Design & Make Custom Writing Paper and Envelopes in Canva

1. Introduction: If you are somebody who likes writing and mailing letters or just really like cute custom stationery, and I have a project for you today. This is what we're going to be making in this class. This is a custom designed envelope that I have designed in Canva, and it also has a sheet of paper inside that was custom designed to match. In this class, we are going to be making this project, which is fully customizable and you can use Canvas elements library or your own designs to make it really cute and customer. This is a fun project to do, whether you're familiar with Canva or not. It's very beginner friendly, and I'm going to give you the templates for it so that you can just start designing and doing the creative stuff right away. I'll also talk about some ways that you can make your own custom envelope templates if you are interested in going a step beyond. My name is Rebecca, and I will be your instructor for this class. I'm an artist and a graphic designer, and I also teach lots of classes on the subjects of art and entrepreneurship. But in this case, we are just making something really cute and fun today. You don't need a lot in terms of materials. We're just going to be using a free Canva account and a home printer and a pair of scissors and a gluetick. That's really it. So if you have those things ready, let's get started and start designing some very cute custom stationery. 2. Getting Started: Custom stationary is really fun. If you're someone who likes to send letters, then this is a great project for you. But also, if you are like me and maybe run an art business, you can use your art to design these kind of products as well. And these could even make a digital products. People could print these off and cut them at home if you were inclined that way. Now, the design of all of this is pretty simple. The note paper is obviously just a rectangle of paper that has been cut to size to fit the envelope. So we're going to be designing that in Canva, first of all. And the envelope is just slightly more complicated in that it's a very custom shape. This one is already glued finished, but I will show you the template, and you can see that you just got to put some designs on it, printed out and fold and cut it yourself. And I could just put a stamp on this and mail it. It's perfectly able to be mailed. In order to get started, I have put a link to the Canva template for this project in a PDF that is attached to this class. I'm just going to show you how to open that up and then we'll get started looking at the Canva design. When you've located the class resource document, then this is what it's going to open up and look like. It's just a PDF with a very simple explanation of what you're doing here, and we are going to click this button right here. This is Canva template link. You do have to have a free Canva account to do this, and you should be logged in, but like I said, none of this is going to cost anything to use these tools. If you do have any issues, also make sure you're not on a private browser. Sometimes the template links don't work on private browsers. And also, it may be a little obvious from the way I'm doing this, but it's much easier to do this project on a computer rather than on your phone or iPad. It certainly can be done, but I'm just going to be doing it on my computer because it is a little bit more optimized. So when you do click on Canva template link, it's going to take you over to a page that looks just like this. A template created by Rebecca was shared with you, start designing now, and you're just going to click on the button down below. It may look a little different from you because I actually designed this, so it's not giving me the same options. But this should open up. This page for you. There are two different pages in the template that we're going to be working on that you can use. The first page is the envelope template, which you can see right here, and the second page is our paper template. And I only made a paper template, even though obviously, it's just a rectangle just to ensure that it's the right size paper to fit inside the envelope that we designed. Now, in the subsequent lessons, we're going to decorate these, and I'll talk that through more. But I will say that you can certainly customize this envelope if you wanted to look a little bit differently. So as you saw in the preview, when I made this, it basically has this is the front area here in the middle. There is the back flap that gets folded up right here. So this is going to be designed upside down. Then this is the flap that folds down and gets glued when you seal the envelope. I've done this in a rectangular design. The reason I did that was to make the biggest envelope possible but fit within a printer page. However, if you wanted to try different shapes, maybe you wanted to do a pointed triangular fold for the back. You can certainly do that. You may just want to select all of these things, drag them down a little bit, and then try a different shape. I actually made this template just using shapes from the Canvas shapes library, so you can see that they're all basically rounded rectangles that I've just layered on top of each other. Feel free to play around with the design of the template if you're feeling extremely creative. Just keep in mind that you want the back flap and the back cover to meet up and fully cover each other so that your envelope doesn't open up or your note inside doesn't get out. So with all that being said, let's go into the next lesson. We're going to start by designing our page first because that's sort of, I think, a little bit of an easier starting point, and we'll see what cool ideas can come up with. 3. Designing Your Paper: We are going to start the design process for our little stationary project by working on the note paper itself. The very first thing that I'm going to do once I have this template open is I'm going to lock this guideline. Basically, I'm going to click on this box here and I'm going to just click on lock position only. That's going to make sure that we aren't dragging the guide around while we work. I just wanted to show you that step just in case it gets a little frustrating when you are moving a lot of elements around. So in almost all cases, you are going to want to have lines on your paper. You could of course do no lines. That's totally up to you. But I'm going to just show you a quick way to add lines to your project so that you can basically make it creative from there. We're going to use the line tool, so that means that we are going to tap L on the keyboard, and this line is going to appear right here. You can also find all the shapes that I'm referencing in the elements tab right over here, if you go to shapes. You'll see that there's all these lines and then all these different shapes you can play with too. We have this line. The first thing I'm going to do is make it a little bit thinner. So up in the top left corner, where it says line style, we can drag this down to one. Now, in terms of line weight, I change this based on what color I'm using. So if I'm doing a solid black line or something in the gray family to make it a little more subtle, then I'll definitely do line weight one because it just is very thin and isn't too obtrusive. But if I was doing a light colored line, like let's say I was going to change the color of it to yellow, for example, it's quite difficult to see here at this one line weight. So I maybe would move that up to four, three or four, maybe against the white paper to make it a little bit more visible. So I'm going to work with just line way one for now, and I'm going to change the color of this to this sort of salon pink color. I'm designing this with a cute style in mind. That's just my personal taste, but of course, you do whatever style suits you. For this first line, I'm going to drag it up to about where I think it would want to start. I usually leave a bit of a gap at the top because it's just a bit more convention for note paper, but it also leaves some room to decorate up here. I'm going to grab these two ends and make them the length that I want. I'm going to hold down the shift key on my keyboard while I do that because if I don't, it can go all over the place. If I hold down shift, it goes in a straight line. I'm just going to make this about the length I want. Not going to go all the way to the edge of the paper. But you could if you wanted to. I'll use the little tool here to drag this around and make sure that pink line is showing up showing it is in the center. Now that we've done the first line, we're going to press duplicate right here and drag this to line it below it and figure out how much how big you want your spaces to be between the lines. If you wanted really narrow, you could do that, if you wanted them bigger, you could. I'm just going to try and go for a medium spacing here. Now that I've done that, don't click out of the element yet. We're just going to click on duplicate again and again because it's going to mimic that same spacing that we did. I'm going to do this all the way down the page. And there we go. We have a full page of lines. The next thing I'm going to do is group these. So I'm just going to click and drag to select all of these lines. And because we locked that outside box, it didn't pick up on that as well. I'll hit group, and now we can easily move this around as a unit or change the color or anything like that very easily just by changing the group rather than having to do each individual line. A is very core, this is totally enough. You could just print off at this point. You don't have to add more decoration, but odds are pretty good you're going to want to. And before we move away from the lines, if you do have an issue where they are not perfectly lined up, you don't have to do it all manually. You can click on the group of lines and go to position in the toolbar and then go to arrange. Now, this doesn't show up all other groups, so let's just spend group that very quickly. Space evenly appears. And you can use these. If they are lit up, then there is an option to sort your items so that they're in the same line together or to make them evenly spaced. Mine already are, so they aren't options here, but just so you know that's where you can find that tool. You don't have to do everything manually. I'm going to regroup the lines. And then think about decorating the page. So if you have your own illustrations or artwork, you may want to do that, which is totally cool. You could also export these templates and take them over into procreate if you are an illustrator and wanted to do something hand drawn. You can totally do that. But a really easy way to make these cute is just to use elements from the Canva library. I'm going to do a really simple design and just put a little illustration here at the top. But I'll show you a couple examples of some other pages I designed, and you can go wild with what you want to include. Some different ideas I've had would be to to a big image in the background, but make it faded. You can do that using the opacity tool to make it look sort of subtle in the background. You could do an illustration in the corner and cut out some of these lines. There's lots of ways that you can decorate a note paper sheet. I'm going to go into elements. We'll go out of the shapes tab, and I searched for bunnies before just through elements, but you can see that I've recently used them. So I'll search for them again. And we're going to go into graphics. You'll notice here that if you haven't used Canva before, there are a lot of pro elements here with the little crown on them. That just means that you can only use them if you have a paid account, which is not necessary. But if you do, of course, you can use them. I'm going to go into the filter tool right here at the end of the search bar. Click on that and then click on free, and that'll only show you items that are free to use. I found this little bunny right here, which I think is very cute. I'm just going to make it the same color as the lines using this PC color. Make it a little smaller and just put it right at the top of the page. And I think in this case, actually, I would like to have one less line so it had more room at the top. I'm going to group, delete the top line. Regroup. I just give it a little bit of breathing room. There. Get a little bigger. Perfect. So this is just a really simple kind of note paper that can go with your envelope design. I like going a little simpler on the paper just because I end up writing a lot when I am writing things. So it ends up looking quite busy with my text, but of course, have as much fun as you want. A simple design like this is also a little bit more ink friendly for your printer. But depends on the printer you have, I have an ps and co tank, which has a lot of ink in it, and I find the ink very affordable, so I don't mind printing full color pages. So this is your starting point for designing a note page. But I'll show you a couple of other designs that I've made. I made this page, which is very similar but kind of inverted colors. So in order to make this one, I just added a rectangle over the whole design over the template and filled it in with a lighter version of the pink. I didn't want to do super dark because I thought it might be harder to write on. And then I just inverted the picture here to be white rather than the pink. And I made the lines white and then increased the thickness a little bit. These are actually three point line weight. Just to make them a little bit more visible on top of the colored background. That's one option. I also did this variation, which is just a cute header, so you could definitely make a header or a footer on the page. It takes up a bit more space, but I think it is a very cute style. Here, I just used another bunny graphic and added six of them just for sort of a border effect. This is just a rectangle, and then this is a scallop effect. I just search for the word scallop in the elements library. And then I made the lines a little bit darker, and I believe yeah, they're line weight two as well. So they're just a little bolder. It's just a bit of a boulder design. But I think all three, no matter which one you do is very cute, and it's also kind fun to have variations within a collection, so you could use all of them with your envelopes. Now that we've designed some stationary paper, we can move on to decorating our envelope to match it. 4. Designing Your Envelope: It's time to decorate our envelope, so let's get started. There's a lot of ways that you can approach decorating this, and I'm going to start by just doing the same thing I did before, which is locking all of these items down. That's just going to prevent them from sliding around too much. As I mentioned before, we have the back flap at the top. We have the large rectangle in the middle, that is the front, and we have the back cover back side of the envelope that is upside down here. I'm not going to bother decorating these two flaps on the side because this is what basically gets glued down in the end. They're not super important unless you were trying to do maybe a dark colored envelope and you didn't want a little bit of it showing, in which case you could fill this in as well. You can certainly start putting items on here and decorating it however you like. Now, I did lock it, but one option is to actually unlock it first. And to just use some of these boxes to add the background color. By just reusing the boxes that are already in the template, we're going to preserve those rounded corners and not print any excess ink. So I'm just going to click on this top one and duplicate it. I'm going to move it to the front. So hit on position. Oh, it's already in the front, so we're good. I'm going to line it up with the whole envelope actually and just drag it down there so it covers all of it. And now I'm going to go to fill color up here in the top left. And I'm going to pick this lighter pink color right here just because I think it's a little bit easier to write and read on. And I'm also just going to change the border color to the dark pink just so I can still see it, but it blends a little bit easier. So when I'm cutting, it's not necessarily going to leave a black line. Now I will go in and lock those elements. So that they don't slide around. But we can still see the line where the folds are going to be just by hovering over the tabs on the side. I'll just give you an idea of that. So now that we have our pink envelope, let's first add in a rectangle in the middle for where we're going to write our two address. So I'm going to hit R on the keyboard. We're going to make this box white just for contrast. Of course, you're designing this however you like, but I would suggest maybe leaving a white area for writing the address just so it's super legible for the postal workers. And I'm going to go into border style and round the corners of this box. Now, I'm just going to position it sort of in the middle and we'll make it a little bit more rectangular. And see it's locking onto the middle of the tabs and the page as well. So I know that's a good location for this. The stamp is going to go in this top corner. Over here, I'm just going to do a couple of lines for the from address. Same way we did the lines before, I will tap L on the keyboard. I'm going to make these lines white. And maybe we'll change just to border with two just so they're a little bit more bold. And then I'm going to relocate it up in the top corner. So that's the line where the fold is going to be. I'm going to bring it down a little bit. Hold shift to make it a bit shorter, and I will duplicate that twice. There we go. Now we have three lines in the top left corner of our front envelope. For writing our return address. That's basically it for the necessities of an envelope. It is nice to decorate a little bit. So I'm just going to use some of the elements from the other pages that I showed you to make it a little bit cuter. So I'm going to go into elements and just find the ones I used recently, so they're right here at the top. I'm going to put one of our little bunnies in the bottom corner of the front. And I think I'll make that a darker pink just for a bit of contrast. And on one of the example interior pages I showed you, I used a scallop border, and that's right here. So I'm just going to put this right on the edge here where the fold is going to be. This is actually going to be the bottom of the back of the envelope, and I'm going to duplicate it, rotate it 180 degrees and put it up here as well. So now it's going to be on the top and bottom of the back of the envelope when it's all sealed. Which I think will be very cute. Finally, I want to use this other bunny graphic that I had on one of the other note pages. So I'm going to add that here and I'm going to put it along the back flap, so I'll rotate it 180 degrees because we are designing these two parts upside down. I'll put it up here in the middle, change it to white, and I'll duplicate it a couple of times to give it some friends. I'm just going to hold down shift to grab all of them and put them in the center. So that's my really simple design for the envelope. When it's all folded, I think it's going to look very cute. Even though this section is quite empty, it's going to have this tab over top of it, so I think it will actually look a lot more cohesive when it's all put together. If you are trying to save on ink, then, of course, maybe just use a white background and some colored elements. You can turn this box into a line shape, give it a border rather than making it white on a color if you wanted to make it stand out a little bit. In order to print these pages off of Canva, you just need to download it to your computer or whatever device you're using. So we just go to share. Download, and then I'm going to download as a PDF where you can do a PNG if you prefer. And just keep in mind that when you are printing on your computer, often, your printer will scale the image down to maybe 97% of the page, but I like to make sure that it's scaled at 100%, just to get the stationary items to be the size that you actually intended them to be. So I'm going to print off these, and then I'm going to go over to my desk and show you how I cut them out and assemble them, which is very straightforward, and then we're done our project. 5. Cutting and Glueing: I printed out two of the sheets that I designed. This is the envelope and here is the paper. I already trimmed the paper down to size just using a paper cutter and I follow the dotted lines around the edge. You can also use scissors if you want. This is pretty straightforward, so I'm not going to go over how to cut the paper. But we are going to go over just assembling the envelope very quickly. Now, I did print these on a little bit heavier paper. This is on 28 pound printer paper. It's just a little bit more substantial than regular printer paper, which is usually 20 pounds. Of course, you can use regular paper, especially for the writing paper. But for the envelope, you may want to use something a little bit heavier, but you don't have to use a card stock or anything if you don't want to. I think a heavier printer paper is a nice touch if you wanted to. The tools I'm going to use for this are just a little pair of scissors. This is a bone folder. It's used for bookmaking and it's just for making creases really and also a little glue stick. Okay. The first step, I'm just going to cut out along the edges of our envelope. Now that the envelope is all cut out, we just have to start folding along these four creases. Then we just glue down the two tabs and ready to put our paper inside. I'm just going to fold it over. I'm just doing my best to fold right along that line. And same with the top flap. Okay. If you are going to design your own template for the envelope. You just want to make sure at this point that the top flap covers the inner flap so that the envelope will actually seal. Then we'll just fold in the two tabs that we're going to glue. And this is where I like to use the bone folder just to really crease down this edge. You could also use just your fingernail or you could use a old gift card or some sort of plastic card can be helpful. Okay. Okay. I haven't glued it yet, but that's what our envelope is looking like, which looks really cute in my opinion. There's our little flap. All that's left to do is just put some glue down. You'll see that these two little top pieces do come up a little bit, so I'm not going to put glue on the entire strip, just the part that covers the back tab. I'll just put on some glue stick here. You're welcome to use tape or you could even staple it or use a liquid glue if that feels a little bit more secure to you. It's whatever you like. Okay. I'm just going to let that dry a little bit before really testing it, but that's basically it. And when you are done and have put your envelope or your letter inside the envelope, you can again use the glue stick to seal it or you can use tape or stickers or whatever else works for you. Now just to show you I will put the piece of paper inside. So you just want to always make sure that it's going to fit. So I'm going to have to fold it more than twice. There's my little letter, pop it inside the envelope. And we're done. I think that turned out pretty cute. And I from folding, you see, I have a little bit of extra paper just on this edge. I'm just going to grab my scissors and clean that up. There we go. Looks perfect. So you can write your return address, your sending address and put your stamp on and you're good to go. You could actually just mail this. 6. Class Project: Now that we're all finished, I hope that you are happy with your final project and you created something really cute. I think there's a ton of versatility to this little project, so you can create a ton of stationary, whether it's all color coordinated like this or mix and match set. It's totally up to you. As a class project, obviously, I would love you to make this, and I would love to see the result, especially if you did something a little bit different or maybe did something I haven't thought of in terms of the design and technique. So if you don't mind taking a picture of your finished project and showing it to the class, you can upload the picture to the project area, then I would be thrilled to see it, and I'm sure your classmates would, too. Now, just before we wrap up, if you did enjoy learning with me, I do have lots of other classes that you can take a look at. Some are graphic design, some are more business oriented, but there's probably something for just about everybody in there. And if you did enjoy this class or have any feedback, I would love it if you left me review. I read them all and really appreciate it, and they're also really helpful for other students if they want to decide to take my classes. Finally, you can also find me on YouTube. If you want to see more content from me, that's maybe a little less class oriented, but hanging out, working on my art business. I will put the link on the screen for that if you are interested. Finally, if you have any questions about this project or anything related to it, just leave it in the discussion for the class, and I'll be happy to chime in there. So that's everything. Hope you had fun with this project. Looking forward to seeing what you did with it, and good luck with your creative pursuits.