Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating a Brand Set From Scratch

With this demo, I am going to use some Creative Live assets. I have a folder prepared on my desktop that has some key assets. I have some colors, some images, and then some logos. You'll notice that the logos are .PNG files. Now, that's really important because PNGs, like we said, support transparency. The Creative Live logo has some transparent elements to it. It has those dividers in between the squares that I want to make sure don't turn white when I drag them into my design. You'll also notice that I have some photos that I've selected. These are things that I've just gotten from the Creative Live library, but they are different from what's in the Canva free photo section. I wanted to use some Creative Live branded items. Now the first thing that we're gonna do in our demo is we're gonna create a brand set. Let me show you what a brand set is. If you go over here in your dashboard to your brand, you'll see that we have lots of different stuff here. Now all of this is gonna eventual...

ly represent the Creative Live brand. The first thing I'm gonna do is go ahead and change the name of my team. Instead of dcmjs's team which it does by default, I'm gonna go ahead and change that to Creative Live Canva Crew. Now, anyone that I attach to this team will be able to access this brand set. So, we'll be able to have a nice unified brand across the board. In my brand page here, you can see I have two separate things. The first is a brand kit tab, and the second is templates. Let's go ahead and start with brand kit. I have a couple of different items in here: color palettes, fonts, logos, and uploaded fonts. For the color palette and fonts, Canva does a great job of giving you some suggestions. They know that not everyone is a designer, so if you want some inspiration, please click on these links. Check out some of the stuff that they recommend. And you can always pull those brand colors in later. So for the brand colors, I have here one of my files is a handy cheat sheet of the Canva brand colors. These are in Hex Code. All of Canva's colors are done in Hex. Hex is a six number letter system for web codes. If you are unfamiliar with Hex Codes, definitely do a little bit of research. They're really easy to get a hold of, some information on. If you want to convert some of your brand colors from RGB2 Hex, there are some online tools that do that really quickly. Just look it up, and you'll be able to get these codes yourself. So I know that Canva has three codes in addition to black. So what I wanna do is go into my brand palette. And I'm gonna add some of these brand colors. The first brand color that I'm gonna add is that black. So go ahead and put my slider over here. The Hex Code for black, any web designers know is a whole bunch of zeroes. And I'm gonna hit enter, and that's my first brand color. And then I'm gonna go through the line and add some of these other ones. So let's go ahead and add this yellow. So I'll take my brand color here. Click on the plus, and then go to my color code. Add the yellow, and I'll do that two more times. Now interesting thing that Canva does that I absolutely love is when you are putting in your brand colors, the very first color that you put in here it's going to color the rest of your Canva experience. And to show you what that looks like take a look at this header bar up here. It's changed from the typical Canva blue to this black. So as you're adding in brand colors make sure that the first one you put in is your core brand color. It's the one that represents your company or your brand the most because that's what every team member's gonna see as they go through the various elements of their Canva experience. It's a great way to bring your team on board, and get them used to seeing your brand in Canva. I have one more color here, and that's a nice gray. So again I'm just going to go through my colors. You can always delete a color by hovering over it and clicking on the X. And put this in here just like that. It's a nice dark gray. Click enter, and there we go. Now we don't just have to have one palette. We can actually have multiples. So let's call this one CL Complete because it has all of the colors of the basic Creative Live brand. I can actually add a whole second palette if I wanted to, or as many as I want with lots of different colors. And these will all be selectable by your teammates. This is a great way if you have let's say different personalities to your brand, or you have a set of secondary colors that you want to be able to use. You can add them here. I'm gonna go ahead and delete this color. By deleting all the colors in a palette, you then delete that palette. And here I have my core CL brand colors. So that's colors. Fonts are really important for a brand because they convey the tone of your organization. I can do two things. I can either select from some of the fonts that Canva provides by clicking on these icons here and choosing the font on this drop down. I can choose the size. I can choose if it comes in bold or italic. I can choose that here. Or I can upload my own fonts. This is a feature that comes with Canva for Work. Creative Live uses a font called Proxima Nova. You want to make sure you have all the rights to these fonts if you're uploading them. Don't worry Canva's gonna ask you if you do. I'll go in here and you can just click on this button here that says upload new font, and it will ask me where my fonts are. And let's see, I will want Proxima Nova light and black. So here's where it says you should probably make sure you own these fonts. I know that I do so I'm going to upload them. It just takes a second and then you'll be able to choose them in that little icon menu on the right-hand side over here. So here I can see I just uploaded one of them. Let's go ahead and grab the second one. Let's do regular, and I'll click this box to say I own it. You can only upload one font at a time. And once that's done, we can go up here and select it as our headline, subhead or body text. So for Creative Live, they appear up at the top. Here are your drop down. I'm gonna do the bold and for the subheads, I'm going to do the regular and I'm also going to to the regular for the body text. So this is pretty much the same font across the board. This is a pretty common practice if you're not choosing two different fonts then you can always stick with the same font just different styles of it to use in your designs. So now that I have my colors and fonts, the last piece of my brand that I wanna upload are my logos. I'll go ahead and click on this big plus sign here, and it's gonna ask me where my logos are. I have two of them. Let's click on two at the same time to see if they are uploaded. I have a big logo here that's black and a smaller one that is blue. Boom, here we go. An important note about uploading logos. You'll wanna upload PNGs because the transparency is supported natively by Canva. If you upload a JPEG, just know that your background will always be white whatever color the background is of your logo. You'll also wanna stay away from SVGs. You can upload them, but I found that there's really not a lot of benefit to SVGs other than being sort of infinitely scalable. If your PNG is big enough, that's fine. And then your logos will always appear in your elements drawer when you go to create new designs. And I'll show you how that works. So here we have our full brand. This is our full Creative Live brand. In addition now, we have templates. If you create templates, they will show up here. There's a lot of templates that sort of come natively when you have a team account. You can always clean these out and just kind of get rid of them like this. Where you're clicking on the little arrow, and you're just removing them as a template. That way all your templates are yours, and not these predefined ones. Or you can sort of start from these and make them your own. And then your team will be able to select from any of them. So that is the brand set. Now for our second demo, let's go ahead and put this brand set into practice. Let's create some graphics. I'm gonna create a set of three social media graphics for Creative Live using our new brand set. So the first thing I'm gonna do is go to all my designs here. And gonna clean everything up so let's do three just regular Instagram posts. So in order to do that since I don't really see Instagram up here I'm going to click on the more button. And I'm gonna do a quick search for Instagram recommended, social media and there we go so Instagram here is telling me it's 1080 by 1080. I'll go ahead and click on that. And I think I want to decide right now that my version control system is . . . I'm going to have all three as different files. So that means I'll create one first and then I'll make copies of that for my different ones. So to begin, let's go ahead and pick an interesting layout I like this guy nice and simple. So here we have three pieces of text all with a couple of different fonts and sizes and then a background graphic. Now the point of these graphics are let's say we have a new Sears coming up on Canva so I wanna make sure I promote that using some really cool graphics and some stuff like that. So to begin, I want to go into my text, and I'm gonna click on any of these pieces of text, and the first thing that you'll notice is the document itself has some fonts. I wanna make sure those are my brand fonts. So for this one, I'm gonna go here. You're brand fonts automatically appear in the dropdown. And there is that lovely Proxima Nova, and I wanna click on these next two guys here. And make sure they are also my Proxima Nova. So here I wanna make. I wanna change the text a little bit so that let's say, "There's a designer in all of us." That's a very both Canva and Creative Live message. The "all of us" is hanging a little bit. I don't like how long this middle line is so I'm just gonna drag in my ear a little bit. And let's go ahead and make this a little bit bigger. The text is a little bit small so I'm gonna select all of my text. And then go up here and increase the font size. And now I'm on too many lines so let's drag that ear out. It's all about little micro changes and recenter that. Now the line height is a little bit bigger than I want so let's go and select all that text again. Go into spacing, and we're just gonna drag the slider to decrease the line height. Now I want to change this down here to say. Let's do CreativeLive.com, and I wanna add the Creative Live logo. So what I wanna do is go into my uploads section. All of your items that you're adding including your brand assets are gonna be under uploads. And here you can see I have logos, any other stuff that I upload that are not logos, and I can also make some folders if I wanted to. This is a great why to organize stuff. You can also pull in from Facebook or any of the previous items that you've made. So I want to add the Creative Live logo. It's a dark background so my design sense is telling me I want something that's light that will be easily visible. So I'm gonna take this and just drag it right in there. As you can see it makes it really big. So I'm going to scrunch it down. Another interesting trick is that if you're resizing something and you find the aspect ratio is going all crazy on you. All you have to do is hold down the shift key. So hold shift while you're dragging, and it keeps nice and stable. Alright now this looks like it's kind of. I dragged it into that background frame which I really didn't want to do. You can see that it deleted that image back there. That means I dragged it into that background frame, and it replaced that image. I didn't want to do that. Very easy to do. All you have to do is just click undo a couple of times. And you get that background image back. Now there's another way to add items instead of dragging onto your frame. You can just simply click, and it plops it right on to your screen. Alright nice simple drag, and since this is kind of a partnership here. Alright so this interesting. So this is something you may run into. Because I am dragging this, it's thinking. Canva is thinking, "Oh you want to make this the background image." I do not want to make this the background image. So how do I move this without clicking and dragging it. Well the easy way to do that is to simply nudge like we were talking about. So I'm gonna hold shift, and I'm gonna push my left arrow so that I move it into position without dragging it. That's a quick way to sort of get around that bug of dragging something when you have a big image in the background like that. So in addition to the Creative Live image, I also wanna add the Canva logo. I know I can get the Canva logo by going into elements. And the I heart Canva, and grab one of these really cool guys here. Again, I don't want to drag it into the background so I'll just put it like that. And the last thing I want to do here is. Do a little message, "Join us for our design series on Canva." I'm gonna leave that at the top. Let's adjust this a little bit. Again I'm just nudging here by pushing my left and right arrows. And I have a nice graphic. Now that image is not very creative. Although I definitely love pizza, it might not be appropriate so let me show you how to change that. In addition to uploading your logos which you did on the brand page, you can also upload images. So let me show you how to add those images to your design. One of the things you wanna make sure you do is make sure you're not on the logos tab in uploads when you're uploading images. Because then it's gonna add them and think that their logos. So instead we're gonna just click on our uploads over here. And you're gonna click on this big green button. It's gonna ask you what images you wanna upload. I have two that I've already prepared. This painter and this photographer image. And I'm just gonna go ahead and click upload, and it adds them right here. Now because I'm working in my team account, any of my team members can use this images which is really helpful. So now all I have to do is choose one of those images. And click and drag them right onto my palette. And here you can see it already applies the filters that were already on the image which was making it a little bit darker. And there I have my finished graphic. And that's our second demo for creating a Canva graphic.