Lessons
Intro to Canva: The Guy Kawasaki Interview
11:26 2The Power of Design: Canva Philosophy
05:41 3Canva Account Setup
10:35 4The Canva Interface
10:28 5Canva: Opening the Drawers
28:00 6Manupulation in Canva
18:43 7More About Your Account
12:12 8Canva for Work Account
25:59Lesson Info
The Canva Interface
All right, so we're going to keep going with our canvas interface. We've created our first blank design on we see that the page is broken up into a couple sections. Let's go through an unpack what they are heather barr most people are familiar with it has a couple of menu items, and we'll go through them one by one in addition to the blue header bar will see this dark gray what I call the drawer this's, where all the goodies are. This is where we're going to find everything, every piece that we're going to include in our designs and then in the light gray area. Over here we have the stage this's, where our layout is going to be with the wig again, what you see is what you get, everything that goes into this white frame who is going to be part of our final graphic. Um, let's, take a look at the header bar and go through the camera logo always takes you back to your initial can va page, which looks like this so your dashboard in addition to that we have filed underneath, of which we have...
some interesting options, we can save on dh make a copy of the existing design that were in, uh, special note most cloud based tools canada included automatically savior changes ah, this is because the files are living online, they're not living on your desktop. We'll get in diversion control a little bit later, but just to note, it'll clue you in on what's going on with the changes right here next to the file menu. If there are unsafe changes, it'll let you know please don't close your browser you will lose a little bit of work on bill give you the thumbs up if it's okay to go onto something else enclosure designing will say all change is saved next to the file menu we have the title of our design. It was a little tricky for me when I first got into this to figure out what this thing is called like this particular piece how do I name this stuff? If we just click on it gives us a little prompt design title, we'll call it my first design her ray and then that is going to show up on your dashboard once we make some changes and actually create something worth looking at share which is a which is a great button for taking your designs directly online, you can save them to your desktop and cart them around in the u s beer or whatever or email them as you can hear directly from canada, you can post them to facebook or twitter uh, you can link your accounts to canvas so that anything that you do doesn't even have to touch your desktop you don't have to save files out anymore you can post right to these thieves social media sites and then you can also share as in editable design we'll get into that later that's going to be working with other people in canada it's an interesting and great function where you can send something to someone and say hey take a look at this thing I just did not only can they look at it but they can added it they can make changes to it if you want them to in addition to share we have download this is a very important button so it's telling me that I have not designed anything yet, which is very kind of in otherwise I'd be saving a lot of blank white squares on my desktop, but this will be populated once we make some changes and we'll go through exactly what kinds of files weaken save out from canada that end up actually living on her desktop a good way to think about it is share doesn't touch your desktop always stays out in the ether and the internet and download does come to your desktop it is thumb something that you can save for later in addition to those guys, the last one in the head or bar is a little toggle that says make public again, I click on this and it's saying you cannot publish a blank white square I'm a minimalist I love white squares clearly they don't they don't agree with this s o they're telling me no fool you have to design something first fight, we'll do it later. This toggle allows you to publish your design on what's called the canvas design stream, and we'll find that find out where that is a little bit later, that's where anyone is using can va can put up their great designs and it's this great stream where you can get inspiration from what other people are doing. If you don't want to make your design public that's fine, I work with a lot of clients where they would not appreciate me putting their designs upon line without checking with them first s o it's by default turned off your designs are not public when you first create them and the question for you from the chat rooms, which is great from arto think with who wants to know are those designs and templates are those searchable once you make them public they are you can assign keywords to them. In fact, if we want, we could hop over to the to the design stream right now to show you guys how to do that, so to get to the canvas design stream oh, by the way look, it's already put my lovely white square and is my first design clearly the dashboard thinks it's worthy. I don't know why twitter doesn't, so there are a couple of menu items down here that that we can get into one of them is notifications that's if someone shares a design with you will go through that later of workflow, then we got these two guys learned to design and get design inspiration uh can va employees and has collected some of the greatest designers that I've seen in a long time, which is really cool I mean, these guys are putting out a lot of good stuff and we'll see that when we go into the premade layouts, so campbell wants to show off their design prowess and and by doing so show you how to be great designers the this link here learn to design will take you to what's called the can of a design school the link for that is design school dot can va dot com, which is pretty easy. We'll go through what's in the design school later, but this is amazing, amazing stuff I read every article that's put up there and I've been designing for fifteen years and I still think some of the stuff that they're doing is really cool below learned design we'll see get design inspiration, this is what you're talking about with the design stream the question was once you created design, can you search for something like it? If we go to the design stream which is canvas dot com pound design dash stream we can see and we're sort of inadvertently giving shoutouts to all these cool designers who have recently put work up we can see what other people are doing with canada and it's pretty cool as far as searching for a design you can see uh what people have wrote about it here this person has said that they're designed is titled business driven here we have some comments on some designs here you can see someone's tag someone else again that's that's what we were talking about with your handle starting with an at symbol very similar to twitter um I don't know if this is searchable um but you can certainly go through and poke around and see what the latest cool creations people have been doing in here are there is a future that will get into a little bit later where you can save your things into folders you can search through them but we'll save that for the workflow session. Cool all right so let's go back to our here's, our dashboard and in this other tab are lonely white square is still sitting there completely un designed the poor guy um so that was the header bar that we just went through now we'll take a look at the drawer this is again this is where all of your stuff is going to live all your graphics images things that you can drag directly onto the canvas to create your designs. The drawer has a couple icons here which control in search layouts text, background and uploads search allows you to search through all of these different kinds of things whether it's a line or a nikon or an image I'll give you a good example fi search for lion it's going to show me images of lions, icons of lions, drawings and illustrations pretty much anything it has to do with the word lion you can get here some of them have this little free sticker next to it some of them don't we'll go into why some of them don't some of them do a little bit later but we're looking at the search function here we can search through anything let's try uh uh what's too light bulb so here I have a graphic images some really cool stock photography they try to cultivate and give you the most beautiful up today contemporary options available against some are premium some are not that they usually here you can see it by the sticker whether it's free or not so that's the search feature additionally, you'll notice that when I when I first click on search, I get thes uh, icon buckets here and they kind of fly out when I roll over them. These are, uh you could do a visual search. You want to type in a keyword so let's, look at photos so here I can look at just some photos that canvas collected. There are thousands and thousands of these guys will lead this. I can close that and go into something else. We have a total of ten items here. Holly's that's probably going to go away, hopefully, or maybe in the next month or so. Grids and frames, shapes, lines, illustrations, icons, photos and charts. Now to a designer, some of these kind of mean the same thing to me, an illustration that it kind of is an illustration is just a small version of it. But to the to the non designing public, they're going to look at this and say, ok, great. I can choose this so I can do this. I can put any of these different things in here. This is how they're divided.
Ratings and Reviews
Redawna
This was a fantastic course! You will walk away from this course confident, skilled and knowledgeable enough able to create amazing deliverables/images/graphics for all social media platforms. Especially if you are completely intimidated by design and don't know where to start, this course is for you! (that was me) I really enjoyed seeing into the mind of a designer with his tips & rules about fonts, flow, colors and brand integrity I have made some fantastic designs! Thank you Matt, Canva and Creative Live! Absolutely one of my best CreativeLive purchases.
Aaditya Somani
This course is fantastic. Matt is an excellent teacher, he explained all the details of Canva in less than 4 hours. And those basic design tips were a bonus! Thanks a lot, Matt and Creative Live. Would definitely recommend it to take your designing game to the next level.
Barbara Schiffman
Great course, great teacher -- I'm a Canva and design novice but am now creating book covers for my own books/ebooks. Matt taught me things about using Canva's tools that have already improved my design "eye" and skills -- especially about the value of simplicity. Many thanks!