If I only had 10 minutes to teach you how to design with Canva, this is what I would tell you. Ready? Let's do this.
Hi, Mollifly people. It's Natalia. Welcome back to my channel where I help you create better content and grow on social media. 10 minutes is not enough to make you a designer, or is it? In this video, I'm sharing all you need to know in a nutshell to start your own Canva journey and help you get better at design.
Let's go. We're on the Canva homepage and there are many ways in which you can start a new design. You've got all the different formats in here. You've got the templates that can help you start design when you're not feeling particularly creative, or you can just hit the create a design button here in the top right corner and go to Instagram posts because this is what we'll be designing today.
I'm gonna just click that. And I always start with naming your designs because that keeps your Canva account nice and organized. So I've named it Instagram posts YouTube tutorial, and I'm just going to quickly go to more and save it to a specific folder.
That's my tutorials and tips folder. Again, keeping everything nice and organized. Let's start off with the background.
This is something that every design needs. So if I just select my canvas, I can go to the top in here and select a color. From here at the bottom, you can go for a gradient, have something more funky, but I've got my color palette that I want to use in here.
What I love about Canva is that you can always access their library from the elements panel in here to the left, and you can use all the different shapes and graphics, stickers, photos, videos. All of the assets are available to you with just one click. I have something very specific in mind.
So I'm just going to go here to search for elements and search for desk workspace just to find like a laptop image or something that will match my aesthetic. Let's say this is the one that I want to use. I can just click on it.
And from here, I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller. Now, this is my first talking point. This is something very important for any of the new designers to know.
You always need to give your design a bit of that breathing space. you shouldn't really be filling it out kind of completely. I mean, you can have something like a closed composition, but I prefer to kind of give a bit more breathing space around my elements.
Now from here at the top with the image selected, I'm just going to round those corners to give it a bit of a softer look. And maybe I'm just going to add like a little frame from here. And from the top in here, I can just change the color to something a little bit kind of off black. It's not completely pitch black. It's actually a little kind of...
brownish so I'm going to use that for this design. The next thing we want to do is to add text to our design. I can just go for adding heading like this or I can just hit T and that's going to add a text box for me like this.
Now the most important thing that you need to consider for any of your designs is that it's readable. The legibility is so important because after all all of your visuals need to communicate a message and unless someone who's seen your design can actually read everything and they won't really be interested in seeing it further and intrigued by that piece of content. So this is very important. And this is something to consider when you're choosing your brand colors. So in here at the top, you can actually see that my color palette for this design is very, very simple.
I have a dark tone for my text. I have a light background because it's easier on the eyes. And I actually have one accent color that really goes well with the rest of my colors.
And it actually just... matches the vibe. It's very subtle and it's making sure that everything on that design is really easy to understand. From here, I'm going to say become a designer in 10 minutes. And from here at the very top, you can actually choose your fonts.
There are so many amazing fonts within Canva, but I've got something very specific in mind. You can always go for those tags to search for something that matches a specific vibe that you're looking for. A serif font, a sans serif font, something modern, elegant, anything of that nature.
but I'm looking for forum. This is the font that I want to find. So I can just easily search for it, click on it and just make the text bigger like this, or I can just squash that box like this and make it bigger. Another very important thing and a telltale sign that someone is a beginner designer is not adjusting your line spacing. The default line spacing, especially within Canva, is kind of very wide and it really affects the balance of your design.
So from here at the top, just go to line spacing and just bring them together for more. natural look. I want to include two other text boxes, so I need to make space for it.
So I'm just going to drag this one and balance it all nicely. Now I'm going to hit T for another one, and I'm going to say quick Canva tutorial. From here, I want another font, and that's going to be Glacial Indifference.
Let me see if I can find it here. Yes, it's right here. I'm going to keep it bold, but make it not italics. I need to just select that. text because sometimes that text box doesn't really respond to what I'm doing clearly and I'm just going to move it up like this.
I'm going to go ahead from here and actually adjust the letter spacing because I want more of that visual interest in here, maybe something like this. Now to save myself all the formatting, I can just hit alt and duplicate that text box and as you can see that panels of 30 appear and this tells you how well aligned those spaces are. So in between my quick canvas tutorial above and become a designer there's 30 pixels of space and between in 10 minutes and quick canvas tutorial at the bottom there's 30 spaces as well. So this is what I want. This is a nicely balanced design and this is another pointer that's very important.
Don't just randomly align different elements. Make sure that you're creating visual balance for all of your designs. Now I'm going to change that text to how to. And I actually want to add more visual interest to my design. So for this, I can actually use the different effects.
Now in here, I can go to the effects tab and choose this background. And I actually want to make it that dark color like this. But that, of course, means I need to change the text color to the light one. And as you can see, I've got this interesting visual effect in here. From the bottom like this, I can actually just adjust around this.
I think I was around kind of 40, 54. points in here. So I'm going to match it with this corner rounding in here, again, creating that balance. And I'm going to just add a bit more of that spread like this, just to make that box much bigger.
Now I'm dragging it ever so slightly just to retain that 30 from the bottom and the top. So this is what I'm ending up with. Now, another tip for me in here to be a better designer is to not make your visuals too wordy. You want to be concise. You want to be be to the point and not really stretch out your messaging too much and not overwhelming your viewers.
So this is all I'm going to do in terms of text. Maybe I'll add another accent just to add that visual interest to this design. Now from the elements tab, I can go to my shapes in here and I can actually just add a box like this. Canva is very smart in terms of using your colors.
So it actually used the color that I wanted, but you can go ahead and change it to kind of different colors that you've got within your palette or choose something from the default colors. play around with this tool in here, but I want this pink right here and I'm going to make it smaller just like that. Now, as you can see, I'm not placing it randomly. This is very, very important. Again, something that I've mentioned before, you want to create that visual balance within your design.
So I'm not just placing this circle in here or to the left, I'm going to just align it perfectly with this image underneath with the edge like this. And you can see this line appear. So this means that this is perfectly aligned. I'm going to go again to the border style in here and go to border weight three just to match the same border weight that we've got under this image just to make sure that this is kind of the same vibe and the border color is going to again be this nice off black in here.
Now I can just click on that shape to start typing. You can see this bar appears. I can use it for text but I actually want more control so I'm going to add my text box like this and I'm going to say watch it now.
Now from here what I can do is to actually go to uppercase and that's going to make all of my text uppercase of course and from here I'm going to change it to glacial indifference again just to match all of my other fonts this is an important pointer you don't want too many fonts within your design just do not overwhelm it everything needs to be again balanced okay I'm gonna make it smaller like this just like that and overlay it on top of my shape now let's see how big I want to make it and again this is an important point I'm leaving that breathing space around. The common mistake that I see new designers make is that they kind of try to fill that whole space. I mean, it's attaching right now. I'm just going to scroll in, but you can see like this, they're not leaving that breathing space.
So I definitely want to make sure that there's enough margin around it. I may go to spacing, just adjust it a little bit more and just align it to that shape perfectly like this. I feel like this element right now is a little bit too big. So I'm going to just select. both of these elements and group them together.
Not only does it help you kind of retain the positioning that you've chosen before, but it also helps you maneuver that element across your canvas a little bit easier. So I'm just going to kind of move it around. And as you can see, I'm trying to balance the whole design.
Now I want to make sure that this is going to be aligned perfectly. So I'm going to select all four of these elements without that shape that we've added later on and just drag it to the bottom just to make sure that they're aligned to the middle and to the center. You can actually go to position in here and make sure that this is all aligned in terms of the center.
The middle is not going to be there because it's four, but if I grouped all of these elements, you can see that they're sitting perfectly in the middle. I'm going to just ungroup them. You can always go in here to group your text or group your elements.
And I'm just going to move this one a little bit like this. Brilliant. Let's add another shape.
So I can just go to my shapes in the elements tab and click on the line, or I can simply hit L for a line to appear. I'm going to drag it to the top, change the line color again to our off black. And from here, I'm gonna choose three line weight just to balance everything together.
This is very important to consider and I want to just add it like this. I'm gonna grab another one, hit Alt and drag it to the bottom and that duplicates it. And what I want to do is again, hold Alt to duplicate this element and I can just drag the side of my line and you can see that it just snips to the center. So this is exactly what I want and this is exactly positioned.
where I want it. I can actually zoom in just to make sure that it attaches nicely. And this is exactly what happened. So I'm going to again, hit alt and drag this one to the top just to create that effect like this. Now I'm nearly done.
What I want is to just add my Instagram handle. So again, holding alt, I've duplicated that text like this, and I'm going to say add. Natalia Kalinska. And I don't like that it's bold, so I'm just going to select the text and make it not bold.
Now I'm going to move that text like this just to center it. And I'm just going to drag with holding alt to copy that text over. And I'm going to say content marketing.
Now we've got our finished design. And what I want to make sure is that it's properly sized for the platform it's intended to. Now this is an Instagram post in the portrait dimensions.
I'm going to go to share and to download my design. And from here, you'll be able to see the sizing. This is 1080 by 1350 pixels, which is exactly what we want for our Instagram feed. Now, from here, I'm happy to go ahead with a PNG file, which is the best kind of file that you can use on social media.
And you can go ahead and download it from here. So let's recap the most important parts of a good design, the readability and the colors. We have enough contrast in here. This is legible.
Anyone can read it very easily and it's not too wordy. There are also good fonts, good font combinations and color combinations. So this is very important. Now there is visual interest in the form of an accent color or a shape in here.
I could actually make it something a little bit more fancy with the shape choices in here, but I want to keep it minimalistic like this. There is enough breathing space around all of my elements. and the elements are also properly aligned, centered nicely with this design, and they are actually nicely balanced against each other, and the whole design is properly sized.
This is something that you always need to remember. Drop me a ready in the comments if you're really leveling up your design game in 2024, and tell me what you want to learn in Canva this year. Make sure to watch this video next to stop wasting time and design much, much faster. Subscribe for more Canva tutorials and content creation tips. and hit that like button if this video was useful to you.
As always, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.