Social Media Content Creation in Canva: From Beginner to Advanced | Maggie Stara | Skillshare
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Social Media Content Creation in Canva: From Beginner to Advanced

teacher avatar Maggie Stara, Creative Marketer & Top Teacher

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome

      2:49

    • 2.

      What You Need To Know

      5:12

    • 3.

      Psychology of Colours

      3:31

    • 4.

      Hex Codes & Colour Palettes

      10:32

    • 5.

      Understanding Licensing

      5:57

    • 6.

      Finding Free Images & Videos

      10:38

    • 7.

      Finding Your Fonts

      7:33

    • 8.

      Design Dos & Don'ts

      9:34

    • 9.

      Introducing Canva

      1:37

    • 10.

      Canva Interface Update

      3:52

    • 11.

      Canva Pro vs Free

      13:53

    • 12.

      Beginner Canva Hacks

      13:03

    • 13.

      Master Your Canva Workflow

      12:09

    • 14.

      How to Find Inspiration

      7:26

    • 15.

      Canva for Social Media

      3:45

    • 16.

      Inspirational Quote Graphics

      13:12

    • 17.

      Interactive Instagram Stories

      7:47

    • 18.

      Post Your Instagram Stories

      6:35

    • 19.

      Master Transparent Backgrounds

      5:42

    • 20.

      Create Instagram Highlights

      9:11

    • 21.

      Add Highlights To Your Profile

      1:48

    • 22.

      Captivating Carousels

      17:00

    • 23.

      GIFs & Memes

      8:32

    • 24.

      Turn Yourself Into a GIF

      8:25

    • 25.

      Easy Instagram Reels

      12:41

    • 26.

      Plan Your Grid in Canva

      5:23

    • 27.

      Facebook Banners

      9:39

    • 28.

      Animated Pinterest Pins

      12:01

    • 29.

      LinkedIn Cover Story & Banner

      9:42

    • 30.

      YouTube Channel Banners

      7:40

    • 31.

      Clickable YouTube Thumbnails

      14:08

    • 32.

      YouTube End Screens

      13:16

    • 33.

      YouTube Intro Video

      9:39

    • 34.

      Social Media Video Ads

      15:04

    • 35.

      Advanced Reel Tricks

      10:16

    • 36.

      Canva For Business

      2:05

    • 37.

      Design Amazing eBooks

      16:25

    • 38.

      Clickable & Fillable PDFs

      1:48

    • 39.

      Compress Images & PDFs

      3:53

    • 40.

      Animate Your eBook

      5:13

    • 41.

      Impressive Business Cards

      9:18

    • 42.

      Animate Your Email Signature

      12:01

    • 43.

      Powerful Presentations

      19:44

    • 44.

      Design a Simple Website

      17:33

    • 45.

      Make Stunning Mockups

      7:11

    • 46.

      Add Flair To Your Desktop

      5:36

    • 47.

      Bulk Create With AI

      10:53

    • 48.

      AI For Image Creation

      12:25

    • 49.

      Advanced Animations

      12:03

    • 50.

      Canva Mobile App Tips

      6:58

    • 51.

      Additional Advanced Features

      11:12

    • 52.

      Bonus: Looping Smoke Effect

      13:32

    • 53.

      Class Project

      1:39

    • 54.

      Thank You So Much!

      1:15

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About This Class

Whether you're a beginner in the world of social media content creation and content marketing, just looking for some guidance on basic graphic creation, or you're an expert looking to pick up some new tricks - there is something in this course just for you! If you're looking to improve your content creation skills for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and other social media platforms - you're in the right place!

This course is packed full of exciting, valuable lessons that teach you exactly how to create beautiful graphics within Canva that will help turn your online presence into something truly remarkable. It's taught using follow-along videos where I share my screen with you, so you can create your projects at your own pace as you watch! Plus, I'll provide you with my custom, downloadable, mobile-friendly templates to ensure that each graphic you create is going to look fabulous on mobile too. 

We will be using the Pro (Paid) version of Canva for this course but I will also be showing you how to get around some of the premium features for those of you who will be using the free plan of Canva by using some clever hacks and external helpful tools.

Are you ready to create something remarkable today? By the end of this course, you'll be able to make your own:

  • Canva graphics to use anywhere online and offline for print

  • Instagram inspirational quote graphics, multi-post carousel images 

  • Easy Instagram reels
  • Sharable GIFs and meme posts
  • Facebook graphics and banners for your business page

  • Animated Pinterest pins 

  • YouTube channel banners, video thumbnails and animated end screens

  • Business materials including eBooks, mockups and business cards

  • Simple websites for yourself or clients

  • Animated email signatures
  • and more!

If you have any questions about whether this is the right class for you or throughout - please don't hesitate to pop into the discussions section and ask me anything and everything and I'll be happy to help!

Make sure to download the course guide attachment before you begin and I can't wait to see you in class :)

 

Meet Your Teacher

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Maggie Stara

Creative Marketer & Top Teacher

Top Teacher

Hey I'm Maggie - your creative instructor!

I was first introduced to the world of social media marketing in 2016. I was SO excited about the possibility of working online but I was really struggling with the lack of honest, authentic, and high-quality information out there for beginners. So before I even began working in this world, I knew one day I'd want to create the kind of high-quality resources for aspiring marketers that I felt were missing in this space.

Why my classes:

My online skills have led to working with an exciting range of talented people, from sole traders to multi-million dollar businesses. And in addition to working as a freelancer, I've also worked in a digital marketing agency and an in-house corporate role. With this wide range of ha... See full profile

Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Welcome: Whether you've been working within Canva for years, or this is the very first time you're hearing about it, stick around because this might just be the course for you. Hey, guys. My name is Meggie Star, and I'm a digital marketer, online course instructor, digital content creator, and a whole bunch of other things, and I use Camba for pretty much all of them. In this course, I'll be teaching you everything you need to know from the basics like how to choose the right fonts and brand colors for your content creation and where to find videos and images that are licensed for you to freely use in your designs through to creating amazing social media banners, animated pins for Pinterest, quick and easy Instagram rails, video ads for social media, engaging and interactive Instagram stories. Sharable gifts and memes, cohesive and captivating carousel posts, clickable YouTube thumbnails and animated YouTube end screens. But there is so much more to being a great content creator than just social media. So in the last part of the course, you will also learn how to use Canva to create amazing ebooks and how to animate them to share them on social media. How to create professional business cards that will impress the pants off of anyone you meet at your next networking event. How you can utilize some lesser known features within Canva to create powerful presentation slide decks and even how you can use Canva to create an awesome website that you can use to conduct surveys, collect e mails, and even book appointments. Finally, we'll also be going through some more advanced techniques for creating captivating videos, using Chat GPT and other AI tools to bulk create content within Canva and so much more. This content is perfect for anyone who wants to learn how to create eye catching content for their own business or for their clients or who maybe wants to give away some of their designs or templates in exchange for people's e mail addresses and grow your email list or to actually sell it on platforms like Creative Market. And whether you're using the free or paid version of Cambra, there's something in this course for absolutely everyone. According to a recent study, content creation is the fastest growing form of small business, and with the skills that you'll learn in this course, you'll be well on your way to joining other amazing content creators out there on their journey to online business growth. The skills you'll be learning here are the exact skills I've used with my clients to create content for a wide variety of businesses. And I'll be taking you through my exact processes that I've developed over the years, including how I gain inspiration for my designs throughout the month. So when it's time to sit down and design for myself or for a client, I have plenty of assets to draw inspiration from for my content. Like I said before, I pretty much live inside of Canva, and I can't wait to show you around my home and show you everything that this amazing software has to offer. So if you're ready, I can't wait to see you inside my first lesson. 2. What You Need To Know: So to kick things off, I'd love to spend a little bit of time over the following few lessons, just covering a few really great tips, tools and resources that are out there that are going to help you to make the most of your content creation process. And before you get started, just make sure to go through and download your course guide, which is linked as a PDF in the projects and resources section, and I've also hyperlinked it for you in case you're not able to access the attachment. Inside, you'll find all of the resources we'll be talking about throughout the course, including super handy keyboard shortcuts, which we'll talk about a lot in the lessons. You'll always know where things are within Canva if you want to track things down manually, and you'll also learn how to speed up your workflow with these handy shortcuts. In your course guide, you'll also see some previews of the kind of designs you'll be learning to create throughout the course. These will also pop up in the first few seconds of each lesson so that you can get a really quick snapshot of what you'll be creating within that lesson. But before we get into everything, I also wanted to mention that Canva changes its interface a lot a lot a lot. And it's a good thing because it means that they're constantly developing the platform and they're making things better for you guys. But it does also mean that some things might look slightly different on your screen depending on when you're watching this course. And it's also because social media platforms change their dimensions and change their preferences and things change. But that's totally fine because like I said, I love this stuff, so I don't mind continuously updating it and making it better for you guys. But that being said, if something looks slightly different on your screen or you're looking at a bit of a different dimension with social media platforms or anything like that. Not to worry because the skills that I'm going to be teaching you in this course are going to not just give you know, step by step instructions on how to create something, but hopefully also give you the flexibility to adapt as these platforms evolve. But that being said, if there is something that you think needs to be updated, please let me know, or if there's something that needs to be added or you've seen something online that you're like, This is really cool and it's not covered in the course. I'd love to know how this was created. Ask me. Ask away, ask for support, ask for help, ask for feedback. Just ask. I will be happy to help. Now, I know some of you are going to want to just jump ahead and go straight to the lessons where we start creating stuff. But I would really encourage you even those of you who might have been using amba already. You think you're a pro and you've been using it for years. I would still encourage you to go through the basics because sometimes we get into bad habits as creators, myself included, and it can be really helpful to kind of get back to basics and remember what font pairings go well together, what contrast means, what the hierarchy of your typography means, and all of the kind of basic terminology that's really key to creating amazing epic content online and making sure that everything stays on brand as well. Not to mention that I'm going to be taking you through how to find inspiration for your design. And kind of getting into that sort of creative flow that can be really hard to jump start if you're sitting down and you're trying to create something and your mind just goes blank. So we're going to overcome all of those challenges in these initial few lessons. So I would really encourage you not to skip these steps. And finally, I also just wanted to manage your expectations in terms of the version of Canva that I'm using. So I'm going to be using Canva P to demonstrate a lot of these lessons. That being said, if you're on the free version of Canva, you will have access to most of the stuff that we're going to be talking about throughout this course. The differences are pretty minor now. They used to be quite intense. But really, there's just kind of minor differences in some of the things that we'll be talking about. So, for example, when we get to branding and storing your different brand assets on the pro version, you can store pretty much unlimited brand assets and fonts and colors, whereas on the free version, you can only pick up to three brand colors. So it's usually just a slight limitation like that. So you won't be at a huge disadvantage. And if you're brand new to this, I would very much suggest that you just start with the free trial of Canva and then upgrade only when you feel that it's necessary. But also be aware that when you sign up to Canva, there is a free 30 day trial of Canva P that you can jump on if you want to follow along with absolutely everything within this course, and then you can always cancel it if you feel that the free plan is enough for what you need in your day to day. As it says here, most of the advantages of the Pro account have to do with access to better workflow functions like more storage for your designs, and just options for quickly bulk editing designs and those sorts of things, which are just ways that you can save time if you're using Canva every single day. I personally wish that I'd upgraded sooner because I spent years creating stuff for myself and for my clients on the free version, and I wish that I upgraded earlier because it has made my workflow so much easier. But if you are not going to be working with in Campa every single day like I do, then the free version might actually suffice for everything that you need. All right. And now let's get into everything in the next lesson. Make sure to download your course guide, so you've got access to all the resources we'll be discussing throughout, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Psychology of Colours: Over the many years of teaching branding and marketing, I've gotten a lot of questions specifically around colors and color schemes. So before we jump into the next lesson, where I'm going to be taking you through how to actually go about selecting color palettes for your brand or for your clients, I first just wanted to take you through a bit of the reasoning behind why brands pick certain colors. Because while knowing the psychology of colors may not be the B and end all for choosing your color palette, it can still be a useful tool when trying to decide on the overall vibe that you're wanting people to associate with your brand. So let's take a look at the color emotion guide here and talk about why certain brands have chosen specific colors to connect with their audience. Yellow is the color of the sun, so it makes sense that it evokes feelings of optimism, clarity, and warmth. Brands like McDonald's and Subway use yellow for its playful qualities, while cat who create construction equipment have chosen it because yellow is also a sign of safety and caution. Orange stands out in a crowd, so it's creative. It's useful, it's enthusiastic, which makes it perfect for brands like Nickelodeon and fanta. Red has actually been proven to have the ability to raise people's pulse rate when they look at it because it's a powerful color, and it's warm, it's exciting, it's sexy, it's urgent, it's all of these things. It's super bold, and it makes it perfect for brands who aren't afraid to put themselves out there like Coca Cola and Netflix. Purple is the color of royalty and wisdom. Brands use purples regal, sort of anything is possible vibe to draw in customers who are looking for an experience that is a step away from the ordinary, which is exactly why brands like Hallmark, Cadbury, monster.com, and the sci fi channel all leverage the power of purple. Blue is a calming color that conveys feelings of strength, dependability, and tranquility. Technology brands like Del, IBM, Intel, and Facebook take advantage of Blues trustworthy message. Green is serene and it's peaceful and it conveys the idea of growth. Many brands whose products deal with agriculture in the environment utilize this color like John Deer and animal planet, while brands like whole foods take advantage of the fact that people also associate green with health. Lastly, black, white, and gray logos signify balance and innovation. Car companies like Mercedes Benz and Honda use logos that feature silver. Apple uses white, black and gray or silver throughout their brand and products, and then companies like Nike just use a simple black logo for a minimalistic look. But, of course, there are plenty of brands out there whose logos and color schemes are not this clear cut, and they don't just neatly fit into one color category. And that's perfectly fine. But hopefully, knowing a little bit about the emotions that we associate with these different colors will help you in creating content for social media. For example, if you're going for a minimalistic and innovative feel, you might use black, white or gray. Whereas if the emotion you're looking to evoke in your audience is one of trust and calm, you might go for more blue hues instead. You'll notice that even different fonts here evoke different emotions on top of your colors and we'll talk more about that in a later lesson. Canva themselves actually have a really, really great resource for this in case you're wanting to look up the meanings of other colors. I've linked this within your course guide. But for now in the next lesson, let's take a look at how to actually create color palettes, so I will see you there. 4. Hex Codes & Colour Palettes: Okay, so now that we know a little bit about what different colors mean and what emotions they are tied to, we will now be talking about color palettes and hex codes in different colors and how they play together in forming a brand color scheme. So brand recognition is such a huge part of marketing and colors can be a really important part of that. So you'd imagine if, you know, Facebook decided to just go purple one day or Coca Cola just went green. We've got these different associations with particular brands for a particular reason because they use the same color schemes over and over and over again. So we learned to associate those colors with their brand and their logo and everything else. I mean, McDonald's, like, the first thing you think of when you think of McDonald's is the golden arches, and it would be super weird if they randomly just stopped using the color yellow and their signature red, right? So color schemes are such an important part of branding. That's one side of it. The other side is that I would encourage you not to stick with a color palette or a brand color scheme just for the sake of sticking with it, and then for the sake of branding. It's totally okay to evolve. My own brand colors have massively evolved over the years, as I felt my own brand has evolved. I've changed my colors slightly. So it's entirely possible. If you look at some even big brands like Sark and AR and B and B have totally different color schemes from when they first started. So it's okay to change, but I would say not too frequently. Because then people will never really recognize that it's you coming across their social media feed if you don't have that sort of consistency going on. So play around with things, but I would say that at some point, it's good to just go, This is my color scheme. These are the colors I'm going to use in my marketing materials over and over and over again. And these are the ones I'm sticking to until it no longer makes sense for these to be my brand colors. So If your clients, if you're doing this as a social media manager, and if your clients don't have a color scheme in place, you can use the tips within this lesson to help them create one. And now you'll know why it's such an important thing for them to actually have their own brand colors and have them be really consistent in their designs on social media as well. All right. Let's get into it. So let's first talk about hex codes that represent the colors on a page like this. So let's say if you're on a website like this one, and you're like, Oh, I love all these colors. I would love to use them in my design, but you have no idea what the colors are or how to get them into your design. There's a really good free chromic extension, which is this eye dropper tool which allows you to essentially just hover over any color on a website or anywhere else on the Internet. And it will tell you what that hex code is. So hex code is essentially a representation of how much red, green, and blue exist in this particular color, and it's always six characters, which is a combination of letters and numbers. With this, you can continue doing this for as many colors as you want. You can just keep picking a few different colors, and it'll essentially build a color palette here for you. Then if you're ever interested in what that hex code is for each particular color, you can find out just by clicking on it or you can export it as well. Now, at this stage, we haven't yet familiarize ourselves with the Canva editor, so I don't want you to worry about it for now. But the one thing I want you to know is that whenever you're within Canva, a shortcut to this as well, is if you ever have a photo that you want to bring into your design and you're like, Oh, I really like those colors. Instead of going through and using that chrome extension, you actually have this built in within Canva. So let's say I want to change the colors of these shapes. I've got a little eyedropper here as well. And I can just do the same sort of thing where I just go, Okay, well, let's change these colors to the colors from the photos below. So just so you know that you've got the eye dropper there as well, or you can use the chrome extension to identify colors in images or in websites. So that's all about picking individual colors, but how do you actually go about building color palettes? So we're going to look at a few tools that will help. But first, I just wanted to say, I really love going to Pinterest to look for inspiration first and foremost because there are already lots of clever people who have put together some really great color schemes that you can use, whether you're looking for something like minimalist or Earthy or techy or whatever word you want to put in front of the words color palette, and it will pop up with some ideas for the kinds of color palettes you could use for this sort of brand with this kind of feel. And Canva themselves also have an option for color palette ideas, or you can go to their color palette generator and upload a particular image here. That you like the look of, and it'll build a color scheme or a color palette for you, which is really cool. And then additionally, I want to point you to two resources that are a little bit more graphic designer and web designer specific. One of those being Chroma. When you first start with Chroma, it will basically look like this because it's trying to get a feel for the kind of colors you like before giving you some options. So it'll say, choose a set of your 50 favorite colors. So you don't necessarily need to be thinking about color palettes just yet. Just go down and go, which colors do I like? I'm going to go through this really quickly and just pick 50 colors, so I can show you what it looks like once it's got those colors selected, and it begins training to build some color palette options for you. Once you've selected your colors, it's going to then begin training itself and generating some data. Karma will then come up with some really cool color combinations for you. You can also swap the colors to see what it'll look like with the other one on top. And then whenever you like a particular color combo, you can just hover over the eye, and it'll tell you the hex codes of each color. So, this can be a really cool exercise. And at any point, you can go to your settings and edit the training colors if you don't like what it's come up with. It also has the option for web content accessibility guidelines. So I'd like to have this turn on to make sure the contrast between the colors is nice and crisp, and we'll talk a little bit about accessibility in just a second. But just so you know that these are some options, I really like the way that this tool thinks because these are colors that I would probably not ever think to put together. But a lot of the time you just think wow that actually looks really, really cool. So this is just a way to get some more ideas flowing. And then we'll move on to our final tool, which is coolers. Coolers is a way to actually go in and build your color palette based on all these different ideas and all these different hex cos that you might have floating around. Of course, they have trending color palettes as well, lots and lots and lots of them, so you can always go through and explore their color palettes, but their power is really in the generator. Similarly to Canva within the generator, you can start from an image, but you can also completely start from scratch as well. So let's say I wanted to start from an image, but I want to actually pick the colors from this particular image. It has a little bit more flexibility with that, whereas Canva just kind of decides those colors for you. So that can be really nice, and you can then open that in the generator. But let's say I actually have now seen this full screen, and I only like a couple of these colors, and I want to try out a few different combinations with these. So what I can do is I can lock the ones I like, so I'm going to lock this one and this one, and then I'm just going to hit the space bar, and it's going to give me some other options for the other three slots for my color palette, and I can keep cycling through until I find the ones that I like. But maybe I like this one, but it's a little bit too dark for what I'm looking for. I can have a look at some different options here. So I can look at slightly lighter shades of this kind of minty green and then say, yep, that looks pretty good. And then I can keep hitting the space bar to shuffle through some more options. If you click on the actual hex code number here, you can tweak a few things in terms of how much red, green, and blue is in this color, or you can head on over to the picker, so you can hand select a particular color or add your own hex code in if you know you've got a particular brand color in mind that you already really like, you can also move these colors around, so if you want them in a particular order, and finally, of course, you can export them. Once you've got a color palette that works for you, you can head on over to port, either export this as an image or a PDF or even a URL, if you want to share it with somebody. Once you've exported your image, Here's what your color palette will look like. You'll have your beautiful hex codes there, and you can use these within your cava design. Now, lastly, I did say I would talk briefly about accessibility. So this is a really great tool that I've linked within your course guide that will allow you to build out your color palette and check that everything is as accessible as it needs to be. I'm just going to put in a couple of my brand colors here, and I don't need too many options. Let's say, these are the only colors that I actually want for my brand. I'm only going to have a three color color palette, It will then tell me how I can use these colors in a way that's accessible for all users, meaning that it's going to be easy enough for them to read the text if it's light text on a dark background or dark text on a light background. It'll essentially tell me you can't use white text on this particular color. I can't also use my turquoise text on a white background, and this is a really, really great option for when you're selecting your color palette to do a last minute check to make sure that you're actually going to be able to utilize the colors that you're choosing in your designs. A way that's really easy for all users on social media to actually be able to read very clearly and engage with your content. Hopefully, you're starting to see how your design work is starting to take a little bit of shape. In a little bit, we are also going to talk about font and font pairings that you can use for your brand. But for now, let's chat about something we all need to be across as content creators, which is understanding different content licenses. More on that in the next lesson, and I'll see there. 5. Understanding Licensing: Okay. Okay, so as we go into this particular lesson, I did just want to jump on here and say that this lesson is not intended to freak you out because I know it can have that effect. Whenever you start talking about licensing and restrictions and copyright laws and all of that stuff, I know it can be quite intimidating. So please just note that First of all, everything in this lesson is intended for guidance purposes only. I'm not a copyright lawyer, so always, always, always check the licensing restrictions on any new software and tool that you use, and we'll go through how to actually check that on the different platforms. But just know that it's not as scary as a lot of the articles out there make it seem. It's really just sort of best practices. So the actual resources that I'll be giving you that are 100% free for you to use, make it very clear from, you know, the very first home page through to their terms and conditions that you can use their images and their videos and their graphics for whatever you need to use them. So if you're ever not sure, just pull from websites that you know are 100% free for you to use. If you're ever not sure, then make sure that you seek advice from people who do this for a living or make sure that you're actually outright purchasing the assets if you're not sure if you're able to use them for free. But we are going to go into exactly where to look for information on all the different websites and how to know what's free, what isn't and how you can use it. So please don't worry too too much. I just want to give you this information so that if you ever come across it, you'll know what it means and you know what it means in terms of how you can use the material that's found there. All right. And hopefully, you're a little bit excited. I know this is a little bit too nerdy, but I just wanted to preface it by saying, it's not as scary as it might seem. And we'll get through it together. All right. Let's jump in. So some basic terms to be familiar with in terms of taking images, videos, artwork, photographs, and music off the Internet and using them for your own purposes. Royalty free is a license type that grants the buyer a determined set of rights to use content in multiple ways for a flat one time fee. This means you only pay for the license once and you can use it forever within the accepted ways without any further payment obligations. So you'll often see stock image companies using this term, so you can, for example, just purchase an image once from a company like Shutterstock and then use it on your website as many times as you want. Then there's creative commons, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a globally accessible public commons of knowledge and culture. They essentially just help creators license their content according to the type of restrictions that they want to place on people purchasing and using their content. So CC zero or creative commons zero is the least restrictive type of license out there. It lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build on even commercially without needing to attribute the original creator of the work. Other creative commons licenses might also allow for free use but might require actual attribution back to the author of the work. Then let's talk about noncommercial versus commercial. So noncommercial means something is not primarily intended for or directed towards a commercial advantage or monetary compensation by an individual organization. So for example, if you're using an asset in a lecture presentation in a class you're taking at a university or for a personal project, then it would be classified as noncommercial. Commercial use of an image or video or what have you would be to reproduce it in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation. For example, any images or media that would be used in TV production or use in advertising, where you're actually getting money from using that image. The important thing to note is that music distribution is the most monitored of all content use because it's also the easiest for programs to pick up. So obviously, this is a little bit more murky now with TikTok and Instagram reels, for example. But if you were trying to use a popular song by DJ allied as the background song for your Facebook ad, it'll automatically get rejected. Or if you're using it in YouTube video, you might get a copyright strike. So generally, best practice is for you to either use content that is totally free for you to use without having to attribute the original creator. Or for you to actually go and purchase that asset to use for business purposes. And the good news is that there are so many platforms dedicated to providing you with either free or paid content who are dedicated to transparency, so it's super easy for you to find out whether the content you're taking from the web is free for you to use or should be purchased. If there are any copyright issues on your work, by the way, you'll usually just get a warning to re upload your work without the copyrighted element on platforms like Facebook and YouTube. So don't read all of the scary articles out there that tell you this is the end of the world. It's really not. But that being said, just get into good habits. Make sure you're pulling content from the platforms that you know are 100% free for you to use and do whatever you want. Just in case. So that means not Google images. Please don't pull from Google images. Just don't do it. I've had so many clients do this. And that is when things get really, really risky. So I'm going to give you lots of really handy resources that will allow you to get access to so many free assets. So just use what you know, and if you're ever not sure, make sure you're reading the terms and conditions of the platform that you're pulling content from. And in the next lesson, we're going to get into all the amazing free platforms that will give you all the assets you need. So I'll see you there. 6. Finding Free Images & Videos: But your brands out there will often either stick to taking their own photos or purchasing photos from sites like Shutterstock or Adobe stock, which are high end professional photos that are very specific. So what I mean by that is if your client is looking for an image of something like a woman in business attire shooting a goldfish or cats having a picnic and reenacting scenes from the Titanic, Then, yes, they will have to purchase these because they're so ridiculously specific, you will not find them for free. But I found that most of the time people are just looking for a nice background image for a quote graphic or something to include in a blog post. In which case, some of the free websites that we're going to be discussing here will totally suffice for that. So my first go to resource for big, beautiful arts images that are completely free for you to use on social media or anywhere online is unsplash. In here, you can either just browse through images that they've gotten in there or you can search for your own using some of the keywords. So you'll notice that just for the word animals, it's got about 10,000 photos in there. Some will be completely free for you to use and download. There will of course be some ads, and then there's also their unsplash plus subscription, which is a paid service, which are often lack very specific images. But in my experience, everything you need you can get from unsplash for free. Once you click into a particular image, you'll have some options for the dimensions of the download. So you'll notice that the original size photos because these are taken and submitted by professional photographers are often ginormous and way too big for what you'll need, especially for social media. So when you're downloading photos, think about how big you need the image to be for your purposes. So, for example, if you're just creating an Instagram post, it's never going to need to be wider than ten ADP. So I would just download the medium size image here, which means it's going to be a smaller file size, and it's not going to take up nearly as much room on my computer. While I'm in here, if I'm also logged into unsplash, which is completely free for me to do, I can also like an image or add it to one of my collections. So I can create a new collection. These are all completely private. You'll see the lock there, so no one else can see these. It just is a really good way to sort of organize your thoughts, especially if you're working with a few different clients, and maybe you want to just chuck a bunch of images all into a folder and then decide later whether you want to download them. This can be a really easy way to do that. Of course, with free image websites, the downside is that there's going to be a lot of downloads of the same image. But if your clients want something really unique, then of course, they're going to have to purchase it. If you keep scrolling down as well, often, it will give you related images to the image that you've just selected. But they're not necessarily from the same photographer, so they might have a slightly different look and feel, which is why Kaboom picks is another great resource. So we're going to jump into that website next. But one thing I wanted to point out is if you head on over to the menu and head on over to license, here's where you can read all about how you can and cannot use Unsplash images. You can basically use them for anything except putting them up on a competitor website or selling them because they're providing them for free. So, of course, they don't want you actually selling the images that they're giving you for free, but you can sell the end product that you've created using their image. So now heading on over to Kaboom picks. This is also quite a artsy kind of feel in terms of the images you'll find on Kaboom picks. Their search engine isn't nearly as strong as it is for Splash. I find that it is a little bit limited in terms of what you can search for. The categories tend to be quite good, but the actual searchability here, a little bit limited. But the thing that I really like about their particular engine is that when you find an image you like, you will not only have a color scheme here, which is quite cool, but you will also have all images that have come from the same photoshoot. If you're creating Instagram carousels, for example, or just a collection of images that you want to have in a blog post that you want them to all have that same look and feel, then this can be a really great resource for that because you know that it's taken by the same photographer in the same day of the same area, and it will give you that consistent look and feel. Likewise, with Kaboom picks and their licensing. If you head on over to license and FAQs, it will tell you pretty similarly to what Unsplash told you you can basically do anything attribution is not required. But of course, it's appreciated, but it's not always possible, especially in social media posts. So just know that legally, according to their current licensing, so always check with every website. But according to this, at this stage, you're able to use their images for whatever you want without attribution. Then I want to move on over to Pixabay, which is another great resource. It offers much more sort of stock image kind of images and videos that aren't quite right for every single brand. I've had very few clients where they would want images like this on their social media. But there are definitely especially more corporate brands for which this is the right kind of look and feel. It also means that their search engine is actually quite good. It's similar to sort of Google images where you're able to get much more detailed images based on the keywords you're putting in. And the benefit of Pixabay is that you don't just have images. You also have vector graphics and illustrations, which can be great if you're putting together a presentation, for example, and you want to have some illustrations included in that presentation. This is a really great go to, whereas the other two websites don't have this functionality. And of course, they have videos as well, which is great. But again, they're a little bit stock kind of stocky. Yeah, they can just be really, really random. And I can't imagine too many clients that W a man with a chocolate egg in a ribbon. I don't know what this is, but anyways, you can download it for free. And yes, so we'll look at a slightly different website for videos that I find to be a lot more suitable for a lot more brands. But the last thing I want to say about Pizza Bay is that they also have music and sound effects. So that can be really great if you're looking for something, let's say, inspirational, and up Mat. This is where you can go to find music that's completely free for you to use even in advertising in the background of your reels, in the background of your videos, et cetera, et cetera, and then you can go by genre and by mood and just download that straight to your computer. Lastly, let's look at pixels, which is my preferred website for getting free beautiful videos and photos as well. They do have photos, but generally, I just use them for their video functionality. Also because you can filter by orientation, which is great if you're specifically looking for videos that can work in the background of your reels, your TikTok or you're looking for horizontal videos for your longer YouTube videos, for example. So I find these to be, you know, just a lot more human and approachable and beautiful. And they also often have similarly to kaboom peaks. If the particular creator has shot a couple of different things all in one shoot, generally, you'll see some related videos underneath. It's not always the case, but sometimes you can get a couple of different shots of the same model. So, for example, this, this, and this is all the same creator and the same model. So if you click into one video, you will see the other ones underneath as well, which can give you that really nice sense of consistency. Now, with photos, we talked about downloading it in the appropriate format, so it's not too big. With videos. Likewise, you probably don't want it taking up too much space on your computer. So if you only really need it for Instagram or something like that, don't go ahead and download a four K video because it's going to be gigantic, just download it in full HD. Once you know what dimensions you need for the video, type that you're creating, you can just download that here. And like on unsplash, you can create collections and like a few different things once you're logged into pexels so that you can create little collections and save them all in your folder. Once you go through to download the video, it will actually say, you can potentially help to support the creators. But if you were to check Pexels license, once again, you don't necessarily need to give attribution to the photographer or the videographer, but it's always appreciated. And in terms of organizing all of your assets, I would make sure that you're creating some sort of a Google Drive folder or folder on your computer that is dedicated specifically to these assets so that you know, whether it's three years from now or ten years from now, that these were assets you pulled from pixels or unsplash, and they're completely free for you to use as many times as you like, so that you don't accidentally confuse these with your other images that you might have in your folders that you've maybe gotten from clients that might have stricter licenses or copyrights in place because those might be assets that your clients purchased from Shutterstock, and that means they are the only people that have the license to use them. You cannot use them for future work. So make sure you are dividing up your assets by things that are completely free for you to use, and then any assets that you may have purchased or gotten from your clients. So those are my top resources. Of course, Canva have a really great collection of their own photos and videos that have been submitted by different users, but some are also pulling through from sites like Pixabay. And you can use those directly within Camva as well. But often they're only available for pro users. So these websites are really great for those of you who are on Canvas free plan because you can go and download these beautiful images from these websites, bring them into Camva and you don't necessarily need to be on the P plan. So that's a cool little workaround. Now the next lesson, we'll go into how you can find fonts for yourself and for your clients as well. So I will see there. 7. Finding Your Fonts: In this lesson, I first want to talk about the different kinds of fonts that are out there and how to potentially choose font combinations for your clients or for your own brand for your designs. Now, this gift here is just for fun because I love the office. But it's also how designers often feel about people using fonts like comic sans in a professional marketing material or papyrus for their logo. And I've actually included a really funny Saturday Night Live skit about this in your course guide featuring Ryan Gosling, that makes me laugh every time. Definitely make sure to check that out. But the point is that when it comes to any design, but specifically when it comes to fonts, the simpler, the better. Don't try to pack a really small graphic with six or seven different font styles because it just makes people really confused as to what the most important information on the page is. Let's now talk about the different kind of font styles you might encounter in Canva and in your other design work. Generally, you will find sera San serf, script, and handwritten fonts. There will also be other categories like decorative fonts and slab sera fonts, for example, but these are the four main ones that I want you to focus on for now. So largely, you'll be dealing with serf and San serapons. The main difference here is that seraponts will have these extra little tapers or lines, which might also be called tails and feet, which extend out at the edges of the letters, Was other fonts don't have these serfs, which is why they're called sand seraph meaning without the seraph. So Serafonts like Playfair Display here are often considered classic and traditional while sand seraponts like pen Sands are considered to be more minimalistic and modern. The script fonts like satisfy here are considered elegant and unique, while handwritten fonts like permanent marker are considered much more informal, playful and artistic. So let's check these out in action. You might have a Serafont like these two as your heading font paired with a San sera font as your paragraph font. Or you could actually choose to go San sera for both the heading and the paragraph fonts, but just choosing a slightly bolder font for your headings to make them stand out a little bit more. Or you might decide to go with a really fun and playful rounded font for your main heading font. I perhaps your brand is targeted at a younger audience, and then you could pair this with a more traditional sand sera font that has slightly harsher edges or another rounded edge font like Quicksand on the right there. But the point is that there are lots of different font combinations out there and some great tools which can help you out when choosing what the best option is for you, but make sure you're not choosing more than three fonts total for your brand. Otherwise, things can get very, very confusing. So there are sites like font pair here, which can assist with just giving you some ideas of different font pairings that work well together, and there's lots and lots and lots for you to browse through. But my preference is to actually start with font joy here, which works really similarly to coolers, which is a tool we covered in a previous lesson for creating color palettes. It allows you to essentially lock in some fonts, so you can just go through generate a whole bunch of different font pairings. It also has three different fonts, not just two, which is a really big benefit. You can keep cycling through a few different options. Then once you find one that you really like, you can lock it in place and then keep generating font pairings that work well paired with the font that you have already chosen. You can even put in your own text so you can see how something might look in your brand voice, and then you can also use the sliders here to try and find fonts that are similar to the one that's there, but maybe slightly different or you can actually search for a particular font. So if you found a font in a previous tool or in another tool that you really, really like, you can search for it here and add it to your trio of your font combinations. Another great tool I want to introduce you to is called mix font, which allows you to see different font pairings in action on sort of a dummy website here. And it works similarly to font joy, where you can just hit the space bar on your keyboard, and it will cycle through a few different options. And then when you find one that you like, you can say, Okay, I'm going to lock this in place and keep cycling through a few different options that work well with that as the heading font. I like this because it's a little bit more visual, so you can see how something might look. On a live website, maybe not so much in designs, but it can give you a lot more perspective of how things will look in a more visual way. The downside is that you can only use two fonts instead of three, like you could with font joy. Now, bearing in mind that not all of these fonts will be available within Canva, of course. But if you are on the Canva pro plan, you can import your own custom fonts into your brand kit, and we'll go into that a little later on. But for now, if you just want to look at font combinations that are available within Canva, I've also added some resources for this within your course guide. Otherwise, you can also head on over to something like fonts.google.com, and you can search through different fonts based on the style that you're looking for. So if particularly, you don't really want to be looking at Saraf or San Saraf, but you actually want to be looking at something like a handwritten font. This is a really great way to do that. You can put in your own text and then find fonts that you like. And once you find ones that you like, for example, satisfy is already available within Ca, I know that much, so we could actually go through and start using it straight away. But if it's one that's not available in Canva, you can just download it here and then upload it into Cambra as well. Also, in terms of finding fonts that you like online, you can use a free chrome extension called what font. Once you have it activated in your Google Chrome browser, you will be able to hover over any font on anyone's website, and it'll tell you exactly what font you're looking at. So that's a really, really handy way to find out what fonts people are using and potentially use them in your own marketing materials. Lastly, if you're looking for something really, really custom, then I would go to something like creative market.com, but knowing that you have to purchase these different fonts because they are custom designed by designers, and they can get a little bit pricey. If it says, you know, $28, that may not be for the full commercial license, that might be for a personal license. So sometimes the different licensing options will make a big difference. For example, if you wanted to use this font on an app, it would cost you a lot of money. So it just depends on what you're hoping to use it for. But this can be a great way to just get some really, really unique font options into your designs, and can be a great option for clients that don't mind spending a little bit of extra money. Overall, the reason that I like searching for fonts outside of Canva first like this is because it allows you to think a little bit more objectively about the fonts themselves before thinking about how they're going to look in your designs. But if you prefer to just jump straight into Canva and try out a few different font pairings there, then by all means, do whatever works best for you. All right. And now in the next lesson, we're going to go into some key design dos and don'ts to consider while you're creating, so I'll see you there. 8. Design Dos & Don'ts: In this lesson, we're going to clarify a few common terms in the design world as well as covering some key design dos and don'ts that are based on some very common mistakes that people make when they first begin designing. It does hurt me to think about some of the very first designs I ever made for myself and clients. But I know without them, I wouldn't be here teaching you how to learn from my mistakes, so they've served their purpose. And please don't be afraid to go out there and get creative and make mistakes because each and every single one of these will teach you something about what you can do better next time. And also just definitely make sure you're saving all of your work somewhere in a Google Drive so that in a few months or a few years, you'll be able to look back at those designs and see just how far you've come with your design skills. So, let's get started with some key terms here, JPEGs versus PNG files. You've probably heard of both of these at some point, but just to cover the basics, some quality is compromised when a raw image that's taken on a camera is converted into a JPEG. And the reason for that is that the compression is what's called loss, meaning that some unnecessary information is permanently deleted from that image. But it does allow you to create a smaller file size than you would with a PNG. The main advantage of a PNG is that it will allow you to have transparent backgrounds. And that can be really beneficial if you're creating graphics with irregularly shaped objects or you're trying to cut people out of an image, in which case, you would have to use a PNG file. Now, generally speaking, I always save my designs in PNG format because this format also holds really crisp lines and gradients a lot better than JPEG images. So if you're going to be including a couple of different colors to create a gradient in your graphic, then JPEGs just won't cut it a lot of the time. But photographs that you'll be pulling from the web will often be in JPEG format because they're already edited and don't have the design elements that your finished creation will have. Effectively, unless you're trying to really save on space because JVs are generally smaller in file size, I would always save in PG file. Now there are also two different types of digital graphic files, rasters and vectors. A stographic is made up of a grid of many pixels, whereas a vector graphic is instead made up of many lines or paths. One of the biggest differences between a vector and raster is the ability to scale the graphic. Because rasters are made up of just a certain amount of pixels, at some point of scaling, they will essentially become really, really blurry or pixelated, but a vector doesn't actually have this problem. Now, since a vector can be scaled to about any size, without losing the sharp edges of its shapes, it's generally the best option for logos, which often have a large range of applications that you want to be using them from from the tiny, tiny side of a little pencil to the giant giant side of a giant building. Mva does now have a feature for you to export in SVG files, which are vectors. So if you need a small graphic to be printed on a poster or a T shirt, you'll have the ability to export it as a vector and be able to scale it up without losing quality. But keep in mind that any photographs cannot be made into vectors. It only applies to shapes or other elements in your designs. So if you're, let's say, importing an iPhone photo into Canva and you're trying to export it as a vector file. It still will not be able to be scaled to the size of a billboard without getting blurry because it was originally a raster image because it was a photograph. So it was not designed for that purpose. But if you design something like a logo that is just made up of lines and different shapes, then you would be able to scale it up. Now, other than just size, it's also important for you to know whether you're designing for web or for print. If you would like to have the potential to use a graphic for both purposes, then design for print because it's going to be the higher quality format, and then you can repurpose it for web. But the main difference for web and print in terms of using free tools like Canva is that your dimensions will either be in pixels for web or inches and centimeters for print. Now, that is important because web graphics will normally be 72 PPI, which is pixels per inch, while print materials will have a resolution of 300 DPI, which is dots per inch. Now, all of that sounds a little too jargony. But all of that really means is that in web graphics, there will be 72 little pixels of color in every inch of that graphic. And for print materials, there will be 300 color dots per inch, making them a much more beautiful, solid color when it's printed. But all you really have to concern yourself with is, do you need to print your project? If you do, then just make sure you figure out what dimensions you want to print it at and put those inside of Canva, and Canva will take care of all the rest in terms of your resolution and then allow you to export your document for print once you're finished. We will be going through this throughout the lessons as we talk about how to make business cards and ebooks and things like that that you might want to print out. If this is not making too much sense at this stage, it's totally okay. It all will in the future. For now, it's just a bit of an introduction. Then we get onto the more common mistakes that I see my students making, which is not having enough contrast between the text and the background of their graphics. Make sure you're keeping your contrast high to prevent this issue. And make sure you're not over using capital letters, especially when it comes to cursive or handwritten fonts because not only do capital letters make people feel like they're being yelled at in these types of fonts, but they can actually really overpower all the other texts in the graphic. And then finally, just make sure you're being careful of the type size you're using. So it is better for your text to be too big rather than too small, but neither is really that good, not to mention that text that feels too small on your desktop screen will often be completely unatable on a mobile device. Then within the world of design, hierarchy refers to the arrangement of visual elements in order to signify importance. What this means is that you want your most important elements to hold your viewers attention through things like scale and color and type. And the least important elements should be made to hold less attention, by making them slightly smaller, slightly less bold. And that also allows people to sort of scan your graphic at first glance and know exactly what the important bits are that they should be taking out of it. Because just remember that when everything stands out, nothing stands out. So don't be afraid to highlight the most important parts of your design for your audience. Now, we've talked a lot about branding up to this point, but a lot of the time, it's easy to get caught up in Klein's brand in style and forget who the actual intended audience is for your design. So remember that while your design may look fantastic, if it's not right for the right people that you're trying to communicate with, it will probably still miss the mark. So always be reminding yourself of who you're designing for in terms of the brand as much as the target audience as well. Then let's talk about space because often overloading your graphic with way too much information can really work against you. The emptier parts of your design can actually just be just as important as the parts that you fill with stuff. Space can help you put more focus on a specific aspect of your composition, and it can let your design breathe and help balance out the elements, or it can potentially add some sophistication to your design. So, again, this is a really, really common beginner mistake, but even seasoned designers often forget that sometimes less is more. And whenever you think, Oh, is there too much stuff in this graphic? You probably are correct, and perhaps it might be time to strip a few things down and try to simplify. Finally, calls to action are prone to being over used in graphics. This is more the case with website design than graphic design. But even on simple graphics, sometimes you'll see companies advertising a sale and asking for an e mail and asking for a subscriber and a follower. And linking them to their Instagram and their YouTube channel. And it's so much that often people end up doing none of the things you're asking for because you're asking for too many things. So in a social mediographic, only ever be asking for one thing at a time. Now, we've covered this in a lot of different areas up to this point, but just remember that when it comes to design, less is always more. And finally, always check what your designs are going to look like both on desktop and on your phone, because if you are designing on desktop on a bigger screen, That does not mean automatically that things are going to look good on your phone and on social media platforms, on apps, on Instagram, what have you. So always make sure to check your design on different devices. Now, I know that's a lot of information, and don't worry. We'll be putting all of it into practice throughout these lessons. I just wanted to give you some context ahead of time with covering some of these terms and best practices, and now it's time for us to jump into Canva and take a look around some of the features that are available to you and how you can use them in your design workflow in the next few lessons. So I will see there. 9. Introducing Canva: Okay, so we've covered some of the basic dos and don'ts and terminology and resources that you can use for your creation process. And now it's time for us to actually jump into Canva and take a look around. So as someone who is not naturally organized as a person, I have really tested just how quickly you can get really disorganized inside of Canva if you're not doing the right things. And that's just because you could technically have a completely separate document for every single thing you create. Which could be a disaster. At this point, I could have like 1,000 different documents if I was doing that. And especially if you're working inside of Canva, with your clients or with teams, this is just an absolute mess. So By doing all the wrong things, I have learned how to do the right things and passed them on to you guys in terms of your workflow and how to organize yourself and how to get into really, really good habits and practices so that you're not labeling your documents, cute kitten picks when it's actually a YouTube thumbnail so that you can actually find your documents in three years from now when you're looking for something that you create today. Okay. So lots of good stuff in the upcoming few lessons. I hope you're excited. If organization is not your thing, I'll try to make it as fun as possible. And if we can get through it, then we will save ourselves a lot of time down the line when we actually get into creating our beautiful graphics. So I hope you're at least a little bit excited. I know I kind of am, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Canva Interface Update: As we talked about earlier in the course, Canva changes quite a bit. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they make updates, and it can throw things off a little bit. So I just wanted to include this lesson to show you how things in this course might look different from things on your screen if you're using the newly updated version of Canva. These changes will be reflected in the next version of this course as I do re record the course in its entirety every few months, depending on need. These are not big changes, they're not functional changes, so they're not going to throw things off too much, but I just wanted to do this so that we can manage your expectations so that if you're like, Oh, my screen looks different from that, you'll know why that is. On Canvas previous editor, which is what I'm on here, which is what I teach in this course, Things might look a little bit different to what it looks like now. I just wanted to show you how things look in the editor, and we're going to go over what all of the things are that you're looking at right now in the next few lessons. No to worry, this is just a demo of the changes for now. So I've just written some texts here and you can see that there's this bar at the top that allows me to make some changes to the background color, and will also allow me to change the text if I click on it. It will allow me to change whether it's bold or the actual font and maybe the font size as well. I can change all of these things in this bar that remains static up top. And in the new editor, you might have this section on the left hand side here that has some menu items that you need to close before you can go into your design, and you'll notice that bar at the top is not there anymore. It only appears when you click on an element on the page. If I click on the background versus the text, I have different options. With the background, I can now change the background color. And then if I click on the text, I can do all the same things that we were able to do in the previous editor. It just means that this doesn't appear until I actually click on an element on the page. So it's not really a huge, huge change. It still functions exactly the same way. So everything in the course is still very much relevant. You're not going to have issues of translating this In case you're in a design document, you're like, my bar is not up the top. What do I do? Just click on any element on the page, and it will appear. Then there are a few sort of cosmetic changes with the editor, for example, when you go to add a new page in the new editor, you can switch between them by clicking on the new pages, or you can use the scroll view to go and kind of scroll through the pages, which previously looked a little bit different. But you can switch back to the thumbnail view just like you would previously. Then the other changes that on the left hand side, you've got all these menu items that you can now access without clicking into them. You can just hover over these and they will pop up. And then when you go away from these, they will hide themselves again. As I said, not a huge, huge change there. It's pretty minor. The changes in the new interface are just slight, but I just wanted to add this lesson so that you feel confident in knowing that if things look slightly different on your screen, than they do on mind as I'm going through the course, it's okay. There are no functional differences, really. It's just about maybe where things are located. And I know that can be a bit scary as a beginner. So I just wanted to manage your expectations with this lesson. So hopefully that's helped, and of course, in the next few lessons, we're going to go through Canva and actually talk about where to find things, how to create, how to do everything within Canvas. So all of this is going to make so much more sense as you go through the lessons. So thank you so much for watching this one so that we can feel confident in knowing that everything is okay, even when changes happen, and I know change can be scary, but it's all going to be okay, and I will see you in the next lesson. 11. Canva Pro vs Free: Okay. So when you're not logged into Canva, at this stage, we're just on the cama.com website. You will have the option to sign up for free or check out a few different options here, or you can actually just hit play with Canva. And this will take you through sort of a guided tour of everything you can expect in the editor. So if you're ever not quite sure or you don't remember exactly what I was talking about in this particular lesson, that can be a really great option to get yourself really familiar with the editor. So we're going to start off by jumping into my pro account so that I can show you a few things, but then we'll also talk about how things might differ if you're a Canva free user by jumping into my Canva free account at the end. Depending on your own account settings, your camera might be in light mode or in dark mode, you can always change that within the account settings option. But I'm just going to keep mine in dark mode. And then what you're actually seeing on your screen, whether you're cava pro or free user will depend on how much you've used canva. So it might have some recommendations, for example, obviously, created hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of designs within Canva. So it's got some recommendations for what it thinks are like, but you might be starting with a completely blank slate. Same with your recent designs. So I have some of my own designs here, then ones that have also been shared with me by students where they retain ownership of that design. It's just a project they're submitting, so I can actually look at it, review it, but I can't edit anything. So those will also be visible in your Camva dashboard, if anyone is sharing designs with you on a view only purpose. And yeah, we'll have lots and lots of designs here, but things can get very messy very quickly, as we'll continue talking about throughout this lesson and throughout the course, as well. So we'll be talking a lot about how to get yourself really nice and organized so you're not sort of depending on getting a design from your recent design section over here. So let's have a look at some options. So over here, it'll tell you you can create a doc, a whiteboard, presentation, some social media templates, videos, et cetera, et cetera. You can also search for something really specific. So, for example, if I wanted to create an Instagram story, it will pop up with some ideas over here. And then these ones over here are the ones that will pop up with lots and lots and lots of different templates. You can also search by your own projects. So if you have a project where you've created Instagram stories in the past, it will search through just your own designs here, and then you can just sort of hit Enter or select one here. And that will bring you to this amazing template section. You can also get to it in a slightly different way. So if you don't really know what you're searching for yet, you just want to kind of browse around. You can head on over to templates, and that will bring you to a similar spot where it'll have some recommendations over here. You can browse by subjects, you can browse by topics, or you can head on over here and go to social media. And in this case, I could say Instagram story and find me all the Instagram story templates. So there's always a few different ways to get to the same place within Canva, as is true with any other software, But once you get into, let's say, Instagram stories in this case, you'll see hundreds of thousands of templates, which can be really overwhelming, especially if you're a beginner. The more you can actually filter this down by either using Canvas own filters where you can go by style, by theme, by feature, by subject or topics or any of this, you can sort of tick things along. You'll start to see that it's going to narrow things down. So for example, if we were looking for Instagram stories that are only collages, we're now down to 5,000 templates, which is a lot better and a lot more doable in terms of searching through. Or you can use your own keyword. So for example, if I was looking for a marketing Instagram story, I could just look for that particularly. And I'm still up to 800,000 templates, so I might need to actually filter this down even more. But you can start to see that these are templates that have those keywords in their creation process. So it's giving me a lot more targeted Instagram stories, not just sort of general templates. So at this stage, let's just go ahead and select a template, and then we're going to start customizing it and familiarizing ourselves with the editor. But before I select the template, I just wanted to point out that you'll start to see some crowns in the bottom right hand corner here and some templates that don't have these, which means they're free for you to use. If they have that crown, it means that they're a pro template, so it will only be available if you're a canva pro user. So I'm just going to go ahead and select a free template for now and going to click on customize this template. Now, just because we have chosen this particular template at this stage, does not mean we're stuck with it because we can continue here in the design section over here. We can continue in the template section to look at more and more templates. We can continuously add new pages to this document as well, so I can go ahead and add a new page. If I like a different kind of template, I can keep bringing a few different designs in here. So that I have lots and lots to choose from. Now, the first thing we want to do is rename our design because we want to make sure we're getting into those really nice habits. So, in this case, it says, digital marketing Instagram story. That's actually pretty accurate. I would probably go Instagram Story demo. Marketing, something like that. So those are all keywords that I might potentially search for in the future that would help me to bring up this particular design, which, again, is handy if I've got hundreds of different designs to choose from. I would also recommend that you go one step further and head on over to file and save your design to a folder. So you can have all these different folders and folders within folders here, and it's a nice little way to additionally organize your assets. So I could save mine to Instagram assets or Instagram stories, and then I could also create a new folder, or I could just save it in here. And that just makes it a little bit easier for me to search for later down the line. And the good news is that Canva is now ridiculously smart. So not only can you search by the name of your design file, but you can actually search for the content within your design. So, let's say you don't really remember what you titled your design, but you remember something from the design itself. So, in this case, let's say it says digital marketing agency. In my Canva dashboard, I can search for digital marketing agency. And it will pop up within the project section, it will pop up with anything that's a match. Anything that has these words within it that I've created as a design. If I click into it, it will then open that document for me. So that's a really, really handy feature that again, is going to keep you really nice and organized. So within this editor, I'm going to be only seeing templates that fit these dimensions. So an Instagram story is the dimensions of ten 80 by 1920. If you're ever not sure what those dimensions are, just go to file and it will tell you exactly what the dimensions are here. So it's only going to be showing me templates that fit these dimensions. It's not going to be showing me, you know, Instagram posts or tweets or anything else because they're not in the right dimensions. And then I can search for some ideas here, so I could search for anything with the word beach in it. So I can again just add a new page here and keep on exploring some new options. And once again, you can see that it's got the pro icon in the bottom right hand corner, or it doesn't, if it's a free template. We're going to navigate around the editor a lot more in the future lessons. I'm going to leave it there for now. Let's head into our dashboard because I don't want to overwhelm you with too many things all at the beginning. I just wanted to point out a few key elements over here. So we've already talked about what templates mean. Now let's talk about the brand hub. So within the brand hub, you'll have potentially several brand kits if you are managing a few different brands under your account, or you might just have the one, in which case, you can add some color palettes. So if you're on the freight plan, you'll be limited to having only three brand colors. But on the P plan, you can have as many colors and as many color palettes as you want. Now, it might seem silly for me to have this many variations of essentially the same color palette or the two color palettes for my business. But there is a method to the madness and we'll talk about it in the next lesson. But effectively, I just wanted to show you that this is my main color palette with all my different brand colors, and then I have one that doesn't have the darker colors in it. Then I have one that doesn't have the yellow element in it. So it gives me some slight options in terms of using a function that we'll talk about in the next lesson, which is the styles function. So don't worry about it for now, but just know that this is the reason why I've set up a few different versions of my color palette so that it gives me some more options within the Canva editor. Then you also have your fonts. Now, this is too many fonts. You shouldn't have this many fonts for your business. But effectively, you want to have two to three fonts that you have in here that you can pull from that you know you're always going to be continuously using for your designs, and you can also upload your own fonts. So if you are using fonts that are not within Canva, you can upload them here and add them to your brand kit. You can add in some photos, graphics, icons, logos, all of that good stuff if you're a Canva pro user. And like I said, you can potentially have several different brand kits managed all within one account. And brand templates and brand controls, we'll talk about in a later lesson when we talk about our workflow options. But for now, let's switch to a Canva free account so we can take a look at how some things might be different if you're a Canva free user. So on my Canva free account, I'm on a light mode, so it looks slightly different. I also don't have any recent designs here. It is making some suggestions, but it obviously doesn't know me very well yet. If I was to head on over to the brand hub, I've got a brand kit here, but it only has a limitation to the three colors. If I tried to add more, it would ask me to upgrade. And I can't have fonts, and I can't have any of those sorts of things. Honestly, it's not a huge, huge limitation because likely you will have three main colors for your brand. Anyways, so probably not something to hugely worry about. Same with any kind of templates. So if I go to Instagram story, and I was trying to use some in my projects. I need to switch over to the actual templates. If I was trying to use a pro template like this one, it will then say, you need to upgrade or use P for free for 30 days in order to use that template. But I can select from hundreds and hundreds and thousands of beautiful free templates, not a problem. So I can go ahead and customize this. And as you navigate through the editor, you'll start to notice these little crowns over here that will essentially tell you that is just something you do not have access to. One of those things will be downloading your images in PNG format with a transparent background, which is something we'll talk a little bit about. So for example, if I was going to try and download this as a PNG, I can't click on transparent background. It's going to ask me to upgrade, but I can still download as a PNG in the correct format. Without any issues, I just can't have it be transparent, and there is a work around to that as well. So we'll talk about that a little bit later on. Now, same with the elements when we were talking about it earlier, if I was going to search for something like beach and go to photos. Now, if I was going to try and load in one of these pro images, you'll see it's got that watermark, and it'll say, if you want to remove the watermark, you just have to pay $1 for that element. But realistically, you can get around this pretty easily if you're in something like Unsplash and you just download an image from Unsplash and pop it into your uploads folder within cava. That's a really, really easy way to get around this and get some beautiful, high quality images into just your uploads folder and then use them in your designs without that watermark. So not to really hugely worry about the elements that you might be pro elements because you can usually find them on other sites and just bring them into your cara uploads folder. The main main difference that you'll find between these two plans will come down to your workflow because a lot of social media managers or designers just don't have the time to be pulling assets from other websites and manually changing colors and doing all those sorts of things that Canva Pro users have access to, which we'll talk a lot about throughout the course. But that's pretty much it. It comes down to speeding up your workflow, for the most part. Every other limitation, there is some sort of free app out there that will help you create a workaround. Also, when you are putting things in your uploads folder, I would just recommend that you go through and add them to a particular folder. So, in this case, you know, I could create a new folder that says background shots or something like that. So I know that it's not going to be in my uploads folder forever. This is just a duplicate image, but it's a good idea to try and not keep too many things in your uploads folder because again, it can be really hard to search for it a year or two years from now. So we're going to leave it there for now and in the next lesson, we'll go over some cool beginner hacks that I want to share with you, so I'll see you there. 12. Beginner Canva Hacks: O. Throughout the course, we're going to continuously build on your skills as we go through the lessons because it can be really overwhelming to try and learn everything all at once. But I wanted to take this time in this lesson to introduce you to some really cool areas of the Canva editor that are really going to help to start you on your design journey. So we're going to just be starting with a blank presentation template here. And this is where you're going to start to see why we created a few different color palettes in our brand kit. I'm just going to go ahead and actually just select a template here and I'm going to say, let's apply all 15 pages. I want to take all 15 pages of this beautiful presentation. I'm going to definitely name it presentation brand pitch. Again, I could put it in a folder, but for now, I'm actually just happy keeping it as that. So now, in the design tam, I have a few different options. I've got the template section. I've got a layout section, which is very particular to only presentations. You won't see it in other design documents, and then we've got our stars option. So this is the one that we want to focus on because we'll be able to see that my brand kit is pre loaded here with my brand fonts and a few different color palettes. This is why I have a few different ones because, for example, these are just my blues with a bit of yellow. But as you'll see, if I apply that to this particular template, it's not very accessible. I don't think people would be able to read this very well. That's where I might want to bring in a few different options. This actually works pretty well. I don't normally use the one with my yellow in it. I normally use this one for any kind of templates, and then I can just keep clicking on it and it'll give me a few different variations of my colors. Then once I find one that I really like, I can say, Hey, apply that to all the pages in this document, and it's going to make everything really nice and branded with my exact brand colors. So that's a really, really quick workaround. You can do the same thing with brand fonts, which is really cool. So now I can click on that. It's going to apply my brand heading font and my paragraph font to this particular template, and then I can say, apply that to all the pages. Again, it's going to make everything really, really nice and branded for me. If you are a Canva free user, you will have to do a little bit of manual labor with this where you can still access your brand kit, but you won't be able to use the styles function quite as effectively. So you will have to manually go through the colors over here, and you will have your brand kit here with your three different colors, and then you can manually go through and select the colors that you want to change. It's not a huge hinderance. And a really good free work around is the fact that often you'll find that these kind of templates will have a few different main colors. And let's say you want to change all of the oranges in this template to your particular turquoise or your particular pink. When you do that manually, down here, it'll say, do you want to change all of the oranges to your pink? And you can say, Yeah, change all of them. And that's a way to get a similar kind of functionality as what you can do with the styles function, but just for free within the actual color editor up here. So I'm just going to head back into the design tab, so I can show you a few more things. Within the styles function. You will also have some options to see trending combinations that Canva have pre selected with both fonts and colors or just color palettes or just font sets. So you can select that there. And you will also have your designs down here that will allow you to apply a style from a recent design to this template. So I can say, Okay, well, let's try this out. What happens if I select a recent design like this one to use for this slide deck. So it's done a pretty good job of applying the fonts and applying this image of me. It hasn't really quite nailed down what to do with the gradient blocks that I've got over here, so I might just need to move a few things around. But that's pretty good. So these are all just a few ways that you can streamline your workflow. Likewise, with the layouts function specifically for presentation templates. You can cycle through a few different options or based on the elements that you have on a particular page. So this page might be a little bit tricky for it to master. Let's try and find one like this one, for example, that might be a little bit easier with the different elements. So it doesn't always have options in there for you. But with particular layouts, it does a pretty good job, and it will tell you you can change it to look a little bit like this or you can change it to look like that. And These are just frames that you can pop images into. So it's sort of saying here's where I would put an image if I were you. But it can be a good way to just get a few ideas if you're feeling stuck and the actual templates in here are not sparking any sort of ideas for you. And the last thing I'll say is when you're in the templates option, if you find a template that you really like the look of, but you don't necessarily want to use the information or the assets that are within it, you can also click on the three dots in the upper right hand corner. Scroll down and say, apply style only, and that will give you the fonts and the colors of this template, but it won't necessarily replace any of your text or anything like that, and that can be great if you're working with your own design. You've got all the texts. You've got all the images. You don't necessarily want to replace it, but you really like the look of a particular template, and you just want to apply the particular style of that template. You can do that really easily with just one. All right. Now, let's just add a new page and have a look at what options we have in the elements tab. So if I was going to search for something like coffee, you'll notice it will say, do you want to look at graphics, photos, videos, frames, audio, and you can also see that up here. So let's have a look at photos first. And we can also use the filter functionality to only search for free images, for example. So if I know I'm a cava free user, I don't want to look at any pro elements. I can apply that as a filter, and then I know everything I'm searching for here is free. I can also do that with the cutouts option. So for example, if I'm looking to add a coffee cup to a design for social media. I can do that using the cutouts option, which is really, really cool over here. And maybe I'm just gathering a little bit of inspiration. I don't know exactly how I'm going to be using these elements, but I just want to organize myself a little bit. Then at any stage, you can hit the three dots in the upper right hand corner and add this to a folder. So perhaps you already have a folder for this. So in my case, I might add it to something like creative assets over here. Then I could just add that to a folder, or I could create new if I wanted to make this coffee inspiration, for example. And add that to a new folder, which helps to keep me nice and organized. And one more cool thing when it comes to your photos is with a term like travel. If you go to the filters, you can go by color search, but you can actually put in your specific brand hex code color and apply that, and it will pop up with any photos within the travel category that have your beautiful brand colors in them. That can be really cool if you're trying to maintain a really consistent look and feel for something like Instagram. That's a little bit about the photo section. Then let's take a look at how we can use the filters within the graphic section. So graphics won't have cutouts, that's for photos only. But instead, within the graphic section, we can look at static or animated elements instead. If I only want to be looking at animated elements, I can select that filter, and then I know everything in here is going to be beautifully animated. And again, I could use this section to organize myself a little bit, or in this case, what I can do is I can look at things like view collection. This won't always be the case. Not every single animated or static element will have a collection, but sometimes there will be designers who created a couple of different assets that look the same, in which case, you can go to view collection and then see all, and this will be all of these beautiful graphics that are both animated and static that are created by the same creator. That all have that same beautiful look and feel. This can be really, really powerful when you're designing a presentation or carousel, for example, for social media, and you want all the graphics to look the same. It can be really beneficial to look at graphics that have collections. Sometimes the view collection option won't be there. So in this case, let's say, this has a collection, but it also has an option to say, SMR like this, which might give you assets from the same creator, but also from other creators that have elements that are similar to the one that you're looking at, and that can be a great work around to getting different graphics that are all kind of the same look and feel. If you're ever not sure how you discovered a particular element, by the way, but you have it in a design like this, and you almost want to backtrack and figure out what keywords you used to find that particular element. You can always look into the info section here, and it'll tell you what kind of keywords are used to find this element, and then you can again potentially see more like this and look at other elements similar to it from there as well. Sometimes you'll have some graphics that will have editable colors. Like this one over here, you can see that I can edit these colors and make them into whatever I want, which can be great. Sometimes they're just pure illustrations or animated graphics like this one where there won't be the option to edit the colors. So it can be a bit of a limitation. If you want to have everything really nice and branded in your own brand style, you might have to hunt around for some graphics that allow you to edit the colors. But once you find particular collections that you really like that have editable colors, instead of saving them all to a folder, I actually have a bit of a preference to adding them all to a deck like this. So what I do is once I've got a collection, I will add them to its own page inside of a big document like this one. Where I can always refer back to this whenever I'm designing a new social media post or a new presentation, and I can always just copy and paste this into a new design. This also allows me to change the colors of all of these assets all at once. So let's say I really like this collection. I'm going to be creating a new carousel, and I want to use a couple of these different assets. What I can do is I can duplicate this page and then head on over to design, head on over to styles, and shuffle through my brand kit so that I can make all of these different graphics, my own beautiful brand colors. Now you'll notice some of them have changed color and some of them haven't, so not all of them have editable colors, but that's fine. Let's say I just want to select the ones that allow me to change it to my brand colors. That's a really nice way to really quickly edit all of the different elements all at once and access them all in one place. Then what I can do is I can let's say highlight these three, then hit Command C on my Mac or Control C if you're on a PC. And then I'm just going to command V on Mac or I could control V if I was on a PC and just bring them into this beautiful presentation over here. Or alternatively, another workaround is to go into the project section here. I can search for animated elements because I know that's what the deck is called. It will pop up with this as a presentation, and then I can select whatever page I want to be bringing in here that I already know is nice and branded, and it's just going to bring all of this beautiful content into my new design. Now, within Camera, occasionally, you will also find animated elements that are called lottis which do have editable colors that will allow you to change it to your brand color or just whatever color you want, really. But they can be a little bit tricky to find. So I've created these collections for you and included these in your course guide where you know that all the animations within these two collections will be editable and will allow you to change them to your beautiful brand colors. Okay, so that's a lot of information already. I know it can seem like a lot, but I promise we're going to be utilizing all of these different functions throughout the course, throughout all the lessons. You're going to get so so familiar with them. I just wanted to quickly introduce you to a couple of them for now, and we'll cover many more beginner advanced Canva hacks as we move through the lessons. But now in the next lesson, we're going to go into how you can utilize Canva with your clients or other team members to optimize your workflow. So I'll see there. 13. Master Your Canva Workflow: In this lesson, we're going to cover a few different ways to keep yourself organized within Canva, which is especially key if you're going to be working with multiple clients or team members or potentially selling your templates on platforms like Creative Market and EtS. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. But at this stage, I'm actually just going to switch over to a different team so we can take a look at how this might all work on an account where there are multiple team members. So if you want to tag people, you want to comment, do all those sorts of things, we can take a look at how to do that. So if you are invited onto a team or you're working with multiple team members, it's important that you and your client know that not everything you create within Camava even if you're creating as a part of a team is going to be visible to everyone on the whole team. You actually have to give the team access in order for them to see any of your designs. For example, I'm on my mom's team here, and you can start to see that certain elements that I've created are visible to the whole team. Was there are others that don't have any kind of photos next to them, which means this is probably one I created and actually forgot to share with the team, which is just poor etiquette on my behalf. But whenever you're creating something, so for example, these are our YouTube end screens, and I want to make sure the whole team has access to it. I can head on over to share, and then I can click on people with access, edit this and make sure that it's visible to the whole team and say that they can edit. So anyone that's part of the team can edit or I can individually go through and add different team members, so I can add their names or e mails in here and give them either a review or edit access that way. So this is really important because if you are creating something and you're like, yep, it's in there and your client's not seeing it or vice versa, your client's created something and they want you to see it. If they haven't actually made it visible to you as a whole team, you won't be able to see the design. Then you've got some options within the design itself in terms of commenting or collaborating. So this stage, you can see, it's just me in this design, but you can technically both access the design at the same time. So if someone else is in the design, you're going to see their head pop up here. But in this case, I could just say something like, can you check this out Please. Or you could say, can we make this slightly bigger or something like that? I could also assign it to a different team member. And then as soon as I was to hit comment on this, it will then send the team member an e mail to say they've been tagged in something. They can then review the design and resolve the comment. If you head on over to file and view all comments, you can go ahead and look at resolved comments as well. So if you accidentally resolve something and you're like, Oh, I really wasn't supposed to click on that, you can always find it within file and comments. Now, if you have clients who are not super savvy within Canva, and you might have a design document that has 40 pages of your hard work in it, and you don't necessarily want them messing around with it. But you do want them to have some sort of edit functionality or edit permissions, then what I would do is just go over to file and make a copy of your design and share a copy of it so they don't have access to the original because if they make any drastic changes, You can go to Version history and potentially recover your past changes, but it can be a bit more tricky. So I would just go ahead and make a copy and share an editable copy of your design with your client, if you think they're going to potentially screw things up a little bit. Now, let me just switch on over back to my existing cava account, so we can take a look at some options for sharing designs if you don't maybe have a team. So we're just going to go ahead and select our previous template here just so we can take a look at some sharing options. So if I was going to share this by default, obviously, it's going to say only you can access so that no one else can access it. You can change this to say anyone with the link, and potentially, I would leave this as view or can comment, not edit. So, for example, when I share designs with students or they share designs with me, I always make sure that it's just on view so that I can't make any changes to it, but I can see what they've done. Because otherwise, things can get very, very messy. But if you are goi