If you're in the world of designing online, whether it be creating social media posts or selling digital products or anything in between, you've likely heard of Canva. Canva is absolutely, in my opinion, the most beginner-friendly and user-intuitive design tool out there. There are a lot of options out there when it comes to software to use for graphic design, but none come close to Canva in terms of budget friendliness and ease of use.
So in this video, I'm giving a full Canva tutorial for beginners, for those who may not be super familiar with using it yet. yet. We're going to be walking through how to start a project, how to use the editor, what kind of content Canva has in their library and how to access it, how to edit elements, text, and more.
So if you're somewhat new to Canva and just need the basics and a step-by-step walkthrough, then this video is for you. Okay, so we're here on Canva and when you want to start a new project, you'll come here to the top right where it says create a design. And you can either type in what you're looking for or choose from one of Canva's suggested types of canvases.
So this is just talking about what orientation and what size the canvas or the workspace is going to be. So you're basically choosing your project size here. So these suggestions are everything from Instagram posts to Facebook posts, flyer, planner.
presentation. There are so many different ones that Canva has as presets, and you can see what size it's referencing. If you look to the right where it says the size.
So for an Instagram story, we're looking at a canvas that's 10 80 by 19, 20 pixels, whereas something like a flyer is going to be eight and a half by 11 inches. So you can just select one of these, or if you're thinking of something specific, you can type it in. So let's say I'm looking to make a Pinterest pin. I can start typing Pinterest and it'll populate all of the different Pinterest.
preset. So then I can choose the one I'd like. I can also come down here to custom size. If I don't see the preset I'm looking for, I can input a custom width and height in pixels, inches, millimeters, or centimeters. Or I can also come here to import a file.
So let's say I have a photo that I want to bring into Canva to edit and create a design with, I can import files here. So for this tutorial, let's just choose Instagram post and start with that. Before we go any further, I want to let you know about my brand new digital products with Canva course. It's going to be opening up for enrollment very soon.
It's my full comprehensive course that walks you step-by-step through creating digital products using Canva and selling them online. So if you've been interested in the idea of selling digital products online to make passive income, but feel like you've needed a deeper dive and a more comprehensive walkthrough and group of tutorials for creating different digital products, then this course might be just what you need to take that next step. At the time of this filming, it's not quite launched yet, but we do have a wait list going.
So definitely click on the link in the description box below to hop on that wait list. That way you'll be the first to know when the doors do open for enrollment and you may get an extra perk or two from being on that wait list. But like I said, if you've needed just an extra hand to hold to walk through this whole process of learning how to create digital products using Canva and selling them online, then hop on that list and keep an eye on your inbox for more details to come. Okay, so here we are inside of the Canva editor.
This is what it looks like. Here's my workspace. So because I chose chose Instagram post, it gave me a square size that is the right size for an Instagram post. And I've got all of my design menu tools here on the left. So I can choose the elements tab to find things like graphic illustrations, icons, photographs.
I can choose the text tab if I'd like to add a text box. I can choose the draw tab if I want a freehand draw. So let's just go through some of these because there's so many great options.
So here under elements, we can access all of the content that's within Canvas. content library. So that's one reason I love canvas because it's not only an editor, but it also has a built-in library of tons of different images, fonts, graphics, everything that I would need to create a stunning graphic design.
So here under elements, I can search for something I'm looking for. So let's say I want a flower. I might type in flower and then it'll populate results for me in all of these different categories.
So I've got graphics. photos, videos, shapes. So let's just click on graphics. And here it's giving me all of the different results for flower graphics. So graphics are pretty much any element that is not text or photos.
These are things like icons, stickers, graphic illustrations, drawings. Then I could click over to photos if I wanted an actual photograph of flowers and so on. Now, if I come back to where it says all, I can see the different categories here under the elements tab, like shapes, graphics, stickers, photos, videos. So let's look at shapes. If I click see all, this is going to give me the entire shapes section.
So I've got lines and shapes here. And if I choose one to put on my design, it'll bring it over into my workspace. And then I can click and drag to enlarge this or to make it smaller. I can click and drag to move it around, which is another reason I love canvas so much is for the ease of this drag and drop editor.
Then once I have. have an element in my design, I can see all of my options for editing that element up here in the top menu. So here, when I have this element or this shape selected, I can come to the color to change out the color of the shape.
I can change the border weight. So if I want a border around On my shape, I can do that. I can also make my shape more transparent. So if I come to this transparency slider, I can bring the transparency down to make it more see-through. So let's say I had this photo in the background and this element or shape on top, then I could make it as transparent as I want.
So here it's a solid color, but I might want to make it a little transparent to be able to see through to the background photo. Now as I'm moving this element around, I'll see some different lines appear on the workspace. So I can see when the element is completely centered because this solid pink line going from top to bottom will appear. That tells me it's centered.
And the same if I continue moving it down, I'll see one going left to right and that means this is completely in the middle. Now if I have another element on the page in a different area, then I can be sure that I'm lining them up if I'm moving this one and I want it to line up on the side because the dotted pink line will appear down. instance, the right side here, this is telling me that these two elements are lined up along that line.
You can see it. If we move this one this way, we can see that dotted line appear as soon as we've anchored them to the same spot. So those little lines that appear as you're moving things around are super helpful when you're designing in Canva.
Alright, so let's talk about photographs. If I find a photo I'd like to use, I can bring it into my workspace and I can edit this photo in a lot of different ways. So while I have the photo selected, I can come up here to the top menu where it says edit photo and I can come down to effects. So let's say I want to add a blur effect to this photo.
I can click. blur and use my intensity slider to make this photo more blurry. So this is really handy if I'm wanting to use this photo, let's say as a background to put some text on top, I can make my text a contrasting color and the blurriness of the image behind helps to make the text on top stand out and be more readable.
So that's one fun thing I can do with a photo. I can also use the background remover. If I have Canva pro the background remover is available for Canva pro users and it automatically removes any back.
so then I can use this with a different background if I like. So let's say I just want to click on this background and make it a different color, then this is an amazing tool for creating an ad with a photograph that I didn't necessarily need the original background of. Also on my elements tab I can come down to where it says frames.
This is one of my favorite sections on Canva. A frame is basically just a specific shape that you want to fit a photo into. So We've got all different fun shapes here.
Let's try out this little squiggly scratch shape. So I might have this frame in my workspace and then I can click on the photo I want to drag and hover over it and it automatically places it into the frame, making it the shape of the frame. There are a lot of different fun frames.
We've got a computer mock-up, so if I wanted to bring that photo over and make it appear as if it's on the computer, I could do that. I could also do a letter shape. So here I have the letter K and I could bring my photo over and into the frame and now I've got my photo in the shape of a K.
All right, let's move down to our text tab here on the left. We can click to add a text box. Now we can do this and make it our own custom text, or we can come down here to Canva's font combinations that are already available. If we like one of these, we can just click to add that and edit it as well.
And some of these are pro and some are free. So any... elements or text that you see with the little crown symbol means that that is a pro element or text.
That means that if you're on the free plan and you use a pro element or font, you're going to have to pay a dollar to remove the watermark from it before you can download it. But if you are a Canva Pro user, which means you're paying monthly for Canva Pro, you can use any of the pro content for free. So we just want to be aware of that as we're choosing elements and text to use looking for the little pro symbol.
Now we've added our text box here to make a completely custom text box. So let's just put in some example text. Let's say have a great day. And now when we have this selected, we can come up here again to our top menu, we can change the font. So this is another place where you'll see some free fonts and some free fonts.
pro fonts. So you'll want to choose if you're on the free plan, mainly just the free fonts that don't have the little crown next to them. So let's say we like this font and we can also size it up or down by clicking and dragging the corner out. or down.
You can also size it using the plus or minus on the size here, and then you can change the color of the font. So I can choose any of the default colors, or I can come up to this little plus sign and choose any color that's here. If I know the specific hex code of a color that I like, I can enter that. And if I have a photo that I'm using in the design already, let's say it's this photo, then I can come back to that color area and pick the eyedropper tool, which is the color picker. So once I select that, I can hover over my photograph and choose a color for for my text right from the photograph.
So let's say I want it to be this nice yellow color and hover over that and click, and it automatically brings my text to that color. When you have a photo in your design already as well, Canva will also bring up this photo color section, which automatically pull colors from your photos. So if you want to just switch through these to see which color you like the best for your text, you can do that and ensure that everything that you're choosing color-wise is cohesive and works together.
Now Canva also offers a lot of fun effects for text. So when I have my text selected, I can come up here to effects and there are so many different fun things you can do to level up your text. So you can add a shadow, you can add a page lift effect, which is basically just kind of a blurry, subtle shadow underneath to lift it up off the page a little bit.
I can make my text hollow. I can use the splice effect, which is a combination of hollow and shadow underneath. I can do an outline. Now, another thing I can do if I have more than one element or text on the page is I can select them both.
And when I select more than one item, this little menu automatically appears. And one option is group. So if I click group, that makes both of the elements appear as one layer that I can move around then together and they stay.
positioned together wherever I move them. Then I can also ungroup to bring them back to two separate elements and move them around separately. When I have something selected, I'm also able to duplicate that specific element with this little plus symbol that says duplicate. So there I've got a duplicate text.
I can also do this with photographs and elements as many times as I'd like to duplicate that. And I can come up to this little more symbol to have more options like copying and pasting, duplicating, deleting. I can add a link to this text by clicking link. So this is like, if I wanted to give my buyer of my digital product, a PDF that has a clickable hyperlink in it to take them to a certain URL, or even another page in a multi-page document, this is where I can do that. So I can add my link in here or choose another page in the document that I want to add the link to.
And it will actually add a clickable link to this text so that when I download the final PDF file, the person looking at it can actually click on this text and be taken to that link. Now let's say I have two different elements on the page that are sort of scattered around. If I select both of them and click on the three dots, then I'll have aligning options. So I could align these both to the left.
I could align them both to the right or whatever I'd like to do. Let's duplicate this text for this next example. So let's say I have several different elements. I can highlight them all click on the three dots, and then I have this space evenly option. So if I click tidy up, That's going to automatically bring them into alignment so that they have equal spacing between them all and they're centered.
Now, if I want to duplicate everything on this page into a new page, I can click this little button for duplicate page. And that gives me a second page with everything the same on it. I can also just add a blank page if I don't want. all of my elements that I've added to this, but I do want to add a page to my workspace.
I can click down here to add an extra blank page. I can always delete with the trash can, and then I can also upload my own elements. So let's say I want to use a photograph that I've sourced outside of Canva, or it's my own photo that I want to bring in to work with. I can come to uploads and this is where I can click to upload a file into Canva.
So Canva has an awesome content library, but there are times you may want to bring something into Canva from somewhere else, and this is where you would do that. You can also click this Draw symbol on the left to be able to freehand draw on an element or on your workspace. So if, for instance, we have this photo as our background, we might want to put some little doodle marks on there.
We can change the color that we're drawing with, but we might want to just freehand something really nice on there. This is great if you want to do these little cute doodle marks. You can choose the thickness of the pen as well so you can make it bolder. And you can also erase by clicking the eraser and then just clicking on the mark.
So there are so many fun features. There are a lot more than this as well. We could spend all day literally going through everything that you can do on Canva, but once you have your design ready and finalized and you're ready to download it, you're going to come up to the top right-hand corner and click share.
And then you have sharing and downloading options. So most of the time, if you're wanting to just download the file, you'll just come to download. And the first thing you'll need to do is select your file type.
So here on Canva, you can choose a JPEG, a PNG, a PDF standard, PDF. print, SVG, MP4 video, or GIF. Most of the time when we're working with digital products that we're creating in Canva to sell online, we're going to be looking at JPEG, PNG, and PDF most likely.
So a couple things you'll need to know about the differences between these, JPEG and PNG are smaller file sizes so it makes them really great for web use and sharing online. PDFs naturally are larger file sizes because they're better quality files which make them better for printing. So PDF print is the highest quality out of all of these. It automatically downloads at a DPI or resolution of 300 DPI, which is the minimum that you want for printing. So if you're creating something that's meant to be a printable, you definitely want to download it as a PDF print, which will give you that 300 DPI.
The rest of these default to exporting at 96 DPI, which is not very high resolution, but it's... more than enough for anything that is only for web usage. So really if you're creating things just for digital or web use 96 dpi is fine. It's only when you're creating something that's intended to be printed out that you'll need to start making sure that you have at least 300 dpi.
Again this is something that we dive deep into inside of my digital products with Canva course. If you're interested in learning the nitty-gritty of all these technical details including sizing options, resolution, and even a workaround for if you're not using Canva. ...enva pro but you need a high quality jpeg or png then definitely hop on the waitlist for that with the link in this video description and you'll be the first to know when the doors open for enrollment for that.
So once you choose your file type then you'll need to look at whatever other options there are. for the download settings here. If we have Canva Pro, we can use these size and quality sliders for JPEGs to increase the size and the resolution. Again, those are only Canva Pro features.
If you want a PNG, you've got a size slider as well, and you can also choose a transparent background. So PNG is the only one besides SVG that offers the ability for a transparent background. Now you can do that on an SVG, but SVG is also a Canva Pro only option. So then you've got your PDF standard and PDF.
print. Remember standard is just fine for anything that's digital or web usage. Print would be for anything that needs to be printed out.
And then on PDF print, you can also choose to change your color profile from RGB to CMYK. If you're wanting to make your printable really high quality, then you would want to choose CMYK. Again, that's mainly just for printables and that is a Canva Pro only feature as well.
If you don't currently have Canva Pro, I do have a free Canva Pro 30-day trial linked in the description box as well. Feel free to click on that and sign up to check out Canva Pro for 30 days to try out the different pro features and get access to the premium content to see if Canva Pro might be something that you'd enjoy using. So once you've got your design finalized and all of your download settings chosen, then you're going to click download to grab your final file.
So hopefully that was helpful for you, friend. Like I said, there is so much more that you can do on Canva and I would love to show you and walk you through every single step inside of my digital products with Canva course. You can check that out with the link in the description box below or sign up for Canva pro with that link as well to get your free pro trial.
But in the meantime, I'd love for you to comment and let me know what your favorite part of designing on Canva is. Happy selling friends.