Lessons
Class Introduction
03:26 2Canva Philosophy
02:55 3Canva Account Set Up
06:28 4The Canva Interface
22:22 5Element Manipulation
21:14 6Demo: Super Simple Starter Design
07:27 7More About Your Account
03:46 8Canva For Work
02:03Lesson Info
Canva Account Set Up
Lets go ahead and jump in, and I'll show ya how to sign up for a new Canva account. The first thing we're gonna do is go to www.canva.com, and redirect you to the signup page, and I'm gonna pick what we're using Canva for, whether you're education, small business, a company, a nonprofit, or personal. For right now, we're just gonna pick a personal account, so I'll go ahead and click on that, and you choose to signup with either your Facebook or Google accounts, today, I'm just gonna use my email address. So, I'll add my email address in here, I'll go ahead and put in my full name, Matt Stevenson, my email address, and I'm just gonna confirm that, and I'll go ahead and pick a password, and click Sign up. All right, so now that we've created an account, it's going to ask us what we're going to be creating. So, I'm an Artist, I do not want to invite any team members at this time, so I'm gonna skip this process, we'll talk about teams in a little bit later, and then it's gonna ask me what ...
I want to create. This is Canva's way of sort of introducing you to getting started right away. It makes you pick something that you want to create to start with. Lets go ahead and start with a social graphic here, and it's gonna say, what kind of social graphic. I want to make a Facebook post. Great, so when I create account it jumps me right into what's called the Creation interface, but we want to take a step back. I like that Canva wants you to start creating immediately, but I wanna walk you through some of the basics of the interface first. So we're gonna click on the Canva logo up here, and we're gonna go to what's called the dashboard interface. It looks like this, where we have a nice big gray area over here, its got the creation picker up top, and then in this space here, it's gonna show you all of the designs that you've created so far. So, on the dashboard screen in the left-hand side, this is your account settings and settings profile. I'm gonna click on my name here, and show you just some of the things that are in here. You can change your account settings, or you can adjust your personal profile, and then you can also upgrade to, what's called, the Canva for Work, or Canva Premium Version, of the product, and then finally, you can also Sign out. You can look at all your designs, which is the screen we're on right here, where it's gonna show you everything that you've created so far, and then it'll also show you things that have been shared with you. If another Canva user is creating something, they can actually click a place, that'll show you a little bit later, and then that is shared with you. They're still the owner of that design, but you can use it as a template, or you can re-use it and make a copy of it. You can also create a team. This is a Premimum Feature, where you can add people that are all working inside of the same Canva account, where they have different users for one big place with all your designs. Another cool spot in your dashboard is your brand. This is something that we're gonna talk about in the second segment, where you can actually add all of the stuff having to do with your brand, and then they're all in one place for re-use. This is the template section that I was talking about, where you can search for all sorts of really, really cool designs that are premade for you to choose from. Here you can pick what you want to create. It's basically anything you can imagine, and then over here some really great designs free for you start with. Everything here is customizable, so you can change colors, images, or fonts, and then another neat feature that was recently added to Canva is the ability to make folders, and I'll actually do a sample one here for you. Lets say I want to make a new folder for Creative Live Social Graphics. This allows me to organize anything that I create in my All Designs area into different folders. We the free account, you get two folders, and with the Premium account, you can create any number of folders you like. This is a great way to organize all of the things that you're gonna create inside of Canva, and then finally, you can throw any of your designs away by just dragging them in to the trash, but be careful, because they are deleted immediately if you do that, and then, we have this Upgrade button here. They give you lots of chances and opportunities to upgrade to a new account, and we'll talk about the value of being a Canva for Work member a little bit later. One interesting thing that Canva does that I absolutely love, is they introduce you to being a designer by these two links here. One of them is Learn to design, and the other one is Get design inspiration. The Learn to design brings you to a page in Canva, all about Tutorials, where it shows you some really interesting tips, that we're actually gonna go over a little bit today, on how to be a good designer and create some beautiful stuff. It's a really great resource that Canva gives you because they want you to be successful with everything that you design. So lets talk a little bit about this Create a design section up here at the top. We can search all of those really cool templates that I talked about, and find that exact starting point that we want to use, and then we could also use custom dimensions. If we find that what we want to create is just not listed here. Lets say you're making something for a piece of software or to share, that is not listed in any of these designs, you can create your own, which is really great, because then you can enter in your custom dimensions, your custom width, and height. You can either do it by pixel, or by milometers or inches. But for right now, I'm just gonna create a basic social graphic, like we tried to do earlier. So I'm gonna click on Social Graphic, when I hover over it, you can see down here, it's gonna tell me the pixel ratio of that, or in inches, for in the case of a flyer, and what it does when you click on that, is it actually brings up a new tab, you'll see here. This is gonna be just about how you always work with Canva. You'll have one tab open in your browser for your dashboard, which contains all your profile information, and your graphics that you've created, and then you're gonna have another one here, and this looks a little bit different, this is gonna be your creation tab. This is where we're actually building the designs that we're gonna be using.
Ratings and Reviews
Tomas Verver
Good overview, essentials of Canva.
Tomas Verver
Good overview, essentials of Canva.
Kellie Mertz
Student Work
Related Classes
Graphic Design