Lessons

Lesson Info

Interface Tips

So, let's talk about some interface tips that we didn't cover in the basics course. Here we're gonna start with keyboard shortcuts. These are some really great time savers in order to help you manipulate objects on your stage and save files really quickly. The keyboard shortcuts come in a file. It's actually from Canva and it's being provided with this course. I'll show you what it looks like here. So, we have a lot of different things that the arrows can do, such as moving elements, deleting things, copying things. There's some great text shortcuts. It's really helpful to select a couple of these, really master them, and it makes your workflow really much more efficient. There's things like resizing things in a different way, holding Shift to adjust the proportions, the aspect ratio of things. And then also sending things forward or back. It's really great to be able to quickly arrange things in your document. So definitely check out this file. It's a really great tool to have as you'...

re working through Canva. I want to show you some other things that will help you. One thing as a designer that I like to put in practice is a system of version control. There's a couple ways to do version control in Canva. Version control at its core is the ability to organize and control different variations of a file, let's say for edits or things like that. We want to make sure that we try to keep as many versions as possible. The first way to do version control in Canva is to simply overwrite your file. Let's say I start with a graphic and here we'll do just a simple social graphic for this purpose. And, I'll just start by choosing one of these guys here, like a pizza night. Now, when I go back to my, let's go ahead and force a save by clicking File and then Save. Even though it usually saves automatically, I just want to make sure that it saves right when I click something. Then let's go back to my dashboard here and here you can see, there's that copy of that beginner's challenge that is automatically added there. Let's get rid of that. And here you can see the social media graphic that I just created. Now, it takes a little bit of time for Canva to generate a preview of your design, so be patient, it will show up in this gray area, and then you'll be able to preview all of your different designs. You can also change the title from here as well which I don't think I mentioned before, and you can do some other things like make a copy and move it to the trash. Making a copy is the first type of version control that we have, and what we'll want to do is make sure that we are naming our files properly if we're gonna use copying to control the versions. So let's say I create a version to show to a client, and I call this, Pizza Party, and I'll want to do something like version one or add a date to it. There's lot of different ways to name a file in order to make it distinct from other ones. For this purpose I'll just do v1. Now, when I go to make a copy of this, so I can click on it to open it up, and let's say I want to change these colors around a little bit. So instead of red, I want to just go with plain old black. So like we did before, I'll click on black and I want to make that a global change across the board, so it's asking me, do you want to change all reds to blacks? Yes, please. Now from here, I'm going to, I want to save this but I want to keep that red one, because I want to be able to show the client both of these. So what I'll do is go into File, and I'll do Make a copy, and what that does is it opens a new tab, and it's that black one. And then what I can do is just go ahead and close this one out. Now it's gonna be named differently, so I'll want to go back over here to my dashboard and reload, and I'll be able to see both of them in here. So here it says Copy of Pizza Party one. That's good that it tells me that that's the different one, but I want to be a little bit more distinct in my naming, so I'm gonna change this name to, let's go ahead and make sure it's closed over here. I'll call this Pizza Party v2. So this is the first type of version control that you can do inside of Canva. Now, remember you're not downloading these and keeping them on your hard drive or anything like that, so these files are all living in your dashboard. So it's really helpful to be able to organize these. Now another organization principle that we can use, that we can take advantage of, is our folders. So I'm going to add a folder, and I'm gonna call it Pizza Party Flyer. And I can take both of these designs and simply drag them and add them to the Pizza Party folder. Now I can see here that both of these are added to the folder called Pizza Party Flyer. That's one type of version control. There is another type of version control that comes into play when you're working in a single file. Let's go back to this, and instead of doing v two, I'll just move this to trash, I'm just gonna call this Pizza Party, because let's say I have a whole lot of other files in here in this Pizza Party folder. And I want to work with a variation just in this file. Well we can do that by using the pages. If you're working with a design that has a single page, say a single Facebook graphic or Instagram post, or even a flyer or a postcard, you can go into that file and create another page that has the version below it. So here's my black version, I want that red version back, so all I have to do is click this little icon over here which is our copy button. That makes a new page right below, and on this page, I can go ahead and click on the black, and change that. Now interesting thing to note, when you do global changes like this, is that it affects the entire document, so that's one thing to consider if you're gonna do version control, or various versions inside of the same Canva file, is that the global changes are truly global. So here we can see, it affected everything, but I don't want to affect everything. I just want red on this, so what I'm gonna do is select those red elements, or I'm sorry, those black elements, just like this. And make each one of them red. So there's plus and minuses to doing version control each different way. One other thing to note is that if you're doing undos, trying to go back to different versions of your file, they are limited, meaning that you only have a certain number of steps. From what I've found it's anywhere from like 20 to 25 steps backwards in your history. You don't want to go too far back, because then it starts getting a little messy. So if you're messing up, try to undo very quickly, or create new versions of your files, either using this method where you're doing it inside of the document, or you're making separate documents and naming them properly, in order to keep the number of undos to a minimum. We also have some tool tips that I wanted to go over. The first one is the copy and paste placement across pages. This is really cool, so if I copy an element by just clicking on it here and doing the Command + C option, if I go to a different page and I do Command + V, then it's pasting it in place based on what the previous, where it was in the previous page, which is really cool. So it's doing the calculations for you and it's putting it exactly where you need it to go. That does not happen if I just hit the Copy button. It actually offsets it by a couple pixels, and then if I were to move this, I would have to try to find exactly, I could line it up based on something previously there, but if this guy wasn't there, and I wanted to put this exactly where the top one was, I'd have to kind of eyeball it, but I really don't want to do that. I want it to be exactly where I want it to be, and that's a great way to do it, is to Command + Z, or Control on a PC. And then on your next page, Control + V and it goes exactly where it was on the previous page. Another great tip for working on your canvas is the multiple select tool. The way the multiple select tool works in Canva is a click and a drag. And here you can see, it's actually, the version of this click and drag select is what you call, it's called touch select. Meaning that even if I just barely touch an element, it's going to select it. This is a little bit different than what PowerPoint does, where you have to completely engulf an item with your drag in order to select it. With Canva, all you have to do is barely touch the edge of an item and you've selected it along with everything else. You'll notice that I'm not selecting the background, and that's because that the background is being set via the Background drawer. This means that I can select to my heart's content and I'll never have to worry about messing with that background item. However I can always click on that background item to change the color or the position, the size, anything like that. But Canva is treating it a little bit differently than my other elements in order to give me that freedom of being able to multiple select things. Or, just click in general, and it selects the background. One other great interface tip for Canva is the ability to group different items. Let's say for instance I have all of these circles around my page, and I want to be able to move them together or rotate them, or do whatever I want. One great way to do that is to group them. So what I can do is Shift + Drag in order to select the ones that I want, and then if there are some that are outside of your drag, you can always hold down Shift again, and it ends up getting all of the ones that you want to grab. So here I'll Shift + Click one more time, and now I have all of my circles selected using the Shift key. And what I can do is go up here and there's a Group button that appears when you select multiple items. Just simply click the Group button and now every time you click on these guys, you're actually clicking on all of them. So you can use that to take the entire group and rotate it. You get your anchors just like you would with any other element. It becomes basically a solid element. And then if you want to, you can edit individual items by clicking inside of the group, and you can ungroup the entire thing if you want to as well. The last interface tip that I wanted to talk about is nudging on the screen. This is a great way to get things positioned exactly where you want, if you're maybe not that great with your mouse or your touch pad, and you want to make sure things are exact. To nudge, all we have to do is use our arrow keys to go left and right, and up and down, and it moves it by single pixels. If I want to nudge a little bit farther than that, let's say I want to move it farther away, and I don't want to keep clicking the right arrow. All I have to do is hold down Shift and then it will nudge things in increments of 10 pixels. This is really great to get things exactly where you want. If I want this just touching the I let's say, just like that. I'll show you another great example of the detail that you can get, so if I want to copy this, and then rotate if I want a second slice of pizza here. And, it's close but I want it even closer. I can use my nudge to get it just right.