff is $1.00 per photograph which if you ask me that's pretty darn awesome you know most photo places you by photos for a dollar but they will be a small size and resolution here you can buy a dot a photo for a dollar and then just make it as big as you want and it's going to keep a really great resolution for a dollar so I think that's a very reasonable price and let's say I wanted something like a smiley face okay so it comes up with tons of options some of them are free some of them are paid the only time the free stuff is not right at the top is when you do a custom search I think that it's picking stuff depending on the relevance of your search term and that's how it ranks it so you might have to scroll through a lot of paid stuff to find something that is free and that you can use but don't be discouraged because there's guaranteed to be free stuff in your paid search results okay then we have charts which which are awesome for infographics or whatever it is that you're trying to convey to your people and lastly we have if you really want to you can have I love canvabadges so you just pop them into your design very cute and they will thank you for it but you certainly don't have to use them the nice thing is a lot of things that are free come with you no watermarks or advertising and canva is not like that it's your choice if you want to add and I love canva badge okay and I do love canva I have to say next you have text now under the text you can see there are a lot of awesome awesome logo like designs so if you're looking for some inspiration look no further you can find some really great stuff and you just customize it and then when you want to add text I'm just making a very long document here you click on it you say whatever it is that you want to say hello there and then right here are all free fonts and they have a really nice selection of fonts you just pick whatever it is that makes sense with the tone of the document or the image graphic whatever it is that you're making and you're good to go so it's really easy you can change the size and you can very easily change the color as well and one more thing you hear do have the ability to do uppercase lists so if I want to put bullets left justified Center justified right justified text spacing we can make the letters wider apart closer together the line height if there are multiple lines I could change that also can change the transparency of your text and you can link to your text so let me actually just see if I can go link okay and I just go HTTP you know let me just try Maria Saracen calm I don't know if I have to put the HTTP in front of it I usually just copy and paste nope it didn't do it so you do HTTP colon okay so now you can see that the link is like a lovely glowing blue and that means there is a link there okay just FYI if it wasn't there that lovely glowing glowing blue then you would know that it didn't work okay now one little caveat is if you are linking text you cannot have multiple links at least the last time I tried in one text box like this so if I wanted to make the hello let's just see I just want to highlight and make the hello Maria Saracen calm and the there let's say I wanted to make it Facebook calm okay it is going to be confused okay so it changed it to Facebook just so you know so you cannot have multiple links in one text box if I wanted it to be hello Maria's Harrison comm and their Facebook comm I'd have to make two different text boxes and then put them next to each other so that in that respect it's a bit annoying because it's not selecting individual words but on the flip side it's kind of cool because it's a little bit faster it saves you the step of having to click on the text box highlight all of that you don't actually have to do that you can just click on the text box do your link and you're good to go so you can add header text subtitle text which is smaller and body text which is the smallest to move it around you just click on it you get this little four-way arrow icon and you can just move it around now another cool thing about canva is that you can figure out exactly if and when your text is properly lined up so you can see when I move this if I move it just to the right spot that line is going to show up right here that tells me it's lined up with the heading and again there we go I know that all three lines are exactly lined up on the left-hand side now if I wanted this to be in the middle that line just showed up there so that's I believe the middle of the canvas see that line there nope there's the middle of the canvas okay so the line goes all the way from the top to the bottom of the page so I know that when I there we go that's beautifully centered on the page then we have backgrounds so you have a ton of free backgrounds you can use and then you start getting into paid stuff if you just want the blank background you can use one of the shapes just use a rectangle or you can get any of these backgrounds and change the color extremely easily and if your custom color isn't in here you just go and put it in the color code box right here all right so I think I've shown you the the basics of course here are my uploads I have a whole bunch of images from the giveaway I ran but you can just upload your own images right here you just upload them from your desktop or wherever you have them stored and you can also upload images from Facebook sign in and you can use your Facebook photos but I've never done that okay and then don't forget canva has thousands if not hundreds of thousands there were millions of images that you can use and/or use for free or pay a dollar for okay so now let's say that you're ready to start whatever it is that your design is and you need to pick a color scheme so you let's go let's click out of this I'm not going to save it and let's say that we're starting from scratch we're going to make a us letter size document and with a brand new document all that we see is a blank sheet of paper we don't want to use any of the layout so we want to design something from scratch and so let's go to search we're going to add a shape so that we can make the background a solid color but we don't like any of the colors in this palette okay so what you could do so these colors just aren't going to cut it for for what we want to do so what you could do is either have your own palette that you already know and love and you just go and you you find the color code number and you put it in sorry you put it in right here you press the plus and you just put the color code number right there but let's say you don't have it or you don't even have a color scheme what I love to do is use Pinterest and I often go on Pinterest and I just look up color schemes and you come it comes up with thousands of beautiful options and you can even narrow it down so that if you want well this says for the home or for the bedroom or whatever but you can go to red vintage green warm gray blue so let's see blue color seems um or you can just type it in the search bar if you have something in mind that's very specific and here are all these beautiful color schemes so you don't have to wrack your brain brain you don't have to revisit your color theory from high school you can just go on to Pinterest and check out any of these beautiful color schemes and then you pick one so for example if I really loved this one I just click on it and then I just right click and save image as usually I give it its own special name so it doesn't have a million letters and numbers as the file name okay so I've already done this and then the next thing you do is you go to Google and do a Google search for the term color picker now lots of options will come up but the one I love is the one that says get colors from image okay it's nothing fancy but it's just really really easy for you to use and it's actually HTML color codes dot info okay so I'm going to browse and I already saved an image to my desktop earlier and I called it color schemes okay so I'm going to open that up and it's going to load it into here hopefully oh sorry I'm supposed to click show image okay and then when I hover over it if I click it voila there is the color code number so I just want it without the hashtag I'm going to copy it and then I'm just going to paste it and there you go and then I'm going to go over over this one and I get the exact color code for that and I sorry go over here and I let's say I wanted to add new image it could be anything that I add just by the by so you could just do another thing and then put color code in here so that's how you do it so you use the HTML color codes info and you just go over the image and it's very easy to get the color code number the next little thing I want to show you is so let me just show you a design that I made and this is for 15 opt-in gifts you can create in a day so what I did was I customized this color I picked a blue that I really liked this is a graphic free graphic from canva and I just want to show you if you want to do a drop shadow in your text or on your image unfortunately canva doesn't have like a preset for drop shadows so what you would do is take this image and copy it okay and you would make everything in that image black okay and you probably know exactly where I'm going with this and then you go back so that it gets moved to behind your front image and then you can just position the drop shadow however you'd like it to be and then you just change the transparency so that is just a very very super simple easy way to do it unfortunately you can't feather it but it does look pretty decent just with the transparency changed so let me see that I'm going to leave because I don't want this to be tedious but also so now when you have a document let's say I wanted to make another page I don't have to go and put the bar there and the image and all of these like that all I have to do is press this which is basically copy this page and you'll see that I have another page that pops up and the reason that this caught this change color initially when it appeared it was that plum color it's because that is what the shape color was that I used so I used this and then I just adjusted it to make it a bar so that's why it whatever you use it'll show up is the original color first as it's loading and then it'll go to the color that you chose okay very quickly you can see that you can this is one big text box and you can change the color of individual text in that text box by highlighting just that portion if I wanted to change the color of the entire text isn't that cool let's go click it changes all the things that were set a different color to black in one click which is pretty damn amazing if you ask me again the one bummer is that if you have a big block text block like this you cannot link it to a variety of different things you need to create different text blocks for each link that you want to include okay now let me show you how to move group groups around so let's say that I wanted to move this so I just clicked on it and then you press shift and click on the other image or item in your document that you want to move and you can then just very easily move them around okay that'll save you a lot of time and if you want to undo something you just click on this very nifty little undo button up there and of course you want to go file save whenever you are working on a design usually it does autosave so that's the good news this is the place where you can title your design that's the undo button the share button you can post it on Facebook or Twitter you can email it to someone which is pretty darn awesome as well and then when you're ready you can download it as an image or as a high-quality PDF so because this is an opt-in gift PDFs are really great for people to be able to access and read and they look very professional also you have options here you can download or save all of the pages in your document or you can just do specific pages and then if you are doing this for printing purposes you can also publish it with crop marks and lead but generally you don't need to go into the advanced you just basically go as an image or as a PDF another option is you can make it public or you can make it private the green public will be on and if you click to the other side if it just says make public then you know that it's private currently if you need help there's this little tab down here and they have a ton of help articles and tips that you can use and I think that's okay and I want to show you that you can zoom in on the bottom left here you can zoom in to 100% 200% you know however you like to work you can see your image disappear I'm just kidding so yeah if you like it to be really in your face I actually like working in at least a hundred percent it will also I think pick up yes it picks up spelling errors this isn't actually a era but it will show you if it thinks that you have a spelling error and then another little nifty trick that I can tell Mac users is that if you want to make the copyright sign you press out option G and that'll come up with a nice nifty little copyright symbol alt option so it's one key alt option and G the letter G all right so I think I have shown you almost everything I wanted to show you I'm going to just save this design I'm going to delete this last page because I don't need it and I'm going to zoom out the reason zooming out is helpful is to see all the pages in your documents so I actually just need these these three pages this one was a duplicate I'm going to leave that delete that and then I'm going to go file save I'm going to close this and then I land up in my good old home console right here and if you want to duplicate something let's say you love what you did and you can repurpose it for something else I would just say copy it that way you can mess around with it and if you end up doing something that you hate or if it gets buggy it does happen believe me I love canva but it can be buggy you just know that copying making a duplicate of your design means that you're covered so if anything goes wrong you have the original and then if you want to delete as I was just doing right now you just press Delete it'll have this little pink screen and you just reload and it'll disappear so that you don't look messy and that is it in a nutshell I hope you found this useful and if you need me to tell you any more tips tricks if you have any questions please feel free to reach out on Facebook that's probably the easiest way to start the conversation going and I will respond as soon as possible and let you know my secrets for whatever it is that you're trying to do and as you can see I have lots of designs here canva even congratulated me for making I think over 50 designs so I do love this and I hope you will too thank you so much for joining me and I will see you soon for more bits fun and shenanigans bye

Channel: Maria Saracen

Views: 34,951

Keywords: Canva, drop shadow in Canva, Canva tutorial, designing optin gifts with Canva, opt-in gift design, online design tools, online design software

Id: aHwRitBdPHI

Length: 28min 39sec (1719 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2015