Canva for Music Creators: A Beginner’s Guide to Song and Album Artwork | Curtiss King | Skillshare
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Canva for Music Creators: A Beginner’s Guide to Song and Album Artwork

teacher avatar Curtiss King, DIY Musician, Author, & YouTuber

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:04

    • 2.

      A Tour of Canva Desktop

      4:35

    • 3.

      Navigating Canva's Image Editor

      10:11

    • 4.

      Class Project

      0:33

    • 5.

      Understanding Color and Font Psychology

      4:27

    • 6.

      Designing Your Music Artwork

      8:40

    • 7.

      Creating Promo Assets For Social Media

      3:33

    • 8.

      How to Export Your Artwork In Canva

      1:13

    • 9.

      Quick Tips and Final Thoughts

      1:13

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About This Class

Are you an independent musician struggling to create eye-catching song or album artwork? Whether you're promoting your latest single or launching a new project, professional-quality visuals can help your music stand out and connect with your audience. In this beginner-friendly course, you’ll learn how to use Canva Desktop to design stunning artwork—all without the need for expensive software or prior design experience.

I’m Curtiss King, an independent artist, producer, and creative entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in the music industry. As someone who has built a successful career by doing it myself, I’m passionate about teaching artists like you how to elevate your brand and take ownership of your creative vision.

In this course, you’ll:

  • Take a guided tour of Canva’s dashboard and image editor.
  • Learn the fundamentals of color and font psychology to create impactful designs.
  • Get hands-on with designing custom artwork for your music.
  • Discover how to export your designs for professional use.
  • Walk away with quick tips and insider tricks for creating standout visuals.

By the end of this class, you’ll not only understand Canva’s essential tools but also feel confident in your ability to create artwork that represents your music and brand authentically.

This class is perfect for independent musicians, DIY artists, and anyone new to Canva who wants to design their own music artwork. All you need to get started is a computer, internet access, and a willingness to unleash your creativity!

Let’s bring your music to life visually—see you in the first lesson!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Curtiss King

DIY Musician, Author, & YouTuber

Teacher

As an independent artist, music producer, and author, I've dedicated my career to empowering do it yourself creators just like you. With over 20 years of industry experience, I've built a name not only through my music but also by sharing my journey on my YouTube channel, CurtissKingTV, where I've connected with a community of over 300,000 aspiring artists and producers. I'm also the author of The Prosperous Hip Hop Producer, a guide that's helped countless producers find financial and creative success in their craft.

I bring real-world insights from my hands-on experiences as an independent artist, from selling music directly to my fans to navigating the complexities of the modern music industry without relying on traditional streaming platforms. My courses are designed to equip... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: DIY is an independent artist. Have you ever wanted to create eye catching artwork for your music without needing expensive software? In this class, I'm going to show you how to unleash the creative power of Canva, an inexpensive and powerful tool that I personally use to make professional visuals. By the way, I'm Curtis King, an independent artist, music producer, author, and YouTuber of the channel Curtis King TV. Over 20 years as an independent creative, I've built my career as a successful DIY, do it yourself, independent artist and music producer by finding success on my own terms. And as an artist myself, I know what it feels like to put the responsibility of artwork and design in the hands of a graphic designer that doesn't deliver. This is why I'm passionate about helping independent creatives like yourself do it yourself. Thing that I've learned in my experience is that your visual presentation is just as important as the music itself. By the end of this class, you'll be able to design single song artwork that truly represents your musical style. Whether you're a complete beginner or someone who's dabbled in design before, this class is for you. I'm super excited about teaching this class because once you learn the skills that I'm getting ready to teach you, you will have full control over how your music is presented to the world. And this class is perfect for independent artists and creatives that want to make a memorable impact with their visuals. Course, we'll go step by step. I'll walk you through everything from how to use Canvas tools to how to create your own custom design for your single art or your album artwork. And the best part to me is that you don't need any prior designing experience to get through this course. We'll cover color psychology, typography, psychology, and how to apply that when making decisions about the artwork for your music. All you really need is a computer or laptop or your phone in order to access Canva. For the class project, I'll be requiring you to make artwork for a single song that best represents your style and your sound. And honestly, I can't wait to see what you come up with. With that said, let's get started on taking your visuals to the next level. I'll see you in Lesson one. 2. A Tour of Canva Desktop: In Lesson one, I'm going to take you on a tour of Canva. I'm going to show you the tools that I use. I'm going to show you how to navigate it. But in order for us to do that, I need you to download the Canva Desktop App. Now, I'm a Windows user, so I have downloaded the Windows version. There is a Mac OS version. There's also a version that you can use for your smartphone. What you'll be seeing for the majority of this course will be for the desktop app. There's so many features that are so much easier to navigate when you download. Once you download the Canva desktop app, this is what the dashboard is going to look like. The only thing that's going to be missing is recent designs unless you've already signed up for Canva. The Canva account that I have is the one that you pay $12 a month for. I use it because it gives me full access to any and every tool that is necessary to what I do. If you're just getting started and you're curious about Canva, it may not be a necessity, but it is something I wanted to. Things first, you'll see on the left side, you have a few different windows that you can click through on Canva. We're going to start here on the Home tab, and as you can see, the Home tab has a variety of options to choose from. This is where you're probably going to spend the majority of your time. Here at the top, you'll see that it even gives you options of what type of artwork you may want to create. By clicking on these, it'll navigate to a new window, and it'll give you further options to dig into that we're going to talk about here in just a second. As you create designs, you're going to also see your recent designs fall down here. There's even a convenient recent designs tab here that you can easily open up new windows and navigate through. Next up is the projects tab. Here you're going to see a more extensive breakdown and list of the designs and even sub folders that you can create that will include the important assets that you'll use from every single piece of artwork, whether it's your logo, specific photos that you may use. This is where you're going to organize things if you choose to do so. Here is where you're going to find images that you upload. Don't need to be concerned about this one because we're going to find this when we actually edit an actual photo, and I show you some of the options that are available. Canva, you also have the ability to upload videos, and as you can imagine, in combination with their templates, this can create some really cool designs. Next tab is the templates. In the Templates tab, this is where you're going to navigate what I believe makes Canva so different from other platforms. One of my biggest challenge as an independent artist was finding a graphic designer that had the ability to create professional artwork in different categories. What Canva has done with this templates tab is brought together some of the best graphic designers from around the world and had them create templates for different scenarios, artwork for songs, art albums, artwork for banners, fliers, whatever you can think of, you'll find that here in the templates. With these being made by graphic designers, they have already gone through the process of picking the right fonts, picking the right colors that all reflect a very specific message. Next, brand. Now, this brand tab comes with the premium account that you pay up to at this moment in time, I believe it's $13 a month. This is where you can organize assets of your brands. It says here, introducing your brand, easily set up, manage, and grow your brand with all of your ingredients, assets, controls, and workflows in one place. Replace logos, images across existing designs in just a few clicks. Find all of your brand assets and templates from One place in the editor. I've seen a lot of people use this in order to save time. I rarely use it, but I at least want to make sure that you've been exposed to it. This is an awesome place for you to upload. All of your logo designs to one place, assign brand colors, assign brand fonts, and even assign a brand voice for those of you that are AI enthusiasts. Next tab is the Apps tab. Inside here, what you're going to find are additional apps, additional tools that help you do some very specific things. For instance, you can add effects like a liquefy effect to your photos. You can convert low quality videos into stunning HD with the help of AI. You can even integrate and quickly add your artwork that you make inside here into some of your other programs like Dropbox. Last but not least, you have this dream lab tab, which is a newer tab that allows you to generate AI images just from a single prompt. Of all the AI image generating tools that are out there right now, this is just yet another that you can use to experiment with. 3. Navigating Canva's Image Editor: Okay, now that we've seen these main tabs, let's navigate here to where we're going to spend most of our time, which is the dashboard and Home tab. Since we're probably going to be spending most of our time in this class, creating square artwork for singles and for albums, why don't we start first by creating a custom size artwork just so you can see some of the tools that are internally once you start to create. Going to go over here to the top and go to custom size. Now, of course, most of the artwork that we create for our music is going to be in a square format. And most of the distributors that we use are going to require us to use 3,000 by 3,000 as our measurement. Let's go ahead and create that design. Whenever you create a new design, this is where you're going to go ahead and title it. Let's just call this single artwork. Once you're inside your new artwork, you're going to see there's a ton of new tabs that weren't available before. The first one being the template tab, and this is going to be a quicker way for you to navigate through a lot of those templates that you saw before. Now, based upon the template or the size that you choose, Canva usually creates templates that are made specifically for that size, and they assume what type of artwork you're making. Since we didn't designate this as a single artwork, let's just put it in here. Okay, so I've typed in here single cover, and what you're seeing already are a bunch of inspirations here. If you see a template that you like, you can easily click over the top of here. And what you'll see is that every single one of these tools are now able to be edited. You can move around the layers, the letters. What I like about using the templates is that it also serves as an educational piece to show you how to actually make your artwork. Whenever you click on any layer, you're going to be met with a bar at the top that gives you the option to edit, change the border, round the corners, crop the image, reverse and flip the image, change the opacity or the transparency of the image, animate the image. Change the position or copy the layer style. We'll go more into detail with that when we actually design our artwork. The next tab is the Elements tab, and the elements tab, let me tell you, is so powerful that I feel like it helps you to replace the necessity to download images, search out images, PNGs, and transparent images on Google. Are you looking for an ice cream cone? It's here. And in many different styles. What I love the most about it is that they don't have anything in here that is low Rz. So whenever you're on Google and you're looking for images to add to your artwork, you run the risk of one not having the permission to use it and two of it being so low rez that it looks unprofessional when contrasting it with other elements in your artwork. And as you can see here, you can add charts, tables, frames where you can put your own photos in here into these customized shapes. Grids, if you wanted to add multiple photos on an i tab is the text tab, and this is how you add your own text. If you click down here to Add New page. And just like the templates, you also get some pre made options here for adding your own text. These are all, of course, created by graphic designers that took into consideration typography psychology. So, of course, if you see something that catches your eye, you click on it and you can use the corners in order to expand it. Double click you can type whatever message that you want there. Now that we have brought text into the equation, we have more options up here, as you can see. Here, if I click on top of this font, I'm able to navigate through the numerous fonts that are provided by Canva, as well as uploaded fonts from my own collection. The next window is the font size. Next over, this is where you change your text color. Highlight the entire text that you want to change the color of. Click here to add new color, and then you can browse all the different colors across the color wheel and then pinpoint what color you would like your text to be. As you choose colors, what you're going to see is that they're going to also start to populate up here. So you can always reference any color that you've used before. Here is where you're going to be able to borrow colors from an image that you share with the text, and then here is where you're going to see some default colors that choose from that Canva provides to you. Next over is obviously the ability to bold your text, put it in italics, underline it, create a strike through, choose whether or not you want every letter to be uppercase, the alignment of your text, bullet points on your text. Then next up, this is where you change the spacing of your text, whether it's the spacing between every individual letter or spacing between every line. Next over, this is where you're going to change the transparency on your text. Next up, you have an effects tab here for the text. Here's where you're going to unlock ways to make your text stand out even more. You can add drop shadows, IFs. You can hollow out your text, create a slice effect. You can outline your text while changing the colors, create an echo effect, glitch, even a neon effect. You can create a background effect to further highlight your text, and you can even curve your text here. Last but not least, this is where you're going to change the animation. We'll talk about this as we get into more of the Instagram stories and add artwork. This is something you typically won't use for static images. Next tab is the brand tab, and this is where you're going to access those things that you initially set up in your brand kit. Next tab is the Uploads tab. This is where you're going to be able to provide your own images and upload them directly to Canva. Canva will, of course, host your images, logos, photos. One awesome thing that I love about this tab is that you could always search for things by typing it in. So if I put logo, now let's load up an image so I can show you some of the additional options that are made available. Whenever you add a photo to your project, of course, you can change the size of it. If you click on Edit, it opens up so many more options. Most important one here is the adjust option. This is where you can edit your photos the same way you would in any photo editing software. They have an auto adjust option that uses AI to make sure that your images are perfectly contrasted. They have great saturation, lighting, brightness, and all that good stuff. You can change the temperature of the image, change the tint, the brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows. And if you ever do anything that manipulates the photo in a way that you don't like, just push reset adjustments and you're back to where you right, next up, let's talk about Magic Studio. Magic Studio is where you're going to unlock even more powerful tools for your images. This is probably the most common one that I use. This is an automatic background remover. Let's click on. For those of you that remember the days when you had to manually delete backgrounds, and it wasn't just this easy, I'm sure you see that and think that this is witchcraft. No, it is not witchcraft. Not only is it quick through Canva to delete a background, but you can go into here and you can actually use their brush tool and delete anything else that you don't feel like should fit here. Now, some of these are some of the premium options that come along with the paid account. Next up in the advanced image settings, you also have a filters tab. This is where you can have some pre baked filters over the top of your image. The next tab is the Effects tab. Here's where you can add things like drop shadows, dual tone effects, blur effects, autofocus. In the Effects tab, I typically use the drop shadow pretty often. Let's go ahead and remove the background, and let's go ahead and click on the Drop Shadow and let's see what it looks like. And as you click over every single one of these, you'll see that you even have some additional ways to manipulate these drop shadows. And the last tab here is the Apps tab, and this is where whatever app you find, you're going to be able to access it here really quickly for this particular image. For the next tab, you have a draw tool. This is a crazy tool that allows you to draw directly over the top of your images using your mouse. Next up, you have another way to access your projects quickly through here. You have another quick navigation to your apps. The next tab is another way that I feel like Canva makes Google obsolete when images, pretty much any image that you could think of. In the next tab, this is where you're going to see videos that are made available royalty free by Canva that you can utilize within your artwork. Next, this is where you're going to find some creative and high resolution backgrounds provided by Canva to whatever artwork that you're working on. And then after this, this is where you're going to be able to access any files that you may have chosen to organize before jumping into. Last thing I want to talk about are some of these tabs here at the very top. If you click here on the file, you'll see that you can create a new design quickly right here and within the app. You can upload new files, change the settings, show margins, print bleed, change your accessibility options. Canva typically auto saves. You don't have to worry about that. You can move your designs to a new folder, make a copy, download. If you navigate over here, you can undo and redo anything that you do within your artwork. By clicking here, you can give access to someone to share in your designs and add to them, add commentary, as well as help. Here you can get insights on your designs. And last but not least, this is going to be the powerful button that allows you to export whatever artwork that you're working on. Alright, now that you've taken the tour of Canva, let's talk about your class project. 4. Class Project: Alright, let's talk about the class project. By the end of this course, you'll be exposed to so many different styles and tools and lessons and techniques that will help you to create your own artwork whenever you need it. To see where you're at, I would love by the end of this course for you to create your own artwork for a singular song. It could be for a song that's already released or for a song that you plan to release. Either way, I want you to put the things that you learn into action. Once you create it, feel free to submit it for some feedback. 5. Understanding Color and Font Psychology: In this lesson, I want to explain the importance of color psychology as well as typography psychology. For those that don't know, every color that you choose to use, every font that you choose to use sends a message to your potential listener and viewer. When creating your artwork, I think it is supremely important that you choose colors and fonts that represent the color, the style, the temperature of the message and the music that you're trying to convey. Of times people are choosing colors because it's their favorite, and sometimes they're even choosing fonts because, well, it just looked good. But it doesn't always mean that it's going to accurately represent the message that you want to convey. Do it the right way and you can attract the right eyes and ears, but do it the wrong way, and you could alienate people that could potentially be fans of yours. First off, let's talk about color psychology. Here it says color psychology is the study of how colors can affect our moods and behaviors. Here are some common associations between colors and emotions. Red can be associated with anger, passion, excitement, and love. Orange can be associated with warmth, kindness, joy, and friendliness, yellow associated with hope, joy, dangerous and happiness, green associated with nature, growth, freshness and contentment, blue associated with wisdom, hope, reason, peace, and relief, purple associated with mystery, nobility, and glamour, pink. Associated with softness, reserve, and earthiness, brown associated with disgust, Black, associated with sadness, fear, nobility, mystery, and coldness, gray associated with sadness, regret and disappointment and white associated with truth and indifference. Of these things are subjective based upon our upbringings. Now, for many of us, these associations with emotions and colors start at a very young age, whether it was through the cartoons that we chose to use, whether it was the colors that we were attracted to, based upon our gender or based upon our social circles, or even by our favorite clothing brands or our favorite cereals. There are corporations that have done millions and millions of dollars of research to make sure that they understand how these colors make us feel. We need to make sure that us as independent creatives have a basic understanding of this if we wish to convey the right emotions to the right consumers. Font itself also carries a psychology. It's called typography psychology. Now, fonts are typically separated into different font families. But if you can, just follow the way that these fonts look and ask yourself, how do they make you feel? It says here, the family of Seripant. If you look at it, it looks traditional, trustworthy, and timeless. Kind of like something that you would associate maybe with Apple products. For the slab Serafont, it looks like confidence, unique innovation. For San sera font, it looks clean, modern and to the point. And if you notice the differences are very, very subtle in the sizing of the letters and the spacing of the letters, and the sharpness or the smoothness of the edges of the letters. Next, script font gives off the feel of elegant, creative, emotional, modern font, style, innovation, individuality, decorative font, casual, whimsical and creative. To reinforce this even more, I thought this was a really cool image. As you can see, every single font looks like the word that it represents. Innocent. Looks childish. Street looks kind of 90s urban. Scary looks like an actual horror movie. Fun, looks like almost like a balloon animal. Intelligent. Looks corporate, cool. Looks pretty modern. Straightforward. Cool. The more that you sit with fonts, the more that you start to understand the message that is trying to get from you. Magazines do a great job of this. So as you start to choose colors that you think best represent the song that you're going to make a single artwork for or the album artwork that you're making, think about these things. What best represents the message, color wise that you want to convey. In addition to that, make sure that you're not using a font that misrepresents what your album is all about, because when things are not done in an appropriate way for your artwork, it can look like a movie poster to a movie that nobody wants to see. 6. Designing Your Music Artwork: Now that we have a pretty good understanding of color and typography psychology, we should be able to confidently move forward into choosing the appropriate template for our music in terms of what will best represent it. As we did before, let's set up a new session for 3,000 by 3,000 piece of artwork. As we did before, we're going to go ahead and access the single cover templates. I'm also going to navigate here to uploads, and I'm going to upload some photos that I took in my backyard. Thing that I like to do is sit with the music in the background and really get a different type of understanding of the song. Now, obviously, you wrote it, you produced it, so you have a great understanding as it is. But now I want you to look at this as if you have been employed as the graphic designer for your particular song. I want you to ask yourself some very general questions such as, does the song pull me in? Does the song push me away? Is the song in my face or does it feel distant? When you ask certain questions like that, they make certain types of templates, make that much more sense. Think if a song feels distant, the text should align with that, such as this template right here. It feels mysterious. It feels at a distance. However, if a song is in your face and over the top, perhaps a template like this makes a whole lot more sense. And then also keep in mind, although we're going to edit these templates so that we don't have an exact type of artwork like somebody else to a certain degree, we're also going to make sure that we hold together its original integrity set in place by the graphic designer. Avoid analysis paralysis where you won't know what to choose, I like to open up multiple browsers in order for me to go back and forth through a few different templates. So what I'll do is I'll kind of just go through these and see which ones grab my attention. Now, for this particular artwork, we're going to call this song Angels. I like this artwork as well. And we're going to imagine that this is a song that pulls us in as a listener. We're going to imagine that this is a song that has some reflective energy to it, that has some really warm energy to it. And so I'm going to find artwork that I feel aligns with so with these already in mind, all I have to do next is just put in my images and then manipulate those images or edit those images so that they make sense in context of what this template has already laid out for me. Now, I have a few photos that my wife snapped of me in the backyard, and I'm going to see how these translate within this template. If I drag the photo over the background, it will replace whatever the template had in place. It'll also expose some other elements that maybe I couldn't see before that won't be necessary for the artwork we're doing. So if you just hover over it, click on it, and push delete, it'll be gone. Let's try this one. That's not too bad. And what I can do here is just replace some of the elements as they are given to us. I put my name here, and as you can see, this is all in lowercase letters. Let's keep it that way. Now, something that I'm already noticing is that this blends in a little bit too much with the background. Originally, it was on a black background. So something that I can do to match this photo more so to the original template is to edit this image and take away some of the brightness. Increase some of the contrasts, change the vibrance and the saturation, and I can even choose to either sharpen it or blur it, depending on what effect that I want to give. Would just be careful about what you're actually adding and always keep in mind that as you zoom it out, that's going to be a more accurate representation of what your artwork is going to look like on a mobile device, which will be most of your listeners anyways. So just something to keep in mind. Something else that you can do to really contrast the background is you can click on the background, click on the transparency, and then turn this down, it's actually move this to the side because as you can see, the original background is still here. Let's click on it, press delete. And now what you're noticing is that there's a missing background color, which is black. Click on the background, click on background color, and then black background, and this should return it back to where it was looking like before. I like the positioning of where the name is at. Not too sold on how the actual font looks. But what I want to do is kind of stay as close as I can to the relationship between these two fonts. I like that. Something else I might want to add. Say, for instance, if this is an album cover would be a parental advisory sticker. But now, as this is, I wouldn't be mad at this, but I think another way that we could really make it look unique from anybody else who uses a very similar template would be to grab the background image, and I do this so that we can establish some separation between the next thing that I'm getting ready to add. I want to find some texture. What you'll see a lot of times in artwork in a very subtle way is you'll see these sort of overlays that represent a bit of texture. You'll see this image right here. And if you put it over the top of the original image, and we click here on the transparency, let's test what it will look like if this was the texture that we added over the top of the g. Already, it's giving it an entirely different energy. Now, I like the way that this is looking. I think it has a nice little contrast on things, but let's try one more. All right. And let's choose another one of these images. If we double click it, we can even move it up and down. I want to move this one up so that the text at the bottom shows up where it needs to. This right here, which we're going to end up having to change anyways. So let's go ahead and get this here. Then here, it gives you an option to add sort of a message to the listener or the viewer that reinforces what this song is about. It says, To my distant daydream, you know who you are. Let's say to the angels, watching over M. Thank you. Would definitely want to change the color here so that it evokes more of the emotions that we're going for it. Let's try some blues. One thing you want to keep in mind as you're adding the colors, make sure that it's actually popping off the background, and it's contrasting what the background has given you. If the background has given you dark, make sure the text is light. If the background has given you bright, you want to contrast that with dark. There's always another way to contrast what's going on. Say, for instance, you do like this color, but you just want it to pop and separate itself from the background, click here to the Effects tab and choose one of these shadow presets. For instance, like the lift, change the intensity of it, or we can choose outline. Keep in mind, as you start to add things, you're straying away from the original look of this design as it was intended by the graphic designer. Because even though it may look aesthetically pleasing to you to do this, it may start to come off a bit amateurish if you don't know what you're doing. Also, when you start to change too many of the elements, it starts to emphasize things that you may not want to emphasize. So I'd be very subtle about the way that you're adding these things. So there's a part of me that wants to test out? What would this look like if we borrowed colors from the original image, which to me is another cheek code to make this either match well or to contrast well. Let's try some brighter colors. And there you have it. I like that. Something else that might be interesting to add, and let's just test it out would be maybe Angel wings. When you find an image you want to use, if you click on it, you can hover it there, and you could easily just add that. Something I would do to blend this in a little bit more, since we know these are obviously two different sources, I would add a texture over the top of this. One texture that I love to use is plastic, because as you can see, it just already looks like a graphic design has put some detail to this. When you add this particular layer, if you right click on it, you can determine where you want this layer to be in relation to the other images that are here. Here's the hot keys to change these layers. I'm going to make sure that the layers sit behind the text, but in front of the image. But I'm going to also take the opacity, the transparency so that it looks just a little bit more subtle. One thing that I can guarantee is that as you try different things, you will find different techniques that work specifically to your taste and to the sound of your music. 7. Creating Promo Assets For Social Media: Alright, now that we have our artwork put together, let's talk about converting that artwork into a promotional item that we can use for social media, specifically into an Instagram story or vertical post. With this window still open, what I want you to do is navigate over here to the plus sign, and let's create an Instagram story, which is typically ten ADP by 1920. Something that you want to keep in mind as you start to develop these and look through the templates, there are spaces that are already occupied by tools on your different social media platforms. So it's important that you honor those by creating native content that knows where these things are at. What I love about using these Canva templates, they have already taken into consideration where the text should be and should not be. Now, let's say that I chose to go with this artwork and I wanted to take elements away from this one in order to convert a post. We can easily do that by clicking on any of these particular elements, pressing copy, and then pasting it over to the other file. Let's go ahead and copy the background. Let's start with that one. Copy the wings. Sometimes you got to reorganize those. Let's copy the text. And you want to pay attention to these borders and make sure that you don't have text that is too close to the borders. And as you can see, there's these pink boxes that are around here that are guiding you in terms of where your borders are at. And then also, too, as you hover your mouse, what you're going to feel is that sometimes your images and your text lock in place. That is also a guide that is telling you, Hey, this text is centered, it is in a nice place. Keep it there. Then I'll copy this text, and I'm also going to use this in a different way. Instead of using this as the message, I'm going to put this and I want to say out now because obviously this is for a story, and I can use this now as kind of a call to action for those who are last but not least, this is optional, but you can copy over the texture, and you can add it here for that same effect. Then as you can see at the top here, I have a lot of empty space. That is on purpose because what it allows me to do is then use some of the in house features such as the music preview tool that I can use on Instagram and allow my music to play there over the top of here, and then I can preview my music within the stories and lead people to downloading and purchasing my music. Another cool feature I want to expose you to, especially because people are used to seeing more dynamic images or moving images on Instagram and social media platforms. You want to make sure that you separate yourself from everybody else who has access to the same templates. Well, one way to do that is if you click on any of these elements here and hit Animate, you get access to a bunch of different animation presets. If you click on one, add animation to whatever layer you have going on here. However, if you click on page, it'll animate the entire page and design. So if I just click this one or if I hover over it, it'll show me what it looks like. Isn't that cool? And this, of course, makes your image pop out just that much more. It looks a little bit more exciting. Now, once you pick the actual animation that you want to use, go ahead and click here on the Play button and see what it looks like. Boom. Now you have a five second edit that you can go ahead and use. To export it, you're going to export it a little bit differently. We're going to go over a whole section of that in a second. You'll push share, download, and you're going to actually export it as a video so that you can upload it as a video within your stories and promote it on multiple platforms. 8. How to Export Your Artwork In Canva: Okay, in this final lesson, I want to show you really quickly how to export your new artwork. After you're done with your artwork, go over here and hover above the Share button, click it, then click Download. When it comes to file type, you can use JPEG, PNG or multiple. We're going to be more so centered in on PNG and JPEG. It's definitely important that you use PNG, which is suggested unless you're dealing with a website in which you're uploading your music and artwork that doesn't allow for larger files. JPEGs typically are able to give you great quality just in a smaller file. PNGs typically are the ones that we want to go for because they're able to handle complex layers and images. Of course, we want to keep the resolution 3,000 by 3,000. Then we want to make sure that we choose the page that we want to export. Now, you can export both of these. Only issue is that it's going to export as a zip file if you're on the desktop. Let's just choose one. Click Done and then download. And then there you are. You have your artwork and you have access to it, and you can use it wherever you see fit. 9. Quick Tips and Final Thoughts: Okay, D wires, as you can see, we have completed the course, and we have only cracked through a fraction of the power and capability of Canva. Of course, as you start to dive into your artwork and you start to create your class project, I want you to keep in mind the things that we said about color psychology, fonts, and just really pay attention to the albums and things that you have consumed. Start to really dive into the why you may be making the decisions that you're making. Some of those may be decisions that are being made for you. Now, obviously, we're dealing with art. So these are not all absolutes, but I wanted to at least give you an idea, a framework of how to navigate canva so that you can take care of your own art responsibilities. It can be a headache sometimes putting this in the hands of other people, especially when they're not reliable. You, however, can rely upon yourself. At the end of the day, I look at music and I look at the artwork that is attached to it as photos in a photo album. Get to choose what best represents what you're doing. Have fun with it, make sure that you're telling the stories that you want to tell, and at the end of the day, you have the full control as a DI wire. I wish you the absolute best, and I look forward to seeing your class projects. Once again, my name is Curtis King. Have a good one.