Create your children's book layout in Canva the RIGHT way

hi my name is Heather and today I'm going to show you how to lay out a page of your children's book for Amazon KDP in canva [Music] I think canva is really neat because it's a lot like Photoshop but it has some really cool collaboration tools and the price is way less than Photoshop I thought it would be a good option for creating a children's book layout for those of you who don't want to spend a ton of money on Photoshop to start we're going to go to the help page on Amazon KDP set trim size bleed in margins and we're just going to find out what the size of our page needs to be so we're going to go to examples of page size with and without bleed and you want to expand that and then you're just going to find the size of your book on the left and then you're going to go over to the right and see what your page size needs to be and if you want an explanation of what bleed is then check out my video where I explain all of that I'm going to go with the 8.25 by 8.25 page that's what I've used in my other tutorials so I just think it'll be easy to kind of translate it over so if I pick 8.25 by 8.25 and then I go over here this is what the size of the page is going to be 8.375 wide by eight and a half high if your book is a different size then you're just going to find your size here and then go over to the right and you're just going to pick the size that corresponds with it then we're going to go over to canva and we will create a design and we're going to do custom size change the pixels to inches I'm going to do 8.375 by eight and a half and then create new design this is going to be our document that we're going to keep the whole book in all of the pages so whenever you want to add a page you can just click this add page button one thing that I don't love about it is that it does arrange them all going top down you can preview them in a grid if we click on grid view down here at least you can picture give page two and three are going to be next to each other what the spread would look like but as far as like when you're designing it you can't really see what it's going to look like but we'll go over that in the next video which will be how to create a spread so don't worry about that for now for now we're just going to add however many pages that we want in our book so we don't even need to add them all now like I'll just do six for now and if we click back to here we'll close our grid View the first page is always going to be by itself because when you open the book you're going to have the inside of the left cover on the left side and then you'll have page one on the right side so whether you choose to leave this blank or make it a title page or whatever that's up to you so I'm just gonna skip the first three pages because you know maybe you want a copyright page a cover page a dedication or something like that and let's start at page four before we import any artwork first we need to add our guides canva does have the option for bleed and margins but from what I could see it doesn't seem possible to change those values and make them custom so we're going to just set some guides ourself so if you go over these rulers and if you don't see the rulers go to file view settings show rulers and guides and then you can just drag from a ruler over on each Edge we're going to set a ruler to 0.125 for the bleed it doesn't need to be exact exact because it's just a guide so you can just kind of drag it and look at that number up there and you just want it pretty close to 0.125 I also couldn't find a way where you can set it manually unfortunately but we can just do that for now and then pull one down and look over on the left pull one over on the right this one's not going to say 0.125 on the right because it's actually the distance from the left hand side but you can just kind of eyeball it and try to make it about even with the other ones and then we'll pull the last one in and just kind of eyeball that one these are the rulers for bleed which means that anything past these lines is going to get trimmed off so you do want the artwork to go past the lines you need it to cover the whole page but you just don't want anything important to go past these lines now we can add rulers for the safe zone so we're going to drag extra rulers and it's just going to be double the size of the bleed so if you see that the bleed goes this far 0.125 the safe zone is going to be 0.25 again you can just kind of eyeball it because it does not seem like there's a way to set it exactly if anyone doesn't know of a way to set it exactly let me know and then I will put it in the comments like in a pinned comment or something now we have the safe Zone guides up here basically what it means is like I said before the outside part will get trimmed off and then the safe zone is just where you want your text to be inside of because then there's no chance of cutting it off the page probably isn't going to get cut off past the bleed but just in case you want to make sure you have the text inside the safe Zone now that we have those set up we can go ahead and pull in the art so I'm going to go to file import files and I'm going to select my art for the page I'll just click on it and we can size it to the size of the page and it will snap to the size which is nice if you need to go a little bit bigger if you want to kind of zoom in a bit you can do that too but remember you don't want to zoom in too much because you don't want it to get blurry now that we have the artwork dropped in we can add the text so I'm going to click on text over here you can click any of these it doesn't really matter I'll just do subheading I can move this and you can have it centered or on the left or on the bottom you know whatever works for your layout and I'm going to enter my text here and now I can just resize the text box however I want it let's add some styles to the text so I am going to click outside of it and then I'll click the box so that way the whole box of text is selected and then I can change the text color I'll make it white I can also change the line spacing and the font there are a ton of fonts in canva and if you get the paid version of canva you'll get even more but even without the paid version there really are just so many fonts I always try to pick one that will be relatively easy to read for the young kids but it is also fun to find one with like a little bit of personality I'm happy with this font and now I'm going to go to effects and there's a couple different things you can do over here one is you can add a drop shadow so I wouldn't really need it for this page but sometimes the background might be a little bit busy and so you just need the text to kind of stand out a little more what I like to do is click on color and click on the add a new color and then do the eyedropper and then you can select the color that's like right behind the text so it would be like this green and then just make it a little bit darker and add a little bit of a blur it'll be different for each page design what looks good and what doesn't look good but basically I try to make it very subtle so that it's not really obvious but it just kind of makes the text Pop a little bit you can change offset so it doesn't like stand out so much and bring the transparency down a little bit and just make it not super obvious and that way the text just pops and then another neat thing you can do and I wouldn't do this on every page but maybe just you know one or two if it makes sense for the page is that you can add the curve to the text you can modify it down here so it doesn't make total sense for mine but let's say if I had less text so if it was just this sentence then it might look pretty neat but I'm going to keep it like this and then I'm going to actually duplicate this block and I'll bring it down here because I have some more text that goes down there pay attention to the center guide here if you have centered text and try to make your text so that it is the same distance from the left and the right just to kind of make sure everything lines up and that's it this would be the layout for this page if I wanted to download just this page I could go to share and then download and I could either pick like a JPEG or a PDF it kind of depends on what you're using it for if you're just kind of sharing it to say hey what do you think of this design you could do JPEG but if it's actually for KDP then you would want to pick the PDF print however you're really going to wait until all your pages are done before you export it as like one big PDF but when you do export it as a PDF you're just going to make sure you pick flatten PDF and you don't need to check the Crop Marks and bleed since canva doesn't have custom bleed then we don't care about canvas bleed so we're not going to export that and we're not going to include any notes and then you can just select your pages here so again if you're done with your book you can pick all pages you do need to upgrade to canva Pro for CMYK but what I would do is just select RGB export it upload it to KDP see if it prints okay first and then if it doesn't then you can try doing CMYK because I've been lazy about doing things in CMYK format pretty much my whole life and as far as KDP goes my books have come out fine even if I used RGB format so I wouldn't really upgrade right away I would just wait and see if it looks okay and then if it does then just don't worry about it and then you can just click download but stay tuned for the rest of the videos that I'm going to make in this series I'll do how to create a spreading canva and how to do the cover and anything else that you will need to know to publish your children's book if you have any questions you can let me know in the comments or you can always email me at Heather heathercash.com if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe so I know to make more videos like this thanks so much for watching bye

Channel: Heather Cash Art

Views: 71,640

Keywords:

Id: Xn3dCLDoifo

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2023