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
Demo: Super Simple Starter Design
Let's go ahead and dive in and create something. This is gonna be our first Canva design. So we're gonna start from scratch. I'm actually gonna get rid of this so you can see how we do this from the very beginning, as you would by creating a new account. So I'm here at my stage, I wanna create something really cool. The scenario that we're gonna use is my son's birthday is coming up soon, so I wanna create a graphic that I'm gonna share on Facebook with my friends and community about his birthday party. It's gonna be a really fun event, and I wanna represent that in the visuals of my design and make sure people wanna come so they RSVP, they have the right information. Canva is the perfect tool for that. Especially if I'm starting from scratch, I really don't have a lot of design background. This is what I'm gonna do. So we're gonna start by creating a social graphic. I know that it's gonna be something that I put on Facebook, so I wanna choose a Facebook graphic. So I'm gonna click on ...
this more button over here, what that allows me to do is choose from a wide variety of sizes for my graphic. And the one that I wanna create is gonna be the Facebook graphic, so I'm gonna type in Facebook here. And it's gonna give me a couple different options. It's not really an ad, it's not really a cover photo, it's just a Facebook post. So I'm gonna click on that guy. It's gonna open up a new tab here, and I can go ahead and start my design. In case I wanted to know, a Facebook post is 940 by 788, which is interesting to know. And I have my blank stage here. Now I wanna create a graphic, and I wanna start from scratch, so what I'm gonna do is over here in the layouts drawer, I'm gonna click on the search bar and I'm just gonna type in birthday and see what comes up. Cool, I got some graphics, some photos, but I really want a layout. So let's go to the layout here and it automatically has started creating some birthday graphics for me. So let's see, I want something for a kid. Oh I think I saw something. Great, so I really like this one. Even though it doesn't say birthday, I know that I can always change that text to whatever I want. But I really like the colors of it, I think I'm gonna keep those colors. And I like the layout, it's got a really good emphasis on that birthday, it's got the really great colors at the top. So all I have to do is either click on it or drag it to my canvas, and it goes right over and I'm ready to start changing this to what I need. Now the very first thing I wanna do, is manipulate this text to say happy birthday to my son. So I'm just gonna click on it. It's gonna give me the cursor here. See? Now it's a little too big. As I'm typing I'm realizing that what I'm doing is outside of the boundaries of my stage. So before I'm complete typing here, I'm just gonna select all of this text here by clicking and dragging, and then I'm gonna change the size here. I can see it's really big, it's 144 point. So I'm gonna bump that down, I'm gonna make it like half of that, just to see how it looks. That's a little bit better. And then I'm going to actually create another piece of text behind it. I'm gonna move this down here by edge selecting to make some space, and I really like this font, and I like the color too so I wanna keep those. I'm gonna duplicate this element. And I'm gonna do copy in order to make another one. Now when I duplicate something, it offset it a little bit. As you can see, this graphic and the one behind it are a little bit off, I'm just gonna drag it to move it back to center. Here you see it's giving me a lot of different guides. It's giving me a guide on the left, on the right, on the center. I can tell that it's a little bit off here so I'm just gonna drag these all the way here to make sure it's absolutely center. As a designer, that's one of those little things that my OCD kicks in and I absolutely have to make everything centered. And then finally I'm gonna change this text to say his name. And I'm gonna say hi buddy, hi Clark. I hope he's watching. And I'm gonna change that color to give it a little more pop. Here I can choose one of the document colors. I'll make it that light color. Oh here you can see I didn't select there. There we go. So now I have Happy Birthday and Clark, I will move this all up to there to get it out of the way because I wanna make another text box below that with some RSVP information. So since it's a Facebook post, I'm gonna keep it really simple and I'm just gonna say comment on this post to RSVP. So I'm gonna take the text down here. It's a little spaced out, so let's see how it looks if I just go ahead and start typing what I need. Great so two things to note, one it's a little bit low. So I'm gonna just edge select and move it up. And then I'm also going to make it a little bit bigger because I don't think this is very visible. So I'm gonna select all the text here, another quick keyboard command to select all is Command+A or Ctrl+A in PC. And I'm gonna increase the size to let's say 24 point. That a little bit better. Now this, I do love spaced text, but this is a little bit too spaced for me, in terms of the letter spacing, so I'm gonna bring that in a little bit. Remember we're gonna go up to our style bar, to spacing, and here the letter spacing is set to about 670. I wanna pull that back, let's say, keep it a little bit spaced to 320. That's a good, for this at least, a good space between the letters. Now another thing that I wanna change is that word RSVP is kinda hanging there down at the bottom. And I wanna knock down some other words. In order to do that, remember I'm gonna click on my ears over here, and just draw it in so that it adjusts the line break. And then I'm gonna reposition this, get my nice little markers there. And that's it. Now I wanna change one of the colors here. That yellow is nice, but I wanna make it a little bit brighter. Again, a great way to do that is to select on any element that is yellow, either my text or any of these balloons. You'll notice that when Canva created this template, they made each element separate, which is great for us. And I'm gonna click on the yellow and I'm gonna change it to an even brighter yellow, let's go way bright, like that. And there we go. Now it's gonna ask me, do you wanna change all of it? And I certainly do. Now it's just a little brighter, but I think it works a little bit better. And there is our first super simple Canva graphic. To recap in this first segment, we were introduced to your Canva account, we talked about the basics of the Canva interface. We talked about the dashboard page, and the stage where you're gonna be manipulating things. We talked about the various elements that you can add to your design and we talked about the layouts, starting from something that is already great, and they're prepared for you. In the next lesson we're going to get in a little bit more to some basic design principles and we're gonna do some more samples, creating some more great stuff in Canva.
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