Lessons

Lesson Info

Demo: Branded Pinterest Photos

So, now that we've looked at some advanced tips and tricks, let's go ahead and create some more demographics for you guys to see. So you can watch the process from start to finish. I'll go ahead and clean this up. I'm gonna close this tab. Go look in my drawer here, make sure. Let's go ahead and delete this so we're looking at anything. Another note, if you're deleting items a lot, like I am here, and you ever want some of them back, you can simply go to your trashcan here on your dashboard. It's the last one in the drawer. And here you can see, it's still generating some portfolios for all these, but a lot of these are some of the things that we worked on in this tutorial where I deleted them. If I ever wanted them to come back this is where I would go to it. You'd just click on the arrow, and you'd say, put back. So, for this next demo, we're gonna create a set of branded Pinterest posts. I'm gonna use my own logo and a couple images that I've created. And we're gonna do it from star...

t to finish. And we're gonna do it from magic resize, which I think will be fine. So the first thing I'm gonna do is just do my general design. Let's go ahead and pick something interesting like, let's just do the social graphic again. So it's a regular 800 pixel by 800 pixel. It starts us off with a blank canvas here. I'm going to add a couple elements to my brand. So let's go to my brand, which is back here on this tab. And. I'm going to, let's go ahead and delete these guys here. And I'm gonna upload another logo, another two logos actually. So I'm gonna upload a dark logo and a light logo. Great, and there they are. Now these are PNGs, because they have a transparent background to them. And I think the colors are fine. I'm not really gonna use a lot of colors for right now. And then I'm gonna go rename this. I'm gonna say DCMJS's Brand. And I'll show you how to change the fonts again. So I'm gonna go into fonts and select this here. I'm gonna go to this guy. And just choose a nice complementary font here. I'm gonna look for something. Alright, let's do. Alright, and we'll keep the body text the way it is. I really like alternating thick and thin fonts. I think it brings a nice balance to compositions. It doesn't detract too much from eyes. It's good to not have all your fonts to be really bold, or to have all them thin. It's good to have a nice little mix. So I'm gonna go to my designs. And let's go ahead and go to the social media. I'm going to start by uploading an image. So I'm gonna go to uploads here. And I have a couple images prepared. So let me just click on upload your own images. And let's do this guy here. Once it uploads it's a little bit of a bigger image. I think the general rule of thumb is to keep things under two megabytes. If you're adding some bigger images in there it might clog your system a little bit. And we'll just put that right on the stage. And I'm gonna move this just about here. So now, I'm gonna do some composition. I like that this is sort of in the left third of my design. So I'm gonna keep that. I'm not really gonna crop it to put it in the middle while keeping the left third. But then I'm realizing that I'm kinda emptying my top and bottom. No problem at all. I will actually fill that with a black shape. So I'm gonna go to Elements, Shapes, and just pull in a square. And I just want that for the top. So I'm using my anchors here to pull it out. Getting pretty close with it. It can go beyond the stage. That's totally fine. And then I know that it's over top of my image, so I'm gonna send it to back. I'm gonna use my keyboard command of command bracket, command open bracket, which sends it backwards, or on PCs it's Control. And I'm gonna go ahead and change that color to black, or dark gray. And I'm gonna duplicate this by holding down the option key. Now I have a nice top and bottom bar, and I want a little bit of text on here. So let's see. Actually, you know what? One of the great things about design is that we change our minds pretty consistently whenever we're working in a file. So I don't like this top bar. I feel like it's head's a little bit cut off. So I'm gonna change this a little bit and just pull it up here. Still keep him on that section over there. That's a little bit nicer. I wanna focus on that shirt and not his head. There we go. And the next thing I wanna do is bring in my logo. So if I go into Uploads, Logos. I'll just plop one of these guys here. These are pulling in right from that logos brand section that I had earlier. And I'll make it a good size and kinda tuck it in over there. And now I want just a little bit of a headline, something to draw my users in. So I'll go to Text, and I will add a heading. Now, one thing that I'm noticing is that it's still keeping the brand assets from the previous font set that I used, which I don't want. And that's because I haven't refreshed this page. I was working in this tab here. So that's something to note. If you're changing your brand in one tab, and you have designs open in the other tab, you'll wanna go ahead and refresh that. So I'm just gonna make sure everything saves. I'll wait a minute. I'll even force a save. And then I'll refresh. And those new fonts from that new brand should be available. And there we go. So there's my thin header font. I'll go ahead and just plop that right in there. And I'm gonna select all, and I'm gonna change the color in my style menu here. And let's use white for this, because it's kind of a dark background. And I wanna do something kind of big and bold. I wanna us to call this, let's go ahead and say, store sale this Thursday. Now, let's go ahead and make that bigger, because the text right now is just way too small. I'll select all, and I will go into there and make it bigger. And let's go ahead and put it down here. I wanna left align it. I wanna make sure that this is nice and succinct. I see great border here. I wanna make it the same height as my logo. So in order to do that, I'll probably wanna make this size a little bit smaller. And maybe one more touch here. Making sure that's probably gonna go back to where it was. That's fine. I'll go ahead and move my ear in to make it two lines. And then it's very spaced out, and I want it to be the same height as my logo. So I'm gonna adjust the line height. So I'm gonna select everything, go up into spacing, and then just pull the line height in a little bit until it's about right. And then the last thing I wanna do is right align it, because this is creating a nice box here. I wanna do the same thing over here. Again, it's all about balance. So I'm gonna go to my alignment tab and right align. And then I wanna move it to be symmetrical. There's that edge selection again, with this guy here. Get it about right. And then you'll notice I'm nudging, so I'm using my arrow tools to get to exactly where I want it to be. Now, I have a nice clean graphic. It's got some great text on it. I'm missing one thing, and that's my URL. So I want one more piece of text. I'll add a subhead. And let's go ahead and make this white, again to be on that dark background. And I want this all caps. So this is gonna say DCMJS.com. Oh, wait, it's not typing. DCMJS.com. And this is gonna be, I want this to space out a little bit just because it's a very bold font, and it's gonna be very small, and I wanna be able to make sure we see each letter. So I'm gonna go up into spacing, and letter spacing. Let's give that a little bit of space there. And then I am going to bump up the text size one bit, and then I'm gonna rotate this so that it's up on the side here. And now I have my graphic. So this is the beginning stage. I really didn't pick a size for this. It's just sort of what I first touched. But I want this to go on a couple different. I wanna make a couple different Pinterest post about this, maybe with some different colors down here in the bottom, and maybe some different texts. Let's say I have a sale two weeks from now and then one after that. So the first thing I'm gonna do is make sure this is all saved. All changes saved, very good, thank you. And then I'm gonna do a magic resize to get it to that Pinterest size. So first, I'll go up into Resize, and I'll deselect all these. Sometimes it just recommends a couple things for you. I'll deselect all those, and then I'll go into Pinterest Graphic, which I can see right off the bat, it's gonna be a very different aspect ratio than what I just created. So let's see what magic resize does. Sometimes I'm very surprised at how well it does. So with just one click it makes a new file. You can see it makes a new tab. So I have my original here. It doesn't change that at all. And here it's titled it for me, which is great. So I'm actually gonna change this. So I'll call this Sale graphic, let's say, general, because I really didn't care about the size. And this one, so here it did my Pinterest graphic. Not as good as I thought with the magic resize. No problem at all. So what I'll do is I'll rename this immediately so that I don't have to worry about it later. And I'll call this sale graphic Pinterest. Important things to note, the aspect ratio is a little bit off. Let's just go ahead and take all of these items. I'm going to shift. I'm sorry, I'm going to just drag, select, and touch all of the bottom items, and just kind of pull them straight down here to the bottom. And then I'm gonna look at my graphic, and maybe change that crop a little bit. I think it's okay if he gets supper big. Still put him a little off-center, which is nice. And then I think I want this guy to be a little bit down about there. And that's it. So all the elements were put there for me. I just had to finesse it a little bit in order to get it to exactly where I needed it to be. And what's nice is that it brings that exact same logo across, which is perfect. So I'm just nudging some stuff to make sure it's lined up right. The more time and care you take with the small elements, it actually really shows. People, even though they may not notice it, there's something about balance that's thrown off if you're not nudging things and just making sure to take that extra little finesse step to get it exactly right. So now, if I switch between the two tabs, I have the regular one and my Pinterest size. Now I wanna do a couple versions of this. I like this, but I wanna do something for the next sale. So I have two ways I can do this. I can make another file by going up here and clicking on Make A Copy. Then it'll open a new tab, and I could rename it. But I don't think I wanna go through that. I'd rather just create this all in one document. So instead of making a new file, I'm gonna have three pages in one file. And to do that I'm gonna go to my copy tool right here. And I'll hit it once, and you know what, I'll hit it one more time. So now I have three pages, and it copies everything for you. It makes everything identical. It just completely duplicates it. And I wanna change this a little bit by maybe changing this background color. Let's go ahead and pick something. Let's pick a new color. By the way, if you ever see any new colors here that you want something else or something different, go ahead and just click on this plus, and it'll add the color to your document. So let's go with a dark kinda red. I wanna match this red here. It's always a good principle to match colors to images that are being used in your file. It really brings out some colors, and makes them pop. So I'll pull this down right about to there, something close, just close to what this is. And then I'm gonna change this text here to say, be a little bit more general, store sale next week. Now, I have kind of a hanging line here. I don't really like that week is the only word on one line. Just another typographic quirk that I have. So I'm gonna bring in my ear here, and you can see it's actually making three lines out of it. This is the case where bringing in your little ear on your type box is not doing what I want it to. So I'm gonna do this by hand. I'll leave the ear out. And then I'll go ahead and manually just put a space after next. No problem. And then this final one let's do the same thing. So I'll click on this, and choose a color. I wanna do, let's flip it up. Let's do white for this one. So this bottom one will be white. That means that you can't read my text or my logo. So what I'm gonna do instead is go over here to Uploads, since I do have a dark logo in my logo section. And I'm just gonna drag it right onto the stage here. Now, I want this logo to be the exact same size. So I'll have to zoom in in order to see it. So I'm clicking my zoom tool, and I'm getting really close to here. Now, I can't see the other one 'cause it's on white, so I'm just gonna pop it up here. And you can move it so that, this is a little trick, move it so that it's aligning with the top left corner of your file below. And just drag to get it to what that size is, and move it down in the space. So now I have a dark logo. Now I need some dark text. I'm gonna click on my text box. I'm gonna select all, and I'm going to change the color. Let's go ahead and change this text to, because it is a... Whoops, I accidentally made a page. I clicked on the wrong button. So to delete this, let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit. So to delete this page that I created, we're just gonna click our trash tool right there. And let's go ahead and change this text to say. Now, you can see that I typed a little bit too much text for the width of my box. No problem at all. I'll just grab my little ear and move it over. I think that looks great. Keep the image there. And now I have three Pinterest graphics. So let's go ahead and save these out. Now, Pinterest is not a kind of account that you can link to Canva in order to get things directly into it. So I'm gonna have to download these as PNG files. To do that I'm gonna go to my download button, and I'll download with PNGs. And now, it's telling me something that's really important. If you're gonna download PNGs in a Canva file that has multiple pages, it's gonna make a zip file out of it. That's no problem. That's exactly what I'm looking for. And then you can also select the pages that you want. So let's say, I only liked those first two. That white one was cool, but it's not really for me, at least not yet. So I'm just gonna do one through two. And I don't really care if it's transparent background because it's a rectangular file. So I'm gonna leave that unchecked. And then I'll go ahead and click Download. And then it is preparing my file. Let's go ahead and look at those files, see what they look like. So here, it's downloaded Sale graphic-Pinterest, which is exactly what I named it. And if I open that up, it's gonna have both of my Pinterest graphics sized exactly how I need them. Now, this is an interesting thing to know, and it might be a little bit of change in your workflow from the current design programs that you're using, but Canva does not have a native file type. What does that mean? Well, Illustrator has an AI file. Photoshop has a PSD file. Even PowerPoint has that PPT file. There are not Canva files that you're gonna be downloading. And that's really important because it affects your workflow. That means that everything that you do in Canva is gonna remain in Canva there online. It's all entirely Cloud based. The only things that you're gonna be downloading, the only actual files that you can send around, or upload, or do whatever with, are gonna be the ones that you're gonna do from this download button. It's not a horrible thing. It's actually a good feature about working in the Cloud, because everything you do is gonna be maintained here. But that means that you're gonna have to be diligent with your organization in folders, which we talked about earlier. So after I've done these great graphics, I wanna go ahead and make sure that I do some post production to this by closing this file here, a little bit of clean up work, closing that file here. I'm gonna refresh my browser so that I can see everything. And here are my two files. Here's the Pinterest one, and here's the general one. So I'll go ahead and add a new folder, and I'm gonna call this DCMJS Sale Graphics. And load these guys in here. And I can see the folder that they're contained in. And now, no matter how many hundreds of things that I create in here, I can always go to this folder and see just those sale graphics, which is really, really helpful. And you can even set a description for the folder. So I can say, use these for, say, March through July only. And that's it. There's our first set of Pinterest graphics that we created using Canva. So, now that we've created some Pinterest, some social graphics, let's try a print graphic. I think this will be really interesting to show you this workflow as opposed to the digital ones. So I'm gonna keep these in here, and go to all of my designs. And here you can see the thumbnails have rendered. They look beautiful. It lets me know exactly the size, and what's gonna be in these. But I wanna create a really awesome poster for this sale. So what I'm gonna do is first go into the poster. And here I can see that the poster size that they're going to give me is 18 by 24. I have a printer lined up, let's say, and I wanna print something even bigger than that. I wanna do 24 by 36. Well, this is the case where we're go ahead and use the custom dimensions. So I'll click on use custom dimensions, and it's gonna ask me what I want the height and width to be. So I'm gonna change this to inches. And I'm gonna say the width is gonna be 24, and the height is 36, a nice big poster. And then I'm gonna click Design. Great, so I have my poster layout here. It's suggesting some layouts for me. So interesting thing to note, because Canva does not have any layouts of this aspect ratio, instead of giving me those pre-designed layouts, it's giving me these grids, which is interesting. I can go into my team templates if I had some, or I could go back to any of my designs, which is really great. So I wanna use all the elements from that first Pinterest post, but I didn't wanna have to go back in and add everything. So here, I can just click All My Designs and go there. And if you have a lot of stiff in all your designs, then you can go to those individual folders, and all that right there. Interesting thing to note, because that Pinterest graphic file had three items in it, it's telling me, okay, you have three pages here. So if you drag something, it might drag all three of them. If I drag it in here, it drags the first one. And I can pick any of these that I wanted to. I like this first one. I really like the dark background. So I think I'm gonna keep that. So, for this poster, I wanna do something a little more graphic. I like, this mock-up's really cool and everything, but I don't want it to be the hero of my design. I want something a little more abstract. So what I'm gonna do is take this design and just shrink it down to something that's still a little bit more of a featured image, but let's go ahead and put it right over here. And then I wanna take this background color that I had, this dark gray, and I wanna make this the entire thing. So you'll notice that as I stretch it up, it goes over my image. That's because it was on top. So what I'm gonna do is send that backwards. There's two ways to do that. The first is through clicking Arrange, and clicking Forwards or Backwards. And the second is to use the key commands, which there's a little cheat code right here. Command, or Control on PC, and the brackets. So I'm just gonna tap that a couple times and send it all the way back. Now, because I love alignment, I love things matching up, I like this text here, and I want it to align with this image. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and click on all this, and I'll just increase the size just a little bit to say, let's do that. You can see it's a little bit too big for the text box, so I'm gonna drag my ears opened, and pull it right down here. Now, it's not quite exact if I zoom in. Because I'm designing a poster, people are gonna be looking at this both from far away and up close. So I wanna make sure that this image is the same size. So I'm just gonna pull it down. Let's go like that in order to get it lined up. Now, I'm noticing that it's not exact. So I'm gonna nudge it up so that it's exactly even with this D, and then I'm gonna cheat it a little bit by holding shift. Again, holding shift adjusts the aspect ratio. Now, you wanna be very careful when you do stuff like this in design, because even though, yes, I'm making it so that it fits whatever it is I wanna fit, I'm also changing the image. And if you have things like humans or something in there that needs to be a certain aspect ratio, you wanna be careful not to change that too much, otherwise, you're gonna throw that off, and people are gonna look like they're in a fun house mirror. So I'm gonna move my text so that it's and even. Let's say right over here. And I'm gonna go ahead and zoom back out so I can see everything. Alright, so my design is started. I'm gonna move this down a little bit just so it's on the lower third of the page, 'cause I have some cool stuff that I'm gonna stick up above it. So it's a poster, right? So it's gonna be very big. My logo doesn't need to be this big. So I'm gonna shrink it down just a little bit, because I need room to play with some stuff. And then I'm going to take this text. This text is gonna become my hero. So I'm gonna move this up here. And since I'm moving these two elements quite a bit, this image and this text, I'm gonna go ahead and group them, because I envision myself kinda fiddling around with it a little bit more. So I'm gonna click on both of those items. Again, to select both of them, I can either shift click like this. I'm sorry, I can either click and drag like this, or I can click on each individual item, and then hit group. And then now, if I move one it moves both of them. Let's put this right about there. And I'm gonna take my text. I want this to be really big. So let's go ahead and bump it up. It's too big for it's width, so I'll go ahead and move it over here. And then the last thing I wanna do is fix the alignment. So I'll go up in my alignment tab and left align, and make it bigger so that, that's about right. And put it right there. So that's the beginnings of my poster, but I wanna add some more cool elements. So I have some things prepared. I'm gonna go ahead and show you some of the graphics. Great, so I am using the shapes that are on this guy's shirt here that I designed. I wanna pull those in as separate graphic elements, and really make this poster pop with some color and shapes. I can drag and drop elements. I'll just select all these cool shapes. And you notice that that changes there in the background. Let me show you what it says. I'll move this to the side. See that little upload button. It automatically knows that you're gonna wanna upload these images. Now, I had these named appropriately. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to change them later. So here you can see it's uploading every single one of those as individual shapes, which is great. Let's go back into full screen mode here. And let's do some cool stuff with these. So let's start by just kinda clicking a few of 'em on the stage. Let's make this one a little bit bigger. I really love the red. Just get some of the shapes in here as kinda abstract. Pop it in there. Maybe it's not all of them. Maybe it's just a couple. And maybe they even overlap a little bit. Let's make this one a little bit smaller 'cause it's pretty complex. That is super cool. And one more. Get this one around the logo. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to balance the composition a little bit and make sure that there's no one part of the page that's weighted a little bit more than the other, making sure that your eye is still drawn to that text. So I want this to be the main focus, but I also wanna give the viewer something kinda cool to look at. I like this guy here. I actually think it's kinda cool going over a little bit over this, but I want this to be in front. However, I do not want the image to be in front. So what I'm gonna wanna do is un-group this, and then select the one element that I want in front, and go ahead and arrange forward so that it is in front of that line so it can be easily read. And let's go ahead and make this even bigger. I love it, nice and bold. The line height is a little wide, so I'm gonna adjust the line height a bit. I'm going to click on my element, select all, and spacing, decrease the line height a bit, and just nudge it. And then we have our super awesome poster. Now, once I've designed my item, first thing I wanna do is I forgot to name it. So I wanna make sure I name it appropriately. So it's gonna be Store sale, let's call it, poster. And because I made it a custom size, I wanna make sure that I remind myself of that custom size. So I'm gonna just say 24 by 36. Again, the more diligent you are with your naming, the easier it's gonna be to find this stuff later. And then I want to order a print. So I'll click on Order Print. And I'll make it. It's not the poster size that's in here. So if I click on 12 by 16, let's see what it does. I'm gonna save this file for later. So you'll notice that it changed it a little bit. So what I want to do is, let's actually go ahead and cancel that, and see if I can go back. So I'll just go back. The print feature here is not offering me the size that I want. So what I wanna do is download this so that my printer can take care of this and print it for me. So instead of doing Order Prints, I'm gonna do Download, and I'm gonna click PDF Print. And I want it with crop marks and bleeds. And bleeds is important. Before I click this, let's go back. This background color, I want it to bleed out, which means that when I print it it's gonna print right to the edge, and then a printer's gonna trim it. So I'll actually pull it out wider than the file itself. And that means when I download, and I do it as a print file, and I do crops and bleeds, and I click Download, it's gonna save it out for me in a file that is a PDF. It's very high print quality, and it's gonna have crops and bleeds. So there, I just downloaded it. It asks me to invite some team members. Thanks, not quite yet. And then let's take a look at that PDF. Beautiful, so nice and high res. Here you can see the crops and bleeds. Let's zoom in on that, and I'll show that to you. So here up in the corner, those marks, a printer's gonna know where those are gonna be to cut that from. And I have my nice, beautiful poster. So, in summery, we looked at some advanced tips and tricks. We designed some Pinterest graphics using the magic resize tool, very efficient and quick. And we designed a print piece as well. So it's not just web based graphics. So, in summary, Canva is a great, great tool for being able to open up design to people who may not have a lot of design skills who wanna learn more about it. It's something that you can use to work with your clients, if you're a designer. Or if you own a business, it's something that you can have many designers all on your Canva team to work with your same assets. It allows you to consolidate and disseminate your brand in a very concise way so that everything looks the same, and it enhances your brand personality.