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
Saving Files in Canva
Now let's talk about saving files. You've created these beautiful designs, you have everything you need in here to communicate what you want to. How do you get that off of Canva, and where they need to be? The first way that you can share files is, by going up here to the share button, in the top of your banner. And this is a way to share the actual design, the Canva designed files with the people who may need to either review them, or make edits. It's also a great way to share with your team, if you're a Canva for work user. In order to share, we can do this in a couple of ways. We can either add people's email addresses, and we can then designate whether they can edit, or just view. And we can share via link. I'm focusing on these two first because they do sort of the same thing, although one is just emailing, sending the email for you, whereas one is creating the link. What these two versions of sharing do is, they share the design file. Which means that the person who's receiving t...
hem needs to have a Canva account in order to look at them and edit them. That's a little bit different than sharing via social, where you're actually kind of downloading the file. So in addition to sharing with people, we're sharing via link. You can also share with social accounts that you've linked to your Canva account. This is a great way to get designs directly from Canva, to where they need to go on the platforms. And then finally, you can embed. Now, an interesting thing to note, this is a great way to show a Canva file that you may need to change a little bit later. It basically creates a live link to the graphic, so that if you change the graphic, you would change this. Lemme show you how that works. First thing you'll want to do is make the design public, you can either do that there, or you could've done it up here in this little toggle. So I can make it public, or I can publish it as a template. And we'll get into that a little bit later when we go to the advanced stuff. I can do this, I have this option because this account that I'm in is a Canva for work account. And that means that when I publish it as a template, other designers who have been shared, who this file has been shared with, can then edit this, and start their own based on what I've created. So I've made it public, and I'm going to go ahead and share it via embed, and here it gives me some HTML. So you're going to be doing a couple things, this is for a little bit more advanced users who are going to be putting in dibs and embedding these graphics into either their webpage, or their WordPress or Medium pages, so that the links are all active, and all that cool interactive stuff that we can create in there comes alive. You can also download the file, and share it yourself in your social media profiles. To do that, we're going to click on download, and it's going to give us a couple of options. Now let's review these really quick. PNG is going to be your standard recommended option. A PNG file has almost no compression to it, like a JPG, so it's going to stay very sharp and clear to the resolution that it's already set. It's also going to be able to be transparent, which is something that you can do if you have a Canva for work account, which means that anything that doesn't, that is this white background here in my file, that's going to end up being transparent, which could be cool for embedding this in a webpage, or anything else. In addition to PNG, we also have a JPG file. Now JPG is a little bit different because it adds a level of compression, which means that things are not going to be as sharp, but the file size is going to be a little bit smaller. It's a trade-off there, between quality and file size. JPG do not support transparency, so you won't get that option to click the cheque box below it. In addition to PNG and JPG, we also have PDFs. There's two types of PDF that we can save our file as, and there's a very specific reason, you're going to want to save a PDF instead of a PNG and JPG. And that's because PDF support vector graphics, meaning that they are crisp at any resolution. So if I select a PDF standard, that means that my images are going to be compressed a little bit, but anything including text, or my icons, or my illustrations, any of the stuff that I pulled in from Canva, that's all going to be really crisp and clear no matter how I print it. In order to bump up that image quality, I can select PDF print, which means that... This is great for creating, say a multi-page document, or a flier that I'm going to be sending to a printer. I can include crop marks and bleeds, that's really helpful for images that go beyond your page size, so that printers can cut them accordingly. And this also means that my images are going to be a little bit higher resolution as I save it out. And the final way to do this is, as an animated GIF or movie. This is still experimental, so use this with caution. This isn't really something that I've explored a lot, Canvas is still working on it. I'm really excited to see what they come up with. But I imagine it's going to be something where you can select multiple pages of your graphic, and it'll create a bit of animation for you. Let's go ahead and see what that does if I preview it. So here, it's preparing my design, and you see that? It's really cool. It makes all of the elements kind of come in on their own, and then I can save that out as either movie, which will be a MP4 file, or download it as a GIF. It's just a nice way to bring a little bit of pop to your designs, if you're going to be putting them on Twitter. And it's great to draw attention if you're doing some sort of marketing to get eyes on your designs. Let's talk a little bit about, the public versus private. If you make a design private, that doesn't mean that you can't download it. You can still always save it for your own, but it does mean that you can't embed it anymore, and it also means that you can't share it with your team. This is something that you're just working on it, no else can see. Most of the time you're going to make stuff public because you want to be able to share it with your team or embed it. And then you can also publish it as a template. Templates are great, let me show you what happens if you do that. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this toggle here, and I'm going to save my changes. And then I'm going to go back and create a new design, and show you what that looks like. So I'm going to refresh my Dashboard. Here you can see there's that graphic, and this little icon here in the corner means that it's been shared with my team, so it's a public template. And I'm going to create a new design. Let's say a new web banner, and not only will I be able to do this, but any of my team will be able to go over here to the layouts, and I can see my team templates. This is a Canva for work feature, and there's that design that I just created. That means that anyone can start from this design. This is great if you're working with a brand where you have lots of different graphics that you've put together and you want to be able to reuse very quickly, or change out an image, or a piece of text, but keep everything else the same. So here you can see I can manipulate stuff, change it around. And if I mess up, and like just make stuff crazy, I can always still just replace my content by clicking on that template that I chose originally. And I can either say replace what I did, or don't replace. In this case, I really messed up, I dragged some stuff around, so I want to replace, and it puts you right back the way it was.
Ratings and Reviews
Tomas Verver
Good overview, essentials of Canva.
Tomas Verver
Good overview, essentials of Canva.