Canva Social Media Design Beginner Masterclass

1. Welcome to the Canva for Social Media Beginners Masterclass!: Welcome to the Canva for social media concentration class. Have you ever wanted to create professional looking social media content, but didn't know where to start? Whether it is Instagram posts, carousels, or simple branding visuals, Canva makes it easier than ever, and that's what you will learn in this class. My name is Kindiaborska, and I'm a designer with six years of experience creating content for social media, branding and digital platforms. I have worked on everything from simple posts to full content systems. This class, I will show you how to create clean, effective designs even if you're just getting started. We will begin by exploring Canva itself. What is it, how it works, and how to navigate the interface. You'll learn the difference between the pro and free versions just so you can make the best choice for your needs. Next, we will cover core design foundations, how to work with templates, choose fonts, use color effectively, and create visually balanced designs. Then you will start creating real projects. You will design an Instagram post, a logo, and a KarasL which will give you practical experience with the types of content most creators need. Finally, we'll go over essential workflows like exporting your designs, resizing for different platforms, organizing your files, and collaborating with others. By the end of this class, you'll be able to create social media content that not only looks professional, but also works effectively. Let's get started. 2. Welcome & Course Structure : Welcome to this Canva course. If you have ever opened up Canva, looked at its interface, and felt lost. No worries. That's exactly how I started. But also, we're about to fix that. By the time we're done, you're going to be familiar with Canva and you're going to know how to create beautiful social media posts all by yourself. This is how we're going to do it. First, we're going to start with talking about what is Canva, how it works, and what do you to begin. Next, we're going to move on to some design foundations just so you feel very comfortable creating and your creations will look intentional. Then we're going to move on to our actual projects. In total, we're going to have three separate projects. One is going to be an Instagram post. Then we're going to create a simple logo and a five slide carousel post. All of this is going to be done from scratch by hand. Of course, I'm going to show you how to export your work, how to organize it, and even share it if you're working with someone else. You can take this course straight through or even take a chapter by chapter. If it's necessary, you can pause or even rewind. There's no rush here. Best part about this is that you don't need any design experience. You can come in as a complete beginner and I'll show you the ropes. Let's get into it. 3. What Canva Is + Use Cases: Let me show you everything that you can design on Canva because there's so many things. Now, we're going to be focusing mainly on social media for our projects, but I just wanted to show you all the different kinds of things that you can actually work on. So right now, I am on canva.com, and I'm in the templates section. Now, we're going to be looking at a few examples just so you get the idea of the variety of things. Now, over here, Explore templates is where we're going to be paying attention to. In this lesson, so let's first click on the Instagram post. Now, as you can see, these are all templates that you can actually customize to your liking. So if you see a design that fits your needs, for example, this one, you can customize this template by clicking on this button and change up just about every single element that you can see here to fit what you want to make. When it comes to the social media posts, for example, in this case, the Instagram post, there are so many things that you can do. So, for example, if you have a business and you want to promote your services or a specific product, you can create a beautiful Instagram post for that. For example, we have this example here. They are promoting coffee with their logo and all the information laid out here. Now, that is one way to go. But you can also create things for your personal Instagram account. Let's say you are a fashion influencer, you can create things like these, for example, with a grid layout as a collage and apply all kinds of effects. Like, for example, here, we have black and white, and I think it's super cool looking. So you can get very creative and once you scroll down from the template that you liked, there's many more templates that are similar to that kind of look that you can also scroll through. For example, this one's really cool, so they got a little bit more artistic. So if it's like a personal page, you have so many options. If you have a business, you have even more options. So, for example, this one, this one's also a good one. Now, besides Instagram posts, you can also create Instagram stories, which by the way, is one of my favorite things to use Canva for. I make most of my stories for my own brand on canva.com just because it offers many more ways to customize the story to actually fit my brand. Also with all the fonts that are available, the graphics, the music, and everything else that you can integrate, it's much more versatile than the actual Instagram app because you only get a few fonts and the stickers aren't always what you want. So Cava is a really good way to go about it. Let's look at some Instagram story ideas here. We have a daily log. This is a really great way to make your Instagram stories pop, to make them stand out and to actually get super creative. You see, there's three videos not layered, but organized organized in a collage, which is one of my favorite things also to do for my own Instagram. So this is a really great way to make your Instagram stories pop out. Now let's look at other things. So, for example, you can also create resumes here on Canva. You can add all kinds of graphics, the layouts vary the fonts. You can really make your resume stand out because I know a lot of people just make a document, and it works a lot of times. But if you want to spice it up, Canva is a really good way to go about it. You can get a little bit creative like this one. We have some graphics and some color here, or you can be a little bit more tone down, a little bit more professional perhaps, and go for something like this. So again, you have many templates that you can look at or you can also create them from scratch. Another cool thing is that you can design emails on Caba and I'm not sure if I forgot to mention this, but mostly it's drag and drop. So let's say you are promoting some sort of product of yours, you can import your own photos from your computer or any kind of device that you have on to Canva and use that for your let's say emails or any kind of design that you're working on. Another cool thing is that you can create logos on Canva. So if you have, let's say, a small business, and you're not necessarily in a place where you can get a designer, you can make it self. And it's super easy because you can go with graphics like these. We have the cherries here and then add a fun font, or you can just go with some text. Text logos also go very well if you have an idea of what you want. You can alter the style of the text, the color, ski for example, this one's really fun. As you can see with logos, there's so many directions that you can go in. Besides that, of course, you also have the presentations, which also can be your, for example, portfolio, like we have some examples here. If you hover on some of these, it will show you all the slides that are there and you can really see if it fits what you want. But you see the variety that Canva offers with its animations and styles. So you can really get creative with presentations as well. Also, another thing I really love Canva for is to create business cards. I have done a few, and every single one always turns out really cool. There are if you, let's say, have a logo already created, again, you can just upload it onto Canva and use it for your business card design to represent your brand. Or you can create it from scratch, like we just saw. But, for example, these, I actually really love this design. It's very creative, and it's not what you see very often, so that's cool. As I said before, we're going to be focusing on social media posts in this course, but when you get the basics of Canva down, you can really implement that knowledge and create just about anything that we just saw. 4. Free Vs Pro (Practical Decision-Making): Now, let's talk about Canva P versus Canva free version because I do see a lot of people that want to start with Canva, ask this question. Should they get the subscription or should they just use the free version? And it's a valid question. And my personal answer to that is, if you're just starting out, go with the free version. That's my personal opinion. The reason for that is because today, Canvas free version actually offers a very decent selection of all kinds of elements like graphics. Stock images, stock videos, fonts, and even some AI features. Let's jump over to Canada. Let's click around. Let me show you what you get in the free version and how to distinguish a element that is for the paid and for the free. So, I have a blank Canvas right here in front of us, and let's start with templates. So first, if you look at the side of the screen, right here, you have two different kinds of templates for the same thing, which is Earth day. And one of them has a little crown in the corner. If you hover it, it says, This premium template is included with your Canada Teams plan. So what does that mean? That means that this one is going to be for the users with a paid plan, which I personally have the Teams one. If you try to use it as a free user, then all of this is going to be covered in a watermark, which is not great if you're trying to create an original design. So what you can do is go back and look for templates that don't have that crown. So the one next to it actually is completely free. So what does that mean? Every single element in this design, every font, and everything else is absolutely free to use, which is amazing, because this is gorgeous. And let's take a look at the side of the screen here and see what you have available as a free user, for example. So this one up here doesn't have the crown. So does this, this one down here. The ones with the crown and the ones without they really so as you can see, even the free templates are gorgeous, and they are absolutely beautiful. And there's a lot of potential for different kinds of customizations. So this is what I meant. When I said that, you do have a very decent selection of things that you can already use. When I started, everything was fairly limited, and there's only a few templates that I could use, and that was the reason why I eventually upgraded to the Teams one. But just scrolling through, I see so many options for both free and the paid and they all look high quality and are different styles. So you can really get super creative here. Now let's move on to the stock images. I'm going to click on the photos. And here, let's just type in nature, for example. And again, you have some with the ones that are for a paid subscription and some that are free, and they are just as gorgeous and you can really make your designs look beautiful, even without paying a single penny. You can just keep scrolling and you don't really have to spend a lot of time looking for good resources because there's a mixture of both. Same thing. We'll go for videos. So if we put in something like mountains, again, you have actually a lot of different kinds of videos that you can use for free, and they're all high quality, too. Let's take a look at this one. It's like a drone shot. That's beautiful. So again, remember, all of this, these are all free resources. So that's amazing. So the same thing will go for audios. I personally don't use a lot of Canva audios just because I already have some pre prepared for the kind of brand videos and stories and posts that I do for social media. So I kind of reuse a lot of my own stuff. You're free to look for any kind of song, and even Canva does have sound effects. And if we just put in something like guitar, you see, some of them have crowds and some of them don't. And there's a lot of amazing options that you can utilize to make your videos, for example, stand out. Now let's move on to graphics. So graphics is a great way to elevate your design. For example, you see, we have these flowers and leaves, also this earth cut out. And if we would search up for something like, let's go with birds. And under the graphics section, there's many different kinds of styles and a good mixture of both, but you can also just filter through, just so you don't have to really pay much attention to what you're clicking on. That was another reason why I personally upgraded because at some point when I hit that ceiling, I just was tired of scrolling constantly and looking for things because the resources were much more limited back then. But here, you have all the free resources and graphics that you can use. For example, these birds, have this one. You have more cartoony ones. They're really cute. These ones are So, as you can see, you do have a decent selection in the graphics. Now, of course, also, as a free user, you do get a good amount of AI features, like you get copywriting, animation, and even some image generation. Now, the amount of times you can use them per day is quite limited. As a teams member, for example, you would be able to use those tools way more. I personally haven't hit the ceiling yet. As I did mention before, you do get a lot of AI features, for example, copywriting, image generation and animation. However, as a free user, the amount of times you can use those features per day is limited. As a teams member, you get a higher limit every day. But I haven't hit the ceiling yet just because I don't use, especially image generation that often. Oh, one more thing that I do want to mention, something to consider and something that I value very much is background removal on Cava. In Canva, it is under a paid plan, so let me show you. I do use that feature quite a lot. For example, let's get this deer on the canvas, and I'll show you. Up here, it says BG remover, which means background remover and does have that crown, meaning it is only for paid users, but it does a very good job when it comes to cutting out things from images. It does save a lot of time because with this feature alone, I don't have to go to an other software like Photoshop to get a PNG of something. I can just get the image and remove the background with a simple click and it does a very clean job, and it saves a lot of time. And I use this feature every single time I design something on Canvas, so that is something to consider. So yes, that is definitely something to consider. But again, if you're just starting out, I think it is quite enough to begin with the free version. You do get a lot of cool things to work with, and the main thing is to just get a good grasp of what Canva is capable of. And the more you get comfortable with it, the more you want to maybe elevate your designs. If eventually you do use Cava very often and you find yourself starting to get limited with the resources that are available to you, I definitely recommend upgrading because once I got the subscription a couple of years ago, I've never looked back. I use Canva every single day. I design a lot, and all the extra little things that the paid plan offers, is very beneficial. Oh. Now, let me show you what exactly Canva Team's plan includes, just so you have a good picture of everything. So here we have the plan. So what I get is 140 million premium photos, videos, and elements. I do get 1,000 brand kits. AI usage limit is high. I do want to mention that I have not hit the limit on the AI features yet. Looking forward to that, let's see. But even with the team's plan, it feels unlimited to me. But here, it says that the business plan has it higher. Exactly what it means, how many times or what is the limit. It's interesting that they don't mention here, but that's something to consider. It comes to the Cloud storage, I get 1 terabyte with Teams. As a free user, you would get 5 gigabytes. So that means anything that you upload that you want to use on your designs like images or videos, logos or anything else that you're uploading onto Canva, you get 5 gigabytes of storage for free. So this should give you a very good idea on what is it that you get as a paid user versus a free user. 5. Interface Walkthrough (Homepage, Editor, Brand Kit): Now, let me take you a quick tour on the Canva interface. Now, before we start, make sure you have created a Canva account. You can easily do that using your email. The sign up will take you a couple of minutes. Now that you have your account, you will probably end up on a homepage of canva.com. Now, it might look a little bit different than it looks for me because the first thing you should see is all the recs and designs that you've worked on. For me, it's quite the list. For you, it's probably completely empty. If it's a new account, no worries, we'll fill it up really quick. Now, I can also change the way this list looks because I understand if I'm trying to find a previous design, it's kind of hard to tell from the little thumbnails. I can change that by clicking on Views Grid. This way I can find the previous designs much easier because they're way bigger. Besides that, up here, you see there is a whole row of different kinds of icons. Now, these are shortcuts to different kinds of canvases. Let's say you want to create a social media. Let's say Instagram post, you would click on social media and this is where you would find it. Now, these are all pre sized, already pre measured canvases. So you don't really have to go onto Google or know from the top of your head exactly the aspect ratio of an Instagram post. It is already pre sized here and you can just start creating. This is where you would click for that. A good way to also filter through the different kinds of social medias are up here. So you have a list. You have Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pints, Tik Tok, Twitter, and YouTube. Also, here on the side, there's a list of the previous icons that we were just looking at, and you can also create your custom size Canvas by clicking on Custom Size. Here you would put in here you would put in your custom measurements for whatever kind of design you want. Here you have your width, your height, and the units. You can go with either pixels, inches, millimeters or centimeters. Down here you see are my recent ones that I've used and that I use consistently. This is a good way to get to them quickly. But also, I can just go over here on the side menu and just click on Create. Before we get into the side menu up here is search bar where I can search if I know the name of a previous design or a folder or project or anything that is on my account. This is where I can search it by typing it here. Now let's move on to the side menu. So you can see this is the Create button. This is usually what I click on when I start to create anything brand new. So once I clicked on it, I have, again, precise different kinds of canvases that I can start working from. Here we have, again, a couple of more shortcuts we have frequently used. So these are the ones that I use most. Then you have popular on Cava, which these are kind of like very commonly used. And then try something new. These are kind of suggestions that Canva is making. Again, if you have something specific in mind and you cannot find it here, you can type into this search bar. Now, moving away from that, next up, you have the home, which is where we are right now. Then next button is projects. So this is where you can organize and categorize your work, putting it in folders and organizing your workspace a little bit better. Then you have templates. Now, if you have something specific in mind, but you don't really know where to start, this is a good place to begin because here, this is what you saw actually previously when we were talking about free version of Canva versus the pro version, and here you can select any kind of design canvases that you would like to go for presentations, documents, website, sheets, and so on and so forth. Or you can scroll down here and see the different kinds of premade templates they have like meet AI video effects. So these are all made with AI. Then inspired by your design. So once you start creating more on Canva, this is probably going to look very different for you and these are going to be similar templates to what you have used before. Then you have Discover. These are some brand new Explore page trending near you. Then you have Canvas top picks and more templates for you. Again, more based on what you have created before. This might look very different for you. Again, you can search specifically for what is it that you want up here in the search bar. But then moving on on the side here, you have the brand area where if you do have a brand, this is where you can actually collect all your brand assets into one place. Then all of your creations can look cohesive and are according to your brand colors and fonts. This is where you would upload everything. You can even create some new categories. Then you have the Canva AI section, and this is really cool because this is directly where you can start talking to the AI chat bot. So think something like Chat GPT or Cloud or any kind of chat any kind of other AI chat that you use. So how this works is I can put in any kind of prompt. Let's say, create a logo for a coffee shop. So this would be my prompt. And from here, I would click on, for example, Design and then logo. But as you can see, it offers social media presentation, marketing. So the AI would help you create a template, right? So I'm going to select a logo. I'm going to send it into the chat and see what Canva AI does. It's going to start generating a couple of different ideas, and I can either keep on chatting with it to adjust it or maybe get really specific and adjust it to my liking, or I can even select some of the ideas that it will generate for me and then further edit them in the workspace. Now, you can see there's already a couple of things okay, so they're already. That was very, very quick. And they all look actually very beautiful. So this is created by the Canva AI. It's quite impressive. So let's say that I really like this. But there's a couple of things that I would like to change and I would want to do it myself. So what I would do is click on this little pen, and here I can change the text only. But if I click on us Canva Editor, it would open up the actual workspace, and from here, I can adjust every single thing. So going from the actual little graphic itself to the text and then even the font, the color, and the background, everything, right? So I find this to be very useful because a lot of times, you know, when you're scrolling through the templates, if you can't think of anything yourself, you're going through the templates to get inspired. But it's just not you're not finding exactly what it is that you're looking for. Canva is a really good place to start. Now, moving on from here, is the print shop. So this is where you would go. If you would want to put your design, your creation, your logo, anything, even just simple text on any kind of merchandise. So you see you have invitations, flyers, business cards, posters, t shirts, mugs, really anything you can think to print on, you can find it here. You can scroll through, and there's even more options in this catalog. Now, I personally have tried the T shirt printing. So I put my own design on a T shirt, and I was actually very surprised by the quality of the print. Be little Sino, I used to work in a kind of t shirt printing business, and I could tell a good print from a bad print, and what Canva sent me was actually very high quality. So that surprised me. And if it's something you're looking for, I definitely recommend Canva for that. But yeah, this is where you would go for your printing needs. And then last but not least, you have the approvals area where if you would be working with a team with other people that are added to your account, this is where you would be working with them. Now. You see, it's empty for me because I am working solo. So there's nothing really to show here. Now that you're familiar with what is on the homepage and what are your options here, let's take a quick look at the actual workspace, and let me show you around. Let's say I want to create an Instagram post. So clicking on the social media Instagram post. Here we have the pre sized Canvas. Very convenient. I don't have to type in my own numbers, which is great. Saves a couple of seconds. But from here, I can start creating. So this is the blank Canvas, and by clicking on it, I can change the color of the background if I wanted to here. You see, there's a couple of color palettes that I've worked with before. It might look different for you. There might be some canva created palettes that you can start using or you can create your own palette. Actually, it's very, very simple. I'll show you that a little bit later though. We have some basic colors, and we also have some gradients. We also have the color picker. Be very handy if you're trying to find the correct shade of green, you would just click on it and drag it all over this area to find the correct shade that you would want. From here, you can also create a custom gradient, which I find to be very useful. You have some style options here, and this is where you would change the color, and here is the color picker. Now, I find myself using a lot the default gradient colors on Canva because I think they complement a lot of designs. Now, this looks amazing how it is. But again, I can go up here and customize it by clicking on this little circle. And customize it just like I just showed you before. Let's say I want the blue to be a different blue. I can just go in the color picker, drag it here, and bam, different kind of blue. Now, from here, you have a couple of options on the side. So up here, we have the templates. If I would want to go for that, I can start searching by typing in what is it that I want, or I can just scroll through and see what is Canva given me today because this can change every single day, and it actually does change. So it is very wise to kind of look for specific things just to save yourself some time. You can also generate with AI. This is another way to do it, just like we just saw it in the AI chatbot. I would have to describe what is it that I want. Let's just select Earth Day and let the AI generate something. And the cool thing is that these AI generated templates are completely unique. So if you are looking for a template, but aren't really finding anything that fits you or fits your needs, it's a good way to go. This might take a little bit of time. Alright. Now, it has finished generating, and this is what it came up with. It's pretty cool. If I click on it, it drops on my canvas, and all the elements are absolutely movable and adjustable. And not only can you move them around by clicking and dragging. You can also change the color. As you can see, the moment I clicked on it, it showed me two little color circles. Now this is where you would change the color. So if this screen maybe needs to be another type of green. This is how I would do it just like we just changed the color of the gradients or the background before. It's very simple. Again, the same thing goes for the text, I can customize either the font by clicking on the font area, long list of fonts can change the size of it, the color, and other things. We'll get into that later when we actually start to make stuff. So this is how that would go. Besides the template, you have the elements section. This is where all the little stickers or graphics live. Let's search for some birds, and from here, I would specify that it's graphic. But you can go with photos, audio, video, and so on. These are, again, a bunch of shortcuts that you can use because here I can also go to photos and get a photo of a bird from here, but it's like a little shortcut if I click on. Here we also have some AI options, but we'll get into that a little later. Another cool thing is that all of the elements are organized and categorized. You have your shapes which are completely customizable. You have your graphics, your three D, your frames, your animations photos, and so on and so forth. So every single time you click on somewhere, it's going to make sure to know exactly what it is that you're looking for. Then let's move on to the text. This is the text area where you can add a brand new text box, so it will give you a blink text on your design. I just clicked on it and it dropped it on my canvas. From here, I can again, go further and customize it. Or, of course, if I would have a font in my brand kit, this is where it would appear, or I could either go for something a little bit more stylized and already pre designed. So these are some fonts that have been paired up by Canada, and I can select one of these. This is your upload section. So if you upload media like photos, videos, designs, whatever, this is where you would live. This is where you would also choose what is it that you want to include. Then you have your tools which are you have your draw, your shapes, your lines, sticky notes, text, and so on. I personally don't use this part too much just because I think that these tools can be found in a better way, and they usually live either up here or I just select my text or whatever other tools from here rather than this specific area. Then you have your projects, which again, your previous work or your organized folders, your apps, which we'll get into later in take a brief look on what Canada has. Next, you have your magic media, where, again, it goes back to AI. This is where you can find your photos, your audios, videos, and it goes really the same. This is where you would search up, and this is where the results would come up. Background you can also create in bulk. Then you have your charts, and you can caption if it's a video. But for the most part, this is a brief overview of the Canva interface when it comes to the menu bar. Up here, you can resize your design, you can also go back if you did a boo boo and you don't really know how to recover from that. I've been there. Then you have other options in the editing and in the file section. This up here, this is where you would export, which we'll get into later, a little bit more detailed, but share button, very simple. And when it comes to the actual Canvas itself, there's a couple of options you can lock your design. So let's say that you're designing something else next to this. So let's add a page down here. Lock this and I can't really alter anything this will stay as is, right? Then I can hide my page. I can also duplicate this. So if I would want the same version of this, but slightly different. Instead of recreating it, I can just click on Duplicate page and bam. Next, I have Delete page, which, of course, deletes the page, and then I can also add another blank one, which is the same button. Under here. Then down here is where you can zoom in or zoom out to your Canvas just to see some details a little bit better. Here, you would change the way you would see your canvases. So again, you see, I clicked on it, and now it's showing me all the ones under here. Some people prefer to work this way. Some people prefer this. I personally usually go for this because it's easier to just scroll through. Then this will kind of zoom out of all of your designs on this page, and you can see if you have a long list of things, this is an easy way to kind of go from page to page and jump from design to design. This is, of course, full screen, and here you have some assistance if you need a came to help you with something, you can't find something or whatever. This is where you would type it in. Other very crucial thing that I do want to mention is this position tab. So this would be showing you all the layers, all the elements that you have in your design and the order of them. So if you can, for example, there's something overlapping this and you can customize it, you can find it in this list, click on it, and then further work with it. Now, this was a brief overview of the interface of Canva. We're going to get more detailed once we start actually creating some designs, but this should give you a good idea of actually how intuitive the interface is. Because most things, if you take a look, for example, at the menu on the side, you can pretty much tell what it does by just looking at the little icon. So it is very user friendly, beginner friendly, and it's just a very simple and easy tool to use. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Templates vs Starting from Scratch: O Now, when it comes to actually designing on Canva, there is two different ways you can go about it. First way is to start with a pre made template, and the second one is to start from scratch. Now, I want to talk about what is the difference between these two options and which option should you go with while you're still learning about Canva. Now, what is a template? A template is a pre design layout. So someone has already figured out the colors, the fonts, and the spacing of the design, and all you have to do is go in, switch out the elements and make your own. This is a wonderful way to go if you are just starting with design or if you need a design done quickly and you might be short on ideas. Let's jump over to Canada and take a look at some examples. Now, here I am in the template section. You can access it by clicking on this template button, which is third option down in your sidebar. I'm here in the Instagram post templates, and as you can see, there is a lot that you can scroll through. I have spent my fair share of hours here. So let's take a look at this template, for example. This caught my attention. Now, let's say that you like this kind of look and aesthetic and you would want to use this particular template. What would you do? In this case, you would click on it and then customize this template. It will drop you into a new window into your workspace, and this is where all the magic happens. So by hovering your mouse over all of these elements is how you can change them for eggs. I would want to change this image to something else if I'm promoting, let's say. Instead of Macha, I would like it to be a coffee. So I would go over to the photos, and here in the search bar, I would type in iced latte. Here we have some beautiful options. I'll go with this one. This one seems to be cool looking. The moment I clicked on it, it dropped it into my workspace. I'm going to click on the Macha one and hit delete on my keyboard. Now, when that is gone, I can replace it with my selected image. And now, okay, we have the image there. Since this is a Macha, I will change the text that says Macha and say latte. Or ice latte, I suppose. Now, there is I wonder why is the sea looking like that? That's okay. So this is how easy it would be to change the elements from already a pre made template. So let's say that I like this outcome and it fits whatever it is that I would want to post, I'm ready. I already have a design, and it took me literally a couple of minutes. Now, this is the advantage that I personally absolutely adore about Canada, that you don't necessarily need to have brilliant ideas every single day. You do have some options with templates, and again, it is a wonderful way to if you're a beginner, and you don't necessarily feel very comfortable with coming up with your own designs or even with just the layout of Canva. So I'm going to close this for now, close this now here. Okay. And now let's talk about what would it mean for you to start from scratch. What you need is a completely blank canvas. And this would require for you to build the design from scratch. And this is why I said before that the template way is a great way to go if you're a beginner, but let me show you what it takes to build a quick design on Canva from scratch. So I'm going to go over to the Create button right here. I'm just going to select the exact same kind of designs that we were looking at in terms of the aspect ratio, which is going to be the Instagram post. So I'm going to click on that. And since we have a completely blank canvas here, I got nothing to work with. I have to come up with everything myself. First, of course, would be the background. So let me just select a color. I'll go with green. Everybody loves a green. So if I am making a similar kind of post that we were just looking at in the template section and it took me 2 minutes to make it, this would take me a lot longer. I would have to go and find my cut out. I can use the same one I just used just for the sake of u saving some time here. Let me put it in the middle. Not trying to completely recreate. And then I would need some text, obviously. So I'm going to go over to the text section and click at a heading. Here, I'll type in iced late. I'm holding down the I'm holding down the Shift button to make the letters all caps. And here, now I got to change the font. So I need something that would aesthetically fit the kind of idea that I might have in my head. I'm going to go with this font. I like this one. This one always goes good with coffee posts, increase the size. Change the color. And of course, this kind of design still requires a lot more elements for it to look decent and presentable and cover all the information that I would want to, of course, included in my design. But the point is that with a completely blank canvas, you would have to know exactly what you want, and you would have to be completely comfortable with the interface of canvas so you can actually get a beautiful design and not get too frustrated. So when it comes to starting from a template or starting from scratch, it really depends on your skill level, how comfortable you feel. And also, you can start, of course, building completely from scratch if you're feeling adventurous, and that is a great way for you to learn. But you need a specific idea of what is it that you want, because it can take a long time for someone who's not as familiar with designing to actually figure out a design that you would be happy with at the end. I would suggest going with templates just for now because it's also going to be a great way for you to learn and notice patterns about the basics of design. Like, for example, how other designers have used color palettes or hierarchy or images and elements. It's not only a quick way to make a design, but also you can learn a lot about the process of designing. Now that you know exactly the differences between working from a template or from scratch, you can make the best decision for yourself, and I'll see you in the next lesson. Oh 7. Text Basics (Fonts, Hierarchy, Spacing): Okay, let's talk about text, and I don't mean just picking out your favorite font and using it on your design. I'm talking about actually understanding what text does in a design because text alone can make your design look either homemade or intentional. Now we're going to be talking about three main things font, hierarchy, and spacing. I'm going to show you a real design as an example, and you will see how the balance changes once we start messing with the already established order. Now, let's take a look. I have a design here, and as you can see, it's already looking very balanced and everything is in order. However, the first thing I want you to look at are the fonts. As you can see, there are only two fonts in this overall design. First one is the main heading, which is the font named Antonio. And then we have the subheading with open sons, right? And generally, I see this as a common mistake. For especially beginners, that they tend to use many different fonts on a single design, and that can make a design look a little bit more chaotic and not as balanced. A good rule of thumb is to only go with two fonts. I know it is very tempting, especially on Can but to start scrolling through all of these fonts and pick out the most fun and creative and unique looking. However, you do have to take into account that when you're creating a design, you want everything to look cohesive, everything to make sense. So for example, in this case, you see, we have some computers here, and the overall look is, first of all, very modern and very sleek. So if I would start changing these fonts that are already look good, it would change the overall look and it wouldn't make sense. For example, let's change the main text here. Now, this is very big and bold, which is a great way to go if you're trying to get the person's eye to go there first. So if I'm going to change this font to something a little bit more decorative and not as readable as this one, for example, let's go with something like this. Now, it looks like a mess. Let me adjust this real quick. Now, this is all in caps. I'm going to take that off. Now, there's nothing wrong with this kind of font, of course, it's beautiful. However, it doesn't really look balanced in this specific design style. Also, it doesn't really go well with this kind of subheading, right? It's also not as readable. I can see this kind of font being used in another style of design. For example, if this post was about maybe fashion, maybe some DIY projects or really anything that's a little bit more creative perhaps. The font that you choose also is kind of like a way to send a message, right? What kind of vibe do you want your design to give off? Now, when it comes to pairing fonts, let me go back to the previous font that this design had. I'm just hitting Coman z on my keyboard here. Now, when it comes to the pairing of fonts, you see we have the bold Antonio with slightly lighter font, and this is a very great pairing. And you want to choose fonts that contrast each other, yet they kind of look cohesive, right? So again, if I would start changing the subheading here to a different style, it would not look as balanced. For example, this one. This font alone, let me increase the size just so we can see. This is a good font, and I love this font. I've used it many times. However, it's very unique. So it's not really good for as a subheading because it's so unique looking, you would want something a little bit more simpler to complement the main text, right? Another cool thing to know about Canva, when it comes to actually pairing fonts, if you go to the sidebar here and click on text, you would probably end up here. And if you scroll down, you see there is already some prepared font combinations that Canada is suggesting. So if you are lacking some ideas or you want some inspiration, or maybe even you want to find something a little bit more unique, this is a really good place to go. Now let's talk about hierarchy. Hierarchy is pretty much a fancy way of saying, Where do you want people's eye to go first, right? So again, going back to this design example, we have the main text. So that's why the designer wants the eye to go first. And that is hierarchy in play, right? The subtext is slightly smaller, so it's not as important piece of information, but it's still crucial to be on the design. When it comes to hierarchy, you as a designer, are in the control, so you are the one you as a designer, you're in control of the hierarchy and directing people's eyes. Whatever you're going to put as the bigger text is the first thing that's going to catch people's attention. So since all of this is already organized in the correct order, let me show you what happens when I start messing with that order and changing the hierarchy of this text. So let's take the main text, and I will make all of this be the same size as the subheading and also the text above it. So this is 246, and this is 40 41. Let's make everything, let's say 100, just so it's visible. Just going to change the size up here, bam, highlight. 100 Enter. Let's make this in a single row, and this will be 100 too. 100 and Enter. Okay. So you see what happens when I make all of the text, the same exact size. Now, you don't know where to look first. As intentional, it looks a little even though it is all the same size, it looks more disorganized. You don't know what to look at first, what to think, and overall, it's just not looking good. So the attention is completely away from the main message, which is get your freebies, which is supposed to be bigger to actually get people's attention. So this is what I mean when I say that hierarchy is a great tool to enhance your design, get your message across, and also and also improve the overall look of the aesthetic of your design. So when it comes to hierarchy, also another way to go is not only the size, but you can also play with effects and colors. Let me go back to the original size of all this text, and let me show you. So if I would take this main text and I would go to effects Effects tab right here, here are a couple of things that I could change up and make this text look different and stand out. Maybe I would want it to look more animated. Now, this color doesn't really quite fit now let's go to cosmic. Maybe this. I'll take off the all caps. And then, of course, I would have to change the font back to something a little bit more clean. So if I would go back to upper case. Now, it kind of gives the same vibe. It doesn't it doesn't play as well. This font doesn't play as well like the previous one does with this subtext. But you see what I mean when it comes to effects. You can also change the color of the main text or even the subtext to kind of play with the hierarchy, but a very simple way to go is just changing up the size. Now let's talk about spacing. Now, spacing can actually balance your design and improve it. Right now, we are looking at this design where everything is centered and well balanced when it comes to spacing. Now, there's two types of spacing. There's the line spacing, which is the lines of text and the spacing between it, or there's the letter spacing. So again, I will go to this main heading right here, and by clicking this T button right here, which is advanced settings, this is where you would play with the spacing. Have line spacing, which changes the space between these two lines of text. I'll just go back to what it was originally because it's very good. This one will change the spaces between the letters. Now, the more crammed it is, the less readable it is and more claustrophobic. Again, it does not look balanced, so you want to be very intentional with your letter spacing. But also, same thing goes for the main title and the subtext under it. So if I would change this spacing between all of these text elements, now it looks cramped. It doesn't look horrible, but it just doesn't look as balanced as it did before because we have a lot going on down here, and this just looks too claustrophobic. So if I go back, all of a sudden, this looks better and you immediately know where to put your eyes first. Other thing to know is how you space your text when it comes to the edges of your design. For example, right now, the spacing between the top of the design and the bottom is pretty good. But what would happen if I would take this text and I would move it higher? Now it looks awkward and it's too close to the edge. Again, the balance is completely lost. If I would move all of it too close to the elements, now the top looks too empty. So again, balance is off. Now, a good rule of thumb, especially on Canva is to highlight all of your text elements, especially in kind of like this kind of design where you have text and elements, and to find the perfect middle, which Kano will give you these purple lines. You see they appear as I start moving these text elements to kind of fit into a good area and make it look well centered. Another thing to know is not to put text too close to the edge because, again, it throws off balance, and it messes with the overall kind of direction. So since we have elements that are all centered and there is the main computer in the center, it would not be wise for me to put the text closer to this edge because that would throw off the balance of everything. Now it's centered. The spaces between the words are good. And the reason why these two, for example, the get your freebies organization templates are a little bit closer together than, for example, this text is because these are really meant to work together more separate from this. 8. Images & Elements: Now that we cover the text, spacing and hierarchy, it is time to talk about the next thing that can make or break your design, which are images and elements. Why I say that is because if your design has great text and great text design, but bad visuals, your design can fall flat on its face. I have a fresh example for us to look at. So let's dig in. First things first, you will notice that we have two separate images on this design. And one thing to know is that when it comes to these images, there are two ways to actually work with them. First one would be just clicking on it and moving it around and make sure it's in the same position, or you can double click it. And adjust it this way. If you would have an image that is not in this aspect ratio, by double clicking, that's how you would change what is visible in the frame. Most images on a Canva are in this frame system and you can add your own frames. But once you drop an image from Canva, that's mostly how you're going to work with it. I'm just going to press Command Z on my keyboard. And when it comes to images on Canva, where do they come from? You can find photos on Canva by going to your sidebar and clicking on photos right here. Now, there's a very wide variety of different images you can use. They all are very high quality. For the most part, there's only once or twice, I think I've come across an image in bad resolution, but for the most part, they are very high quality, and again, paying attention to this little crown icon on the corners, that's going to determine whether it is an image that you can use on a free account or not. The library is very, very wide here. You can go up here in the search bar and search for just about anything that you need and you'll definitely find something. Let's put in fashion. Here, as you can see, there are so many different kinds of photos all related to that keyword fashion. Now replace this image with, for example, this one. I am choosing this one because it looks to be about the same color scheme and style. What I'm going to do is just going to click on it and drag it over here or here, but I want to replace this one. I'm just going to drop it in this. As you can see, it replaced that image and the locked it into the frame. Now if I double click it, I can now play with how much we can see. Let's say, we'll change it to this. All right. Now, when it comes to using your own images on Canva, you can upload your own from your device and you would go up here where it says upload. You click on that and this is your library, how you can upload is either dragon drop from your desktop if you are on a desktop, but otherwise you would hit this button that says upload files. And it will drop you off into a folder or desktop or wherever, and this is how you can do it. Let's say I want to upload this. I'll just hit Select and here it's done uploading. Now, again, talking about the resolution of images that you use in your designs, they always should be the highest quality you can get just because overall, it will uplift your design and make it look way better and way more professional. When it comes to other visuals like elements, they are also very crucial to your design because they can take a design like this, which isn't bad at all whatsoever. However, we can make it better by adding some playful little graphics. Now, what I'm going to do is go up here and select elements. I think elements, I think I clicked on it. All right. In the graphic section, this is where you can find all the fun little stickers and illustrations of all kinds of things. For example, you have whole sticker packages down here, so these are really good for situations where you need many of them, but different kinds, but you still want them to look similar to each other. So it looks cohesive. This is where you would find that kind of graphic. You can also search for whatever pattern or shape or illustration that you want. Now, what I would do is go into shapes and this is what I also would suggest for beginners to work with purely shapes. You can actually get creative with these instead of taking a pre illustrated element and then just putting it in your design and not always they work very well. In this case, we can definitely elevate the whole look of this design. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take some of these basic little square shapes and I'm going to place them strategically about let's put one here. Now, what I'm going to do is duplicate this one, and I'm going to put it right here. Now I'm going to duplicate it again and put it at this corner. Now to lock them all in place, I'm going to go to positions up here and click on layers. I'm going to move this one up a couple of layers so they can all be together. By holding the command key on my keyboard, I'm going to click on all of them and this will select all of them at the same time and I'm going to group them together, just so it's easier to work with them because this way, I can change the size all at the same time and I don't have to bother wasting time making sure they all match. So what I'm going to do next is take this and just drag it down at the very bottom of this design and maybe place it here. From here, I would like to change the color. Now, when it comes to the color, of course, you can do a color pop. But in this case, since the overall style of this design is very minimal, sleek and neutral colors, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to match those colors. I'm going to click make sure I have this element selected. I'm going to go up here to the color picker. And if you scroll down here in the color section, you notice that Canada has extracted the colors from the images, which I do find this feature to be very, very useful because this way you can actually make your elements match in color, which makes everything tied together way more beautifully. What I'm going to do is, well, first of all, ungroup the elements again just so I could color them all individually. Again, clicking on the square that I want to change the color to and I'm going to go down here and start just choosing picking colors. For this one, I'm probably going to try to match it to this image because the squares are closer. Now next one is going to be this one, perhaps something like that. I like the way that looks. This should be something. No, no, maybe like that. Let's go with the darker. Now what I'm going to do is again, go to the layers, the positions area and select them by holding the command key, group them, and now I will go to the transparency tab and I'm just going to play with it. To make it a little bit less bold just because I don't want those elements to take away the attention. I think 58 should be good. Now, just trying to play around with the placement of these little squares. I actually think I want to change the color of this middle square just because it's not playing well with the color of the picture. I'm going to group select that and go down here. That might be too pale. I might have to go darker, start tapping into the other palette. I like that. That's a little bit better. I can't go darker. I think that's good. Now, I see there's a gap. What I can do is go down here to this Zoom in little bar and zoom in here so I could get rid of this gap. It's bothering me. I'm just going to get the image itself and extend it. There. Now it completely matches fully with the element in the back. You see how that already looks way better. It adds a little interest to the whole design and makes it a little bit more intricate, but not too much because we don't want to take away the attention from these two beautiful pictures. Now I'm going to go to positions again, select all of the squares, group them, and now I'm just going to duplicate them with that one click duplicate button and I'm going to place the other one down here. Now just playing around. I'm going to zoom in again, scroll down and place it just about here. Now, going back to positions, I'm going to drag this down under this image because that's how it's going to be layered, I'm just going to zoom back out in there. Now this is looking a little bit too dark, so what I can do is play with the colors. There's something that isn't working very well in my opinion, let's change the color of this one. That's a little bit better. These might need to be a little bit differently colored. If I go dark here, I can go lighter here and there you go. Now there is good contrast. It looks way more fun. Let me just position these a little bit more similarly, how the squares behind this image, I'm going to do the same here just so it could be a good mirror. Man. Now it's not completely aligned the way I would like it to be. That's okay. It happens. I guess I will do the same thing that I did before. I'm just going to take the image itself and extend it so the lien could be there. This way, I added just a couple of simple squares. I matched the colors, I position them strategically and here we have the overall design, I think looks a little bit more interesting and I think it stands out just a little bit more. I really didn't take me that long.This is genuinely the power of images and elements that you can implement into your design to really tie everything together and just make it pop a little bit more. To wrap this up, when you use images, make sure they are high quality. Remember, you can always upload your own or you can use the ones that are on Canva because again, their library is very, very extensive. You can use fun frames like other shapes. Let me show you how to find them if you go here to elements. Go to frames and click on it. This is where you can find all kinds of fun shapes and even different kinds of overall designs of frames to include into your design. To include it onto your design. For example, this is how you would use it. You would select your desired frame, go to images or uploads, and you would just drag and drop into that frame and just place it wherever you would like. But frames are a really cool way to also elevate your design, but make sure you use high quality images. When it comes to actual graphics like the squares that I added, you really don't need to overload your design with them because they can take away the attention, just like I also adjusted transparency of them, just so they could be a little element just to add a little intrigue to the overall look and not take the whole attention away. You can play around with shapes with lines, with colors, with transparencies and with just the right amount of strategic placing, you can really take a simple design and make it look amazing. 9. Color Basics (Palettes, Contrast, Readability): Now, before we start to work on our actual projects, let's talk about some of the most important things when it comes to making a good design, which is everything about color. Now, I understand how this can seem a little bit intimidating to someone who's starting out because often it feels like, Oh, you either have the eye for it or you don't. But I promise you, once you understand the basics of color, you'll understand how systematic it actually is. I have chosen this design for the example in this lesson because it is very colorful. It looks very loud and very in your face, but that is on purpose because even though it might look very maximalist and even a little crazy, it plays with colors beautifully. Now, if you take a look at it, it only really uses four colors, and every single color placement is very intentional. Let's take a look at this and break this down. So the color palette for this design is orange, which is the dominant color. Then you have yellow, which is a secondary color. So the yellow is here to not compete with the orange, but compliment it. And then you have the very soft pink and the beige as the neutral background colors. And of course, the white fortex. So that's the color palette. And what is a color palette? A color palettes pretty much a set of colors that works well in a design. Very simple. When it comes to actually using a color palette on Cava, it is very simple and Canvas interface actually makes it very easy. Now, what you want to do is first of all, choose your color palette. Then when you're starting to add your elements and your text and everything else, you want to make sure to follow that color palette because if you're using different kinds of, for example, orange, it can look very chaotic very quick. This is how you would go about it. Let's say, for example, I would want to change the color of this background star behind this text. What I can do here, is, first of all, select the element that I want to change the color to and then go up here to the color. On the side here, you see the color section. So here in the first slot is going to be the document colors where Canva has saved all the colors that you are using in this design. And from here, you should generally be able to find the color that you would want to change it to because you have all the colors saved. However, if by any miracle, you cannot find the exact color for example, I would want the start to be this yellow. Since I see it here, I can just click on it, and it would change to that yellow, right? But sometimes when you can't necessarily find it, what you can do is go to this color wheel, click on it, and this is where you're going to see the gradient. Here you see is the color code. So this sequence of letters and numbers is the exact code of that particular color. What you can do here if you're on Safari, by the way, is go to the element where you want to take the color from, select the color up here. Open the color wheel and copy this color code. You can do that by pressing Command C on your keyboard if you're on Mac, or you can just right click it and copy it with your mouse. Then you would go over to the element that you want to change the color to. Again, go to the color, open the color wheel and Command B, and you paste your color code. Now, interesting thing I want to mention I don't know why, but Canva does not offer the color picker or the eye drop tool on Safari for some reason. Cannot explain it. I'm not happy about it, but that just is what it is. Now, if you're on something like Google Chrome, you actually have that. Here I have Google Chrome open with the same design, and if I was going to do that, I select my element, go up to the color and open the color wheel and you see this is the tool that we're looking for now. This Eyedrop tool is what allows you if you click on to graze over every single pixel on your design where you can now select the color that you want. And you don't have to bother playing in this gradi and trying to match the exact shade of yellow, right? So that's very handy. And I'm not quite sure why Canva doesn't just put this also available in Safari, but it just is what it is. I just thought it was important to know let's move on. Now let's talk about contrast because that's another very important thing. Contrast is important, especially if you have text and you wanted to stand down and be readable. So for example, this where it says New Retro store, this is a very beautiful example on how contrast works very well because the text is white and the backgrounds quite busy, right? You have orange letter, then you have the pink, and there's a lot going on, especially with this element in the back. Why it actually works so well is because the designer has used something that is a very great tool for this kind of situation, which is an outline to text. So if I would select my text element and I would go up to effects here, I see they have added an outline. And this outline is that darker orange, which is used often in this design, and it ends up not only bringing out the text, but complementing the overall look. Now, watch what happens when I take off the outline. It's not as readable. It's not bad, but it's not as good as it was with the outline. So you see how powerful such a small little detail can be. Now let's take a look at opening soon text. This is also readable, however, the outline, in this case, is white, which kind of doesn't contrast very well, in my opinion, with the background here, you have the soft pink and the beige and the yellow. So this would work way better if the colors were inverted just like this text over here. So let's see what happens if I switch and I make the text white and the outline orange just like we just saw. So I would go up to effx and start switching. So this would be orange, and then I go up here with the A, and I would change that to white. You see, all of a sudden, it's way more readable because the contrast between the outline and the background is much, much better. I think the reason why the designer chose to go with the previous combination is because it's probably a stylistic, a creative choice, and it fits the kind of retro feel of this design. As I said, it's not bad, but it could be better. So the general rule of contrast is go with light on dark or dark on light. That always works very well. Now let's talk about readability. Now, readability actually goes hand in hand with contrast, but it's a little bit more broader. For example, when it comes to this text body over here, it is way smaller font, and also it is in black letters. Since this text are the details of whatever the message is, this actually works very well because the main because the main thing that is supposed to catch your attention is the new retro store opening soon, right? And if the person is like, Oh, that's cool, where is it? Oh, there it is, right, and they start looking more into it. So this doesn't compromise the design, but it gives the essential details and information necessary. And the reason why this works is because it's black letters, even though they're small. But the background, as you can see, is very light, and it's not as busy. So let's see what would happen if this background here would be something like this up here. So darker orange, and you see the contrast isn't as good anymore. It's not as readable. So you definitely want to keep that in mind that readability and contrast are very, very similar. But with readability, you can also not only play with colors, but the size of your text. So this is the detailed information that's not as crucial to the overall design, so they can be put a little lower in smaller font. So now over here, I have made a little example on low contrast versus high contrast. So as you can see, you have the darker background and if you would like to play around with colorful fonts like here, you can go with the color, but just make sure that it is bright. Because what happens, for example, in this situation where you have the background is dark color and the text is d the visibility is way lower. As I said, white text always goes well, even on some lighter colors. You can start playing around with not only the size of the font, but also with different kinds of effects. So if you had a background color that's light and you would still want to use white letters, this is what you could do. Let's say I have a square that is lighter blue. Let me change to lighter blue, and I'll add a text box over it. Of course, you could go with darker text, right? Or if you do want to go with white text, you can start adding things like effects. For example, up here, you have all kinds of effects, so you can add a drop shadow and play around with the settings a little bit. There are other things like echo you see how much more it makes the text pop out. That's just an example. But as I said, you generally can always trust white text on a darker background. In this case, you have a light green background and light text, which again, gives low contrast, poor visibility, and unless it's a creative choice and your main goal is in readability, you can go with this. But generally, if you're using text, you're China, convey a message, higher contrast would probably be a better choice. To wrap up this lesson, stick to around three or four colors per design. Make sure that the main text is in a place where it's readable, so it's also a larger size and give your text and background enough contrast so it's actually visible. 10. Project 1: Make an Instagram Post: To start this process, what you need is a blank Canvas. We can get that by clicking either here on the social media button right here, which is the shortcut, or you can click on this plus button that says Create. From here, you can either find it on this side menu right here, which we would go to social media. And for the Instagram post, we need to use this one. You can also do one by one. But recently I've been seeing a lot of four by fives. So let's go with that. Now we have a brand new window open, and this is where all the magic starts to happen. Now, again, if you do want to play around with canvases, all you got to do is just make sure. Again, if you want to play around with templates, all you got to do is open up your canvas and on the side menu here, the first button that says templates is where you would find all kinds of things by just clicking on it and clicking on the elements that you would want to change, for example, the book click on the text, you can start adjusting and switching out elements and making it your own. Now since we are doing a design from scratch, we're just going to start with the background. Now with the background, you can go so many different ways. You can either click on this background button and find all kinds of fun images and textures, gradients and everything else. But for this kind of design, what I have in mind, I have a very specific particular vision, which I also recommend. When you start designing, make sure you have an idea, a direction, an overall aesthetic or the more specific your idea is the better because that will definitely cut out the time of you just randomly putting things together and feeling lost. Make sure you have a vision for your creation. Now, I need the background. I have created a color palette, you can see here. It was a quick little palette I threw together. These are all my favorite colors and I think this post is going to come out really good. For the background, I would like to go a little bit more dark and moody. I'm going to go with the darkest color that I have in my palette, which is this beautiful, very deep blue ish. That's not a great description of a color, but that's what it looks like. This is going to be my background. To start bringing out life in this, I'm going to start by adding some elements. Now, I have this idea for a coffee shop that has the aesthetic of an old astronomy book in a way. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the elements and I in the search bar going to type in line. Hit Enter and here I have the shapes open, which I definitely recommend starting to work with shapes and not particular stickers or other graphics that Canva has because let me show you why. For example, if I pick out a line from the shape section, and then I'll pick out a line from the graphics section. Now we go to graphics, and let's click on this one, for example. You see this is from shapes. With this one, I can make it longer, I can twist and turn it. It also has all of these settings up here, which gives me way more room for all kinds of adjustments. When it comes to the line from the graphic section, as you can see, I've clicked on it and it doesn't have the same liberties and the same adjustments that I can make. I can increase the length. However, you notice that the width increases as well, which isn't the greatest thing. What, I'm just going to get rid of this one and I'm going to work with purely shapes. Now we have a line. What I would like to do is start to create somewhat of a frame in a way. I'm going to move it, and these two tools, which is this one will rotate it. The cool thing is when you rotate it, it shows you the degrees so you can actually get it to be straight. With this one, you would move it back and forth. By dragging these ends here, I'm just going to connect it to the top and the bottom and I would like the line to be a little bit thinner, so I'm going to go up here in the lines settings and I'm going to bring it down to one. Now, I'm just going to repeat this for this side as well. What I can do is instead of getting another line, I'm actually going to just duplicate this one. Once you have selected it, this little menu will either appear on the top or the bottom and you want to click on this duplicate button. Now you have the exact same element. Place it about here and you see how these purple guidelines start appear. These little purple guidelines that appear as you can see, they actually are here to help you and show you if your elements are placed correctly or with reasonable distance from other things in your design, you'll see Okay, so for now, I have these lines placed here, but I would want one top and one on the bottom. Again, I'm going to duplicate one of them. This time, I'm going to bring it to the middle, rotate it horizontally. You see, minus 180, that was so easy. On other design tools, actually, this can become a hassle. That's why I really appreciate Canva for this because the that was not correct. Command Z. These little guidelines really do help out. I'm going to play Z here. I think that's good. Next, I want some sort of flare to this. What I'm going to do is again, go into the search bar and search up star because the coffee shop is going to be cosmic themed. So again, going into shapes and these elements are completely adjustable, unlike the ones in the graphic section. I'm going to select this star because it's giving me that vibe of an older astronomy book rather than this star because this is giving me wizard vibes, which is not really the look I'm trying to go for here, so I'm just going to place four little stars on each of these corners to bring it together. When it comes to the color, I'm going to select this one and make sure that my lines are also matching that same color, how silly of me. Should have done that before. Now, really cool thing is that you'll notice at the bottom of the color section you see there's change all. So we're going to go from white to this beige and I'm just going to select that. That saves me a lot of time. Now, I'm just going to again, duplicate this little star, make sure I have all four corners to keep it consistent. I'm liking this so far. I will make them. No, actually, that was actually a good size. All right. Now what do we need? We need the main act of the design, which is going to be coffee. I'm going to go to the search bar again and type in coffee. From here, I'm thinking going to go into photos. I'm going to start looking for a little cup that will complement the overall look. I'm looking for almost a specific kind of cup, something that is, first of all, I would love to use a free element, just in case you have a free account so you can use the same thing. Also, it doesn't look too modern, it shouldn't be a to go cup. It should be a proper cup of coffee. Okay. So to save some time, I'm just going to go up here to this little button here and it says show filters. We're just going to filter out the pro elements from free ones and this should help out with finding a element that is for free. I really like this one. I really like it. This one's beautiful and the little blue rim around the plate and the cup itself, it really actually matches the overall look. We're just going to use this. So I clicked on it. It appeared on my canvas. Now let me just adjust the size so it's not too overwhelming. Again, by holding down my mouse on the actual cup, you see this little purple line indicates that it is perfectly centered. Love that. Let's leave it there. Now I need some text. Going to the text tab on the side menu, I have some fonts picked out, which I think would also look good in this post. What do I want to say? This will be let's say store fall Starfall seems like a good idea. I would drink coffee like that. Now, increase the size and this is how you would generally do it. I prefer it this way, drag the corners. Or you can also just have it selected. You can go up here to the number section and just either type it in by double clicking or just play with the plus and minus. Now, let's change the color of this text, which is going to be here, text color, and I'm going to go with this. I love this because we definitely want this to stand out. So from here, I'm going to duplicate this text yet again. However, this should say latte. Again, you see these little purple lines start appearing. Everything's perfectly centered. Okay, cool. I'm going to change the font of this text, so I've double clicked it. And perhaps railway. I think that's good. Also, I'll change the color just so it doesn't take away the attention from Star fall because you don't see a lot of lattes that are named that, so I think that's a good selling point. Okay. And all of a sudden, this course turned into marketing course. Okay, so far so good, I think, what I want is a circle with a price tag, Because we're advertising a latte and we need a price tag. So going back to elements, I'm going to do type in circle. And from shapes, I'm going to grab this. Put the circle here because there's some empty space and it's a good way to not only get in more information on your design, but I also fill in an empty block. Why not? From here, I see this is a little bit, this doesn't match the letters are too far. I'm just going to bring everything in a little bit to pull it together. This maybe can come down in the size and I'm going to change the color to green. It's not bad. Yellow would be way too much. It's not a bad option. I think I'm going to go with the green. The green is better. And from here, let me grab this text. I'm going to duplicate it. By duplicating the text, not only do you stay consistent with the font from your design that you've already picked out, but also it saves you some time from, you know, going to the other side of the screen. Now, I'm going to change this text to let's say this is in store offer. Wow, the text is very big. I'm just going to bring it into a single line, and these little nubs on the sides will do that for you if your text is in three different rows. Now I'm going to change the size. I think what I should do here is perhaps make it all cap, which this is a very convenient button up here. Let's see. Let's see. I'm going to bring it out again, change the size. Perhaps if we add the bold effect, let me put it over and let me see how it looks. Also, I'm going to change the color of it. Okay. What I would want to do is actually curve it to fit into this circle. Again, let's decrease the size. I'm going to place here and I'm going to go over to the Effects button. And here you'll find all kinds of fun things like glows and then outlines and things. But I want to use the curve effect, which is wonderful and it makes it so simple. I'm just going to curve it a little bit more so it fits the curve of the actual circle with twist it a little bit. Okay. All right. I think the bold effect might be too much. I think that's good. Yes. Or should I take off the caps? Actually, that looks way better. And in store, capital letter. Let's do that. Okay. Now I'm going to copy this or duplicate this text again and just set a price. Let me do $5? I think $5 is good. Let's change the color to white and we'll bring in that bold effect. And place it in the circle. Tilt it just so it matches, and bam. We have a price tag. Again, you see those little dotted lines appeared. This shows me if I'm centered in the circle, which I won't be because I have this text here, so maybe I should move it a little bit. Okay. There we go. Now it's making sense. Actually, I could go a little. Let's do that, let's do that. That's perfect. $5. Do you remember when coffee was $5? I missed those days. Now, I think we're almost done. What I want is add some more information. Again, I'm going to copy this or duplicate this text and I'm just going to put in some more info. Let's say it's limited edition. Again, bring it to one row, decrease the size. Whoa. I'm going to use this little trusty little tool here. Limited edition. I'm going to start moving everything aligned because otherwise it's very easy to get chaotic. Same thing we'll go here. Latte, Latte, we can increase the size here. Okay. Now we're looking way better. Okay. I'm going to duplicate this one again. And here, let's say, new menu item. Whoa. That was not supposed to happen. That's okay. New menu item. So when you change your text, make sure you have the actual text itself highlighted when you change it because you can start doing things when you don't even know what you're doing when you're typing on your keyboard. I think this text is getting a bit too large, I think if we decrease the size and maybe change the alignment, which is this handy dandy button up here, would actually start balancing everything out. Where is that guideline? The guidelines right here. Okay. I want to bring it up higher, but at the same time, bring up this because I'm feeling like it's a little bit too low there we go out now we're getting places. I'm going to remember the size of these letters, which is 23. I'm going to make sure that this matches it. I'm going to go down to 23, align it to write. And bam. Okay. Beautiful, beautiful. Now, I think I want some more information, so I'm going to duplicate this layer yet again, bring it down here. Here I'm just going to create, let's say, I have an Instagram account and this is Cosmico. The name of my imaginary coffee shop. One day, maybe I'll open it for real. I'm going to duplicate this again, realign the text to the left side or right side. To the right. This is left, that is right. Let's put some opening hours. Open. Let's say 9:00 A.M. To 10:00 P.M. There we go. Okay. Now what I would want to do to spice it up a little bit more, I'm going to take the biggest selling point of this whole thing, this whole post, and bring this one above the latte, and this is how you can do it. You make sure you have it selected, you go up to positions, go to layers, and this is where you see all the layout of all your elements and the order of what they are in. So what I'm going to do is I got to make sure that this circle with the price tag is together, but also not below the coffee little coffee cup. I'm just going to take the cup and bring it right below the green circle, but above the latte. This way, it creates more dimension. So we have the cup covering. But to actually make it stand out a little bit more, what I'm going to do is have the cup selected, I'm going to go up to edit. And here, I'm going to add a little effect that's called a drop shadow. Now, love using drop shadow. And I use it in most of my designs because this starts separating the elements from the background a little bit more. I'm going to click on this yet again to start adjusting it. I'm going to just angle for sure. I think this is good. I'm going to decrease the intensity just a little bit and decrease the distance. Okay. Now it's giving a very subtle shadow, which I love. I think I'm going to add the same effect to my circle because it is covering the cup. So for the circle, since it's an element, what you want to do is go to effects instead of edit and this is where you'll find that. You have the drop shadow, you see. And let me see how that looks. That actually looks good already. So I'm just going to leave. And now let's just add some little stars, maybe. I'm going to copy the stars that I've already used in this design, cutting my time in half. I'm just going to add it around the cup a little bit, just to add that magic, that space wonder. I think that should be good for now here, maybe to balance out, could do one of these bigger ones and the little one under it here. That's too close. Okay. I like that. I like that a lot actually. And there's a lot of empty space here, so I might just with more stars because I can't have too many stars. These ones I don't want too big. Something like that perhaps and the same on the other side. This is looking real good. That's cute. Yeah. I like that. That's really sweet. I think as the last touch, I'm just going to add a little bit of another circle because I'm looking at the plate itself and it's giving me vibes of a ring of saturn almost. I'm just going to take one of these circle elements and take advantage of the fact that I can actually change the shape. I'm matching it to the plate, making it just a little bit bigger. Now, since it's covering everything, I want to put it behind. What I'm going to do, go back to positions and make sure I have layers selected. I'm going to grab this and drag it under. Actually, in fact, I'm going to put it under everything. That's cool. I like that. But I do want to change the color. Going up here, perhaps this blue. That's not bad. But if we change the transparency, which is also up here, I like that a lot. Okay. Yeah, it's giving me Saturn ring vibe. I'll stick with that. I think our design is ready, and I think it turned out really well. As you can see, it wasn't really complicated. I was just intentionally using the elements that are available to you and I used shapes that Canva has for free and they're all editable. I used a color palette that I had thought about beforehand and I had an idea of the vibe that I wanted to present, which honestly, I did achieve and I'm very happy with this design. I hope that you get creative because feel free to change it up and make your own and most importantly, have fun designing. O 11. Project 2: Create a Profile Graphic / Logo: For our second project, we're going to be creating a logo on Canva. The cool part is that you don't need any design experience to create a whole logo. This time, instead of using shapes, what I'm going to be using is an actual graphic from Canvas library. It's actually going to surprise you how quick and simple this is. Let's get into it. Now, we're back here on Canva, and what I need is, again, a blank Canvas to start working. What I'm going to do is click on this Create Plus button. Up here, we are going to just type in what is it that we need, which is logo. And here we have a couple of different options, but the one that we need is this one. This is 200 by 200. This is 2000 by 2000 pixels, which is a very good size. We're going to click on it and get the party started. Okay. Now since we are again, no really utilizing one of their templates, which, of course, feel free to. There's so many and they're all beautiful, really. Again, starting from scratch, what we need is a background where to start working. Since this kind of design can also be used not only just as a logo, but also as a profile picture for your social media, for example, your TikTok or your Instagram, you definitely want to make sure that it looks put together and that it would stand out on a feed. So I really liked the idea that I went with the Instagram post project. I'm going to use the same color palette, and I think I'm going to go again with this dark blue. Now that we have our background, we can start brainstorming. I know the name. The name of this company that I came up with is going to be Cosmica. It's a play on words. It's like aerobica cosmica cosmic coffee. It sounded better in my head. I'm going to go on and click on this text. I have also picked out some fonts. I just did some preparation right before the lesson. I have this big text element here. This is where I'm going to put in the name, which is going to be Cs that's a good start. Very good start. Now, we're probably going to be working on this a little bit more, but I want to lay down the overall blueprint for this design. I'm going to go ahead and start already picking out the element just because once you start working with the actual graphic of it, you start feeling the vibe and you start changing the text and the color and everything else. Let's just start with that. Going to the elements section, this is where I'm going to be typing in coffee, I suppose. Yeah, let's go with coffee. This time let's go to graphics. The cool part about this is that they're already pre illustrated little graphics that you can start working with. You don't have to draw anything yourself, which people that either don't draw or they just need something quick and beautiful, this is a great resource. What I'm looking for is a coffee cup. That would make sense. It could be a coffee bean, but I think a coffee cup would be a little bit self better explanatory, I think. What about this one? No, the hearts aren't the right look. I'm thinking about something simple, but still something that has character. Okay. This is really cute. I really like these kinds of graphics. I like them a lot, actually. Let's take a quick look. That's cute. I feel like this is already used a lot and I would like to go a little bit more creative and also a little bit more distinct. You see something like this would actually be perfect because it already includes the stars, which I was just using stars in the Instagram post design. This is giving the right vibes, but it's not really necessarily exactly what I'm looking for. I need something a little bit more more creative than that. I think if I specify coffee cup, that would help with finding the right one. I'm already seeing way better options now. Be specific when you type in your keywords. I like this one. But you see it doesn't really fit the look of the text in a way where this looks more sketched. Because of the little specs in the mug, doesn't really fit what I'm trying to go for. Actually I really like the idea of a mocha pot. That could be cool. Before I change my mind, I'm just going to stick to the idea that I had. I like this style a lot. I still looks hand drawn, but it's not as sketchy. You know what I mean? I'm just going to place it here for now just in case and see if I have better options. But there are so many options. Honestly, I could scroll here forever. There's another contestant here. I am noticing the pattern of style that I'm going for here. I just going to keep dropping them in. I think I'm just going to go for one more. And then start working from there, and choose Oh, I think I found the winner. I think this one's it. That definitely has way more character than these two. We're just going to highlight both of these and delete them. Now we're getting places. Okay. I like that this illustration has a lot of character just because it's slanted. What I'm going to do here is first of all, change the color to this beige that I have. Going to do the same with the text to start tying in. I'm starting to see it come together. Let's center everything. However, what I'm not liking is that this plate, there's no break between the plate and the coffee cup. So I could either add a line, which would add more detail, which generally in logos, you don't want to be too detailed. What I'm going to do instead perhaps is add a break here, erase the bottom of this cup. Now, you can do that two ways, actually. One way would be to go up here to edit, if you have a pro account, then what you can do is, in this case, would be brush. Now it drops you into this editor and you would just brush what you would want to erase. I'm just doing it quickly because this is not going to be the way I'm going to go about it, but this is one way. From here, you would select magic eraser and it will take away that area that I had just highlighted. Definitely need a steady hand for that, but since everybody has an account that is pro, what I'll do instead is go back to shapes, back to elements and shapes right here. I'm just going to select the line and from here, first of all, I'm going to change the color to something a little bit more visible so I see what I'm doing. Then next one is stroke style. I'm going to increase the thickness maximum, and then I'm going to go here to line type and I'm going to choose curved. This way, you see, I can start creating a little moment like that. Now what I'm going to do is change the color to the color of the background so it blends in and it looks like it's not there. There you go. Now to move it together, I'm going to go to positions, make sure you have the layers selected. I'm going to highlight both of these layers. I'm going to hold Command key on my keyboard and click on the cup and make sure both of them are selected. Now I'm going to group them. Bam. Now when I'm changing the size of it, I'm actually changing both elements at the same time. That's a really good way to go about that. G to center here. Now I'm going to bring the text all the way above everything, so now I can bring it closer. Now, so far so good, however, I would like the text to stand out a little more. What I'm going to do is, first of all, perhaps make all of the letters capital. But also I'm going to make them all bold. Now, from here I think to tie in together this element with the text, I'm going to go to the effect section and select again the curve tool. From here, instead of curving down, I'm just actually going to curve up. I think it will add and match the vibe of the little illustration because it's slanted, the letters also slant in a way. I think it makes sense. I also looks like a plate. That's not bad. I like that. Let's zoom out a little bit. I think I'm going to decrease the size of it just so that's good. Now, I'm just going to click on some area of the canvas and start dragging by holding down my mouse over both elements. Now I have them both highlighted and I can wound together. I'm going to center both of them, smack down in the middle. I think I'm going to change the color of the text because I want the text to There you go. Maybe no, it's too dark. No, it's actually not bad. I like the yellow for now. Let's keep it yellow. What I want is add the space cosmic magic. I'm going to actually use one of the stars that I have here recently used. We just used them for the Instagram. And yeah, when that happens when you cannot grab your element, go to positions and click on the element that you want to use. I'm going to drag it all the way to the top so I can start moving in. I'm going to zoom in. Now I'm just going to I think place a couple of stars just to really make sure that the message is there, this is cosmic coffee. Let me change the color of the star. There you go. Now we're getting there. I think that's a good size. Let me duplicate the same star, perhaps place it here, but decrease the size to give it a little bit more character, maybe another star. Okay. I think that's good. Maybe one more star. But here. I want to add another element, maybe a circle. I'm going to color it the same as the background. Circle looks like a little either another star or a planet. I'm going to put one here. I'm going to duplicate that, put one here, maybe. I think that's I'm just going to keep it the same size. Whoa. Command Z on my keyboard. I don't like when that happens. But it happens. Let me make this one smaller. I think I'm going to make another little circle here just to balance it out. I think our logo is ready. I think this is a very creative and a fun take on a hypothetical coffee shop that is called Cosmico. It took me one graphic from their library. It took me a couple of shapes, some fun with colors and texts, and we have a whole logo. This could be beautiful for marketing, for an Instagram profile picture or really anywhere you would use an icon or a logo for. Okay. I hope you had fun. I hope you now see how simple it is to make these kinds of graphics on Canva and I hope you go and get creative and create something of your own. All right. 12. Project 3: Make a 5-slide Carousel: All right, it is time for yet another project. This time we're going to be creating a really cool five slide Instagram carousel post. I'm going to show you a few tips and tricks on how to make it seamless, and it's actually very easy. So here we're on Canvas homepage yet again. And for this, we pretty much need the same kind of Canvas that we just did for the Instagram post. So I'll go to social media yet again and click on Instagram post. So now we have a blank Canvas yet again. What I will do is start creating the basics of overall layout. To make this kind of design seamless, what you want to do first is establish the background graphics so you can then continue with your text and elements and you don't have to bother readjusting the background. I'm going to again go with a darker blue color. Want this carousel post to have continuous shapes all throughout as you scroll. I'm going to go on to the element side and I'm going to go to shapes. Where you would find it is under basic shapes, and this is the one that I'm using. So now I'm just going to make it really big and cover the entire canvas. I know this looks a little crazy right now, but trust me, I'm going to move it to the side. What this does is I'm trying to find the perfect middle. You see how here on the side, there's this purple guideline yet again. That's what we want. This is the exact middle of this shape. I'm going to release it and leave it there to make it a little bit more aesthetic. I would go with this color, but perhaps play around with the color of it, maybe just make it a little a little darker or what I can also do is go with this color that I have in my color palette and from here, just decrease the transparency. I think that's a better way to go. I'm going to go to 17. I think that's good. Next is I would want some constellations because it is space them, so I'm going to go to elements and I'm just going to put in constellations. And open graphics. From here, you have many different kinds of options that you can go with. Let me see which one I like most. I think I'm going to go with this one. Yeah, I think I like it. But again, I'm going to decrease the transparency just so it's not as intense and it does serve exactly like a background graphic. I'm going to decrease the size of it just a little bit and half here. All right. Now, another thing that I would want to include, but I also want this one element to be consistent all throughout every single slide. I want to add the logo that we created. Now, I have prepared something for this. I have a cutout of the logo that we created and I took off the text which said cosmica just because this is going to be our icon. So what I'm going to do is I have this other documents. I'm just going to command C. I'm going to copy this once I go back to my Canvas, I just press Command V, and I paste it in here. I decrease the size of it and place it about here. I think that's a good size, maybe let's keep it like that for now. Next, I'm going to take this page and I'm going to duplicate it once, and now everything's absolutely the same. Now if you think about it, this shape goes into the next slide which should be here. What I will do since I have it here in the middle, I'm just going to move it to the other side and find the middle again. The moment that little purple line appears, that's how you know it's the middle. I'm going to zoom out. Do you see that? There you go. I'm going to take my consolation and I'm going to move it here or maybe even here for now. Next, I'm going to duplicate this yet again because we do have five slides, so I'm going to repeat this process without touching the logo that I just put on there. Just like that, I'm just going to repeat this process all over again. I just realized I had this constellation on the bottom, so I should do the exact same thing here. This way, it will connect once you start sliding. Okay. Now, that's the third one. Now we need the fourth slide, again, going back with the shape, finding the middle, and with the constellation, same thing. We might need to move the constellation, I think. Might be possibility because there's going to be other elements in text that's going to come in and this might be in the way, so I might remove it. But for now, I'm just going to keep it like this. Now one last time. Again, the shape, find the middle, perfect, constellation. There. For now, this will do. Now that we have the basic pattern going, let me show you. If you click on the grid view, you can start seeing. Do you see how everything starts lining up? This is actually a little hack. I'm not sure if other people do this, but this is how I make sure that my slides line up by just changing the view of it. Okay. Now going back to the first one, let's now start actually styling it and adding text and other things. First, I want this to be the title page, so I'm going to go to the text and I'm going to select title. I'm going to use the same font that we use for the other Instagram post. I'm going to increase the size. And this slide, this carousel post is going to be reasons to visit my hypothetical coffee shop. Let's just start typing. Reasons to visit. There we go, perfect. Now, just going to make it all one row. Change the size of it. And I'm going to align it to the left side just like that. I'm going to keep this text. Should I do white or should I do the beige? Let's keep a beige for now. If not, can always change it. I'm going to duplicate this layer again and here I'm going to put in the name, highlighting the text and making everything upper case and also bold and also changing the color because the signature color is this dusty orange, no yellow. I'm just going to increase the size of it, so. Perhaps move it up here. I think that's good for now. Also, another thing that I want to implement into these slides is like a marker to show you on what slide you are on. What I'm going to actually use is the same element we used before, which are the stars. Star in the shape. No, that was not what I meant, but thank you. Then going to shape, selecting the star, and I'm going to make it smaller. And I'm going to put it in the corner and just make five of them. How many do we have? Okay, cool. But also, I'm going to go to positions and already group them together because if they're going to be worked on, they're going to be worked on together. Holding down the command key and selecting all the stars, we have it all highlighted, group, and now I'm going to change the the color, which is going to be this color. However, this is the first slide. I'm going to change this one to this beige. This way marks on which slide you are on. I will decrease the size just a little bit, just so it's not as intense. Now what we need is some visual, should be probably coffee. Typing in coffee. Let's pick something good. I have a feeling we're going to be hanging out here a lot. I like that, but I'm going to no, but now it's facing down. Actually, not that bad. Is there something about else? I like the overlay view over the cup instead of from the side of it. Oh, that's cool. That reminds me of a galaxy. Okay. Let's go with this one. Not as big, though. I'm going to try. Actually, if I twist it, Hey, now it looks better. I'm going to place it here for now. I think I like that. Do I like that? Let's see if we have other options here. Or maybe the previous coffee with the little latte art was better because I don't think there was much of under plate which takes up a lot of space and makes it it gives a lot of negative space where you can't really put anything. That might have been a better choice. Where did it go? There it is. Then latest I'm going to use this one. But instead, I think I'm just going to flip it. There you go. All that's way better. Should we do something like that perhaps because I want to put another element here. I'm going to leave it here. Actually, something that I do a lot on Canada to match the visuals and the color scheme of them, I will often go and apply a filter, and I'm going to show you how. For this one, it's very warm toned and it's great. However, the background is more blue and it's cooler. What I'm going to do is go to Edit and filters, C, under Cool, there are these two that I really love to use. There's the Nordic one and Astro one. I think I'm going to go with Astro. It's more prominent. Now I want to add more elements, maybe some beans. Everybody loves a good coffee bean. We got beans. That's actually pretty good. Perhaps smaller. Again, let's find the middle just to make life easier. Actually, in this case, I will also duplicate this and maybe add the beans up here just to balance out because the stars here, then the logo, beans and beans. Makes sense. Okay. So now that we have this one, first things first, we want to make sure that the elements are seamless. Again, I'm going to copy these beans, and I'm going to paste them in the second slide and place them on the other side, find the middle. Seamless beans. Perfect. Love that. Another thing we want to make sure to include here is this. Since there are elements here, I'm just going to put it on the other side. And then change the color change the color of the second star and the first one back to blue. Like that. I have also prepared some text, let me just copy this text from here to here, shortcut on my keyboard commands to copy and command V to paste. Now, let's go to the text that I have prepared. Reason one, the vibe. This is my way of manifesting my business, by the way. I'm just saying. Okay. I think that's good. Is it aligned perfectly? It is. Let's change the color of the text just to make it pop a little bit more. I'm going to duplicate this, put it under, and then paste this. Command C, and highlight Command B. Now that's a little too much. That's okay. Can fix that. Back to this color and also heavily decrease the size. How are we doing on the margins here? Good. For now, I'm liking this look. Perhaps this color of the text should be white just so it's more readable. Perfect. Now I would like to use more visuals. Let's take a look at some coffee cups to add. I like this one. Totally do that one. We have some beans here. No. C makes two types of beans. Let's see. Okay. Let's just type in coffee cup. Oh, that's cute. Isn't that the same thing? It is. Okay. I need some promising looking coffee. Oki doke. Oh, I like this one. This one's cool. Is this too dark? Oh, that's really cool, too. If I flip this one, I can place it. It's not giving me the vibe that I want or the look that I want. What I'm going to do instead is just to go through my recently used and start using these because there are a lot of good ones here. First, there should be there you go. That's good. Let's go it this one. This one is a little less intense. Now I have a position here. I also want to apply that filter that I used before. Under cool, Astro Perfect. Going to positions, I'm going to grab this layer and just drag it under the beans. There you go. Let's just maybe use this one. Why not? It is pretty cool. Decrease the size, just so this one fits a little better. This one also needs a filter. Let's do that quickly. Under cool and Astro. Something happened here, cut off, that's okay. Double clicked it and moved it down. All right. So far so good. I'm just going to grab all of the elements, the stars, the coffee cups, not the beans. I don't need the beans on moe. I'm going to select highlight all of them. Come in see Command V. This way, it actually is in the same place. This is how this will play out. I'm going to take this away. I'm going to grab this one since this cup is going this way, it should come out here, so I'm going to cut off just so I know exactly where it cuts off. Let me duplicate that and then do it. That way you can stay in the same line. You see, there's a guideline up here above. That's exactly what we want. There we go. Now I delete this. I'm going to change the color of this star. Again, beige, this one's going back to blue. Now we're on the third. Now going back to the text, we have reason two is the drinks. I'll remember that. Just copy this text from here. This two drinks Paste. What I would do, actually, I'm now thinking about perhaps I need more of this cup in here just because it's starting to look a little There we go. Now I'm going to copy it, so I dragged it in a little bit more. Paste it in here, again, duplicate it. Make sure to align it. There. Now we have more of that coffee that I like best. Now we can place actually, I like this drink. Let's put it here. However, it's blocking the stars. Let me move the stars out of the way, perhaps here. The stars will go here. Okay. Now let me just cut this so. Now moving on to the third one. Again, I'm going to grab all of these elements. The text, not this cup, this. Actually, I'm going to also grab the logo. No, I don't need it. Command C here, page four, perfection. Now again, copying or duplicating this. This time, what I'm going to do is go back. I really didn't have to crop it like that because I didn't realize I was going to do this. Now I'm going to crop it the other way and place it here. Got to remember to change the stars. Get rid of this. We got one, two, this will be three, and the three is the people. Let me paste this here and change the text and three, maybe move it down just a little bit this time. Te going back to some of these, these two are good. Let's do this. But actually, I'm going to tilt them because I want this to have a little bit more of a fun Look. But what I'm going to do here is Zoom in just to make sure I'm going to keep it here. This way, again, you see we have another element that is a continuation. So now we have that. All we really need is this element to continue here and then we can put something fresh on this side and then it's going to be done. Again, I'm going to go back to the third slide clicking positions. I'm going to copy the text, not the cup anymore, the stars. Come see, and there we go. Now, what I'm going to do here is something trickier. Let me zoom in here just so I know where I'm cropping. Smack down on the corner. That's where I should land. And this one. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let me zoom out. Now, let me move it. That's where it should be. Let me make sure it's cut off a little bit. There we go. Perfect. Okay. The stars will come on this side now, coloring in the last one. We're almost done, and this should be the last page. So let's go with this. Your orbit is here. However, this is going to be more of a ending, so I would want to make this a bit more prominent. But I also want to change the line spacing. Up here on the T, going to play around with this, decrease the space there just so it looks a little bit more tied together. I'm going to change the color actually to this beige that we have. Let me see. I need some more text. Okay, I'm just going to copy the slogan part. Slogan is going to be here. I'm going to copy this text again just to put the the name of the coffee shop, all caps and bald and let's change the color again. But this time, I want a bigger, highlighting and increasing the font. I like that. I think that looks pretty cool. But I also want this constellation. Let me get this constellation on the other side, I copied and pasted it maybe here. Yeah. That looks cool. Maybe I'm going to twice it a little bit just because since there isn't going to be a continuation, I can actually just place it wherever I want. Okay. I think I like that. Let me see. Maybe this should be a little higher. Nope. Okay, perfect. And now we have created this five slide Instagram post. Let's check it out in the Grid view to see how well it lines up. From here, I can see it's actually pretty nice, pretty seamless. It looks like one giant design, which it pretty much is. So that's how your slide should be looking like. I'm very happy with the way it turned out, and I really hope you had fun learning about this because when things like these, they might come across a little intimidating to beginners, but really it's just attention to detail. That's all it is. 13. Exporting (Formats Explained): It's time for us to talk about exporting your work because what is the point of creating beautiful graphics and designs on Kana if you don't know how to export them? Now, there are a couple of different ways you can go about it with different kind of file types. So in this lesson, we're going to go over all of the ones that Canva offers, and I'm going to explain to you briefly what they all mean so you can make the best choice. Let's say you would want to export your Instagram post. I have the Instagram post pulled up right here and the first thing that you'll need to do is click on the share button in the corner. From here, click on Download. Now you see you have a couple of different options with different things going on. Now, first, we want to talk about file types. Now I'm going to click on this and this is everything that you can export your work into. First things first, you have the JPG or JPEG. This Fletap is very, very popular when it comes to actually exporting your work for social media, especially for Facebook, Instagram, Threats, Twitter, X, even Pinterest. If you are exporting your design and you want it to upload it on social media and it's not like this big giant thing that you want to later print, you can go ahead and use JPG. Now, JPG saves on the size of the file by compressing your design a little bit. It's not as noticeable on your phone screen. If you would zoom in very, very much, you would notice it, but it's not as bad. For a regular social media posting, you can definitely use JPG. Next thing, you have the PNG, which this is actually suggested to be downloaded in PNG. Now, PNG usually is used for graphics that have transparent background. Let's say we want to export the logo that we made with a transparent background, we would use the PNG file type because what it would do is take away this green square around it and just give this little cup with the text. However, very particular situation here because remember when we made this, I was actually using another shape to conceal the bottom of this graphic because there is a lot of negative space. In this case, if you would download this particular design in PNG, let me show you what happens. You have PNG selected transparent background. Also if you're using it, make sure that you select the transparent background. I'm just going to hit Download and you'll see. You see the background is transparent. However, there's that bar at the bottom and it doesn't look great. What I would personally do in this case, if you do have that Pro account, hold on. Also another thing about the PNG format, you do need to have Canva Pro. Unfortunately, it is not available to free users. But if you do have the Canva Pro, what you can do is just download this with PNG, but without the transparent background just to improve resolution. I'll show you exactly what to do next. Now you have it downloaded, you open another page. You go to your downloads. And you drop in the downloaded logo. I'm just going to scale it up, make sure to cover corner to corner. From here, I would just press the background remover, which is also a pro feature, but this way, it would remove the background. I didn't remove the background from there. We go. You see how it took away all the green space and now you have just a very good cutout, mind you, for your logo. Now when you download it, you have a beautiful transparent logo ready to be put over absolutely anything. Here I'm just going to make sure to select the second page because since we are on the second page, it says up here. I'm going to download this in PNG. Since I also have a Pro account, I can scale it up and make it even bigger. So if you really want to get the best resolution you can possibly get from a PNG, you can definitely do this. I'm just going to keep it at 2000 by 2000. There you go. I have the logo ready and I can layer this over anything. So for example, if I had some sort of any kind of image, wait, no. Let's say I would have any kind of background here image, I would go to Layers, put my logo, and there you go. I can put this logo over anything now. One thing PNG doesn't do is save space, so it will prioritize resolution over the file size. Unlike JPEG that prioritizes file size over resolution. So the size of the file is going to be smaller with a JPEG, but for PNG, the file size is going to be larger, so it's going to take up more storage. Now let's go through the rest of this file types. We have the PDF standard and PDF print. So PDF standard goes for your regular documents, your CV or your resume and sometimes even for presentations. PDF print, for example, is for particularly if you have a design that you want to put on a poster or a T shirt or a calendar, any kind of merchandise printing. Use PDF print. SVG, on the other hand, is actually a PNG, but a little bit more serious. SVG is scalable vector graphic, meaning, let's say I have a PNG and I zoom in really close, I'm going to start to see some pixels. Let's try that real quick. I have this downloaded here. Well, that's not the best example, but you see, if I zoom in really, really close, you see these pixels. Now, this wouldn't happen with an SVG because SVG uses a different almost like a mathematical calculation to pull the image together. I can't really explain it to you in the best way, so I'm just going to keep it at that, but SVG is heavier in PNG version. Then you have the MP four video, which is for your video. If you're creating videos for TikTok or Instagram stories or reels or any kind of animated action, you can use MP four and then you have also GIF or JIF, I'm not sure which one is the correct way to pronounce it, but JIF is the little tiny animation. If you want a little sticker that moves every three or 5 seconds it was, then you can use this one. Then last but not least is the PPTX, which is your PowerPoint presentations. Now, last thing that I want to point out is that, for example, when you would download this one, it would download a regular image in your downloads folder. However, if you would want to download a whole thing like we made a five slide carousel post, how you're going to download it is you're going to go to share Download. From here, of course, select either JPG or PNG. If you're doing PNG, make sure this is not selected because we want that background. But then you are going to go down here and make sure that all of these pages are selected because that's going to determine what you're downloading. Let's say you don't want the first one, just deselect the first one. But since I want it, I'm just going to keep it selected. Now, press Done and hit Download. And unlike the other one, it's not going to download it as four separate images. It's actually going to download it in a folder. And this folder is going to have everything organized. You have all the slides numbered 1-5, and now you can start using them or just admiring them. Isn't that beautiful? We did a good job with this one. And that's That's pretty much your exporting basics. For regular social media posts, use JPG for elements that you would want them to have a transparent background like logos or even cut out, for example, of coffee. Use PNG and make sure to select the transparent background. You also have options to download your documents as PDFs, your designs for printing, your videos, and your gifts, and of course, your presentations. 14. Magic Resize: Now, let's talk about a really, really cool feature that Canva offers, which has saved me so much time. Let me tell you. It's called Resize. So with the help of AI, Canva actually allows you to resize your design. So let's go back to our Instagram post, and let's say I would want to post it on Instagram story instead. Instead of me just sitting here and spending time to completely recomposition everything, open up a completely new canvas and copy, paste everything, or even recreate it even worse, all I need to do is just do a couple of clicks. You can find the resize in the upper left corner of your screen, and here you can see you have suggested. These are actually the resize options you have. One thing to know this is a pro feature, meaning it does use AI. Also, in this case, it does count towards your AI usage for the month. Now, most users, if you're doing one or twice per day, it doesn't really affect much and doesn't run out of credits, but if you're doing a giant scale thing every single day, then you might run into some problems because the usage is quite limited. And also another thing I want to point out is that this feature, since it does use AI, AI does make mistakes like we all know. But sometimes it does need a little tweaking. I just want to save you frustration because if you do run into that problem and you think you're doing something wrong, you're not, it's the AI. Okay. Now let's imagine I want to post this beautiful thing that we made to Instagram Story. What I would do is just click on Instagram Story and you see the actual size of this one was, I believe, four by five. Let me check. It's 1080 by 13 50 in pixels, and it would resize it to 1080 by 1920, which is the vertical Instagram story size, not story but real, pardon me, but also that can work for TikTok and stories and reels. But other than that, if you would want to be a little bit more particular, of course, you can select the social media, which then if you click on the pen, this is where it will specify what kind of size you want. What exactly is the aspect ratio you're looking for? You have the post, which is a square, so you can make it into a complete one by one. Then 1080 by 13 50, which this is actually what it is. 1080 by 1920. That's the story and also happens to be the real, same size. Facebook post 940 times 788 and so on. And also you have the mobile video. Let me check that. Mobile video version which similar sizes, but it's just the titles that really change. For this, let me select not all of it, but let me select the Instagram story one, particularly. Oh, I can't. Okay. Sorry. Pardon me. Okay. So from here, what I would do is just click on the Instagram Reel, which it will also work for Instagram story. Since I have that selected, next thing is, I have two options, copy and resize and resize this design. Now, be very careful here because if you want this particular project that you have going on with all the elements intact, do not select Resize this design because that will scrap this and just turn this canvas into Instagram story, meaning you're going to lose all of this. What you want to do is copy and resize. This way, you will just create another canvas and copy all the elements into it. Let's press that and see what happens. Okay. And it's good. That's very quick. It's going to open a new window, and here I have my design on a correct sized canvas in a video form also. So this is where I can start adding all kinds of little moving graphics or stickers or even start animating things. But this is what I said when I was mentioning that it needs tweaking. For example, you see it's still like that. Square almost size, right? From here, I would have to do a little bit of tweaking, move some of these things, like so. But also, when you're making a square post or rectangle post, I suppose, in this case, into a story, remember that there's such thing as your profile picture on your Instagram story is going to go up here, your name, then there's going to be some comment section down here, not a comment section, but you can comment. There's going to be buttons and things, so keep that in mind. But yeah, this is the kind of tweaking that sometimes it needs, and it's okay. It does still save a tons of time. I mean, this already looks better. For two clicks, not that bad. Another interesting thing is that Canva does offer the magic switch feature, which is something else. They can translate all of this information that I have on here into another language and transform this into a document, which means it would just take all of the information on here and just put in written document. So copy paste, you can copy paste from there and so on. Let's try to translate one. Let's try Spanish. Espagnol, professional friendly, conversational original. Let's do original without creating a copy. Oh, no, I need a copy. Okay. Okay, so there's some tweaking is necessary, of course, because each language does change when it comes to the amount of words and how things are worded, change and sentence structure. So yes, it is looking a little chaotic, however, everything's adjustable and I still have every element here ready to be fixed up. That's pretty good. That's pretty good, very impressive. Again, for a single click. Pretty good. This is basically how I have saved a ton of time when it comes to resizing one design because let me tell you, I've spent so long opening a new canvas, grabbing all the elements, trying to figure out the composition of things, and it's such repetitive and tedious work that with the help of AI, you don't need to do that anymore and I love that. Because the best part of designing things is actually getting creative and getting to do cool stuff like this and think of new concepts, not repeating the same thing over and over again when it just becomes tiring. Go ahead and resize your new Instagram post and post it everywhere. Show off your work. 15. Folders & Organization: Once you start working on Keno, you will notice how your design starts to pile up. Your homepage starts to fill up with all kinds of designs and different thumbnails. And for example, like you see, my homepage looks a little chaotic with all kinds of folders that are all kinds of projects that have the same thumbnail. And this can get very messy, very, very quickly. Believe me, I know. So one way to combat this chaos is to actually organize your work, and that's exactly what this lesson is about. Let's talk about folders and organizing them and creating them, naming them, and some ideas on how you could organize your work. I understand that folders aren't the most exciting thing when it comes to designing on Canva, but it does keep the headache away. Okay, so folders are an amazing way to organize your work because when you design something and then you exit from Canva, if you don't name your designs, Canva will automatically save it as untitled design. And when you need to find that particular design, you can go into the search bar up here, search designs, folders, and uploads. But if you haven't named it, you're not going to find it. First things first, always name your design after you're done, and this is how you would do it. For example, I have a post here. Let's say I'm ready to exit, I would go up here on the upper right corner and hover over this text over here. Now I'm going to double click on it and highlight it, and this is where I would be putting in the name of my design. In this case, Star fall at Ig Post and click Off. Now it has renamed. You can also see it on your window up here. So now when you go home to the home screen, let me reload it just in case. There you go. This is the design I just renamed. Before it was just Star fall. Here, ACM actually has renamed it because we did the resize. But for example, this one also isn't named. This is another way to do it. So if you click on the little pen on your home screen, by your design, cosmic logo, and now it is renamed. Make sure you organize it at least by naming your designs. Next way is to actually categorize your work. Now you can do that by going to the side of your screen, the left side and here you will find a button named Projects. This is going to open up a page where you can start creating folders. Let me create a folder, organize all the work that we've done so far and let me show you how actually useful this can be. So first things first, I would press on this plus button by Add New, and I'm going to select new folder. I'm going to name that folder. Let's start with Cosmica. Let's just name it that for now. Of course, I can select some people, but don't really want anyone to have access to this. I'm just going to create this folder. Now, as you can see, I have a whole new folder. So now I just have to start adding my projects to this. So now when we have the folder created, what I'm going to do is just select the projects that I want to go in that folder. I'm going to select every single cosmic project we made. Now from here, I have everything selected, I'm going to go down here. I can download it. Great, but that's not what I'm here to do. Let's press on this folder button right here and select the folder I just created. And move, there you go. Now I have a folder that's only holding the particular designs we made only for cosmic. Now, I don't have to scroll through my crazy homepage because let's face it, it's not great. I know. I have to be a little bit more organized, but that's not what the story is about. The story is about the fact that now I have it organized at least in one single folder. From here, I can actually go even further and create subfolders, which can be also incredible because for example, if you're a content creator or maybe a small business owner, you can go and just put everything in a folder according to your business, or you can also go a little bit more detail. Let's say you create a folder for social media, name it social media. Then in that folder, you can create more folders. So maybe one folder can be for Facebook ads, the other one for Instagram ads. Then it can be for email designs and stuff like that. You can really narrow down and categorize every single design so you don't have to frantically scroll through millions of them on your home screen with a lot of them having the same thumbnail. So from here, I can add another one. Let's add a folder and name it. Let's do Instagram posts. This is only going to be for posts, not stories, not reals, just posts. Two things should go in that folder. Should be the regular post that we made and it also should be the carousel one. Or I can make another folder for that. But for now, I'm just going to put it in there. I'm not crazy. There you go. Now I have everything organized in there. So once I click on it, it's more narrowed down. Then you can create for assets, as I said, for emails or documents, really anything that you keep on, really anything that you design on Canva. But besides designing, you can also categorize and organize by folders you all of your uploads. So going back to the project section, you have the upload folder, which is usually already automatically created, so I'm just going to open it. Again, I have a lot and none of this makes sense. So how I can help it is by creating a folder within my uploads. And you can do this with your uploaded images, your uploaded videos, what else? Kind of type. So designs, brand templates, and files, pretty much anything you upload on Kenman So what I should do is probably create a folder. Let's do particularly space stuff because I see there's a lot of space images. I'm just going to create a folder named space, select cornea and nebula, pillars of creation. This one I forgot. What was it named Deep Field. Let's go. For now, let's keep it to six. Move it to space. There's probably going to be way more to add there. But I'm not going to do that right now. It's going to take me forever. Here we go. Now I have all my space uploads. When I would go and start designing something, and let's say I have to add something. Oh my God, I can't find it. Where is it? Oh, no. Wait. Oh, I will click on the folders and I have all of my uploads categorized. So here we go. Yay. That's great. Amazing. So organizing your work is definitely a really, really good way to stay on top of everything. Be a little bit more clear headed about your process and overall, just keep you organized and keep your work efficient. 16. Sharing & Collaboration: Now you know the entire interface of CNA. You know how to create Instagram posts, you know how to create a beautiful logo and even some really cool carousel posts for Instagram. You also know how to export your work. I think it is very important to also know how to share it because KNA offers some amazing features for anyone that uses the platform. Of course, some users get more features than others. So if you have a pro or Teams account, even better. But for free users, we have plenty of options. First of all, if you would want to share, for example, going back to our Instagram post design, you would click on the Share button and from here, besides downloading, you also have more options. First of all, you can share your work with a link, which is the most popular way that creators and people in general share their design. First, what you want to do is change the access and you can do that by selecting the level here and you have three options. First one is only you can access, meaning no one else can. Then you have Teams, which I do have a Team's account. That's why this appears for me. But if you also have a Team's account, you can then share this design with the rest of the people that are added to your team on Canva. Last is anyone with a link. This is what people usually go for. Now, if you press this button, copy the link anyone you send this link to will get access to this design. However, there are levels to access. Now let's look at that next. Here, next to anyone with link, this is where you can choose anything you want. First of all, can edit mean and how you change the access level is by clicking on this section right here. You have three different options here. First one is can edit, meaning whoever gets this link can move every element, change text, change colors, everything that you just did on this design. They can do as well. Be very careful when it comes to sharing with this kind of access because sometimes people unintentionally switch something around and don't know how to put it back, so just be careful. Next one is can comment. This one's a great option if you are a little nervous that someone's going to change something. This allows people to give you feedback with a really cool a little window next to your design. Let me demonstrate this. I'm not going to send this design to anyone else, but I will open it on another browser with the same account. Now, as you can see, there is this border around this design from this browser, meaning that my other account has clicked on it. Now, watch what happens. Let me just as you can see, as I start moving from one browser to the other, it actually changes on the other browser, so the other account, meaning that it shows in real time what is being touched, which I find very cool and this feature will actually come in handy with another feature which I'll tell you about. But for now, what's going to happen is that I'm going to add a comment. For example, I want to give feedback to, let's say, the color of this font. What I will do is right click on the element and press comment. Here I'll be like, let's give good feedback. Great color choice. Smile face. Slightly smiley. Let's do it. Here I have added a comment. Now I'm going to go back to my other account, and here I see this little bubble. Oh, I have a comment from someone, and it says, A, great color choice. This allows the person to give feedback without having the access to change anything. This can be with your coworkers and your friends. Like this is one of my favorite features about this kind of sharing. So last but not least, you have view. This means that this only allows the other person to see the design on Canva. Now, they don't need an account. Also for the comment, can comment access. They also don't necessarily need an account. It's going to be named as guest, I believe, but these two don't need an account. This one definitely does. But with the view, it only shows the design to the other person with the link. They can't do anything about it, but this is also a great way to get update someone else on the progress of your design. Then lower you see there's for all team members, only for members with the link. This again is only for the team's subscription. One thing I did want to mention is that with KNEdit, Canva offers this amazing feature that you and someone else with the link and this access can actually work on the same design at the same time remotely. If back in the day this activity required some serious software, now, you can do that online on Canva. However, you do need a pro account for the other person to collaborate. This is how we would go. Let's see. I want to move around the $5. You see how on the other screen it changes. Same thing with this. If I wanted to duplicate another star, I can see the change happen in real time. That's absolutely incredible. So if you have someone else that you would like to work with, but you guys aren't in the same room or even in the same country, just share the link, give them access, and you guys can work on the same design at the same time. I absolutely love this. Another cool way you can share your work is by presenting. Let's say that you make this beautiful presentation on Canva, you can present it directly from the browser, so you don't need to use PowerPoint or any other software. You can just click on Share then click on Me and here you have the present option. If you click on that it will give you choice full screen, presenter view, and then present and record. You can also record as you're presenting it. It's awesome. For example, here, well, I do only have one page, but from here, I could be pointing at stuff, talking, and then down here, there would be probably more pages and I would click through, and this is a really cool quick way to present your work without needing any kind of exporting or saving. Last but not least, something I want to mention is that from Canva, you can actually connect your Instagram account to Canva and if you have a pro account, you can actually schedule publishing from Canada to Instagram. It's a really cool workflow hack if you're a creator of big scale and you create a lot of posts on Canva for that. This can definitely come in handy to make your life easier when it comes to posting. That wraps up this lesson. You have learned a lot throughout this journey. You've learned how to create beautiful stuff. You've learned how Canva works about all of its cool features, how to export, how to share, and I think you're ready to go and create some cool stuff. I hope you have fun. Don't forget to get creative and best of luck. 17. Class Project: Create Your Own Social Media Content: Now, it is your turn to create your own social media content. For your class project, you will design a small set of social media visuals using Canva. You can follow the projects from the class or create your own version. But ideally, your project should include either an Instagram post, a carusel with multiple slides, or optionally a profile graphic or logo. Start by choosing a theme, brand or idea. This could be for a business, a personal page, or just something creative. Then apply what you've learned. Use templates or start from scratch, work with texts, colors, and images, and keep your design clean, readable and visually balanced. Once you're done, export your designs and upload them to the project gallery. You can also include a short explanation of your concept and design choices. This is your chance to practice and build something you can actually use, keep it simple but make it your own. 18. Congratulations! What’s Next?: O Congratulations on finishing the class. You have now learned how to use Canva to create clean, effective social media content. The most important thing now is to just keep creating. The more you practice, the better your designs will become. Try experimenting with different styles, colors, and layouts and continue building your own visual identity. If you haven't already, make sure you upload your projects to the gallery. I would love to see what you have created. And if you enjoy this course, feel free to leave a review. It really helps us improve and create even better content for you. Thanks again for joining, and I'll see you in the next class.