Social Media Content Creation in Canva: From Beginner to Advanced

1. Welcome!: Just a few hours, you're going to go from designing things like this and this to this, this, and even this. My name is Maggie Sara, and I've helped more than 100,000 of my students discover their passion for Canva, and the course you're about to take is the course that I wish I could have taken when I first started working with Cava for my social media clients back in 2016. The inside, you're going to learn everything from the basics like how to choose the right fonts and brand colors for your content creation and where to find videos, images and music that are licensed for you to freely use in your designs and how to set up your Canva workflow so that you can work faster and smarter, not harder. As we then start creating content together, you're going to be building on your Canvas skills with each lesson as we look at creating incredible graphics for a variety of fictional and existing businesses for platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You will then elevate your skills by learning to create eye catching social media videos by learning how to layer images and videos on top of each other, how to create powerful animations. And even how to create videos that can be used for paid ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Now, as I've already said, I love Canva and all of its incredible features. But unfortunately, more often than not, its designs are not actually optimized to work well across devices, which is why I've also provided you with my own custom tablets that we'll use throughout the course so that you can feel confident that whatever design you create, it's going to look great on desktop, tablet, and phone screens. But there's so much more to being a great content creator than just social media. So we will also be looking at how to use Canva for business to create amazing eBooks and how to animate them. How to create professional business cards, a custom animated email signature, amazing posters for print, how to create image and video mockups of your designs, and even how you can use Canva to create a website that you can use to conduct surveys, collect emails, book appointments, and how you can create professional polls and quizzes. Then together, we're going to explore the powerful world of AI, where you're going to learn how to effectively talk to tools like Chat GPT and Canvas dream lab so that you can start creating powerful images illustrations and videos to use in your designs, whether they stay digital or you include them in your printed creations. Finally, we'll then be moving into the advanced section of the course where we're really going to step things up a notch and start creating amazing expert level animations for infographics, apparel, skin care, and even how to create disappearing gifts and advanced product ads. And I'll even be covering what you need to know if you'd like to give your designs away for free as lead magnets or actually sell them on platforms like Etsy and Creative Market. Of course, you will have access to your course guide where you'll find all of the resources and templates you need and details about all of the helpful exercises which we'll cover at the end of each section of the course so that you'll feel really confident in your skills before moving forward. I do pretty much live inside of this magical world of Canva, and I can't wait to show you around my home and help you make the most out of the time that you spend with this amazing software, whether you're using the free or paid version of CAVA. I hope you're as excited as I am, and if you're ready, I'll see you on the inside. 4. Psychology of Colours: Over the many years of teaching Canva to my students, I've gotten a lot of questions around colors and color palettes and color schemes. And so in the next lesson, we're going to get into how to actually select colors for your brand. But in this lesson, I just wanted to focus on the psychology behind why brands pick certain colors. Even though, no, I don't think this is sort of the be all and end all and you don't necessarily need to follow this in order to pick the perfect brand colors. Sometimes the brand colors that you choose are just ones that resonate with you for reasons other than the ones we're going to talk about in this lesson. But I do find this stuff really fascinating, so I'm hoping you will, as well, and I wanted to share it with you because sometimes you just have this idea that you want people to associate your brand with a particular feeling. You want people to feel a certain way when they see your content coming across their feed. And there are, of course, lots of different ways to do that. But colors actually play a really important part because there's something really primal about how we respond to certain colors. So I wanted to go over that with you in this lesson. Okay, so let's take a look at the color emotion guide and talk about why certain brands have chosen particular colors to connect with you and their audience. So starting with yellow, which is a fun color, it's optimistic. It's warm. And brands like McDonald's and Subway definitely use this because it's playful and it's vibrant, while there are other brands like Cat who create construction equipment that also use it because it is also a sign of safety and caution. Then we've got orange, which is creative. It's youthful. It's super fun, and it gets you really pumped up, which makes it perfect for brands like Nickelodeon and Fanta. Then we're moving on to red. Now, red has actually been proven to have the ability to raise people's heart rates when they look at it. So it is this kind of bold, powerful, exciting color, maybe even a little bit sexy, depending on the brand. And basically, it makes it the perfect color for brands who aren't afraid to put themselves out there like Coca Cola and Netflix. Then we have purple. Purple is the color of royalty, and it's the color of wisdom. And brands often use purple's regal, sort of anything is possible vibe to really draw people in who are looking for something a little bit extraordinary because it has that kind of magical mystical feel, which is exactly why brands like Hallmark, Cadbury, monster.com, and the Sci fi channel all leverage the power of purple. And my own brand has a few different colors, but purple is a really big part of my color scheme because of this exact vibe. So I am really a big, big fan of purple for this reason. We've got blue, which is a calming color that conveys feelings of strength and trust. Technology brands like Dell, IBM, Intel, and Facebook all leverage and take advantage of this kind of vibe. A lot of tech companies will often use the color blue for this specific reason. Then we've got green, which may be this particular shade of green. Doesn't demonstrate this very well, but green in general is quite serene and it's peaceful, and it makes us think of growth, which is why many brands whose products deal with agriculture and the environment might utilize color like John Deer and animal planet, but also companies like Whole Foods, who will take advantage of the fact that people also associate green with health and wellness. And you'll notice my own brand also has a lot of green in it for the purposes of signifying personal growth. I'm going to go through my entire color scheme in the next lesson. But for now, just know that these are some of the decisions that went behind me also choosing my color scheme. Lastly, we have black, white, and gray, which signify balance and innovation. Lot of car companies will use it for this reason, but you'll also see companies like Apple using white, black and gray, and silver throughout their brand and products and companies like Nike also getting on board with this minimalistic look. So they're all sort of using it for different reasons, but it is kind of this minimalistic balance innovation, minimalism. All of those kind of vibes will generally be associated with brands who leverage almost like a colorless palette. So they're going for this monochromatic black, white and gray feel. But of course, there are plenty of brands whose logos and color schemes are not that clear cut, including my own, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And not everybody sort of fits neatly into one color category like Coca cola, for example, and that's perfectly fine. But hopefully, knowing a little bit about the emotions that we associate with these colors will really help you in creating content for social media. For example, if you're going for a minimalistic feel, you might use light neutral colors and really simple fonts like this one. Whereas, if the emotion you're looking to evoke in your audience is one of trust and calm, you might use some more blue hues, light and dark blues, but generally this kind of blue vibe instead. And if you're looking for something really fun and playful, then you might actually combine a few really bright colors together. And in addition to just the color schemes here, you might start to notice that across these three slides, we were using different fonts as well, which help to additionally evoke even more emotions on top of just the color schemes that we're using. So we're going to talk about fonts and all of that in just a little bit. But this was just to sort of demonstrate that it's not just the words on a page. It really is everything else that's going on around it. Am I also have a really great resource here in case you want to look beyond just the meanings that we were talking about here of loads of other colors. So I've linked to this in your course guide. But for now in the next lesson, let's go ahead and actually look at how to create gorgeous color palettes, so I'll see there. 5. Build Your Colour Palette: So we've already talked about this a little bit, but a brand is so much more than just its colors and its fonts and its logo and all of the other things that go into building a brand. But brand recognition is a huge part of your marketing strategy, and colors do have a lot to do with that. So while I want to encourage you to play around with this and not just sort of stick with the same color scheme forever and ever, for the sake of consistency or because someone out there told you should be doing that, I do think it's important for you to develop some sort of brand color scheme and learn how to use that in your design work. Because just imagine that if you woke up tomorrow and Facebook all of a sudden changed its signature blue to orange or Coke started using the color blue for their logo. Or McDonald's arches, golden arches were no longer so golden, and they just went into some weird, obscure color. That would be such a weird world to live in because we associate these brands with these very specific color schemes. But that being said, brands definitely evolve and change over time. Even really big brands like Airbnb and Starbucks look totally different from when they first started their business. And honestly, I can't really imagine a world in which they'd kept their original branding, so I'm really glad that they changed it. And the same is true for me. My own branding has completely changed from what it initially was when I first started my business. So we sort of started with this very chaotic brand because initially the business was more of a travel brand that I was running with my partner, Nick. So our color scheme was supposed to symbolize the beach and the ocean and everything that sort of appealed to digital nomads at the time because that's what we were doing, and that's who we were trying to appeal to. And then in 2020 is when I took over the brand and started running it solo and I toned things down a little same sort of color theme, but just slightly different colors and slightly more professional. And then in 2024 is when I started working on the business as my own personal brand under my own name. And so my color scheme, my logo, my font, even the images that I'm using are now so much more catering to my ideal student and my ideal customer. And the brand is bold, it's professional. It's a little bit playful. Whereas previously it was sort of all playful. And yeah, there just wasn't really a strategy in this prior to me actually having a brand designer to it. And it's also much more accessible, which is something we're going to talk about a lot throughout the course. So let's go ahead and find your perfect color scheme, and we will then add it into our Canva workflow in a later lesson. But just know that it is absolutely perfectly fine for you to evolve, your brand, look and feel as your business evolves, as you evolve as your brand values evolve. The first awesome free tool that I want to bring your attention to is the Eyedropper tool, which is a free Chrome extension, which allows you to basically pick any color from anywhere on the web, whether it's an image, even a video, anywhere that you're like, Oh, I love this, and I want to steal it for a project, or I want to actually build my color scheme off this. You can continue to pick colors let's say we're doing this from this website because we really like the vibes here and we want to build our color palette around it, and you can start to see that it's already building out a color palette, and each color as we hover over it has its own hex code. So hex code is essentially just a representation of how much red, green, and blue exists in this particular color, and it's a code that is a combination of six characters, so that might be letters, numbers or both. So this is what you're going to be able to put into Canva when you're designing. And if you find a color scheme that you'll really like or hex codes you want to save, you can always export it, or you can just copy and paste these across into Canva. So that's just a really cool little free extension. But you can also do this within Canva, as well. So I know at this stage, you are not familiar with the Canva interface, and that's okay. We're going to go through just so you know that there is an option for you to do this within the Canva editor if you're just purely doing this from images. So the color eyedropper chrome extension is great because it allows you to do it sort of from anywhere. But once you're within Canva, you can import an example, color palette or an image like this one and build out from there. So at this stage, I've just got black here. So if I was going to go up top into my color section, you'll notice it says the document colors are really just transparent, black and white. But let's say I want to go ahead and pick some colors from my image so I can use their built in color picker here, or underneath here, it'll also say, these are the actual photo colors. But let's say I want to actually manually pick these out so I can start building out a bit of a color scheme. And you'll start to notice that as I'm picking these, now the document colors represent those colors as well, so I can use them anywhere in future designs. Again, you will get to know this editor so, so well throughout this course. So if you're like, Oh, this looks super intimidating and I don't know what I'm looking at, that's totally fine. I just wanted you to know that even though there are also external tools that do this, you can also do it within Canva, and then these colors will show up here so you can continue using them throughout your design. If we're talking purely inspiration for color palettes, I love going to Pinterest and putting in the keyword that I'm looking to represent. So for example, in this case, it would be a minimalist color palette because there are actual brand designers that have put this together because this is not how my brain works. My brain does not function in beautiful color schemes, which is why my brand looks so chaotic at the beginning when I was responsible for creating my own color scheme, it was not pretty. It did not work. It was not accessible. It's really just best to sometimes leave it to the experts, which is why I love coming to Pintris and browsing and actually just gathering some ideas. So sometimes you'll notice it actually has hex codes in the color palettes and sometimes it won't. So that's where either the color picker, the eyedropper chrome extension can be handy, or you could screenshot this and bring it into Canva or another tool that I'm going to show you in a little just so you know, this is a really great way to just gather inspiration. And then an additional tool that I want to bring your attention to is called chroma. Now, chroma is a little bit design heavy in the sense that it is built for professional designers, and us mere mortals can still get value from it, but it's specifically created for designers. But I do find it really helpful because it does give you some color combinations that I would just never think to put together. So the interests and in the spirit of brainstorming, I did want to just show you how it works. So, you start off by choosing 50 colors. That's not necessarily 50 colors that you want to build your color scheme around. It's just 50 colors that appeal to you for whatever reason. So I've already done this. I'm going to go through this really quickly with you so I can show you exactly what it looks like once you pick those 50 colors. Alright, so now we're going to say start training, and it's going to give us some options. Once you've chosen your 50 colors, you're going to get some really trippy and really cool color combinations here that I would just never, this is not how my brain works at all. I would never put these colors together, but how cool does that look? And you can always swap them around to see what it'll look like with the base color the other way. And then you can also favorite some colors and look at the details that'll tell you the hex codes, and it'll also tell you your web content accessibility guidelines ratio. So this is something that's turned off I think by default, but I would definitely turn this on so you can make sure that the colors you're being presented with would pass those accessibility guidelines because you also don't want to be kind of creating color schemes that don't work across the Internet. But this is just, again, another cool little tool for you to allow you to brainstorm. And what comes up here is so dependent on the colors you've chosen. So because I sort of went through it and picked colors at random, not ones that actually appeal to me, I would say that these results are a little bit skewed generally when I do by picking colors that really appeal to me, I get some probably better results. But, yeah, it's something for you to just test out and just have a little bit of fun with. But then in terms of actually building out your color palette, I would definitely go to coolers and then start the generator. This is one of my favorite, if not my favorite color palette building tool because it just allows you to be really playful but also really methodical in how you create your color palettes. So you'll see it says, press the spacebar to generate color palette so we can press the spacebar, find a color palette that we like. Oh, I actually really like this one. And then let's say we like a couple of these colors, but maybe not all of them. So let's say I like this mint green, so I'm going to lock it, and I like this mimi pink, and I'm going to lock that, but I'm not quite sure about these. So now, these are going to be locked into place. But if I keep hitting this base bar, it's going to continue to shuffle through the rest of these colors to find other combinations that will work with the ones I've already chosen. Then let's say I like this purple, but maybe it's not quite where I want it to be. Maybe I want to go a little bit lighter or a little bit darker, or I actually just want to select the color by hand. So I can go ahead and do that and I can use a slider to go more blue, more red, more orange. Et cetera, et cetera. So you can play around with this so so much. And if you don't want to go through the process of doing this manually, of course, you can also upload your own sort of reference photo just like you would within Canva and build out your color palette from there. It's going to give you a color palette already. But let's say you don't really think that the colors that it's chosen are applicable to what you're looking for. Maybe you want it to be slightly different. So let's say that's my color palette, I can then say, I'm going to open that in my generator so I can tweak these a tiny bit because I don't know what this color is, but I don't love it. Let's yeah, let's go a little bit more gray. Okay, so let's say I really love this color palette. Now I can go ahead and export that, and I can export that as a PDF or an image. Doesn't really, hugely matter. We just want to make sure that we are able to actually save the hex codes so that we can use them later on. Or you can also sign into coolers so that you can save your color palettes, which is also an option. Then once you export it, here's how it'll look. So you'll have all your hex codes there that you can import into Canva. So that is a really, really lovely way of building out your color palette. Lastly, let's talk about accessibility. And as I said, this is something I'm going to talk a lot about throughout the course because I don't think that enough people are talking about it in design courses. And I think as human beings, we sort of assume that other people interpret the world the same way that we do, and there's a very good chance that the way you see color is not the same way that somebody else might see color, which is why these tools exist. So I'm going to show you what my own color scheme looks like with this checker. So I've just put in six of my colors, and it will effectively tell me how I can utilize my color scheme in a way that's accessible for everyone that everyone can read the text on top of the colors that I'm using. So it's essentially just a way for you to decide, are the colors that you've chosen? Do you have any kind of green flags here or is it all sort of grayed out because you've chosen some colors that just do not play together very well? As long as you have at least a couple of color combinations that work that will allow you to create content around, that's all we're really looking for at this stage, and we are going to actually look at a tool within Canva that's going to help with this when it comes to your actual designs. But this is just a really quick and easy way for you to do, like, a real quick, final check to say, Oh, the color scheme that I've built is good to go. I don't have to worry about it not looking good on social media or within emails or on someone's website. And in a little bit, we're going to go into how different fonts and font pairings also play a really big role in establishing your brand online. But for now in the next lesson, I wanted to go into something that we should all be across as content creators, which is all about understanding different licenses and how you can utilize different assets based on where you're getting them from. So more on that in the next lesson, and I'll see you. 6. Get to Know Licensing: Okay, so as we go into this lesson, I do want to say that this is not designed to make you super paranoid about using other people's content, and I'm going to be giving you some awesome free to use websites in the next lesson. But I mainly just wanted to go over this because I think it's important for you to know that there are just some restrictions in terms of how you can utilize assets from websites online, and you basically just want to make sure you're doing everything correctly and legally. But I should also say, I am not a copyright lawyer, so always make sure that you are checking the licensing options. Whatever website you're pulling images from, it will always have details about how you're able to utilize images, videos, music. And all the assets that you need in your content creation. So always do your own research, especially if you're going to be pulling from websites outside of the ones that I am going to be mentioning within this course. And yes, those are just some disclaimers, I suppose. But now let's just get into it and start diving into the world of licensing. So the royalty free license type grants the buyer a determined set of rights to use content in a few different ways for a flat one time fee. So that means you effectively pay for the license only once, and you can use it forever within the accepted ways that it details without any further payment. Usually see stock image companies use this term a lot. So you might be able to purchase an image once from a site like Shutterstock as an example, and then you can use it on your own website as many times as you want. Then we have Creative Commons, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building globally accessible public commons of knowledge and culture, and they help creators license their content according to the type of restrictions that they want to place on people purchasing and using their content or in some cases, not actually having to purchase their content. CC zero or creative common zero is the least restrictive type of license out there. So it allows people to distribute, remake, adapt, and build on, and even commercially without actually needing to attribute the original creator of the work. Of course, a lot of the time, you will also see a stipulation that'll say crediting is appreciated but not required. So you can always credit the original creator, but you're not legally obligated. The other creative commons licenses might allow for free use but might require attribution to the author. They might say, Yes, absolutely, use it, you don't have to pay for it, but you have to attribute the original creator. You have to credit them with that work. Then we have non commercial, which means something is not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation by an individual or organization, which is a lot of fancy words, which basically means that, for example, if you're using this in a lecture presentation in a class that you're taking or for your personal projects, then it would be non commercial. So if you're using that image for an arts and crafts project, non commercial. As commercial use of an image would be reproducing it in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation. So examples of that would be using images or videos or music or any other media that would be used in TV production or in, let's say, advertising on Facebook or Instagram. The good news is that these kinds of websites that provide either free or paid assets are pretty much dedicated to transparency. So they're always going to be giving you warnings and details about how you can and cannot use their assets that you're either taking or purchasing from their websites. So that is making things a little bit easier, but also as a side note, I would say a fair bit of the time. I wouldn't say majority of the time, but a fair bit of the time if you do end breaching copyright laws and uploading something that you're not allowed to legally use for your own purposes, you will just kind of get a warning from sites like Facebook or YouTube specifically, that'll say, This has a copyrighted element in it. It's usually music, but it can be other things. And it'll just tell you to re upload it or it'll tell you you can't monetize it, and there's lots of other different things. But I would just say yeah, don't depend on that because other bad things can also happen. So I would just get into really good habits and making sure that whatever assets you're using are either 100% free for you to use or have been purchased in the right way from these websites. So essentially, I guess what I'm saying is do not use Google images because I've seen so many people just, like, a Google man laughing with salad and just, I don't know why you would use that as a search term. I don't know. Maybe you're making a fun PowerPoint. Man laughing with salad. And then there's all these warnings that say, Hey, this is not free for you to use. And then people just put it up on their website. Anyways, and that can create a host of issues. So just don't use gibleimages and use some of the amazing websites that I'm about to provide you with in the next lesson instead. Okay. I'll see you there. 7. Find Free Images & Videos: Good So bigger brands out there will often sick to taking their own images and videos or purchasing these from more high end professional sites like Shutterstock for images or story blocks for professional videos, because these sites also allow them to be very specific in terms of the search terms that they're looking for. So what I mean is that if I was a business owner looking for an image of something like a woman in business attire shooting a goatfshO cats having a picnic and reenacting scenes from the Titanic, then I would definitely have to purchase these because they're so ridiculously specific that no one's gonna really give these kinds of images away for free. But I'd say that most of the time, we're just looking for a nice image to put as the featured image of a blog post or in the background of a design we're creating for a social media graphic. In which case, a lot of the free websites that we're going to discuss in this lesson are definitely not just going to meet your expectations, but I'd say they're going to exceed them because I think that they just have so many extra capabilities now that they definitely didn't when I first started designing with these websites. But also, one thing I would say is that this is especially going to become key if you're a Canva free user. Because you're so much more limited with the assets that you're able to access within Canva if you're not on the Pro plan. But that being said, I, as a Canva P user, actually use these websites pretty much daily as well, because they have other capabilities and also much more search engine functionality than what's available within Canva. So I think they're definitely it's worthwhile for both Canva free Campa Pro users to know about these websites. And, of course, I provided all the links within your course guide as well as a few extras. So let's just get into it. So let's start with Unsplash because Unsplash has some really, really gorgeous, beautiful, very artsy, minimalistic photos that are perfect for so many designs. So within Unsplash, you can search for, let's say, in this case, let's search for a beach. And you will have some that are on the unsplash plus. So you'll see a little plus there, which means that is a paid feature of the platform. You also see some ads, but largely you will find images like this one that are completely free for you to use and download in various different dimensions, which is a huge, huge benefit, so you can go as large as the original image size, which in this case is pretty much four k, so that's awesome. Other great option of Unsplash is if you're logged in, you can create collections. So in this case, I could just create a brand new collection, which in this case, could be something like a beach. And these are I mean, I could make it a private collection so no one else can see it. But let's say I'm doing this for a client, I can just spend maybe a half hour just researching images that I think they'll like. Time I have an image like this one that I really like, if I scroll down, it'll give me related images as well. So I can keep going down these rabbit holes of collecting related images into my collection and then maybe go and download them all at the same time, or maybe even just send the link to my client and say, What do you think of these images for our next blog post or our next social media posts, et cetera. So that's a really beautiful option in terms of Osplash. If you're ever curious about their licensing, you can head on over to License here. Will essentially tell you that all images can be downloaded and used for free, commercial and non commercial purposes. No permission is required, but appreciated. Essentially, you can do anything with these images that you want except to sell them. So you can't just take an image off of Nsplash and literally just say, pay me 40 bucks for this, and you can't create a competitive website. Everything else you can do with them. But of course, always check licenses if you're not quite sure. Moving on, I did just want to say that whenever you're in Unsplash, you can actually filter your search results by the license type in terms of free or Unsplash plus. So if you don't want to see any of the Unsplash plus images because it's a paid option, you can just search by free. I will still have some random ads for other things, but that way you know you're only searching for free images. You can also go by landscape or portrait images only, which is really handy if you are searching specifically for images for social media posts and you know you want them to be in vertical format. It's not quite as critical with images as it is with videos, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but just so you know that that is an option within Unsplash. Nsplash is a really great option for that. I also really, really love pexels. I largely use pexels for videos, but they also have really, really beautiful photos. So we are going to go and look for a beach video. And in here, I can also filter this by orientation. So let's say I'm looking for videos specifically for social media like Instagram and TikTok, so I want vertical videos only. So that's what I would use pexels for. It's really, really beautiful for that, and they do have some very high quality gorgeous videos. And again, you would want to make sure that you are logged in, so you can create collections just like you can in Unsplash. And once again, you can download in various different formats. If you are going to go through to downloading, it'll tell you you can show appreciation or donate to the creator. But again, with pixels, there's no attribution that's required. So those are my two go to. There's also Pixabay, which is a lot more stock imaging, but they've got a lot better search engine functionality. So for example, with splash and pixels, you are able to get so much variation for something like beach. But if you're going to get really specific, like you want men on Mountain or something like that, that's a little bit more specific, you might need something a little bit more stock imaging. And of course, they're going to have promotions here as well. But then they're going to possibly have a little bit more variation and a few more options for you for more specific keywords like man on Mountain. Within Pixabay, instead of searching for images, you can also search for music and sound effects, gifts, et cetera, et cetera you can also find free music from directly within the YouTube studio, which I'm going to link you to, but within your YouTube channel, which you will have, even if you don't have an active channel per se, but once you're within YouTube Studio, within the audio library tab, you've got a whole range of all these beautiful music. And when you check the license type, it'll tell you that there's no attribution required, and you're able to use this music, however you want, not just on YouTube. You can also use it on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. So this is where you can just go through and download some music. That's an easy way to do that. Or the next step up again, is to use a website like Upbeat. Now, I love upbeat because it's $7 a month at the moment, so it's really, really affordable, but it's got a lot more variation in terms of the tracks that you're able to get. It's also a little bit smarter. So once you start downloading some music, it will kind of get to know what kind of music you like, and it'll start recommending some future music tracks that are coming out that are similar to the ones that you've downloaded before. So as you're pulling images from these websites, I would definitely create some sort of Google Drive, Dropbox system, whatever your preferred Cloud storage system is, and organize these assets so that you know that three years from now, five years from now, this is an image you pulled from Esplash or from Pixabay or from Pexels, so you know it's free for you to use down the line, and you're keeping it separate from any purchased assets or any assets that are not freely licensed for you to use for any purpose whatsoever. And it also just makes it really nice and easy because that way, things are actually a little bit more organized. So if you need to look for images that you've used in the past, they're organized somewhere outside of Canva, as well. So that's my preference. I would definitely put it somewhere in a Cloud storage system. And later, we're also going to talk about and look at what assets are available to you within the actual Canva design interface. But for now, in the next lesson, we're going to start talking about how to find the best fonts for your brand. So I'll see you there. 9. Do NOT Do This!: So I'm going to be very honest in saying that this lesson definitely has a very dramatic title, but I just really needed you to hit play because this is an important lesson where we're going to talk about some key terminology, but also some really key mistakes that I see a lot of beginners in the design process make that I would ideally want you to not make and overcome them before we even start designing. So we're going to get into all of that. But one thing I did want to also say is that for me personally, it physically hurts me a little bit to think about my very first designs that I did for clients back in the day. But it wouldn't I wouldn't be here teaching you this, and I wouldn't be here feeling confident in my design skills if I didn't make those early days mistakes. So I think it's really important to learn the concepts and learn how to overcome these mistakes, but the real way that you're going to do that is to actually make a lot of mistakes and get better and better and get 1% better with each and every design that you make. So I think practice is definitely going to be key, but hopefully we're also going to be able to kind of allow you to embody these principles that we're going to talk about because I'm going to talk about them a lot as we actually design. But one thing I also just really wanted to point out is, I think it would be really cool for you to save the designs that you're making in the early days as a beginner, somewhere in Google Drive or in Dropbox or somewhere in a cloud storage outside of Canva, so that in three years from now, five years from now, you can look back at those designs and go, Whoa. I am so much better than this now. I know so much more and look how far I've come because I think it's really easy for us to take it for granted and sort of forget how much we're improving. And not actually take time to reflect on how far we've come and maybe only just get overwhelmed at how far we still have to go and start comparing our design skills to other people online. So I think it's really cool to just keep sort of a memento box of your early design somewhere so that you can really track your progress. I'm really glad I kept my early client designs because now I can look back at that and go, Okay, I know what I wouldn't do there, and I know how we do that very, very differently. But that's great because it gives me the confidence in knowing that I'm a lot better at designing. Let's get started with some key terms here. You might have heard of both of these file formats at some point, but just to cover the basics, there will be some quality that's compromised when an image that's taken on a camera is converted into a JPEG, but it allows you to have an image that's smaller in size. And when I'm talking about size here, I mean, the amount of space that an image would take up on your computer or in Cloud storage, not the actual dimensions of an image because those wouldn't change depending on the file format. Then PN Gs are larger in file size, but will allow you to have the option of having transparent backgrounds like I have here, and they also tend to handle things like gradients much better, which when you save a design with a gradient as a JPEG, sometimes the gradient will just look a bit funny. So generally speaking, I always save my designs from Cava in PNG format because it also holds really crisp lines around your illustrations and contrast better than JPEG images. But photos you'll be pulling from the web from sites like Osplash will generally be in JPEG format because they're already edited and don't have the complex design elements that your finish creation if you're not trying to save on space too much, I would just recommend saving your creations as PNG files, and then you can always use free online tools to compress your images or change file types, which is something we're going to talk about later on. But it's important to note that you can always go down in file size and also in dimensions, but you can't really take an image and make it larger without then compromising on quality. So that's why we try to save in the best quality and format possible. We have two different types of digital graphic files. We have rasters and vectors, and I know this is maybe going to seem a bit complicated, but I promise there's a reason we're learning this because you will hear this get thrown around a lot, not just within this course, but also in a lot of websites where you're going to continue to upscale past this course. It is important. Arasographic is made up of a grid of many pixels, whereas a vector graphic is made up of many lines or paths. The main difference between a vector and a raster is essentially the ability for you to scale that graphic. Since a raster is made up of a certain amount of pixels at a certain point, scaling that image is going to become what we would call pixelated or blurry, but a vector doesn't actually have that problem. So because it can be scaled to any size without losing that sharp edge and all that beautiful contrast, it's generally the best option for logos, which often have a really big range of applications from tiny, teeny, tiny size of a pencil or the side of a pencil to the side of a building. So that's why we want to save things in vector format whenever possible. Camera now has a feature for you to export in SVG, which is a vector file. So if this is something that you need where you need a graphic to be printed on a poster or T shirt, you'll have the ability to export it as a vector. But keep in mind that photos can't actually be made into vectors. Are some exceptions. There are some AI tools that do this, but it's not converted one to one. So if you're trying to save a photo as a vector, it doesn't just magically make it into a vector unless it's converted properly. So that's getting a bit complicated. But essentially, photos will come in raster format. Vectors are usually saved for illustrations and shapes. Other than just size and the usage, it's also really important for you to decide whether you're designing for web or for print. If you would like to have the potential to use your graphic for both purposes, then design it for print in mind as it's the higher quality format, and you can always repurpose it for web. And the main difference in using it for web or print is that your dimensions will either be in pixels for web or in inches or centimeters for print because of what we talked about with rasters and vectors. So this is important because web graphics will normally be at 72 pixels per inch or PPI, while print materials will have a resolution of 300 DPI or dots per inch. That sounds super jargony, but all this means is that in web graphics, there will be 72 tiny pixels of color in every inch of that graphic, where print materials will require 300 little colored dots per inch, making them a beautiful, solid color we printed. All you really have to concern yourself with at this point is, does it need to be printed? If it does, then make sure you're just setting up your design document in the right dimensions, in centimeters or inches so that it has all of the things that it needs in order to be printed in the correct dimensions. And then Canvas pretty much going to take care of the rest in terms of your resolution. And it's also going to allow you to export it as PDF for print. So that's going to give you that nice crisp design. And if that's not really making sense at this stage, it's okay. We're going to go over this a lot when we go into the Cava for Business section of the course when we talk about printing e books and printing business cards. So you're going to see how that all works in action. I just wanted you to be familiar with the idea of designing for print versus digital because there are some subtle differences. Earning is not something you need to know about in terms of the actual term for it, but it's essentially just the adjustment of spaces between characters and in Canva. The reason this is relevant is because you will be able to play around with this through their letter spacing tool, and you want to make sure you're essentially just not squishing your letters a little bit too much, but you also want to make sure that your letters are not so far apart that it's really hard to actually read the words they're supposed to. Much like kerning, you want to make sure that all of your letters are evenly spaced out and that their line height is appropriate for the graphic that you're creating, which again, are some of the tools we're going to be playing around with. Now, I've been teaching this course for a long time now, and one of the most common mistakes that I see my students making is not having enough contrast between the text and the background of their graphics. So make sure to keep your contrast high to prevent this issue, which is something we're going to practice a lot. And another common mistake is the overuse of capital letters when it comes to handwritten fonts or script fonts. Some brands exclusively use capital letters, which is totally fine, but these are best saved for sort of San sera fonts, which, as you'll remember, have that minimalistic or modern feel. Finally, you also want to make sure you're being careful with your type size. So of course, it's better for your text to be too big than too small, but neither option is great in this instance. And text that's too small on desktops, if you're designing on a desktop will often be completely unreadable on a mobile device. So you really want to make sure that you are designing with your type size, your contrast your capitalization and all of these things in mind, which, again, we're going to put into practice throughout the course. And let's talk about hierarchy. So this is quite a funny post that I thought I would include, and you can, of course, pause this lesson if you want to have a look at it. But this is essentially demonstrating why hierarchy is so important because your brain naturally works in specific sizes and in color contrast. There's a method to the madness when it comes to hierarchy. So within the world of design, this refers to the arrangement of the visual elements in order to signify importance. Essentially, the most important elements are made to hold the most attention by being bigger, more colorful, or using a particular font, and the reverse is true for the least important elements on the page. So just remember that if you're designing a graphic and everything sort of stands out, then nothing is really standing out. So don't be afraid to highlight the most important parts of your design for your audience. Now, a lot of times, it's really easy to get caught up in your brand and style and forget who the actual intended audience is for that particular design. And this is actually really true when you're working within Cava for your own business or for other clients, and then you have to design your child's birthday invitation or something, and it ends up looking super corporate because that's just how your brain is wired. So that's why I've sort of used this example here because it's really good to remember yes, you want your design to look fantastic. If it's not right for the people that you're actually trying to communicate with and design for, then it's just not going to work. So always remind yourself that you're designing for the brand, of course, but you're also really designing for their target audience. And just like you have a palette of colors, you should also have a carefully selected palette of fonts, which is something we already talked about. But just like colors, certain fonts definitely have moods or emotions associated with them, so you probably use something like Comic Sands to represent a law firm, for example. So you want to make sure that your fonts not only work well together but really work well with the brand and their intended audience. And this is perhaps the most important lesson that I can give you in the world of design, which is to try not to do too much because especially when you're a beginner, you have all of these amazing skills and all this amazing knowledge in your brain, and you just want to put it all into action. And then you end up doing way too much, and it ends up being way less effective than if you did less. And the way I'll put it to you is think about this particular course. There's a reason why there are so many lessons in the course, and each lesson covers one or two new skills because these skills don't all just belong in one design. They each have their own purpose in different designs. So it's nice to just keep things simple whenever possible. So just remember that sometimes the empty parts of your design can be just as important as the ones you fill. Space can really help to bring more focus on a specific aspect of your composition and let your design breathe, and it can help to balance everything out and bring some sophistication to your design a lot of the time. Let's talk about calls to action. This is something that's probably a little bit more common with website design. But even on really simple graphics, you'll often see companies who are advertising a sale. They're asking for an email. They're asking for a subscriber. They're asking people to follow. They're giving you their phone number. They're just doing so much in one tiny graphic, and it's so much to focus on that people don't really know what action to take. So you want to limit each graphic to one maybe at the absolute maximum two calls to action. Finally, you always want to make sure that you know what your designs look like on a phone screen because just because something looks great on your computer screen, especially if you've got external monitors and you've got this giant screen and everything looks great, does not mean that it'll work on Instagram or another mobile app. So always check, check and check again. So I know that was a lot of information, and like I said, we're going to be putting it all into action, so you're going to feel really confident in actually using these tips and strategies. And this terminology all throughout the course. But I know it's not the most exciting stuff in the world. I'm just really grateful that you were able to stick with me through it. And now in the next section of the course, we are going to dive into your Canva workflow and how to make the most out of the time that you spend within Canva. But first, I want to get to our very first design exercise in the next lesson, so I'll see. 10. Exercise: Craft Your Brand Kit: So remember, at the beginning, I said that we learn by doing not just by watching other people do stuff. So this is your opportunity to put what you've learned up until this point into action. And you can do this exercise for yourself as a personal brand, for your business or an existing brand out there, or a completely made up brand that has come out of your imagination. But either way, actually just doing this for a business of your choosing is going to allow you to have a brand that you can create assets for throughout the course so you can practice as we go. Now, I want to be clear that as you do this, you might find that when we get to designing, you'll put these colors that you choose and fonts that you choose and all these brand assets. You might put them into action within Canva and realize that actually they don't really work together as well as you'd hoped, especially when we get to talking about accessibility. There's so many times that I've created something like this for a client and go, Oh, when I put this into a design, it's completely gibberish and unreadable, and these fonts don't work on a small phone screen, even though they look beautiful on desktop, and you won't really know that until we actually start designing. The point at this point is to just take action and create something, and we can sort of tweak and refine as we go. But at this point, I just want you to refer to the exercise in your course guide so that we can outline the following. Identify the brand name of the business that you're going to be designing for throughout the course. Again, you can totally make this up, or it can just be your own name or an existing business. Anything is fine, just a brand that you can use to practice your skills on as we go through these lessons. Then I know this is a little bit out of the box in terms of what we're covering in this course, but I would love it if you would choose some brand values for your business or your fictitious business. So you can pick four to five core values that you think are representative of your brand. Even if it's a made up brand, you can use this list for inspiration and just choose four to five values that you think you would like people to associate with this brand. Create a color palette for your brand inside of coolers or a different tool that we've used throughout the course, and then we'll organize this later on inside of Canva. If you're a Cava P user, you will have access to as many colors and color palettes as you want. As a free user, you will only be limited to three colors in your brand kit, but there are workarounds to this, and I will be showing you that in the next section of the course. So still feel free to choose as many colors as you want, but not too many. Then you want to choose ideally two, but maximum three fonts for your brand using the resources that we covered in our fonts lesson and maybe add some links to these inside of a Google Doc or somewhere else so that we can organize these later on. But keep in mind that only Canva pro users can import fonts into Canva. So if your trosen fonts are not within Canva and you're on the free plan, you may have to find a font equivalent that is within Canva and free for you to use. So if you'd like to skip this step until we get inside of Canvas so you can pick from the fonts that are available to you, that is totally okay by me. And then gather five to ten free images and five to ten free videos that you think could be used in social media content for your brand using the websites that we've discussed so far. And you can just download these to your computer for now or save them to a Cloud storage, and I'll be showing you how to utilize these and organize these within Canva in the next section of the course. All of this is really at this point, just an exercise in gathering assets and getting some inspiration. Then the next section of the course, we're going to then talk about how to organize all of this within Canva so you can actually use it for your design work. So make sure to just go and gather some inspiration and gather a few assets using the tools that we've already used in this section. Now the next section of the course, we're going to dive into Canva workflow and how you can utilize it to the best of your abilities, which is full of basically all the tips that I wish I knew when I first started designing within Canva. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Introduction: Get to Know Canva: So now that we've covered our design basics, consider this my later this season on insert your preferred reality TV show here, where I basically give you a preview of what's still to come, which is that later in the course, we're going to create awesome designs like this one and this one, and later even these. To get there, we do need to understand exactly how Canva works and how we can use it. For context, I have created over 1,500 different project files within Canva, and each of those files has up to 300 pages within it, and that's not even including my client work. So you can imagine how messy things would get if you get really disorganized in a tool like Canva. So you may not be creating quite that many designs, or you might be creating more if you're feeling ambitious, but I think either way, you just want to make sure you're getting into best practices from the get go because otherwise, it creates so much more work for you down the line. Imagine you're working with somebody in your Canva dashboard and you're trying to find a YouTube thumbnail that you created two years ago, and you labeled it cute kitten picks, and now it's sort of lost forever because we didn't know how to properly organize things. So I know organization and workflow stuff is not the funnest topic in the world, especially for us right brained folk. But I think we can make it a little bit fun and a little bit playful and definitely incredibly useful. So in this section of the course, we're going to go into how to navigate Canva, how to organize things within Canva, how to set up your brand, how to work with others, and how to find inspiration for your designs so that you're never feeling like you're starting from scratch before we actually go into the design section in the next next section of the course. All right, so hopefully we can find bits and pieces that are going to allow us to be playful with this organization and workflow section of the course, and I will see you in the next lesson. 12. Canva Pro vs. Free: So I'm within my Canva Pro dashboard here. It is in dark mode, and I'm going to keep it in dark mode throughout this course, which is a setting that you can adjust within the settings option if you are on the Canva light mode option, which is the default option. The reason that I'm using dark mode for this course is because it is gentler on your eyesight, and we're going to be going through a lot of content. So it's a little bit easier for you to actually watch as we're going through the course. But also, it really helps your designs really stand out because nothing that is not your design is really taking up your attention. So I find it really, really great for that. Also, with the amount of time that I spend within Canva, I want to be as gentle on my eyes as I possibly can, so I really prefer dark mode, but just so you know that's something you can adjust within the settings. Then in terms of the designs that you see here, it will really depend on how much you're using Canva. Obviously, I use it quite a lot. So I've got, I don't know, 15, 1,600 design project files within here. It's a lot. And also, I have my students designs within here. So you'll see there are some additional owners here of these designs. So I generally have viewing rights, not editing rights to these. So it looks like it's within my own Canva dashboard, but actually they retain the ownership, and I just have permissions to view that design. So Canva adds it in here for easy access. Terms of accessing things like templates within here, there are always ten different ways to do something within Canvas. So you have the options here to look at things like social media. You also have the option to just search for things within Canva and also within your own library, which we're going to look at in a sec. And then you have some options on the left hand bar here as well. So the location of these things might change, but the general gist is exactly the same. So Canva has gone through so many iterations, and you will always be able to access templates in a few different ways. So we're going to head on over to templates so we can have a look at how to utilize these. He has some options here already, like we did in the home screen where you can go, or I'm just looking for Instagram stories, for example, so these are going to be these nice vertical. The actual dimensions of these are ten ADP by 1920. So these are pixels because we're going to be looking at them on a mobile screen. So you'll remember from a previous lesson, we're looking at these in pixel format. So that's the format that these are always going to be in. And at the moment, it's kind of showing me a little bit of everything. And now I can start to really narrow this down. So I have 20,000 templates to look at, and I can then filter this down further by looking at maybe elegant Instagram stories, and maybe I'm looking at marketing, and maybe I'm looking at animated stories or I'm looking at all of these different things or maybe I'm just actually searching by color. But let's say, in this case, these are the three things that I want to be looking at, and it's going to give me some options here. Additionally, I can narrow this down just by a particular field. So let's say I want to look at real estate Instagram story. So that way, if this is my industry, I'm not being given Instagram stories for pet hotels and skincare brands. I'm really just looking at ones for within my industry. So I'm still at 20,000 templance, which is a lot, but at least I'm looking at ones that are directly within my industry. So you can browse through and you can start to really see some of these will sort of be animated. You'll see this little play icon, which means that there is some sort of animation or video component. You will also start to see these little crowns in the bottom right hand corner, which means it's only available for me as a pro user. You're a Canva free user, as soon as you would click into this, it would basically say, you need to upgrade in order to use it. If it doesn't have this little crown, it means it's completely free for everybody to use. So there's still lots and lots of beautiful free templates for anyone to use in Canva. But just because you select a particular template like this one and we say, we want to start customizing it, doesn't mean that you're stuck with it. It doesn't mean that you can't still continue to browse through templates. You just have a little bit less limited screen real estate because you do it here within the design section, and you still are able to look for the same. So, let's say, real estate, Instagram story, same sort of search. But you don't have it across your whole beautiful screen. You just have it over here. So it takes a little bit longer to go through the templates. That's the only sort of main difference. But you can continue to add some more designs to your project file. So we can go ahead and add a new page, and let's say we also really like this one. So we're going to add it in. And then it's going to give me some recommendations for ones that are similar to the one that I have just selected. So I can continue adding some designs here and find as many as I like before I begin design. The next thing I definitely want to make sure we get into the habit of is renaming our designs. So in this case, I would say something like Instagram story, real estate. And in my case, I would probably say demo because I want to identify that this was for a particular lesson in my course and not an actual design I was doing for myself or for a client. But the reason we're doing this is so that we can really, really easily find our design a year from now, two years. It can be really messy if this design said something like funny kittens, and then you didn't rename it. So definitely make sure you're renaming it. And I would go a step further and actually organize this within my folder structure. So I would go to File, and I would move to a folder, and then you could create new folders within here. But in my case, I know that I have a particular folder, which is within my Canva course. So for me, I would go my projects and course materials, Canva course materials, and lesson demos. And that's where I would move this so that I know you know, two years from now that this particular project file was just a demo for a particular lesson. But if all else fails and you still really need to find your file and you don't really remember what you named it and you didn't put it in a folder, but maybe you remember something that was on a graphic. For example, questions to ask prior to renovating your home. You remember that that was in your design. Another thing you can do is actually just head back to your dashboard, and instead of looking at real estate Instagram story, you would just say renovating your home. And then instead of looking at Canvas templates for this, we would exit out of that, and we would be looking at our own content here. And it's going to pull out any designs that I've created that have these words or similar words to it within the design itself. So it's the fifth one across. It's over here, and I can just pull that straight up and continue designing. Then let's quickly talk about what's in our left hand sidebar here. So we've got our project section, which is where you can organize your assets so make sure that this makes sense to you. It doesn't really have to make sense to everyone else, as long as there's some sort of method to the madness, that's all that matters. And you can have folders within folders, and you can have different folders for your images and for your videos. And again, that's something that we're going to do a lot throughout the course, but just so you know that when you just chuck things into Canva into your upload section, here is where we're going to organize them, and that is something we're going to talk a lot about. For now, let's take a look at something that is a little bit different on the Canva Pro and Canva free plan, which is your brand. So within your brand kits within Canva, you can have as many brand kits as you want on Canvas Pro version, whereas on Canvas free version, you're limited to just one brand kit with only three brand colors. So because I'm on the Pro version here, I have multiple color palettes, and there is a reason for this. I'm going to show you in the next lesson as to why I have a few different color palettes here. But effectively, I can have as many color palettes as I want. I could technically have more and more fonts. I can upload my own fonts. And I can have things like my brand voice. I can have as many brand photos. So I've had a photo shoot done. So my brand photos are in here. I have some brand icons, and, of course, I've got my brand logos. So you can have as many assets as you want on the Pro plan, on the free plan. You really are limited to only the three colors, but there is a little bit of a workaround to that, which I'm going to show you by logging into my Cava free interface. Now I'm logged into my Canva free interface, and it is in light mode so that I can sort of differentiate between the two. And obviously, I had it open when I looked at some student assignments, which is why there are some student assignments that I don't own, but that have been opened in here. But really, I don't use this for anything other than demos, so there's not much here. And so I just wanted to show you within projects, you can still create folders in here. As many as you want, and you can organize things, which is beautiful. But within the actual brand section, we've got one brand kit, and we are limited to just these three colors. I mean, not necessarily these three colors. You can change them to your actual hex codes, whatever they are. You just put in your hex code. But the problem is you can't add anymore, and it's going to ask you to upgrade if you want to add anymore. You can't really add in your logos. You can't really add in fonts and do any of that, which can be a little bit limiting when you're actually designing, but there is a way around it. So you can essentially create this kind of file that just has your brand kit within so for example, let's say, my brand for this, my demo brand has these six colors, and then this is my heading font, and this is my paragraph font. What I can then do at any time is copy this over by highlighting everything and just clicking on Copy or Command, see if you're on a Mac or Control, see if you're on a PC. Then whenever I create a new design, so let's just say we're creating a random sort of square design, what I can do is paste these assets in here by either right clicking and clicking on paste or just Command V or Control V here. It's going to bring in this sort of brand kit from my other project file, and then anytime I'm creating any designs here, let's just select a design from Canva so that I can show you what that might look like. Let's select one that's a little bit easier to work with. Oh, that's a Canva P. So we need to make sure we're using a Canva free design that doesn't have the little crown in the corner. So we're using a Canva free design. Now, let's say, I want to make sure that the background color is one of my brand colors. What I can do is head to the background color, and I can see all of my other brand colors are automatically there because it says these are my document colors. So because my brand kit is on the first page of this, it means that I can now really easily access my brand colors as I'm actually going through and editing any designs like this. So that makes it just a little bit easier. Of course, it would be much more convenient if my brand kit was really nicely here, so I know exactly what my brand colors are. But that's just a little bit of a workaround. Same with your fonts, so you can just say, Okay, I want to make sure that this is my document font or my brand font. And then in the document fonts, I can see that my brand fonts are really easily accessible because they are on the first page of this design. So that's just a little bit of a workaround for Canva for users. Same when it comes to images. So within the elements tab, let's say we want to put minimalistic home, and we go to photos. We've got a lot of elements with the Canva Pro icon. Now, in the filter search, on the Pro version, you can actually search and filter by Canva free and Canva Pro assets. That seems to have been removed for free users, which is a little bit clunky. So it can be really tough to scroll through and find the assets that you want. There are some really great ones here. I mean, this is a beautiful image that I could easily use. But let's say I can't find anything that I really like. Can do is I can head on over to something like Unsplash and find an image that I really like that's free for me to use. And then I download that. In this case, let's say, I just download it in the small dimensions. And now I can just bring it into my design, and it's going to automatically put it into my uploads folder here, and I can just make sure that I'm replacing that image with this one. So color wise, that doesn't really work for me. I would need to adjust things a litt bit. Okay, that's not ideal. But anyways, you get the point that you are able to essentially replace any images from within Canva with your beautiful free Unsplash. Then within your uploads folder, let's say you want to make a collection of these images that you know are free for you to use, you could select a bunch of them and then move these to a folder that you know is really easily accessible for you for future designs. So as I said, there are some limitations to Canva free. Of course, you will continue to have these little crowns everywhere telling you to upgrade, especially when it comes to exporting, there are some limitations to how you can download and export your designs. You'll start to see if you want to have a transparent background. If you want to download vectors, like we talked about, so that's the SVG file, and want to make sure that that's ideal for things like logos. That's a little bit tricky if you're on Canvas free plan, but there are sort of external apps that will allow you workarounds for a lot of things. The main difference between Canva free and Canva Pro comes down to workflow. So a lot of people like myself who are in Canva a lot daily multiple times a day, it just makes sense to upgrade because otherwise, I would be spending so much time just trying to organize things or moving between different apps to do something that I can do within Canva. It's absolutely possible to just remain a Canva free user if you're only using Canvas sparingly or for simpler purposes. But throughout this course, I am going to be demoing things on my Canva Pro account and just sort of giving you workarounds if you're a Canva free user just because I do think it is quite robust and it would be a shame to not showcase everything that Canva has to offer. So hopefully you can stick with me, even if you're on just the Canva Pro trial, so you can test out your skills. And in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at some additional really cool beginner hacks, so I'll see there. 13. Beginner Canva Hacks: Throughout the course, we're going to continuously build on your skills as you go through the lessons because it would be superwhelming to try and learn everything all at once. But I wanted to just take the time to introduce you to some really cool areas of your Canva editor that are going to help you with your design work. So within the presentation template, even though it's maybe one that you won't use a huge amount, it's something that is going to allow us to demonstrate a few of the cool sort of hacks that are still going to be relevant to your other designs, but it's just going to make it a little bit easier for us. So within the design section over here, we're just going to select a template that we can customize to our needs. So this is just a recently used one. So I'm going to say, apply all 15 pages, and it's essentially going to replicate that for us in our design file. So now let's take it a few cool things that we can do with this. So within the presentation template, you're going to have templates, layouts, and styles. So you always have templates and styles. You may not necessarily see layouts in other design types, but for presentations, we've also got layouts, which is really handy if your brain is fried and it's TM and you're trying to make and a pitch deck for a client and you just don't know what's going on. This is really handy because it'll present you with a whole bunch of different layouts that you can utilize based on what you already have on the page. So that is such a lifesaver, and it does present you with a few different options in terms of what's possible based on the page that you've selected. So, for example, a heading page like this that doesn't really have too many elements on it might have lots and lots and lots of different layout options. Whereas for the internal pages, it might be a little bit more limited. But the thing that we really want to look at is styles. So within styles, you'll notice that I have my different brand color palettes. So you will have noticed in the previous lesson, I've created a few different versions of my color palettes and I said that was for a reason and there was a method to the madness. And there really is. So this is the reason because what you can do within styles, if you're a Canva pro user is you can then essentially say, Okay, apply my entire color palette to this design. But let's say, for me personally, I don't really use this kind of dark black charcoal that I have in my brand kit, I would never use that for a slide, or I would very rarely use that for a slide. So I probably wouldn't make an entire presentation out of it. So maybe I will select a slightly different variation of my color palette, but maybe I really don't want to be using my neon yellow. So I would find one that doesn't have my black and doesn't have my yellow. So you can start to see how this can be really handy because then you can also say, apply this to all the pages, and it's going to make the entire deck really beautifully optimized for my color scheme. And then I can also do the same thing with my brand fonts here, so I can say change everything to my brand fonts. Of course, you can do this. If you don't have a brand kit yet, you can do this with Canvas own either color and font combinations, which is what they have here. So let's say you really like this particular color scheme and font combination. You can test it out. Ooh, that actually looks really cool. I really like that. Yeah, I would definitely use that. So there are some beautiful beautiful combinations here. Or let's say you just want to go with color palettes here or just font set, so maybe just testing a few things out. This is your way to do that in a live design. So I really, really love this option. Then, let's say, you find a template that you really like, but you don't necessarily want to take the actual information from that template. You just want to be taking the actual design style. So that's where you can click on these three dots in the upper right hand corner, and then you can say, apply the fonts, apply the colors, apply the elements, or just apply absolutely everything to my existing design and make it nice and branded, similar to this particular template. So that's another really handy way to use your own information, but get a bit of a different look and feel based on what's in here. Let's talk about elements. So I'm going to add a new page to my design. I can either use the three dots in the upper right hand corner of my page and say, add a new page, or I can use the keyboard shortcuts that are here, and they're also in your course guide. By the way, both for Mac and for PC. So for me, it's command and return, or it would be Control and Enter if you're on a PC. That allows you to add a blank new page so that we can have a look at a few different things within your actual search bar here. So, let's say we search for something like coffee. It's presented me with graphics, photos, videos, frames, everything all at once, or I can use the selection up here to kind of maybe, let's say, just look at photos. This allows me to look at anything that is within this particular search term. And then I can add that to my page either as a photo or as a cutout like is the case with these beans here, which could be cool for a flat lay, for example, if I'm just creating a graphic that's meant to look like a table. If I just want to be looking at cutout specifically, there's a filter function for this in the photo section, so I can look at cutouts only. It's only going to show me images that are already cut out for me. That's really handy when you're creating, again, flat lays or just scenes with a few different elements in it, and you already want them to be not just cut out but actually have these little shadows that can be really handy because that can be quite difficult to recreate. Then if we look at the graphic section, then the graphic section is going to tell us we have nothing to look at because cutouts is only specific to photos. But within the graphic section, instead of looking at photos, we actually have the option for static or animated elements. We can have a look at just animated cups of coffee, which is really, really cool and then add these to our design. Now, within Canva, you'll notice two different kinds of animated elements. Ones like these, which are called lottis. What lotties allow you to do is essentially change the colors of these animations to any color you want. And then there will be some like this one. No, that's actually a lottie as well, because we can see that it's got a color up here that's going to allow us to change it. So let me try and find one that isn't A lottie. I'm going to say this one is probably not. Yeah, there you go. So what that means is I have to sort of take this animation and accept it as it is because I don't have any color options up here, which means I can't change it. Whereas with these two, I can go, Ooh, let's make this nice and brand it with my brand colors, and I can add it to my course slides. So that's really, really cool. Lots can be a little bit tricky to find, which is why I have workaround to this, especially if you're a Canva free user and you want to look for free elements, and you go through the hard work of actually finding free elements, and you want to organize them in a way that makes sense to you. So you can, of course, make folders. So you'll see some of these will say they're Canva Pro elements, and then some will be free elements. And you can always right click here and then add this to a folder, so that allows you to really nicely organize your assets for future use. And you can also look at collections. So if there was an Illustrator or graphic designer who created these, who has a collection of these, now, this is a little bit tricky to see because I'm in dark mode and these are black icons. So I do apologize for that. I'm just going to add a new page here, so we can just bring some of these in so you can see that they're all kind of created to very similar. And the reason I really like these kind of collections is because if you're designing one graphic, you want to make sure that your elements have a consistent width, for example. So you don't want to have one coffee cup that's really lovely like this and has this thin, beautiful edge and thin, beautiful line. And then you bring in totally different, you know, let's say, a graphic like this one that has really thick lines. That's going to really throw off your design. So that's why the collections are really, really handy for that. Not every single design will have collections, but what you can do is instead of collections, click on C more like this, and that's going to give you just designs that are similar to the one that you've just selected. So now in terms of organization, of course, we can add these two art folders to use in future designs. But one other thing that you can also do is just create collections like these. Let me show you what I mean. I have a design document that has all of these different collections of both animated and static elements that I can pull from anytime. So organizing these within folders would be handy, but having them in little kind of collections like this allows me to then use my styles option to make them nice and branded with my brand colors. That's why I absolutely love doing it this way. And you can have so many different I've got 25 pages worth of collections that I utilize quite a lot. So I can make these nice and branded. So this is exactly how they looked when I was pulling them from the elements tab, and then instead, I would go to design and styles. And now I can go through my different color palette options to basically get these to exactly the colors that I want. And then I can just copy and paste these into any future designs when they're already all beautifully branded with my brand colors. So that's one option. The other option is to actually pull it through from directly within your design. So I'm just going to switch back to my original design. Instead, what you can do is you can head on over to Projects, look for the name elements and find your design in here. And then just copy it across. So I can just click the page that I want to add into my design. And now I can do the exact same thing. So let's say it's not already in my brand colors, I can just go to Styles, find my color palette, and apply it directly. If you are a Canva free user and you don't have the option here because you would only have your three brand colors, a different sort of workaround to this it's a little bit more manual, but it's absolutely possible that let's say you find let's go back to our original template. So let's say you have this template and you want to make sure it's all nicely branded with your brand colors. So what you can do is you can just click the actual color that you want to change, and you go into either the three color palettes here or your document colors, as we talked about in terms of the workaround, and then you select your actual color that is your brand color. And then at the bottom here, you'll see it says change so you can do the same sort of thing really. It's just a little bit more manual. So you just say everything in this entire document that was previously this forest green, change it to my beautiful brand color. And you'll notice it's done the exact same thing, and I would just have to do the same sort of thing for, let's say, this purple here. I would say, change it to my brand color, change all, and it's just done it for me. So, yeah, it's a little bit more of a workaround, but you absolutely can still find ways to work around this, even if you're a Campa for us. And one last thing I'll say on the sort of customization front here is that you can do the same thing with lotteries. But like I said, lotteries can be a little bit difficult to find in the elements tab. If you're looking for animated elements. You'd think that you could just search for coffee lottery in graphics and then go to, you know, animated elements, and it would only show you graphics that can have their color changed. That would be the most logical thing. Hopefully, in the future, this happens. At the moment, it's just not how it works. So I know for a fact that some of these are lotteries, for example, this one, I know you can change the colors to your brand colors of this but then there will be others like this one that is just basically a photo that's animated. So it's not going to allow you to change any colors. So that being said, I like creating collections of these not just in static graphics, but also in animated elements. And I've actually created this for you so that you can use this so I've linked this in your course guide, and I keep adding to this collection. But these are essentially just elements that can have their colors change. And I've presented them in this kind of format so that you can go straightaway and apply your beautiful brand colors to the entire template. So make sure to check that out in your course guide. It will allow you to really, really easily utilize these within your designs and already beautifully premade with your own brand colors, which is kind of cool. So make sure to check that out. And, of course, there are more awesome, beginner friendly and advanced Canva hacks to come. But for now in the next lesson, we're going to go into how you can optimize your workflow if you're working with other people within Cava, so I'll see you there. 14. Master Your Canva Workflow: So we've already talked a bit about how to master your Canva workflow, but I've got a few additional tips that I really want to cover in this lesson before we move on to the next lesson where we talk about how to work with other team members within Canva because there's a really cool app that I can't wait to show you. But first, I just wanted to show you a few cool hacks that are relatively new to Canva that are going to just make your life so much easier. So within the project section, we've got sort of a different way of getting to your uploads folder. Of course, you can access uploads from within your actual design project. But here in the upload section, instead of having to go one, two, three, and click into each image like you have to when you're in your actual project file, what you can do here is you can highlight. And now, if I was to continue highlighting, you'll notice that this selection has now gone. So what I have to do is I have to highlight and then hold shift in order for it to have saved the previous selection. Now I have 16 images selected, and what I can now do is I can go to Move to folder, and I know this is going to go into my student reviews, and I can really easily organize everything this way. So that is so handy, especially when you're working on a big project and you've uploaded 20, 30 photos, and it just saves you so much time. So I really, really love. The other thing that you can do is sort of shortcut your way to the most frequently used files that you use. So, for example, for this particular course, at the moment, I'm using the lesson demos folder quite a lot, which is where I've sort of experimented with different designs and things like that. So within your folders, what you can do is, let's say, this personal folder was one that I was using a lot. I can star this, and it's going to add it to my stared section. So that means whenever I open my Cava dashboard, those elements will be here. It could be a particular client or a particular project that you're working with or an upcoming product launch or something like that. And then you can, of course, remove the star so that if you're not working with it really frequently, you can remove that. It's just a really lovely way for you to get a bit of a now I want to cover, I would say one of the biggest mistakes that I see people making within Canva, which is that they open up a brand new design file or project file every single time that they're working on a new template. And what this means is that you end up 1,000, 2000, 3,000 different files, and it can get so messy. And there's really no need for this because you can actually combine up to 350 pages within one design file. So that makes it really nice and easy to keep things really organized. So you can look at a few different things. So at the moment, I'm within the Instagram Rails demo dashboard. What that means is that it's showing me a bit of a timeline because it's assuming I'm going to make a video doesn't necessarily mean that that's what I'm going to be making. I just maybe wanted these dimensions, which are the same dimensions for Instagram reels as they are for Instagram stories. So it's not necessarily that I'm going to be making an animated video, so I can always switch this to just be looking at maybe scroll view here and looking at different pages like this. But let's say I have a design that I'm working with here. I'm just going to do this sort of recently used one. And then next time I want to open up another Instagram reel, it would be so tedious to open up a brand new design file. So instead, what we can do is we can combine this. So I'm just going to go ahead and we're going to copy this across by heading over to Grid view here, and then I can just basically command C or control C if you're on a PC. Otherwise, of course, you can use the three dots and just use the button here. And this will allow me to copy this page over to sort of a master document. So I know I already have this in place, so I'm just going to switch over to it. So this is where I keep up to 113. I would say, a lot of the time even more of my Instagram reels covers. So if I go to GridView, I can see them all here, and this allows me to basically just have all of these different designs just in one file. So if I'm ever looking for a cover for Instagram Reels, chances are it's in here. I don't have to have it all in separate documents, which would be so, so tedious. So instead, what I can do is I can actually just command V or Control V if you're on a PC and bring in my design here instead of having it in its own file. And then I would go back and make sure I'm deleting the original file. And you can do that either from directly within Canva now, so you go to File and move to trash or you can do it from within your Canva dashboard. It means that you've got one place for everything and you don't have to worry about things. And that is just so satisfying. And while you're in here, you can also just make sure that you're labeling things correctly. So you'll notice that just by default, you won't have any page titles. But let's say, this would be sort of spa day. As a page title, and it gives you another option to make sure that this is a searchable design for you. So if for some reason you forgot that this is within Rails templates, maybe you forgot that you had it within my Instagram assets as a folder, but you remember it had something to do with a spade. It gives you another option to search for this, but it also really helps with exporting. So I'll show you what I mean. Let me just select. So this one has no page title. This one has a page title. So let's export the first four pages so I can show you what that looks like once it gets exported. I'm going to go into Share and download. And let's make sure we download is as a PNG. Now, by default, it's going to try and download the entire 114 pages, which we don't want. So I'm just going to download page one, two, and let's just say three. So you'll notice two of them have names, and one is just going to be as page three. So now I can go ahead and download that, and it'll download as a zip folder, so you have to unzip it. And now you'll notice that it says spa day, flipbook, and page three, right? So that just helps you to stay organized. And on that front, also, if you're ever sharing an entire project file with somebody, whether it's a client, it's a team member or a freelancer that you've hired for your business, you've 114 pages in one document. I mean, you probably wouldn't be handing over that many assets, but let's say it's 20. It's 20 different designs. It's so much easier to hand over one link to one document than 20 different links to 20 different designs. That is super, super handy. And now in the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to actually work with other people within Canvas. So I will see there. 15. Work with Others in Canva: So this is where things are going to start to get exciting. Not because you might be working with other people in Canva. You may not, but there will definitely be some nuggets of wisdom in this lesson that you can leverage, regardless of whether or not you're going to be working with other people. So within Canva, you have the option to create a team. It's a pretty pricey option, in my opinion, so it's not something you may ever utilize. But if you do have a team, you're going to be able to do a few cool things. So I'm just going to switch over to a different team because I'm obviously not paying for one. I am under the team of Megatron, which is just me. So I don't know. It was hilarious at the time when I labeled it that. But I'm going to switch on over to a different team so that we can have a look at how things function in a team environment. One thing to be mindful of when you're creating something within a team, let's say you're invited to a team or you're inviting other people onto your team is that technically, you can create as many designs as you want in here, but they're not necessarily shared with the team. It's not something that happens automatically, and that's a good thing because it means that you can practice a lot and do lots of other things other than just the stuff that's for the team. So whenever you have a design like this one that hasn't been shared with the team here, you'll notice there's no little icons here. Whereas if something has been shared with the team, you'll notice that there are additional sort of heads or logos, profile photos here that will say, Okay, this has been shared with the team. So if you haven't shared something with the team, you've just been working on the design, you're not quite ready to share it with anyone. But let's see you get to a point where, Okay, cool. We're ready to share it. Then we would head on over to share and you can then say, Okay, these are the people with access. You would add people from within your team, or you can use email addresses to add people manually. Alternatively, you can also just share a link to your design for someone to view. So this is where this is something I will be doing a lot with you in the files that I've included in your course Guide, where I've placed this on anyone with the link and can view or can comment, but definitely not can edit because that can be super messy if you're sharing this with a group of ten people and everyone has editing rights. So a lot of the time, you'll just be sharing a template or a design for review, but you don't necessarily need people to be able to edit. On that note, if you have clients or you've got team members who are not particularly super tech savvy, I would make a copy of your design and share that with them and you keep the original without any share permissions because that way they can still edit, they can do everything they want. But if they really mess it up, it's okay because you've got the original. I would just head on over to File and make a copy. And that way you can still give them access to the exact same design, but you've got the original. So that's something I would definitely do. If you haven't done that and they really do mess it up, you also have the version history. So it is a pro feature, but if you are working with team members in Canva, it means you're a Canva P user anyways. So you've got the version history, and it will allow you to go back a few days or a few weeks to a version that wasn't messed up in case somebody does do something really drastic. Then once you're working with other team members, as well, something you can do is you can add comments to your designs, whether it's a comment for yourself or for other people. So you can obviously tag other team members, but you can also leave yourself notes, so you can say something like, Hey, Bank. You're the best. Okay, that's not really a design design comment. But let's say I just want to assign this to myself and tell myself that I need to change something. I can leave a comment to myself, and then I can circle through all these different comments or cycle through these different comments because let's say this is a project file that has 100 designs in it and all these different comments, then it would be easy enough to just go through them over here. And then once I'm happy that I've resolved that comment, I would just make sure to tick resolve. While we're here, let's talk about how to share your designs as a template. It is something we're going to talk a lot about when we talk about selling your Canva templates and assets. But within a website, like creative market here, you will have 108,000 Canva templates. These are just a little bit more advanced than what you can find within Canva, whether it's Canva free or Canva Pro. These will be really customized to be templates in all different dimensions to real estate agents or course creators or coaches. So it allows you to get that nice branded look. And in order for you to do things like this, you're going to need to create templates, which is also something that I will be doing a lot with you throughout the course as well. So in order to create templates, and we will go into how to specifically do this if you're going to be selling your assets, but you would go over to share and see all, and then you've got a template link here. So I'm going to say create template link. I'm going to copy that. And now if I was to switch over to an Incognito window and paste my Link in, essentially, someone's going to be able to grab this link and import it straight into their Canva dashboard and use it as their own without affecting my original design. So that's a really, really handy feature that you will likely use a fair bit, as well. Alright, so now I'm going to switch back over to my dashboard so that I can also show you that within the brand section, you have the option for brand templates. This is not something that I utilize a whole lot. It's not something that I'm not saying people don't utilize it. It would be really, really useful for bigger corporates, for example, where let's say you have a LinkedIn cover photo or a LinkedIn banner, and every single team member is required to have a LinkedIn banner that looks exactly the same, except maybe with their own name or something like that. Then you would definitely have a brand template for this. And every time somebody clicks into this brand template, it's going to open up a new design for them to customize to their needs. So that's something that you have the option to create, and you also have the option to look at brand controls. Obviously, I don't have a team, so I'm not utilizing this, and I don't think it's something you would utilize a whole lot. But if you wanted to put controls around the permissions that your team members have in terms of them accessing colors outside of your brand colors, outside of your brand font or having design approvals, this is where you would set that up. Alright, now, I did say that I had one additional tool up my sleeve, which has absolutely revolutionized how I do things. And I do love it, not just for working within Cava, but just working with other people in general. I have used it for so many different things, and that is scribe. So scribe is a free tool with obviously upgraded paid versions that allows you to install this little Google Chrome extension and create these visual standard operating procedures and step by step step guides for anyone in your team, and it is just the best thing. So I did want to include that because if you're working with other people in Canva and you're constantly repeating yourself, you feel like you're constantly explaining the same things over and over again. I can just be so handy to have a full library of these scribe documents or links that people can refer to at any time to understand how something works within your business and within your Cava dashboard. Once you're signed up describe, you'll be able to access this Google Chrome extension, and whenever you click it, it will pull up a little side panel here. And then, essentially, as soon as you say start capture, we're just going to do this without the voice transcription. It's going to capture every single step of where you click on your screen. So for example, I would say, let's say I'm trying to create a document around how to access the brand kit within Canva for client or for a team member. So it's already going to naturally say head to canva.com because that's sort of the first step. Then it's going to say, right, we want to go to brand, and you can see it started capturing this here. And then, let's say we go to Band Kits and then click on this brand Kit. And then I can maybe click on a couple of things on the screen and then add some further explanations. So I could just click on logos and click on color palettes and click on fonts. And then let's say I now say, Alright, complete the capture, and it's going to take me to a new page where I can then potentially adjust some of these things in case I want to add some notes or remove some steps because sometimes, I mean, things happen. So this is pretty good. Yep, we want to click on the brand kit. That's right. And then this is where I sort of just clicked so it would record a step, but I could say, here is where you adjust logos, and here is where you add your color palettes, et cetera, et cetera. So you can start to see how this can become really handy. You can also add additional steps with images or voice notes, gifts, headers as well to help things be nice and organized, because, yes, sometimes I've created scribes that are 20, 30 steps long, so it's nice to actually have subheadings so that people also have a little bit of a menu to scroll through. So this is just a gold mine for creating any process documents if you're working with other people as part of your content creation flow. And then, of course, you would save it, and then you can share it and copy the link and send that straight through to people. And you can create your own little libraries with Inscribe as well. So you can always almost make this part of your onboarding document for whenever somebody is joining your team, for example. And this is where you can also adjust things like the logo or the profile image for this step and then the name. And you can also see how many steps there are and how long it took me to go through those steps. So absolutely a huge, huge help, especially because I'm only on the free version here. I mean, I'm not sure how limited it's going to be in the future, whether they're going to remove some of the free features, but I've absolutely loved this tool, so definitely play around with it, and I will see you in the next lesson. 16. Get to Know the Mobile App: So, personally, I don't really use the Canva app nearly as much as I use the desktop version, and that's just because I prefer the bigger screen, and I also much prefer to design using my mouse and my keyboard shortcuts, as you'll notice a lot throughout the course, as opposed to using my fingers on a small screen. But I still think it's really handy to know a little bit about the Canva app even if you're pretty much going to be exclusively designing on your computer. And that's for two reasons. Reason number one is that at some stage, inevitably, someone is probably going to ask you to make some small revision of a design, whether it's a client or a family member or a friend who's asked you to design their kids birthday invitation as soon as they realize that you have skills on how to do this. And it will happen, trust me. So be careful who you tell about the superpower, but eventually someone's going to say, Hey, can you make this thing slightly bigger, and you will be on a train and not have access to your computer for days because you're heading somewhere fun. And you just need to be able to make a small tweak. And for those reasons, it's nice to be able to jump into the Canva app, make a small tweak. And send it back off. The second reason and probably much more important is you need to know how your designs are going to look on a small phone screen because largely that's how people are going to be consuming your content, and it can be really skewed when we're designing on a big desktop screen, and we think, Wow, this all looks amazing. And then, you know, ultimately, you want to be able to download that design, probably airdrop it to your phone, look at it on a phone screen, and then go, Yeah, that looks good, and then delete it from your phone and then post it from. It's a lot. It's a lot of steps, to be honest. So sometimes it's nice to be able to just jump into the Canva app, look at the same designs that you're looking at on your big desktop screen, look at it on the phone and go, Oh, actually, that needs to be much, much bigger because people are not going to be able to read it. Or that font is actually not readable on a small screen. So for those reasons, it's much easier to be able to just open the app and go from there. So we're going to have a look at a few cool things that you can do with the Canva app in this lesson, and let's just jump straight into it. So let's go ahead and open the Canva app and see what might be slightly different in this interface. So in the upper left hand corner, you've got a bit of a menu here, but you'll notice it's a little bit limited. The one bonus on this is that you've got your stared folder, which I've starred on my desktop, and it's also available on the app. So this is really handy if it is something that you're working with quite a lot, but you can access your brand assets in here, your apps, and dream lab as well. And then you've also got some options in the bottom panel there. So that's where you can access your projects. You can access any templates. And then if you click the plus icon in the middle there, that's where you can decide to create a custom size image or go through any of these options here, jump into any of your brand templates or actually just start creating templates that are designed for you. Of course, you can go back to home and either do that over here as well, or you can search for it over here. So let's say we want to create an Instagram post that's not how we spell post, and then you can browse through either your own content here or Canva templates only. So we have the same filters here, where we can look at different categories of post. But for now, we can either select a template from what it's providing us or just create a blank Instagram post so we can have a look at what's different inside of the app interface here. So we've got all the same options here. We've got the design tab, we've got the elements tab, the text tab. The difference is that they are placed on the bottom instead of the left tan sidebar, but pretty much identical. The main difference there is the fourth category across is camera roll, which makes it really nice and easy for you to bring in images that you take on your phone straight into the app. So you do still have an uploads folder, so you can access all the same uploads that you have on your desktop, but it just makes it really nice and convenient for you to really easily access things that are on your phone, which is also extra extra handy for editing any reels or any other vertical videos. You also have access to your brand assets here. And then you also have the draw function, which is something we're going to talk about a little bit later in the course. But it is one thing that is much easier on the app than it is on desktop, if you prefer to draw with your fingers than you do with your mouse. So you can select whether you want it to be a pen, a marker, highlighter, and then select your color. And then you can basically just draw and as soon as you're done, you can basically exit out of this. And this, if you tap on it, now becomes an element, which you can then of course, use on the desktop app. You can use it on the mobile app. You can use the circles in the corners there to bring this in, make it smaller, make it larger, just like you would pretty much all the same functionality that you have on the desktop app, except you're using your fingers instead of your mouse. So that's quite a handy option. And then, of course, if I then tap on it, and I hit the little trash icon above it, then it's going to remove that for me. You also have the option to access your projects, access any apps. All of that is pretty much right there for you. So let's go and just drag in a couple of elements here so we can have a look at how something might work in terms of actually designing within the camera. So we're just going to bring in a couple of elements here. I'm going to head on over to the photo section, and we're just going to bring in this image of a mountain. And now I've got some options in the bottom panel there, so I can replace this image with a different image. I can crop it. I can adjust it. I can use my background remover, which is a pro feature we're going to talk about throughout the course. I've got my magic studio, my filters, my effects, all these things that we're going to utilize a lot in the course are available to us there. So we can just have a look at one more thing that I wanted to discuss I'm not trying to make a beautiful design here. I basically just want to make sure I have at least two elements on the page so that I can show you once you have more than one element on the page, you'll see the fourth category across is layers. So instead of this being in the position function that it is on the desktop app, we now have it in an isolated layers option. So this makes it really nice and easy because I can now tap and hold and move this just above so that layer is on top of the other one. This was previously much, much harder to do within the Canva app, so I'm really glad that this is now a function, and we can really easily select all the different layers on the page and use them within that function. So at this point, we can also tap on the three dots above my image here. And you'll notice some different options here, including the option to select multiple, which, again, is just one of those things that is isolated to the app because it's much harder for us to select multiple objects without being able to click and drag our mouse. So we can select multiple objects, so now we can move them together. We can size them up, size them down. We can also select the group option so that they're officially grouped, and it's going to be much easier for us to work with them in the future. The rest of the functionality is pretty much the same. So everything we're going to be working with on the desktop app is something you'll have available to you on the mobile app. If you also just tap into the actual canvas, so you're not actually selecting anything, and you use two of your fingers to kind of squeeze your canvas in it will then basically minimize your canvas and bring you into this panel where you can see all the other pages in your document. So as we'll talk about a lot throughout the course, if you have 20, 30, 40 pages within your document, this can be a little bit tough to cycle through on the Canva app. You can, of course, if I hit X, and I'm just in one design here, I can swipe across to all of the other pages, but it can be tricky if there's a lot of them. So that's why sort of pinching your screen with your two fingers and actually being able to see everything as a grid is going to be much easier. It'll also make it easier if you go, Okay, I actually really want to delete this page. I can go ahead and hit Delete and copy and paste and all of those things. It's much, much easier if you're able to look at it as a big grid. Then you also have the three dots up top there, and that's where you'll have some functionality in terms of organizing your designs by moving things to a folder or making a copy, sharing it with people. Potentially moving it to trash, if you think you're done with it. This is where you can also resize, which is something we're going to talk about as a pro feature, and you also have the option to go to settings where you'll be able to add guides and a few different options that we're going to talk about, again, throughout the course a lot when it comes to the desktop app. But all of those features are available to you on the mobile app as well. And then once you're happy with your design, this is not a great design. But let's say I'm really happy with my design, I can now go to Download. And just save this as an image to my phone. It's going to automatically save it, and then it's going to pop up with options for me to share it. So it looks like it hasn't actually saved it, but it's already saved it to my phone, and then it's giving me some other options of how I can save it or share it. So that's a little bit about the Canva app, and now in the next lesson, we're going to head into talking about scheduling your posts within Canva. So I'll see you. 17. Schedule Your Posts: So I thought long and hard about how to incorporate this topic into a different lesson in the course, but I've actually decided to make it its own lesson, even though controversially, my advice is actually probably at this point to not use Canvas scheduling functionality. Look, this might change in the future. But at the time of recording this, Canvas scheduling tool is just clunky. It's hard to use, and it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. But we are going to take a look at it because it is something that I get asked about a fair bit, and then we're also going to have a look at an alternative. So if it's something that you want to utilize in your business, you'll know where to go. So let's take a look at it. Within Canva, you would link your social accounts first. So within settings, you would make sure that any apps that you're planning on scheduling to or posting to are linked here. And you can also do this within the actual editor itself. And then in terms of the actual planner and scheduler, you can also have a high level view within apps and content planner. This is where Canva also lists things like special holidays and things like that. Random acts of kindness Day, which I really like. So this is where you can go and add events to calendar, schedule post directly if you're not within your actual design file. So this is just a high level overview so you can see what you have scheduled. But then we can actually do this in practice by looking at our file here, for example. So let's say this is a testimonial that I now want to schedule to Instagram. So it's my page 27 of this project file. I would go to share see all down here, I would go to Instagram, let's say, in this case, and then I would make sure I am scheduling this to a business account. It's going to ask me to choose the account. So if I had client accounts there, I would choose those. In this case, this would be a JPEG, and the page we want to select in this case is page 27. Again, why it's also really handy to name your pages because it makes it much easier for things like this. I would then write the caption Lo. Obviously, I would put a little bit more effort into it than that. But then I would say, let's publish this at a later date. Let's put it in the future, whatever the time and the time zone is, I would say, Yeah, that sounds good. Then now I would just say schedule. So what it does at this point is logically Cava locks you out of this project file. That makes a lot of sense. Basically, you're locked out of it until the post has gone out, which, if you're planning a month in advance, that can be intense because let's say you have 40 different images or graphics and videos within that one file, you now cannot touch those until this has gone out because obviously, what you could end up doing is maybe adding an extra page or removing a page or changing the design, and then your post goes out and it's the wrong page of the project file. So that's why it has to lock your design, and that is just a little bit messy. So instead, I would recommend using something like Metricol which I've linked within your course guide, which I'm on the free plan here, so you don't necessarily even need to be on their paid plan. If you're on their paid plan, you do have more elevated upgraded access to actually linking your Canva account. So you could essentially still schedule your Canva posts directly without ever having to really download them. They can just come across straight to here if you're on their premium plan. But really, it's not that much of a hassle to sort of just go, Alright I want to create a post, and let's say this is going to be a post, not a real, and then I can just bring in my image or my video. And I've downloaded it from Canva, and I can just bring that in here and schedule it as far in advance as I want. It's going to auto publish it for me, and there's no restrictions to my actual project files within Canva. I can continue working on those, and I don't necessarily need to be restricted as I would be if I was using the content planner from within Cava. 20. Exercise: Set Up Your Brand in Canva: In the exercise that we did at the end of the last section of the course, you gathered some assets for your brand that you want to use to practice on throughout the course, and now it's time for us to actually organize those assets within Canva so that we can use these to begin designing in the next section of the course. So at this stage, what you're able to do in terms of your organization is largely going to depend on whether you are a Canva free or a Canva pro user. You're on the P plan, you can just go ahead and set up as many color palette variations as you need in a way that obviously still makes sense with your brand guidelines. But I would definitely encourage you to do this because I find it super, super handy for all the reasons that we talked about within this section of the course. So set up a couple of variations. If you're on the Pro plan, you can add in your logos. You can add in any fonts from within Canva, or you can upload your own fonts if you need to. And then you can also add in some brand images. With the images that we gathered in the previous section of the course and the videos, I would actually add these into your project section into their own folder unless they're actually brand photos. Unless these are photos of you or your team or your business, then I would just create a folder in here, if you don't have existing folders, then whatever structure makes sense to you, of course, but you could just create a folder that's creative assets for now, and then you can always organize it later, or it could be background videos, background photos, something like that, but it's completely up to you how you choose to organize this. If you're on the free plan, I would still go into your brandkit and add in your three brand colors that you're allowed, for sure. And then I would go ahead and create your resource document that is sort of a brandkit like we talked about in this section of the course, where you can have the rest of your brand colors if you've got more than three then I would also organize this into a folder, so you know that this would be, for example, a brand assets folder. So if in the future, you forget where you've stored this little document, it'll be much easier for you to just go on over to projects, and you know that anything to do with your brand is going to be in the brand assets folder. And this is where you can also keep any brand images and anything else. But you know if you're a Canva free user, anytime you're designing something, you can access this document and you'll have your brand colors and your brand fonts on that first page of that. As a reminder, you can always just open the design and copy and paste that first page across or within your actual design doc, what you can do, let's say I'm designing this and I want to bring my fonts and my colors in, I can head on over to Projects, and I've got it there, but in case I didn't, I could just go to my brand assets folder. Folders and then find my design there and then find this very first page and bring it in this way. So even if I'm a Canva free user, I can really, really quickly from within the project section, access all of my brand colors and then they'll be there for me to use. And just like I would, if I was a Canva P user, I would make sure to add in any images and videos that I collected in the last section of the course and add it into Canva into a folder of creative assets or something similar. If you're at a more advanced stage of your business and you've got additional assets that you want to organize within Canva, I would definitely encourage you to do that at this point. You can do that by creating folders and subfolders and categorizing things in whatever way works for you. So, for example, I have a folder called creative assets, and within that, I've got a folder of videos that are just Bro videos of me working with no audio. It's literally just me on a computer, so that I can use that in the background of reels, for example. And then I've got a different folder that's just neutral background that I can use for videos and things like that that are all within this sort of creative assets folder that I can tap into anytime for my creations. So definitely just continue to organize things in a way that work for your beautiful brain. But I would also encourage you to try and think of a way to create a system that works for someone outside of your beautiful brain because you never really know when someone's gonna need to find their way through your Canvas system. For example, one of the first clients I had, I was in charge of scheduling her social media posts and creating them, and I had to find images of women working on laptops for social media graphics, which was inside of a folder called flowers. And it took me 4 hours to find it, and I nearly I think I did cry. Actually, I would say I cried, but I was way too embarrassed to ask questions at that point. And I would just say, from the previous Mg version, who's crying at her laptop, looking at a folder called flowers that contains images of women working on their laptops, please just find a way to organize things in a way that work for other people, as well. Doesn't really matter what it is. Whatever works, as long as it has some sort of logic and then lastly, I would love for you to just spend 20 to 30 minutes gathering inspiration for your designs using some of the strategies that we use in the previous lesson in this course. Doesn't have to be superwhelming. Just pick one to two platforms or one to two tools that you can use to gather some inspiration and just start gathering assets. Anything that speaks to you at this point, just really the point of this exercise is not necessarily to gather designs that you want to replicate. It's mainly to get you to start thinking like a producer on social media rather than a consumer. Because if this is the first time you're creating social media content, there's from a business perspective, not just sort of posting photos of your dog online, which could also be your business, in which case. That sounds like an awesome business. But let's say this is the first time you are kind of creating content for business purposes. It might be the first time that you're looking at social media through this lens of a creator and a producer rather than a consumer. And it's a different part of your brain and you need to kind of train it. So really just start gathering a little bit of inspiration, putting it aside, organizing it in a way that works for you so that you can hopefully tap into some of these designs as we go into create. But again, largely it's just to get you to really start thinking about, okay, you know, this is a viral reel of a baby and a goat who have become best friends, and all these people have liked it, and it's just gone absolutely bonkers. How hilarious is it? To then you going, Okay, well, how do I get a goat and a baby to come to my real estate office so we can sell some houses? Okay, not, maybe not. Maybe that's that is an obscure example, but you get the point. You're just going to start thinking so differently about the content that you're seeing because you're going to start to see it from a business perspective. So while I'm not encouraging you to acquire goats and babies for business marketing purposes, I think it would be a really good exercise for you to just gather some inspiration and have time dedicated to this, as well, which is something we all have to practice. It feels almost unnatural to give yourself permission to just scroll Instagram for 30 minutes. But that is kind of the perk of doing this for a living. So definitely take some time, and then I'll see you in the next section of the course where we begin creating these kinds of amazing social media graphics. 21. Introduction: Canva for Social Media Graphics: Now that we know a little bit about Canva and how to use it, it's time to actually go in and create some cool stuff. So this is a fun bit. But before we get into the next lesson, I did just want to say, I feel like I always have so many disclaimers where I'm like, Oh, I've just got one thing to say before you get into the lesson. But I promise this one's really important. I mean, they're all important, but this one's really important. I would say that as great as Canva is, and their template library is so beautiful. Their designs are not really optimized to work across devices, unfortunately. So while the dimensions are mostly correct with a few exceptions, they're not really designed to work across desktop and mobile and iPad interfaces and tablet interfaces. So a lot of the time you'll find a beautiful design, and you think, Wow, this looks awesome, and I'm going to design it. And then if you were to actually put a design like this one on YouTube or better yet on the YouTube app and located on a mobile, it just doesn't work. So for this reason, I have made you some customized templates that you can download from your course guide and download them all in one go so you can upload them all into Canva into one folder for really easy access to use in your creation, so you can always make sure that whatever you're designing is going to look great across devices. And you'll see me using these throughout the lesson, so you're going to get the hang of what I'm talking about. But I've included two of each template, one with text and one without text to make it much easier for you to design on top of. And we'll be making sure to keep the important parts of our designs within the lightest areas of these templates to make sure that they'll be visible across all devices. And, of course, I've also given you the option to download a copy of each of the finish designs that we create in the course as well if you'd like to do that, so you can reference it in the future. I'm also a really big fan of cutting out fluff and being respectful of your time. So in that spirit, I do also just want to say that sometimes you might see me speed up my screen if I'm covering something that we've already covered in a previous lesson, but I will always make sure to slow things down whenever I'm covering a new skill or something that's really important for you to actually see. So, for example, in the lesson where we talk about creating eBooks, it would have been an hour long lesson, maybe even longer if I didn't speed up my workflow, and then you just have to watch me kind of go, Oh, do I want this red or do I want it blue for, like, 7 minutes. And that's not a good use of anyone's time. So there will be times when I actually speed things up so that you don't have to watch me make those nitty gritty, tiny decisions that are really not that important while they are important. But not important for you to watch in slow motion. That's one thing. The second thing is, whenever we introduce a new function within Canva, I'm always going to show you how to manually find that thing within Canva by clicking and looking somewhere or right clicking and finding it there. And then from that point on, I may use a keyboard shortcut to get to the same place. And that is, again, just because it's going to save us so much time in this course, but it's also going to save you so much time in your workflow. And I know it can feel really intimidating when you're learning a new skill, and then on top of it, I'm telling you to then memorize keyboard shortcuts. I have put all of them in your course guide, but what I will say is that you really only need to memorize a handful of keyboard shortcuts that are going to save you hours and hours and hours of time and also keep in mind, every time I'm using this keyboard shortcut, I'm always going to put it on the screen, so you know exactly what the keyboard shortcut is that I'm using in both Mac and PC format. So no matter how you're designing within Canva, you'll know exactly what I'm doing, whether I'm clicking and manually finding something or I'm using a keyboard shortcut. Okay, that's pretty much all I wanted to say to preface this particular section of the course. And now let's get into everything in the next lesson. 22. Inspo for Inspirational Quote Graphics: So the reason we're starting with inspirational quote graphics for this section of the course is because I think these are a brilliant first exercise for any creator to get into because you're really taking away so much of the complexity by really only focusing on a couple of key elements. You're selecting a couple of fonts, maybe a couple of colors and an image. Or maximum two images. You're really not overcomplicating the design process. But by doing this, we're going to be able to really look at how just making a couple of little tweaks by changing a couple of fonts and maybe an image in the background, you create a completely different vibe to your design. This is where we start to really kind of come back to the design principles of keeping things really simple and also understanding how the fonts and colors and images we choose create a completely different vibe for the design. So we're going to have a look at a couple of accounts on Instagram that do these kinds of graphics really well, and then we're going to get into Canva and start designing. You can see how marketing agency King Kong are using occasional motivational graphics and slightly dimming their background and using this big bold text on top to create this sort of in your face impact that is such a big part of them as a brand, they're quite masculine, they're bold, they're ambitious, and this just works really well for them. And they also helps to differentiate their text graphics and their quote graphics from other types of content on their account. Then as a different example, we have Boss babe, which, as their name suggests, you know, is quite feminine. The fonts are very sort of slight. They're minimalistic. They're quite condensed, and the colors are, yes, very feminine, really beautiful. And they are still using quite large fonts. So it's still kind in your face, impactful, but in a very different way because the vibes are just totally, totally different. So I really love their occasional quote graphics. On the odd occasion, they do sort of go outside of their brand as well. But largely speaking, either they have these kind of dimmed backgrounds with this beautiful font or then they go for slightly more colorful, but really kind of large text that makes an impact sort of feel. Then as a completely different example, there's Mel Robbins who a lot of the time she's quoting herself, where she's featuring her own quotes or quotes from people that have really made an impact on her. So she's keeping it really minimalistic with a white background, simple quote, and a little bit of her signature yellow. Then she also has these kind of more cutouts where she also includes some bolded text, which I love. But still, it's quite minimalistic, but still allowing her to make that impact, and it does stand out on her feed against her other content. Let's now talk about how to create these kinds of beautiful graphics. One of my favorite tools for this is called momentum. Of course, if you've got quotes of your own that you've maybe said or that you're pulling from your blogs and things like that, of course, use that. But I love momentum. It gives you different images every day, and it gives you a different quote at the bottom, and it allows you to set things like your goals. So I can say, I'm going to kick some butt today, and then I get to take it off when I do it. It gives me a little bit of a dopamine hit when it tells me I've done a great job. Then you've also got your past photos and past quotes that have been featured on momentum. So you've got the entire history of quotes that have been shown to you, and you can always favorite these so that they appear in your favorites, and you can start to make these little collections that you can then turn into quote graphics. So I love it for that. It is completely free for you to use. Of course, it has upgraded versions, but I've linked it in your course guide if that's something you want to use for your content creation process. 23. Inspirational Quote Graphics: So let's now jump into Cava and actually talk about how to create one of these. So we're going to be making an Instagram post in portrait format, which is a four by five or 1080 by 13 50 in terms of dimensions. And that gives us a little bit more real estate than just creating a plain square graphic. And, of course, we could use some of the beautiful templates here. But let's just start from scratch with this one and talk about how we can actually utilize some of the different things within Cava. Just going to start by renaming this. This is going to be my Instagram post four by five or portrait post, and it's just going to be inspirational quote. So I know what it's about. And I've already selected sort of pre selected the quote that I want to use. So I can either go to text over here and add a text box or I can just hit T on my keyboard, and that is going to bring up a text box for me. So that's a nice little quick workaround. But yes, of course, you can always just head on over to T and add a textbox instead, and it's going to essentially do the exact same thing for you. So this is the quote that I want to be using. Let your days fill up with small moments that work together to achieve big dreams. The reason I like it is because it's impactful, but it can suit so many different industries. So let's have a look at how we can customize this for a few different purposes. So I'm going to start with a bit of a feminine sort of vibe in terms of a quote graphic. So I'm going to look at something like woman at Le or woman in nature and see what it comes up with, if we can find I like this one. Yes, definitely really like this one. So anything that's, you know, a woman sort of sitting I really like the look of that, but this one just kind of has that vibe that I'm looking for. So now what I can do is I could either stretch this out all the way to the edges or I can just right click and go set image as background, and it's going to automatically do that for me. Now, there's going to be times where you need to adjust things a little bit. For example, this moon image here is maybe a little bit too close to the edges or not quite close enough. In which case, I can double click into my image, and it's going to allow me to move around within the scope of my canvas, I can then use the Zoom option here and maybe stretch it out if I wanted to get a little bit closer to the female character there. But in this case, I actually think it works pretty well with the original dimensions that was given to me, so I can just hit Enter or hit Done, and that's going to allow me to just snap back into place. So now we can tweak this a little bit, and this is where things get really fun. This is where you can play around with a few different fonts. And when you have your textbox here, as well, you will have noticed that I did that previously, and you can use these kind of arrows that pop up at the edges to make your text smaller or larger and then use these horizontal lines to bring your text box in a little bit more narrow or bring it out. So there are a few things that you can play around with there. Alternatively, if you prefer to use these options up here, you can also use this to increase or decrease your font size. And if you ever were to, let's say, space down so that this author's name essentially then becomes a brand new line. It doesn't treat it as a paragraph. It will then allow you to make your font smaller or larger or change your font style independently of the other paragraph. So I'm going to highlight my little paragraph here, my little quote. And let's use a really nice font here. That's quite feminine. And whenever I have this little arrow here, I can drop that down and see the different styles of this particular font. So I think for us, regular is totally fine. We can test out heavy. I think it needs that really light feminine font. So I think we're going to stick with regular for this one. But just so you know, if you ever see a font that has this little arrow, you can always drop it down and see different boldnesses or if it's pretty much really just the different weights, I should say, not boldnesses. That's not a word. It's the different weights of the font. You can tell that my coffee hasn't kicked in yet. But yeah, that's a really beautiful thing about a lot of fonts that you're allowed to you're able to kind of see different versions of it. Okay, so then for our author font, we're going to go with something a little bit different. I really like using these kind of handwritten fonts. Or author names. So it kind of almost looks a little bit like a signature. And, of course, you can go through textiles and also go through the different categories here. So we talked about Sarah, San seraps. You know, they're modern, they're bold, they're elegant fonts, and that will give you a really good range of the different fonts. As you're going through the different fonts as well, if you start really liking some of them and you almost want to make a collection of fonts, I would really recommend making a Canva document that has those fonts within it, especially when it comes to font pairing. So if you think, Oh, this is a really good font pairing, I would start saving that to an individual Canva document so that you can always refer to it if there are fonts that you really like. Of course, if you have a brand font and you continue using your brand fonts, then that's not as relevant. But if you're maybe working on a few different design projects and you're able to play around with fonts a little bit, then I really love saving little font combinations and sort of making my own little collection within a project file so that I can always refer to that one for fonts that I know I've liked in the past. So this is already turning out to be a really beautiful graphic. I think that works really well with the quote. Then we can also move this textbox around and you'll start to see some pink lines coming up, both on the edges there and also in the middle here. So that's Canva's way of saying this is the center of the graphic and you can move up and down, and it'll align it to the center, so that makes it really nice and easy for you. It kind of snaps into place. Alternatively, you can always right click and go to Align to page and make sure that it's in the center or on the left, right, top, middle, or bottom. So in this case, middle, I think, would not be quite right because it gives us a lot of empty space up here. So I think this graphic works better up here, but we want to make sure that it's in the center, so I would make sure that that is ticked. So that's already looking really good. And now let's talk about how we can change this up a little bit by changing up the background image and our font styles. So I can right click on this and duplicate the page, or I can just hit Command D on a Mac or Control D on a PC, and it will duplicate the page for me. This means that I can snap images back into the background here, so I don't necessarily need to go through the process of saying replace background. I can just kind of pick an image and it'll automatically snap into place and replace that image for me. So that's a really handy thing to do. But in this case, we don't necessarily need to do because I actually want to create that sort of King Kong look of that nice big masculine image. So what I'm going to do is actually change my background color to be black, and then we're going to go ahead and go to elements, and I'm going to select a photo of a businessman. So I would like him to be in action, if possible. Maybe this one, a bit of an action shot. So now if I do right click and replace the background, what I can do is I'm going to double click on it so I can move it around a tiny bit. So he looks like he's walking towards the quote, and now I can adjust the transparency a little bit to dim this down. So that's quite nice. So he's there and visible, but the quote that I'm going to turn into a white quote is really going to help me sort of pop out of this graphic. So instead of this font here, I'm actually going to go with a font called Impact. That's nice. And for my author's name, I could actually leave this, but I like this particular font, which is still bold. It does have that kind of handwritten feel and that script feel, but it's actually really, really bold, which complements that impact font really well and gives it that nice sort of masculine vibe that we're going for. I would probably make sure that this quote is a little bit bigger, and maybe I would play around with some of these options here like this one, which is my line spacing option. Bring that down just a tiny bit because I think those gaps are a little bit too big and then it fits in really nicely with the rest of my graphic. Now, of course, if we were to use the accessibility feature at this point, it would tell me that the contrast is not high enough, for sure. So we want to make sure that this is white on top of our nicely dimmed background. Then for extra bonus points, in terms of accessibility, I could use my shapes over here in the elements tab or just hit R on my keyboard to bring in a rectangle and do exactly what we did previously, which is to dim this into almost like a gradient to really help bring that white font. Out even a little bit more. So I would make that black, go to add new color gradient and make sure the second color is black but transparent. That's going to give me that nice gradient look that I can then stretch out, and it's going to help to bring that text out even a little bit more. So now I can adjust the transparency to be maybe a little bit less transparent because I've played around with that top bit, so I know that that has that nice high contrast. So you can already start to see how the same quote by the same author in two different formats in terms of the font style and the background image that's there has a completely different look and feel. I'm going to do this one more time, and I'm going to speed this up a little bit because we're going to essentially do exactly what we just did, but I would do this for a travel and tourism brand, let's say. So this would be something like maybe tourism Iceland. And I can use the same quote, but maybe with a more subtle font that has that inspirational, motivational look and feel to it. And I would also change the name of the author to match this font because obviously they need to kind of match together. And I would probably keep the background gradient there because I think it works pretty well, but maybe adjust the transparency a little bit. And now we can head on over to our grid view where we can see how three different graphics with the same quote, but style slightly differently can give us a completely different vibe. Now, lastly, I'm just going to head on over to my Canva app and make sure this design looks good on a small phone screen because, yeah, I've definitely made this mistake plenty of times where the fonts are a little bit too small. In fact, for this one, I would actually say the author's name is a little bit small, so I would potentially stretch this out. It's definitely readable, but I think it's tiny bit too small, so I would potentially adjust the size of that. I think this works really well, and that would work especially well for something like LinkedIn, not just Instagram. And, yeah, I think that works really well. It's got a little there because I'm also open. I've got this design open on my desktop, so it's sort of telling me that there's someone else in the design, which is actually just me. But yes, so I think these look really, really well. You could go a step further and actually save this to your phone if you wanted to by pressing this icon in the upper right hand corner and downloading this to your phone and making sure that it looks good there as well. But generally, I find that just looking at it on the app is enough to really determine is this something that's going to post well on Instagram? On LinkedIn, on X, and across all the other platforms. So that's a little bit about our croque graphics, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we start talking about some other quite easy graphics that you can create for social media by taking some cool screenshots. So I'll see you there. 24. Easy Tweet (X Post) Graphics: So let's talk about how you can create really beautiful and simple graphics or screenshots that you take from other platforms. So girls that invest do this with their own tweets or posts like this, but you can also utilize content from other people. So that can be a really powerful part of your strategy like these guys do, where they take collections of tweets or poms from other people and then feature these with their own branding as part of the graphics on their Instagram profile. It can also be really lo fi. Like, it doesn't have to be this beautiful branded thing. Justin Welch does this on LinkedIn, where he takes a screenshot of something that he posted on X and then talks about it on LinkedIn. It's also a nice way to sort of cross promote your audience across the different platforms. And then I've taken this a step further by turning these into reels with just a quick little animated background and some music, which you can't hear at the moment. But effectively, it's just a nice way to kind of, yeah, bring these to life a little bit more. There are lots of different things that you can do with this, and for now, we're just going to look at how to make these inter nice simple graphics. But later on, we can take a look at the different skills that would require you to then turn that into an animated post, as well, if you'd like. So first, we're going to create our design in Canva. Let's just use our Instagram post dimensions as well because these would work really well on LinkedIn. They would work well on Facebook. I don't anywhere else. So I think these dimensions are relatively friendly, and we're going to be starting from scratch with this. But if you actually look for a keyword like tweet, it will come up with some premade designs for this already. So if you're thinking might potentially want to take a bit of a shortcut with this and don't really want to have to design it all, then this is a really nice way to start with something you already have. But again, for our purposes, we're just going to be starting with something blank, so I can just show you how we would go about creating this from scratch. So I'm going to be doing this one for my own brand. So I'm going to be using my brand color here. And then I need to bring in a rectangle, which again, I could do from within the elements tab within my shapes here or just hit R on my keyboard and bring this in. I won't know exactly what dimensions I need until I take a screenshot of my tweet and bring that in. But for now, let's just make that white. Again, you would make that black if your interface is dark and maybe that's part of your branding as well. And then I want to make my corners rounded. So this is an optional step, but I quite like that kind of rounded look. And then what we want to do is create a bit of a shadow underneath it to make this really pop. So in elements, I would put in shadow and then we want to be in the graphics section and we want to find one. I know these are a little bit tough to see at the moment, but we want to find one that's got a straight edge like this so that it will work really well underneath my post here. I would line that up just with the edges here and bring that like that. So that's looking pretty good. But I'll take this one step further and make that a slightly different color. So this is an entirely optional step, but it really bothers me that this creates black shadows on colored backgrounds, and my preference is to take this and go to edit. And in the effects panel, I would head to duo tone, and I would make this purple. So I would just make it a dark purple to match my sort of light purple here, and I would just copy this hex code by hitting Command C on my keyboard. Or Control C if you're on a PC and Command V here so that the highlights and shadows in this are the same sort of color, and then you can adjust the intensity as well. But that just makes it look a little bit more natural because if there was an actual shadow of an object on this background, it wouldn't be black. It would be a darker version of this color. So that's just me being a little bit of a perfectionist, but I do think it gives you a much more natural look. Now I think it's nice to add a bit of a texture to this. So I do use solid colors or I use my actual branded elements that I have directly from within my brand. So in my little icons here, I often use fun little squiggles that I had a designer make for me that are part of my brand. So I would just make that in the back, and then I can always right click and send this to back or use this keyboard shortcut to bring this back as well. So I'm going to be using these shortcuts a fair bit, but for now, we're just going to send that backward. Then I can change the color of this to match this graphic a little bit better. So I can go maybe a little bit. Let's go a little bit darker. Yes, I think that looks pretty good. Alternatively, of course, you can just add a bit of texture to it instead. I'm just going to hit Command D on my keyboard to duplicate this page, but always remember you can right click and duplicate here instead. Instead of using this kind of squiggle, let's call it a squiggle, what I can do is head to elements and look at texture. And I could either pull this in from the graphic section or the photo section, but I quite like the photos of versions of this. So it's just going to give me a little bit of a light texture to my background. So I'll rotate this around, bring it all the way back. And then, again, I'm just going to bring this to the back here, sent to back, and then adjust the transparency down so that it gives me just a tiny bit of a texture in the back there. So it's not a huge, huge difference. You can also instead of looking at texture, you can look at something like grain. So that's going to give you actually, let's swap that out. I think that's going to give us a little bit more of a grainy sort of background, so we can just right click, replace background, click on it again, and let's adjust the transparency down. Yeah, that's a little bit nicer. So we've got a bit of a textured post. We've got one that's got branded squiggles. And in terms of my brand, I could also add my watermark, which is this smaller version of my logo. And that's just something that people do either add in their logo, add in their Instagram handle or adding this little watermark, which is kind of a symbol for their brand. And I would probably just make that a bit darker. So it doesn't take away from the main point of the post, but it's just there to make my post nice and branded. Now that's all that's left to do is actually bring in our screenshot. So for this, we're going to head on over to our phone screen, and I'm going to head on over to X. Now, I have mine in light mode just because it works well for this purpose. But if dark mode is suitable for you, then make sure to switch yours to dark mode, and I'm going to go to girls that invest. And you always want to make sure you are actually tapping into the post that you're looking to screenshot because screenshotting as it is in its current format, it has the date. It has all the reactions. It's a bit messy. So I would just tap into this and then take my screenshot. And I would just crop that down to really only include the information that I want to be including. Now at this stage, I don't actually necessarily need to save this to my phone. I can actually just go and send this straight to my Macbook. So that's always an option. Otherwise, you can, of course, save it and use it within the Canva app as well. So we can do both. Let me just go ahead and save the two photos just so that I have it saved if I need it. But now because I was able to just airdrop this to myself through my phone, of course, it does depend on if you're on an Android, it might change things slightly, and you can work with the Canva app so easily for things like this. So you can always just adjust things within the Canva app instead of switching back to your desktop. But I'm able to just bring that image straight into my design, and I will just adjust things slightly. And you're going to have to do that every time because obviously every post is going to have either more or less texts on. And then if you want to make sure that everything is nice and centered, what I would do is I would just select the elements that you want to make sure are perfectly centered in your graphic. So you can do this by either clicking and dragging, but it's probably going to occasionally select elements that you don't want to select. For example, it might select my background element there. So instead, I can just click and hold down Shift and it's going to just select the elements that I want to select by again, holding shift and clicking, and then Canva is going to say, Do you want to group this? So now I can say, Yes, I want to group it. And now, if I try to align it by right clicking and going align to page. So I can see it's already in the center, but it's not in the middle of my graphic, it's going to align those elements all at the same time. So it was really slightly shift. Obviously, it was already pretty much in the middle. Let's just do that from here so I can really see it a little bit better. So now it's in the center, and now it's back in the middle. So if you weren't to group those elements and you were aligning things to a page, it would just get really, really messy. So it's nice to group elements together. You can always ungroup them afterwards once you've aligned things, but it can just be a really handy way to do that. So now you have your beautiful graphic, and again, we could just select our elements so they're not grouped together at this stage, but just by selecting them all, and I can command C so that I can just copy these across and then Command V to paste them across to this graphic and I already know it's beautiful in the center. So that's a really nice and easy way to create powerful graphics that you can now post across a few different platforms and also potentially share a little bit more information than you otherwise could in a graphic by adding all this text in a more dynamic way. Last thing I will say before we move on, though, is to always make sure you're crediting the original author whenever possible. So, of course, their handle is in the graphic itself, so it's a little bit murkier than it would normally be, but I always try to make sure that I'm crediting the original author. I'm finding them on the platform where I'm posting it, and I'm crediting them there as well. So that's a bit of a fun one, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we dive into Facebook banners. 25. Set Up Your Facebook Cover Design: So your Facebook cover is your opportunity to sort of tell the world a little bit about who you are, what you do, any offers that you might have. And in this lesson, we're going to focus on how you can do that in a way that's mobile optimized. Because, for example, when you look at my cover photo here, it looks pretty good. And then you can see that if I look at it on my phone, on my Facebook app, it still is nice and readable. But if we then switch over to the desktop version of seeing cover photos like this that have quite a lot of text on it, which is really nice. And if you actually click into it, it's a beautiful photo. But then if you look at it on a mobile screen, you can see that the text is blocked by the profile photo. The text is also slightly off to the side, so it just doesn't quite work, and that is the danger of using the built in cava dimensions that they provide for Facebook cover photos because they're actually not correct. They look good on desktop, but then they don't look good on mobile. And the truth is that most people are looking at your stuff on their phones, so you want to make sure that everything is mobile optimized. I will be giving you my own premade templates for this, but I just wanted to show you that within Canva, if you were to search for Facebook cover, it gives you the dimensions of 16 40 by 924. Problem is that these designs, much like with a lot of the other designs that we're going to be creating in this course, there's no thought given to the actual mobile optimization or optimization across devices in these designs. A lot of these creators are just thinking, I've created a really beautiful design, and it sort of stops there. And I would say that some of these might actually display fine across devices. Like this one in terms of actual placement, I would say is correct. Accessibility wise, I would say, probably not all that usable, but in terms of the actual layout, I would say that's probably going to display fine across devices, whereas something like this is definitely not going to be able to be seen on a phone screen. So I would still utilize this for your inspiration, but then when it's time to actually create, I would create a design with the dimensions of 1,200 by 674 pixels and click on Create a New Design. Let's get started by renaming this. So it's going to be our Facebook cover, and we're going to be doing this for a fictitious cafe. And the first thing I would do is bring in the template that I've provided you with. So I'm just going to bring up my folder where I keep all of these images stored. I would recommend that you do the same, so you create a folder within Canva where you have all of these so that you know when the time comes to design, you know that you can pull from that. And you always have two variations of each template, one with a lot of text on it. That looks very confusing, but I promise there's a reason for it. So I'm just going to right click and set the images background so we can see it a little bit better. But effectively, all this means is that with all of the templates I've provided you with, you want to make sure you're designing within the white area, which will mean that all of the elements that are in the white area are going to be seen across all the devices. The rest is basically just explaining that, on desktop, you'll see this white rectangle, and there will be nothing actually blocked because your profile photo is somewhere around here, so it's not actually going to be blocked which is why a lot of those designs do look really beautiful on desktops. But then on a phone, you're going to have this big profile photo in the way on an iPad. Likewise, it's going to be just here. And then also the actual dimensions of the cover photo are different for iPhones and for iPads. So if you're designing within this area, then you can be sure that it's going to be seen well across devices. And then I've given you some numbers to help you kind of just get your head around it. But I would bring in your blank image that I've also provided you with so that you don't have all the distracting texts and arrows in the way. And that way, you know, Okay, I'm designing within this wide area. Of course, you're going to create a cohesive design all the way across, but you want to make sure that any texts and critical elements, any calls to action or anything like that are just placed in here so that you know it's going to be visible across devices. So that's a bit of a crash course on how to set up your Facebook cover design, and in the next lesson, we'll actually start creating. So I'll see 26. Create Your Facebook Cover: So before we start designing in Cava, I did just create a little collection of images within splash that I think will go really well together. I'm not sure which ones I'm going to use quite yet, depending on how they sort of work within the layout, but I really like these because they're not just sort of related to a particular theme, but they also have similar editing styles, which makes it really easy because it means that you don't then have to go through and edit each photo to be warmer or cooler or more saturated or less saturated because that's when things get a little bit complicated. So I think these will work really well together. Going to head on over to my uploads folder, but you don't actually need to do this. You can just drag images onto your design, and it's going to automatically bring it into your uploads. Then I would select my images and make sure I'm organizing them, but for our purposes, I'm happy to just keep things a little bit disorganized for the time being, and I'm just going to select a couple of these images. So I know I want to talk about the coffee at this cafe. So I'm just going to maybe select three images that feature coffee. I'm not sure about this one. Actually, I think this one is going to work better for what I want. Here. Keep in mind, at the end, we're going to delete that template or we're going to make sure that it's not visible. So it doesn't necessarily if it's sort of bothering us at this stage, it doesn't hugely matter. And I would just make these a little bit more narrow so that I can make some more real estate. I can double click into this, so it adjusts the crop, so the coffee is nice and centered. You can bring this over here, and then with this one, I can make it a little bit more narrow. Oh, I didn't actually need to go that narrow. There you go. Okay, so I'm not sure how thick I'll keep the lines in between these photos, but I do like that sort of look. Obviously, that line is not going to be weird like that. It's not going to have that purple and white. If you want to make sure that you're designing it exactly as it should be, then you can always hit R on your keyboard and bring in a rectangle into the back there so that you can make sure that everything looks nice as you're designing. So I think I will probably use a black rectangle, and I'm going to use my keyboard shortcuts here by using Command and my left square bracket and again and again to bring this behind my photos. But as we talked about, you can always right click at any point and go to layer, send backward or send to back. Alternatively, you can also go to position, and you've also got that option there as well. Always 1 million ways to do something with kava. So that's looking pretty good. Obviously, we haven't placed any really crucial elements on top of anything yet. So I'm just tidying things up a little bit because there's kind of a glare on the edge of this photo, so I would just want to clean that up a little bit. So what I would probably do is just stretch this out. So that the photo is a little bit cleaner. And then I would move this around until I see those nice little pink lines that tell me that there's nine pixels in between that photo on either side, so I know it's perfectly in the middle. Because these photos are not necessarily the same dimensions, I didn't really need them to be, but it's good for them to be the same with a part in terms of the gap that's between them. So as we mentioned, this photo is a little bit too warm. Compared to these ones. So what I would do is I would go to edit and adjust. And now we can adjust the temperature slightly to bring it down just a little bit and bring it in line with the other ones. Same with contrast. I would say that this is a little bit muted here, and you will obviously get to know the edits here a little bit more. But when you play around with the Blacks, it'll allow you to go really high contrast or slightly more muted. So I'd say it's just a little bit muted, and that gives you a very similar look and feel to these photos. Alright, so now I'm going to bring in some text just so we can play around with the actual mobile optimization element. So I'm going to hit T on my keyboard, and let's say something like our coffee, your way or something like that. Let's say that's their cafe tagline. Now, obviously, we want to make sure that we're able to see this, and then we'll check the dimensions based on our template that's in the back there. So we'll do a couple of things to make this standout. I'm going to just make this white, and we're going to change the font. And let's just go by their little categories here. So let's just go for bold. And find something that would work pretty well for a cafe. I'd say that's probably a bit much. Yeah, I like that, actually. I can see that working for a coffee shop. That's quite quirky. Obviously, it depends on what their brand is. We're making it up as we go. Now at this stage, still not all that visible. So we would go to FX, and either you can use the lift function and adjust the intensity. That's one option. The second option is to go for the shadow and adjust the blur. Of course, we need this to be black not white, as it gives us a little bit of a lift in a very similar way that the previous function did, but potentially a little bit stronger because you can play around with how far away your blur is or if you want to have a blur at all, because you don't necessarily need to have it blurry. So it just gives you a little bit more depth. But I would say that's still not quite enough from an accessibility perspective. And of course, we can continue checking that with our accessibility checker. But first, I would go to elements, and I would look for shadow. And in this case, we're looking for something like a radial shadow like this. So that we can place that just behind and make it really nice and stand out. If you feel that it's still not enough, you can always Command C, Command V, and copy that across and then use Command and our square bracket just to move that behind to really help it stand out. I don't think we necessarily need two of them because we also have the shadow behind the text, and then we can do our little accessibility check and make sure that that contrast is enough. All right, so from a contrast perspective, we're good. And now we need to check it from a design perspective and see if things are in the right place. So what I would do is take all of our elements. And it hasn't really grabbed the black element there. So I would just hit Shift and click on that to make sure it's also grab that, and I'll adjust the transparency so we can see our little area there in the back so I can see, Alright, my text is in a spot where it will definitely be seen across devices. I could then grab the font and just make sure that it's in the center. It doesn't necessarily need to be in the middle, but definitely in the center of the graphic, I think would be good as long as that makes sense with where it's positioned on the photo. That looks pretty good. I could move it up or down or potentially adjust the text size, but I think for our purposes, that looks pretty good. So now what I can do is just select everything again and adjust the transparency back. Of course, you could at this point, delate the background. So what you can do is head on over to position at any time and go to layers. So now you can see all of the different beautiful things that are on your canvas, and you can see the image in the background there. You could delete it, but either way, it's not actually going to show up, regardless. When you export it, you'd need to unlock it first, and then we can delete it if we needed to. And then that means that the background is just white, and you could always change that over here. But again, because we've got so many elements on top of it, you wouldn't be able to see it regardless. So it sometimes is nice to just leave it there. So I'm actually just going to go back. So in case you ever want to adjust your design or you put this on Facebook and you realize, Oh, that actually doesn't really look all that good. I want to change it, then you can come back in here and play around with it some more. So now we're going to go on over to share, download. And I'll just download the first page as a PNG, and then we'll head on over to Facebook and create our Facebook page. 27. Optimise Your Facebook Cover: Good So on Facebook, I've just created a test page, and I've just popped a photo from Unsplash as a profile photo that is sort of cafe related just for our purposes. And then we can go to add a Cover Photo, and let's go upload a photo because for this one, we don't actually have anything yet, and we can bring in our cover photo. Now, on desktop, you'll be able to move things around a little bit, so you can see that it says drag or use your arrow keys to reposition the image. So on desktop, you can adjust it however you want. So only that area that we talked about will be visible, but you actually adjust where that appears. So especially because we've got this beautiful photo of the barista making the coffee and this coffee here, I would probably want to make sure that we can see as much of that as possible and just adjust it a little bit more. But I think that looks really, really good, and now I can have a look at it on our phone. So here it is on our Facebook page, and I would say, yes, it's visible, but actually, it doesn't look all that great because the phone is really small. So I think we're going to head on over to Canva and just adjust this a little bit. This is why it's handy to keep that template in the back there, so we can do all of this again. I'm just going to create a duplicate of it so we can sort of compare and contrast. We're going to make sure we're highlighting everything, adjusting that transparency. So I haven't quite grabbed that rectangle in the back there. I'm going to adjust my transparency again. And so we can see where that little white area is, and that's going to allow me to hot down shift, and that way, I can adjust the size of the font and make it really nice and big so that even on a phone screen, it's going to look really good. I can see my little pink lines there that are going to tell me that everything is nice and centered. I would say that the shadow there is skewing that a little bit. So I would actually grab my text and align that separately because, yeah, that wasn't quite in the center. I think this shadow is throwing things off just a touch. So we'll align that to the text instead. Let's see how that looks now. We can just grab a few things here, hold down shift and make sure we're bringing the transparency back again. Yeah, I think that looks much better. So I'm going to save that. I'm going to update it on our Facebook cover, and then we're going to have a look whether that's better on the mobile screen. So this is why we always want to make sure we test things. No matter how many times you do things, things just never quite work out the way you think they're gonna work out. And that is the true beauty of doing this because you just never know what you're gonna get, and that's okay. Alright, so that looks pretty good. I'm going to save that. And let's pop over to our phone screen and see how that looks over there. Yeah, that's much better. Obviously, on a phone screen, potentially, I would play around with the placement a little bit, so maybe that text is even further down. But I think that looks pretty good, much better than it did before. Obviously, nothing's obstructed. We can see our barista, we can see the coffee. So that looks quite lovely. With the profile photo, in this case, I would probably bring that into Canva and adjust the contrast on that as well to bring it in line with the other images so that it's nice and heavily contrasted. But of course, this is not a lesson in profile images. So in terms of our cover photo, I'm really happy with that, and I will see you in the next lesson. 28. Repurpose Your Design: So let's now briefly talk about how you would repurpose your design for other platforms. So let's say you've created a design you love your Facebook cover. It's so beautiful and you can't wait to share it with the world, and you want to create it for other platforms in exactly the same way. So Twitter Header dimensions are ones I actually agree with on Cava, but much like with the Facebook cover photos. Look, the designs are beautiful. Are they mobile optimized? Absolutely not. So don't pay too much attention to the things that are on them, but use them for inspiration regardless. There are two different ways for you to essentially repurpose your design. One, the first one I'll be showing you is easy enough for everyone and anyone to do, whether you're a Canva free user, Canva fro user. A Canva free user or Canva Pro user. Anyone can do it. And I will also show you a little bit of a shortcut if you're using Canva Pro now or in the future. So we've got a little Twitter header, so this is going to be our Twitter or next header for our cafe. And now we can essentially bring in the elements of our design. But first, I will bring in a template. So much like for our Canva one, we've got a Twitter one or a X one, depending on what you prefer. We're going to refer to it as both, I'm afraid. So this one is a little bit more confusing, and I'll show you why once we get onto our phone screen. But look, it's a lot. It's a lot. But effectively, you want to avoid putting anything into the darker areas. And then these lighter four circles essentially represent this sort of semi transparent icon that people will see on their phones. So they're not entirely obstructed, but they're still pretty obstructed. So you want to make sure you're trying to avoid them the best you can. So this is the blank version of this template, and we're going to be designing on top of it. So essentially, what we would do is we would come on over to our original design, highlight everything. You can also do this from within the Layers panel, by the way. So if you're ever not sure if you're actually highlighting everything, you can go on over to position, go to layers, and then that way, you can do it this way. So I can click the bottom layer, hit Shift, and then click basically all the layers just like you would in your desktop folder or if you're ever organizing things within downloads, that's the same way you would select things within layers, and then you would hit Command C, if you're on a Mac or Control C, if you're on a PC, and we will head on over to our design and paste it straight in. And now we can adjust everything. That was probably a little bit too big. There we go. We adjust things down. Obviously, we would have to play around with where our images are sitting to make sure everything looks good. We would want to make sure our beautiful Brista has enough real estate there, and our coffee is on full display. So that looks good. I wouldn't really bother changing the plants because we've got a bit of text there anyway. I would just make sure that those edges have the same gap on both sides. So we've got 11 pixels between both. That's pretty good. We may need to adjust our text size just like we did with our Facebook cover photo. We're not just quite sure so what I would do is I would just select everything again, like we did before and just adjust the transparency down. I haven't quite selected my background. Adjust our transparency down so I can play around with my text a little bit. So I would say the text is kind of on the edge there of being just obstructed by the top and just obstracted by that icon. So what I would probably do is I would make it a little bit smaller, and then I would just right click and make sure I'm aligning it to the center here. So that gives it a little bit more room to play with. Additionally, or alternatively, what I could do is just not have it centered at all, but just have it as large as I can make it without obstructing any of the elements. So if you're not too fast by the symmetry of the whole design, then this can be a really great way to do that because you can be pretty sure that nothing's going to be instructed if you do that. So, you know what? Let's just have a little bit of fun with it. Let's do it this way, just for kicks and see how that looks once we put it live on X. So I would potentially swap some of these images around in this case. Yeah, I will actually do that. Because I think I don't want our beautiful barista to be obstructed too much. So I'd probably pop her at the end and then pop our coffee down here and make sure that my gaps are the same. That looks pretty good. Yeah, I think that looks a little bit better. And then it gives her a little bit more real estate. I can adjust this. Little bit more. Yeah, I think that looks good. So I'm going to go ahead and save that, but I will show you how you can do this in a bit of a shorter, you know, shortcut way if you are a Canva pro user. So instead of doing the whole copy and paste thing, you can utilize the free resize feature here, and you could go with custom dimensions if the design you want to be making is something totally custom, or you can actually just look for, in this case, Twitter header. And then it's going to copy and resize your design for those dimensions. It does get a little bit out of whack. So I would say that sometimes the copy and paste feature is actually even better than the resize feature. I utilize both, even though I'm a Canva pro user just because I'll show you what it looks like once we now move this into the new dimensions. Everything is out of whack in terms of the actual sizing of everything and the dimensions and the proportions. So it means that you have to play around with things a little bit more in order to get them to where you want them to be. But effectively, you're doing the same thing in two different ways. So just so you know, that's a little bit of a shortcut there. Alright, so now I'm going to go a little bit rogue and actually do this live on my existing profile because even though I do actually have fake accounts, but I thought, you know what? I could be a cafe for 5 seconds, who cares? I have I don't know. The 60 followers on Twitter. Like, who cares? Anyways, that looks pretty good. Let's refresh that and see how that might look. Yeah, you know what? I don't actually mind that it's a little bit off to the center. It's a little bit quirky. It'll definitely look better on phones than it will on desktop. But you do want to sort of be largely catering to your phone audience because that's where most people are coming from. And, of course, you still want to make sure it looks good on desktop. So look, me being a perfectionist, I would say that the asymmetry of this would probably bother me. Long term, and I would probably stack the text. So what I would probably do is go our coffee your way, and then that way, it's all nice in the center rather than off to the side like this. And then that way it's still not obstructed. But anyways, just as an exercise, I think that looks pretty good. And now let's just have a look at how this looks on my phone screen, if I update. My banner. Right. So that looks really good on a phone screen. So it's sort of sacrificing the desktop view for the mobile view in this case. But again, I think I could stack it in the center photo on top of each other, and it would then look really good on both devices. Alright, I've just done a really quick redesign of it in this format, and I'll just adjust my profile photo just so we can have a look at this because honestly, I just think it's going to make my brain happy, even though I know this is not something that's going to be permanently on my profile, but I just need to know how it would look. So, yeah, I do think that the symmetry is the way to go, even though people are not really going to be looking at it on your desktop screen, but, yeah, that just makes me happy. And that does look really nice on the phone screen, as well. So I'm happy. Hopefully, you're happy, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we talk about YouTube channel banners. 29. Gather Your Brand Assets: In this lesson, I thought we would take a look at how you could approach your design work with a brand that already exists. This is a brilliant way to practice when you're first starting out because it can be really hard to come up with ideas of, like, I'm going to design for a plant cafe, and I'm going to design for a wedding photographer. It's nice to just look at existing brands and think, is there a bit of room for improvement? Is there somewhere where I can add some value and just recreate it for them. Whether you decide to share it with them or not is totally up to you, but sometimes that can be a really fun way to lend clients, to be honest, where you can I designed this just for fun and for me to test out my own skills, but I thought it might be nice to pass it on to you, PS, if you're ever looking for any design work, I'm available. So I used to do that a lot at the beginning, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's just a nice way to build your portfolio and just build up on your design skills. So this particular brand here in Brisbane has some really beautiful branding and lovely thumbnails, but their YouTube channel banner. Could be tweaked slightly, so I thought it would be a nice one for us to take a look at. So in this case, I would probably do a little bit of research on who their competitors are. So because they're mortgage brokers here in Brisbane, I will look at other mortgage brokers like Hunter Galloway here and other brands that I can draw inspiration from, maybe do a little bit of a mood board within Canva. But for us, I think I'm just going to actually use the designs from their website to allow us to kind of get some inspiration for what we want to design for their banner. So this is their beautiful website here. We can see some really lovely color combinations, lots of lovely photos. And then you can do a few things. You can take this website and you can put it into something like relevance AI, which is going to give you a little bit more information around their visual and brand identity. So if you're completely starting from scratch and you have no idea who this brand is and what they're all about and you don't want to have to go through the entire website to figure it out, this is a really good way. I know we're not talking in full AI mode at this stage, but if you're ever doing this, it's a nice way to kind of get to know the brand without having to go through the website. So we'll come back to that once it's loaded. But for now, let's head on over to Brand fetch. Brand fetch is brilliant when it comes to bigger brands, and actually they have an app plug in directly within Canva, where you can access logos and colors of bigger brands. It can be a little bit trickier for smaller brands like this one, but still be a good way of getting some logos and some colors and fonts, but it hasn't quite picked up on all of the different colors that I would want to look at from their website. So I'm going to do that manually with my eyedropper tool, but just so you know that you app can go through brand fetch, especially when it comes to bigger brands. Coming back to relevance AI, we can see that our brand tone is friendly, helpful, reassuring, it's warm, it's personal. We're helping Australians reach financial freedom through mortgage services. So this just gives us basically anything that they're pulling from the website, they're not coming up with anything revolutionary, but it summarizes it in a way that is very specific to who the brand is and what they're all about. So that's a really handy tool when you're looking to design for a client or you're designing for a project or what have you, and you just need a really quick summary of what it is that you're designing for. So now I'm just going to quickly pull some assets from directly within Google Images. I know I said never to pull from Google Images. And you know what? I stand by that. But when it comes to this particular thing, because obviously we're sort of either assuming that this is already a client of ours or we're assuming, you know, this is almost a personal project to build our portfolio, but we aren't actually going to be using this for our own commercial purposes or anything. So let's just kind of tweak the system a little bit here. Then in terms of our colors, I'm going to activate my eyedropper tool, and we're going to make sure we're picking all of the colors. So we want to be picking this beautiful green and let's pick a couple more just so we've got some options. Obviously, we want to make sure that these would be our actual brand colors, but assuming that, you know, they're presented on the website, so they probably are, I think that's pretty good. I will probably leave it there. They do obviously have this black, which is on their shirts, as it colors well. I wouldn't want to take a guess as to what exact hex code it is, but let's say for our purposes, we're just going to that's just pure black. Let's just say it's sort of a dark charcoal. Again, we want to make sure that we confirm that with somebody if this was for an actual client. But in this case, we're happy with that, and I'm just going to bring these hex codes into Canva. 30. YouTube Channel Banner: So within Canva, we want to look up the YouTube Bnner dimensions. And these are correct because YouTube actually wouldn't let you publish anything that's outside of these dimensions. But more than any other design, I can guarantee you that these would absolutely not work on YouTube because YouTube is probably the most strict out of all the platforms in terms of what actually shows up, especially on a phone screen. None of these actually work for anything. So definitely make sure to use my template because otherwise, nothing will be visible anywhere anywhere on YouTube. So we're just going to go ahead and use our SM templates and add in our super beautiful and super confusing template design here, which is very wordy because essentially, you have to have this entire design created, but largely it's for TV dimensions. Then you have this short strip, which is entirely for desktop, then this middle strip is going to be visible on tablets, and then this white bit is basically what's safe for all the different devices. So we want to make sure that any crucial information is in the white bit but also keeping in mind that a lot of people do use desktop interfaces for viewing YouTube. So I always make sure to leave almost like little pomegranates, little nuggets of wisdom or little kind of fun easter eggs on these side bits because that's something that's going to be visible on desktop, even though maybe this is all that's visible on mobile. I'm just going to duplicate this again, just in case we lose and I'm going to have one blank page that's just going to have my color palette. So I'm going to hit C on my keyboard and just bring in a couple of circles here. Oh, I don't need to be typing C inside of my circle. I think I only did four colors. So let me just check my color picker. I'm just going to start with this one here. I'm going to copy that. I'm just going to bring these hex codes in here. Alright, so, remember that the charcoal here is one I basically guest on, really. So we want to make sure we're arranging these in the order of dominance, I suppose. So obviously, this kind of color here on the left, this is locked for some reason. Let's unlock it is our most dominant color. Then I would say they're green, then this color here, and then our charcoal here. Did also have a nice light color as their banner here. So I'm not sure if that's a brand color, but I think that might work for our design. So I'm going to grab it anyways. And then we can hopefully utilize that one when we design as well. So let's bring that one in. I'm just going to copy and paste this or you can hold down Option on a MAC or Alt if you're on a PC, and that's actually just going to click and drag and duplicate whatever element you're holding, as well. So that's a nice little way of doing it. Yes, these have the letter Cs in them because I just held down the letter C, we're just going to ignore that. Essecially at this point, all we wanted to do is make sure that we have our document colors that are pulling in from this page here. Now we've got our first page here, and we can start designing, so I'm just going to go and bring some of the photos that we downloaded into our Cava library. So that we can start working with these. So I'm just going to detach my image from my background and change my background color to their brand color and then replace it again and just adjust the transparency down enough that I can see where that strip is. Alternatively, something you can do, which is really handy and something I use quite a lot is heading on over to file settings and show rulers and guides, or you can hit Shift R on your keyboard, and that brings up these beautiful rulers here, which allows you to actually bring down kind of guidelines so that you don't necessarily need to be working with the templates in the back there. It doesn't work perfectly. I mean, you can bring in vertical lines, so you could technically do it this way, as well. So you can pretty much get rid of this altogether, but it's still good at the end for you to be able to do a final check. I do love having guidelines, and at any point, if these are annoying you, you can just hit Shift R, and they'll disappear, Shift R again, and they'll come into place exactly as they were. These are not going to shop on your final design, so don't worry about that too much, but they are just really handy to have for you to design around. So, remember, I said, I like leaving these little nuggets of wisdom on the side, not nuggets of wisdom, little kind of design pomegranates, little easter eggs, just on the sides that are going to be visible on desktop. They are going to be slightly visible on tablets, so we are going to kind of blend that edge to not make that quite as harsh. But I do think that it's nice to still design the sides, even if they may be only display on desktop. So I'm going to just cut out a little bit of this and let's crop that to our lines. The other brilliant thing about having these lines in place is that when you're doing things like this, when you're moving things around or you're cropping things, your design automatically does it to the lines. So it just makes it so much easier to line things up, and I do love it. Alright, I'm going to bring in the logo, which is going to essentially disappear against the background. That's okay. We're going to figure that out. We're going to change the color on it. But I wanted to make sure that these images here are just a little bit softer. So we could bring in a rectangle like we have in the past and sort of make it a little bit more transparent with that nice gradient look, or we can look at an app called Image blender, which allows us to do something quite similar. So we're just going to open that and have a look at how that works. So we're going to select our image, but I'm just going to hit Shift R to get rid of these lines. Before we start blending. And then in terms of the strength, I don't want it to be too strong because I actually want quite a subtle blend there. I'm going to just move this around and let's have it be blending the edges. A tiny, tiny bit here. I think that looks quite nice. I'm going to save that, look at the strength, maybe blended a teeny tiny bit more. I think that looks pretty good. It just needs to make sure we don't have that really, really super, super hard edge. And now let's do that for our other image. And it's good to keep note of the strength that you're using as well for the blend. In this case, we were using a lot blend. So now these sort of seamlessly blend into my design. If I was going to adjust this transparency, I can sort of check where that appears. So there's going to be a portion of it that will be visible on tablets. Whether this matters to me or not, honestly, I don't tablets too too much. But let's say if it did matter to me, I would just move everything over a little bit so that or I would just adjust the blend to not appear on tablets. But in this case, I'm not too fast. It's the tiniest, tiniest bit. I think it's okay. As long as everything looks good on the other devices, I'm pretty happy. Alright, so I've prepared a little bit of text here. I don't have their actual brand font, to be honest, because it is quite a custom font. So I've just used my Montserrat font, which is quite a bold font and have just gone with a bit of a black and a bit of a white there. And then we want to do something about this logo. Obviously, it's disappeared on us. There is an app that traces it and makes it into a vector, but you can also just use duotone for this. As long as it's a transparent image like this one is, I can basically say, make all the highlights white and make all the shadows white, and it's essentially just going to change that into a white logo, which is brilliant. And I absolutely love using that feature. And I would just add some extra elements to this. So I'm just going to hit C on my keyboard and maybe add in a couple of circles because that's what they had on their website. And let's look at the colors that are available to us. So we've got this sort of light color or we have got this beautiful color. I actually really like this one. I think it stands out really nicely. So let's go ahead and use that one instead, and I'm just going to hold down option so that I can bring this over here as well and hold down option again, and it's going to duplicate that for me. Again, you would be holding down Alt if you're on a PC, or you can just use copy and paste. That's totally fine. I do actually really like designing the rest of the graphic as well, even though, yes, it's probably not going to be visible to most people, but I don't know. It's just something in me feels happy when everything is complete. All right, so we're almost done. That's looking pretty good. Maybe I would just add in a couple of extra little elements. Again, we don't really know what this is going to look like until we put it on YouTube, so there's a chance that we might need to adjust things further. But the last thing I would maybe do is just really highlight this call to action. So one of Australia's most awarded mortgage brokers thing, that's something I got off their website, and same with their get your free property valuation today. So if we go to their website and you scroll down, you'll notice it says that they're one of Australia's most awarded brokers, and they've got free property valuation. Those are the things that I would point out on their banner, and then I'm going to hit R on my keyboard and just bring in a bit of a rectangle to potentially just bring attention to the fact that you can get a free property valuation because it does kind of blend into the rest of it, and I want to make sure that this really stands out as our clear call to action. So obviously, it's not going to be this color. It's going to be a charcoal, and I would probably just adjust the edges a tiny bit because I think their brand suits that kind of organic shape look a little bit better, and I'm quite happy with that. So I'm just going to go ahead and download that and we can have a look at it on our desktop and mobile, but I'm going to adjust the transparency here just to check that everything is where it should be. So I would say, actually, this is not quite in the center of this. It's almost there. It's trying to adjust it to the other elements. I'd say it's around there. But I'm just going to group this, and I'm going to align it to the middle of my page. Yeah, there we go. So now it's in the center. I can bring down my logo a little bit. Perfect. So I'm going to adjust the transparency, and we can download this as a PNG and upload it to YouTube. I have my dummy channel here, and if I go to customize the channel on the back end, it's going to give me some guidelines, and I can upload my beautiful banner here. It's going to tell me what part is viewable on desktop and then what part is viewable on all devices, and then what's viewable on TV. It's a little bit late for that if you've created a not so great design, but that's totally fine. I'm going to pop their logo in just so it feels complete and then we'll publish it and take a look. So that looks really nice. Obviously, I would change the name at the moment. This is just my dummy channel with nothing on it. I think the circles look pretty good. I would actually adjust things a little bit. I would maybe move one over here just for a little bit of symmetry, possibly move this down a tiny bit or make that logo smaller. I would play around with a few things, but I think it's looking really nice. And then if we look at it on our phone screen, it does obviously look very empty because we don't have any videos here, but I think that looks really nice. It's all nice and branded. That is also not their actual logo on their channel. It's a profile photo, so that wouldn't necessarily clash at the moment. It looks like it's a little bit too much blue. I just wanted to sort of put something there for consistency, but I know that their actual channel would work really nicely with the profile photo that they it's all about channel batters, and I'll see you in the next lesson when we talk about thumbnails. 31. Clickable YouTube Thumbnails: So, when it comes to YouTube thumbnails, there are so many different options, but more and more people are going down the path of somewhat more natural looking thumbnails. For my own personal brand, I used to use these kind of cut out thumbnails a fair bit, and I would say that they work pretty well. I have some videos that have, you know, 44 50,000 views that use this exact structure. Wouldn't go directly off of views, though. I definitely look at click through rates because that is where you can really determine whether your thumbnail is actually attracting the right people and it's getting them to click through. So even though I have some videos that I've published more recently that are a bit more natural looking and they don't have as many views, the click through rates are often much higher, which is how I sort of know that the landscape of YouTube in certain industries is definitely shifting to a much more natural but it's always good to test. So you can AB test or split test on YouTube. If that's a little bit too jargony for you, I've provided some resources around this in your course guide, but effectively, what you can do is you can design various types of thumbnails for your video and run a test where YouTube is going to show the same thumbnail to the same number of people and basically determine a winner in terms of the best click through right for your thumbnail, and then that's going to be your thumbnail moving forward. So there's nothing wrong with just kind of identifying a few different thumbnail styles, especially if you're just starting out, and testing out what works because you often just have no idea. And if you're only creating one thumbnail for each video, you don't really know if it's the best performing thumbnail because you're not testing out a few different designs. But the brilliant thing with thumbnails is you don't have to worry too much about mobile optimization because your thumbnails will generally appear relatively the same on desktop and on mobile. The timestamps in the bottom right hand corner will be slightly larger on mobile, so you de want to place any text in the left hand side, and then any images of you on the right hand side, just for this reason so that everything is nice and readable. And you also want to kind of limit the amount of text that's in your thumbnails and make sure that it is unique from the actual title. Because if you're just repeating the title in your thumbnail, it's a little bit of a waste of real estate because then you're giving the same information to people twice. So you want to kind of go for something that's a little bit more intriguing. I do have some videos where I do kind of do sort of the same thing in my thumbnails. That's just because these are kind of my staple videos. But I would say for 80, 90% of your videos, you want to make sure that what's on your thumbnail is very different from what's in your title or potentially have thumbnails that have no text on them at all. That's also an option. So if I was you, I would definitely get started by just looking at some thumbnails that are out there, and gathering some information like we do for every other kind of design. But then when you're ready to create within Canva, these dimensions are actually perfect for what we need. And I'm going to be creating this one from scratch, but Canva do have some really great options here, much like with every other type of design. I would just really recommend going for a consistent look and feel. So don't sort of pick a brand new template every single time. Yes, it's definitely good to test out a few variations of your thumbnail. But you do want to have that nice consistency across YouTube, like you do on every other platform so that people know that it's you coming across their feed for your regular subscribers. I'm just going to upload a photo of myself or bring in this photo of myself, and we're going to be using a pro feature, which is the background remover to sort of cut me out of this photo. Is a Canva Pro feature. In the next lesson, I'm going to be giving you a free tool that does this for you in case you're on Canvas free plan and you don't have access to this. It's completely fine. So there are ways around this, but I do utilize this a heck of a lot within Canvas, so it can be really handy for you to have access to this. Once you're in Canvas background remover, look, isn't perfect. So occasionally, it'll kind of miss things like my glasses here if I were to zoom in, you can see that it kind of missed a little bit here, so we can always erase more or restore some of the original image here, and I can bring down my brush size, and I could very painstakingly try and get that little bit back and maybe a little bit over here. I would say that that's a little bit difficult, but in this case, I would actually just go back and erase the bits around it here. And we're looking at this in a very difficult way because we're kind of going pixel by pixel, but keeping in mind that it's not actually going to be all that visible. So I'm quite happy with that for the time being, and I'm just going to exit out of it, and it's going to update that for me. So now I'm just going to edit my image. But first, I want to bring in some background images. So what I'm going to be working with for this particular thumbnail is it's going to be a video for a plant management channel or a gardening channel. It's gonna be essentially for an audience that's all about plants. So we want to bring in some beautiful plant elements in the back. So I'm just going to go ahead and search for something like I've got a few of these search terms in here already. So I think I came up with Boho indoor plants Room or cozy. These are just random words that I've stringed together. And it came out with some really lovely photos that we can utilize for this purpose. So I quite like this one here, that was quite cool. And then I really like this one, as well. So they're quite warm. You know, they have those nice terracotta pots in the back there. And they are square, so they're not going to take up the entire thumbnail. I'm actually just going to kind of piece these together. And have them behind me. But we're going to look at how to sort of bring it all together. So I will bring these to the back. So again, I can do it within the layers panel here. I can use it by using the arranged panels, but within the layers panel, I can also just bring myself to the foreground here. And obviously, my photo is totally different in terms of editing style than the background photos. But I don't mind that at the moment. So what I would do with these is I would just edit them slightly to give them a bit of a blurry sort of background to separate it from the foreground. So I can use this blur option in the effects panel. And instead of blurring out just part of the image, I can go blur the whole image, and let's bring the intensity to, maybe let's go nine. And then let's do the same thing on this side here. So we're just going to bring it to edit and blur. And remember, it was at nine. So we want to make sure that that's nice and consistent. It's really, really slight, but it just means that I am going to end up looking much, much crisper kind of in relation to the background. Much nicer than my original background. If you'll remember, this was the original background. It's a little bit boring, a little bit plain. So it doesn't mean that this is what's going to be in my video, but it does reflect that being the theme of my video. So we can tweak things a little bit like that, and now I'm going to go to Edit. And this is the point at which you kind of need a little bit of practice to figure out how to edit things in a way that makes it consistent with the other images around it. So, for example, I can see the background images are quite nice and warm. The brightness is really nice. It's got quite a lot of contrast there. So I could play around with it here, or alternatively, I can use some of the filters that Canva provides for me. So I know for me the fresco filter is one that I use quite a lot. It does mean that I'm really heavily saturated at this point, so I would probably tone that down a little bit and then use my adjustments after that point. To then just play around with things a little bit and bring it in line with the rest of the image. So I would bring up my warmth. I would probably leave the highlights as they are. I think the vibrance is what's throwing it off a tiny bit. But that's looking pretty good. And I would probably just yeah play around with a few things here to make sure that it looks really good with the image, but that's behind it. So that's already looking really nice and consistent. And then, of course, it's completely optional for you. If you want to add some text for me, I would add some text. So again, I can go to Text and Textbox or hit T on my keyboard. And then I would say something like you can't kill these, which is very sort of attention grabbing. I would maybe be making a video about some plants that are really low maintenance for people to have in their house. So I'm gonna be using a font that's really fun over here, and this font in particular, works best in all caps. So I would just go to Appercase here and use that, and I'll just bring down my line spacing a little bit here. This is quite hard to read at this stage, so we are going to use a few of the tricks we have up our sleeve in order to bring this to life and improve the contrast here. So remember, we've got the Effects panel where we can do a little bit of a lift and bring up the intensity. So that's already looking good. But yes, I would bring in those gradient rectangles as well. So I'm just going to hit R on my keyboard, and we're going to make this a nice gradient. So we're just going to have this as black and gradients. So this is something that I utilize a fair bit. So you would have seen me do it in previous lessons, so that's why I'm going through it quite quickly. But then what I would do is I would actually put this on a bit of an angle so that it's kind of just off to the side. And it just gives me a little bit of a sort of nice shadow there. That makes it a little bit more interesting. Yeah, I just really like that, but you need to make sure that the corners of your rectangle are all the way to the edges so you don't get that sharp line. That you do otherwise. That looks good, and of course, I would need to bring myself into the foreground. So I'm just using my keyboard shortcuts here by doing command and the right square bracket or the left square bracket to bring myself back and forth. Now, I would probably even this out and go Command C and Command V, and do this on the other side as well, just so it's nice and consistent. I think that looks pretty good, and I can just bring that down. Transparency, I can adjust a little bit, so it's not quite as intense as it is here on the right. So you just need to play around with it a little bit. But I think that's already looking good. This font is quite bold. It's captivating, and it's on the left hand side so that the timestamp fits really neatly in the bottom right hand corner. But now we want to make this a little bit more interesting because what am I talking about? You can't kill these. I'm obviously talking about these plants. So what I would do is go into elements and put in an arrow. So I would go to graphics and maybe go with this one, which looks almost hand drawn, I suppose. And I would just twist that a little bit. So now people know I'm talking about the plants here, and then you can utilize the draw function if you're feeling extra fancy. And you can actually just hand draw some elements directly on the page. So I'm just going to be using the function here and changing that to white, and I could change the actual weight. Let's see how big this is. Oh, way too small. Okay. So we want to go and that looks a bit too what? So somewhere in between. So now what I can do is maybe do a little underline here. No, that is messy. Hang on. Let me try again. Woohoo. That looks cool. And then I can draw some little handwritten elements around here or hand drawn elements, maybe over here. I would say that's probably a little bit too thick, so I would probably change that down in terms of the weight and just make some really slight elements here to make myself pop. Maybe one over here. Again, it's just a few different things you can do to bring a bit of dimension to your thumbnails. Then I can exit out of this. I can move my arrow down a little bit, and I'll say that this is now a little bit too close to my face. I can now grab this as an element and actually just tidy that up for myself a little bit, which is really, really cool as a function. That's already looking really good. And I would just go to share and download. And I'll download that as a PNG, and we're just going to put this through a sort of a check so that you can see what a thumbnail like this would look like on different platforms. And we're going to drop this into this tool over here so we can see how that thumbnail would look on the homepage in a small version. I don't have a title for it yet in the sidebar over here. So you can see how it'll look in various placements and just make sure that you can still read the text. It still looks really nice and dynamic, and I'm really quite happy with how that's turned out. So that's all about how to make some really lovely natural looking thumbnails, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we're just going to quickly go over a free background remover option if you're on the CAFA freak plan. 32. Free Background Remover Options: So let's talk about what happens if you can't use the background remover function because you're not on a Canva Pro plan or if you can't use the transparent export function. So if you can't use background remover, then you likely wouldn't have an image like this one. But let's say you've got an arrow here or an image like this one that requires a transparent background, and you want to export that for your website or an email newsletter, and you want to head to share, download and PNG with a transparent background. So you essentially are just exporting the arrow or just the little cut out of me. You can't do that unless you're Canva Pro user. So for those reasons and a few others that we'll talk about, these tools can be really handy. So we've got remove dot BG, which didn't used to be as good as it is now. I think it's improved a fair bit since the last time I was using it. We're just going to import the same image that we've already worked with. So it will remove your background, and it will allow you the same functionality as the Canva background remover feature where you can kind of tidy things up a little bit because it might make some mistakes. And then you can export it as a low resolution image, or you can sign up for free and download it as an HD image. So it's pretty good, and it's a little bit blurry because this is just a preview, but we can go ahead and erase, just a couple of things that I think it sort of made a mistake on over here. Maybe my hair up here, I would probably tidy that up a little bit, and then potentially just restore the little bit of hair here that I think it's taken away and it maybe shouldn't have. Or it's probably because it was a wall behind me. So it's trying to kind of cut that out, but I think that's going to make it look a little bit unnatural. So I would just put that yeah, so I'm quite happy with how that's working. I would remove that. And then we could just download that as actually has done a better job on my glasses than the Cava remover. So it can be really handy for that. I will just download it as a low resolution image because I'm not signed in at the moment. And this is how that then looks, and we could import that into Canva and continue working with. Other tool I really like is Pixeler Editor. So you would just open an image. I've already got mine open, and then it kind of has the same vibe, same feel as Photoshop, if you've ever been inside a Photoshop, and it has some more advanced functionality beyond just removing backgrounds. So within the cutout and mask option, you have the AI auto option, which will remove your background, same as the other tools, and it will allow you to tidy it up actually in a much better way than what the other tools have done, including Canva, this might change in the future, but at this stage, Canva doesn't allow you to change the softness of your brush, which means you're always getting really hard cuts like this. And that's not always appropriate. So I love the fact that you're able to do really soft erases and soft blends. You're able to really purposefully change the size of your brush as well. You can do so many little things in here, and then it will give you this nice soft blend. And, of course, similarly to Canva, you can add to your mask and remove from your mask. So if you've made a mistake, you can just add it all back in, not being very detail oriented about this. This is just for us to see how this tool works. And then you also have this hint removed function so you can see what you've already removed. You do also have a gradient mask. You can do this within Canva with the Canva apps, but you can't then export with a transparent background. So that is a little bit of a tricky thing. So within Pixeler, you can basically, in this case, we're adding to our mask, so I'm just going to remove that. We need to be removing from our mask, and now we can do our gradient mask and then basically just draw a line up and probably draw a line down. There we go. So it's going to remove this bottom, and it's going to give me this nice soft edge. And then you would just head on over to File, Export and then a quick Export image as PNG because we only have one layer. And then the other thing I wanted to also mention, we're going to use this image for demo purposes is that you can also do a few other things here that are similar to what you can do within Canva, but only if you're a Canva pro user. So you can do a little spot heel. This is a really big logo. It's much easier to do this with much smaller objects. Let's say I want to remove my earring, that's much, much easier. But let's just see how it does with a big logo like this. If we just brush over it, eventually, if you keep pressing, it will remove that and blend it into the rest of the image. So this is something that is available within Canva, but again, it's a pro feature. So if you want to use something like Pixeler for this, it can be a really nice way to easily get rid of a few things, you would have to probably spend a little bit of time making sure you're finesse. But if we're looking at something, like I said, if we are looking at something quite little, if I just zoom in, let me zoom in this way. Big wig version of my ear. Okay. I need a smaller brush, and let's say, I just want to get rid of my earring. It's much easier to do that, or if I'm just getting rid of a couple of beauty marks, it makes it much easier to do that. Bigger logos are obviously always going to be much, much harder, but you can utilize a few different advanced functions within Pixeler as well. Of course, you are limited to the amount of images you're able to do per day on the free plan. But generally, it's something that I use sparingly, so you don't always have to be in Pixeler. Just know that it exists if you really want to do some more advanced tactics, and something like remove dot BG is just not enough for. That's how I would remove backgrounds from my images if I was a Canva free user, but definitely feel free to explore, especially Pix even if you're a Canva pro user, and I will see you in the next lesson. 33. LinkedIn Profile Banner: Within Canva, you have a few different options in terms of the dimensions of LinkedIn banners. So you'll see these taller ones and then these kind of shorter ones. We want to be looking at the shorter templates or just putting in the custom dimensions of 15 84 by 396. So you can always just start from scratch, as we will be doing anyways, but I'm just going to go to customize this template so we can get the dimensions right, and I'm just going to go to add a new page and move that up. So I'm just going to get started by kind of creating our design and then we'll bring in our template so that we can make sure everything is nice and optimized. So these are just a couple of circle elements that I thought I'd bring in just so that we can streamline and speed things up a little bit so you don't have to watch me do the same thing over and over again. But I think with this purple, I think a nice orangy tone would go quite well with that. So I think that looks pretty good so far. We might have to move things around a tiny bit, but now we want to bring in our template. And as soon as you open a folder or an app or anything else, you'll notice that it starts adding it to your left hand side bar, so you can always exit out of that if you don't want to be using that in the future. But it just makes it really nice and easy for you to quickly access the things that you use a lot. So I've already got my social media templates in here because I've used them for previous lessons, and then I can just use the blank version of our template here. It is a bit confusing because the area we don't want to be designing in is the same color as these images that I've chosen, but that's okay. We'll make it work. So we're going to replace that background, and really the only area I don't want to be designing in is this big circle here. So I'm just going to adjust my transparency all the way down and we'll just adjust it back up at the end. Alright, so I'm going to hit T on my keyboard, and I'm going to write, Let's make this your best year. Yet, because this is going to be a demo LinkedIn profile banner, for a business coach for Black female entrepreneurs. So we're switching from a more male dominated industry like mortgages and finance, and we're going to go to something a little bit more nice and feminine with a nice feminine font. So I really like this one, which is the archetype Byer type, which is, yeah, it's quite minimalistic. It's quite thin. I really like the gentle look and feel of it. But because it is quite thin and gentle, you want to make sure that it's large enough to be seen on a phone screen when this is placed as your banner. So it might mean that you have to adjust things a tiny but for now, I think that that's big enough, and I'll just check it before we really finalize everything. Alright, so now I'm going to bring in some images. I have dragged these over from Pexels, so I made a little collection within pexels, and I'm just going to bring these in. I am going to be using my background remover Pro feature, but you know how to do it if you needed to do it as a Canva free user now, but I am also going to give you a little bit of a workaround if you don't want to be using free tools to remove your background. So in the elements section, if we go all the way down here, we've got this frames tab, and that is such a beautiful way to get your photos to become different shapes without you having to really manipulate them. So you've got sort of basic shapes and then you've got really quiet advanced shapes down here. And you'll notice that basically anything that has this kind of green hills, blue sky, this cloud, it just means that this is an opportunity for you to drop any image into this frame, and it's going to snap into that shape. So I'll show you what I mean. If I take this image, I place it on top of my frame, you'll notice it's already snapping into place. And then I can adjust it by double clicking into it and moving things around to the point that I think, yeah, that's pretty much where I want it to be. So obviously, I've placed this sort of outside of the frame because I'm going to be using a slightly different sort of pop out feature. But if you didn't have the background remover option, then you can also just use frames and not really worry about going the step beyond that we're also going to do in this lesson. Alright, so I'm going to have another frame here. Just going to copy and paste my image over and snap that one into place as well. Alright, so I'm going to copy this as well. And now I can right click and detach this image because I forgot to copy this one over before using the background remover, and now I'm going to remove the background from all of my images so we can play around with them a little. Alright, the one in the right hand corner here, I'm going to leave because this is essentially going to be my business coach. So this is the person whose linked in profile this banner would be getting created for. So I really like that she's already kind of naturally looking at the text here. So I'm going to leave that there. And with these, what we can do is we can kind of manipulate it so it looks like they're popping out of that circle. What I want to do is I want to adjust the transparency of this image down just a tiny bit so I can see what's underneath it. And then the unfortunate thing is that as you're playing around with this, you'll notice that the image will naturally be trying to snap into place. So to overcome this, you can hit Command on your keyboard as you're dragging things around, and this will allow you to place elements on top of each other without them trying to snap into place. So that is quite a handy little trick because otherwise, it can be quite a tricky thing to line everything up without it trying to go a bit rogue. Alright, so that's pretty close. I'm just going to zoom in and maybe use the arrow keys on my keyboard just to shift things down a tiny bit. And now I can bring my transparency all the way up and then kind of use my cropping features here just to get the part of the image that I want to have popping out. So it's pretty good. It's almost there. It's a tiny, tiny glitch, so I might need to go down a teeny, tiny bit. I think it was actually good the way it was up, but we might just need to make it a teeny, tiny bit larger. That's pretty good. There we go. So it does take a little bit of finssing until you get to a point where everything is nice and aligned. But the end result then is that you have this nice pop out feature. So I'm going to do the same thing with my second image, and then we'll continue designing. Alright, so that's looking pretty good. Now what I would want to do is either highlight these and group them, or I can just hold each of them down and hit shift and then do the same thing. So I would just bring this to the edge here and make it a slightly bit smaller. And I think with this one, I'll bring it to the bottom here. And I think maybe overlapping with this circle. I think that's looking good. And now I would maybe just want to highlight the most important part of this text. I'm going to hit R on my keyboard and just bring in a bit of a rectangle element and place this behind the most important part of my text here. That's looking pretty good. And go down. Now I'm going to just hit my command and the left square bracket so that I can bring this just behind my text here. And I'm going to adjust the corner rounding so that it fits in with this round shape theme and then adjust my color. And now, obviously, this black text doesn't quite work in terms of accessibility, so I would just adjust that to our background color. I think that's looking really good. So I'm not quite sure where things are placed, so I'm just going to adjust my transparency of my background. Alright, so my text is just on the borderline of where I'd want it to be, so I'd probably bring it up a teeny, tiny bit just so that it's not quite in danger of overlapping with my profile photo. And otherwise, I think that looks really good. I would also want to make sure that this image here is not going to be competing with my profile image here. And I think there's a little bit of an error that I can see there's a little bit more of the cutout, so I'm just going to ungroup, and now I just need to adjust this so that the crop removes that tiny bit of an edge there. That looks better. Okay, cool. So I quite like that. I'm going to adjust my transparency again so that we can export this and have a look at how it'll appear on our desktop version and the mobile version as well. So on desktop, we're just going to go to adjust our background photo and we'll change the photo. As a reminder, this is only going to be live for a little bit, so it's not super dramatic. We just want to see how that might look. And that looks pretty good. So this circle element is popping out a little bit. I'd say that this is overlapping with my profile photo a tiny bit, so I would maybe even make that a little bit smaller, but I don't actually mind that too too much for the time being, and I think the rest of it looks really quite nice on desktop. And in terms of mobile view, I think this works really well. I think the text is not too small. And obviously the pencil icon that's in the right hand corner image, it wouldn't be there. I'm just logged in at the moment. That's why I can see that. No one else could see that. So I think this works really well, and I think the colors play together really well. So that's a little bit about how you can give things a little bit more of dimension, even if they're two dimensional images. So hopefully you enjoy that one, and I'll see you in the next lesson when we start to talk about carousels. 34. Set Up Your Carousels: So when it comes to carousels, you have some different options. You have the option to create a carousel that just kind of it still has a good flow, but everything in terms of the background and the colors and everything is individual to each slide in your carousel. Or then you have the option to create this kind of continuous flow of information where the images are interconnected, and you might even have some overlapping elements that kind of give you this nice, cohesive look where it just feels like it's all part of one big story. So, for example, these two images have different backgrounds and different elements, but this image of me on the bottom there is the nice little overlapping element, which makes it feel nice and cohesive. So I really like this style, so that is the style I'm going to be teaching you in this lesson. But we'll take a look at how you can do both within Canva. So within Canva, if you look for carousels, you'll know it's a carousel because it will have a page one of four, one of eight, one of six. So that means there are several pages within that design for you to look through. Some of these will almost actually have that overlapping look and feel to them. The problem is that if you adjust anything in these designs, even the tiniest bit, it's really going to throw things off. So if you're going to use the carousel designs, I would go with some that are maybe like this where each individual image is its own thing. There's no sort of need or desire to overlap elements. I think these kind of templates are really quite tricky because yes, if you keep everything in its place, there's a good chance that the designer who created it has put a lot of thought and effort into making sure that elements line up really well when someone's swiping through. So, for example, the tail end of this arrow will match perfectly with the front end of this one. Same with this wave will match perfectly with this wave. But as soon as you start messing around with anything in here, it all of a sudden is no longer in perfect alignment, which makes it really tricky, which is exactly why we're going to be doing this in a little bit of a different way. So what we're going to be doing is creating a custom design with custom dimensions. At the height of 13 50, and the width is really dependent on how many actual individual images or tiles are within your carousel. So this is good to figure out before you start designing. Of course, you can adjust afterwards. It's just a little bit more tricky, so it's easier if you already know I'm going to have six graphics or ten graphics or what have you. So for me, I'm going to go with six, and the actual width of each individual graphic is 1080 because one Instagram post that's vertical is 1080 by 13 50. So what we want to do is take that 1080 and multiply that by the amount of images we want to have in our carousel. So in my case, that's 1080 by six, so it's 6,480 is my actual width of my design. And at this point, it could be really tricky to figure out how to actually design things. So there is a way around this. We would go to file and go to settings and add guides. So now we can go to custom and basically say, we want six columns with no gap because we don't need that and add these guides in, and that's going to tell us where each individual image is going to be. So we can design this for our first image, this for our second image. But we can have this nice, cohesive look across. So if we have any elements that overlap at these edges or these borders, we know exactly that they're going to match perfectly. It also means that if we were to not saying you're going to do this, but let's say if your background is a gradient instead of a solid color like it would be here, it means that it will export perfectly and it will perfectly go towards that darker shade. As opposed to you trying to line things up and see if it might or might not work if each of these was an individual page, like in the previous example. So for now, I'm just going to adjust this color to a kind of a light orange. We'll see. We'll play around with this a little bit. But I'm going to be designing this carousel for an online plant retailer. So it would kind of be an informational carousel about the types of plants that are easiest to care for. And the inspiration for today's design comes from a student who actually submitted this exact design for her course project for this particular Canva course in a previous version of the course. So I'm really grateful that she gave us the permission to look at her beautiful design and use it as inspiration for what we're creating today. So I'm just going to make this carousel. Plant, demo. And before we start adding things in, one thing that is a little bit tricky with these designs, and there is a workaround to this, which is that if we hit T on our keyboard and we've got a little bit of text, it makes it really hard for us to actually get these nice, beautiful lines in that tell us. Okay, so we know exactly where the middle of our graphic is, but we don't know where the center is here because it doesn't recognize this as an element. It just has the guides in, but it doesn't know that you're trying to design perfectly in the center of this graphic or this graphic. So for that reason, what I like to do is hit R on my keyboard and just bring in a rectangle for each tile within my carousel. It doesn't actually matter what color it is. We're just going to make it completely transparent here. But this will allow me to I'm just going to remove my text. This will allow me to basically place things on top of it and align them really nicely. So I'm just going to copy actually no, I'm going to hold down option, that'll make it much easier, and then we can quickly do this for all six tiles so that we just have that there as a guide for us. So I'm just going to highlight all of these and lock them in place. So now if I hit T and bring in a bit of text again, you'll see that I can move this within this particular image, and it's snapping it into place in the middle of that transparent rectangum. Alright, so now that we've set up our design and our template, we can now move into actually creating our carousel in the next lesson. 35. Design Captivating Carousels: And now we can start designing. So I'm going to say something like these will be the four plants. You won't kill, maybe with an asterisk because I am not the best at caring for plants, but I know the plants that I'm gonna demo in this carousel, and from personal experience, I can say, you know, I've done a good job of keeping these guys alive. So I'll say something like, unless, of course, you move to a new house, and that's a spell House and forget to take. I am with you. Alright. That's something I would write in a carousel if I was selling plants, and I just left align everything so I can align things nice and clearly. I'm not a huge fan of center aligning things in carousels. I think it makes paragraph fonts, especially really hard to read. So I'm a big fan of left aligning whenever possible, as long as it doesn't kind of kill your design. In terms of the fonts, I would choose a really thick font for my top, just so that it really stands out as a heading font. And then I would pair this with a really nice, subtle script font. And this is when the sort of opposites attract. Thing comes into play sometimes when you think this is not a likely duo that would work well together, but somehow it just does, and I really like the look of these two together. So I'm going to choose these. I've adjusted the line spacing a tiny bit, and in terms of color, I'm going to be placing a lot of really bright colors in this design. So I don't want to be going with a completely black text. I would go with almost a slight kind of an earthy, I guess I'm going for almost like a terracottai kind of color, a little bit darker than that, but I would maybe just go for an even darker version of this. All right. So I think that's shaping up to look pretty good, and now we just have to start placing some plant elements. So it does depend on whether you're Canva free or pro user as to whether you're able to maybe utilize the cutout function here. Or actually use any photos and use the background remover to get the look that you want. So I really like a lot of these guys that are part of these kind of bohe interior shots. So for that reason, I would probably just gather a couple of photos and then use background remover to bring these to life. But you can, of course, also bring elements in from elsewhere. So if you've got something that you really like on something like Unsplash, you can bring that in, of course. So totally, totally up to you. And then you can also use elements like rugs or tapestries or anything like that that really help to bring this to life even more. So I quite like the look and feel of this. And that's something that we can use to kind of overlap with this next graphic. I would just use my command in left square bracket to bring that to the back, so it looks like my plant is actually sitting on top of that, and I'll just adjust it a teeny, tiny bit. I think that works pretty well. Alright, so I would make sure that my text is kind of moving around the plant here. So I would probably just use my return function here or Enter if you're on a PC and possibly just scale this down a teeny bit because I don't think it needs to be quite that large. Now, keep in mind on Instagram, specifically, you won't have your image displaying exactly at these dimensions, so we can bring in my social media template for Instagram here. I'm just going to go to images. And the safe zone we're really working with is just it's very similar. It's super, super close. So you probably wouldn't be designing anything that wouldn't fit on the edges. But basically, on your Instagram grid, this middle area is what you're going to see on your Instagram grid. So the tiny few pixels on the edges here won't be visible until somebody clicks into the image. So not super dramatic, but just so you know that that is the new dimensions that is going to display on your actual profile grid. And now, before we add any super distracting elements, I would probably focus on the text first and then look at the design, especially because I want to actually look at what the plans are that I'm going to be mentioning and then also any additional elements that need to go around here. So if you're going to have a little arrow, just tell people to keep swiping or if you're going to have your Instagram handle or your website or anything like that, I actually add those elements in first and then any kind of additional aesthetic elements in afterwards. So I'm going to just copy and pase this because this is the font that I want to be using, and I am going to be mentioning these four plants. So I'm going to go with one and hit C on my keyboard to bring in a bit of a circle here. Of course, once you bring in a circle, by the way, you can just type into it as well. So I could do this instead. I can just highlight this, make this into my font that I have already selected, which is here, Alpha slab one, and then just bring the size all the way up. And then that way, I know it's perfectly in the center, but it does adjust the shape of the circle sometimes. So I mean, my preference is to have them as two separate elements. It's completely up to you if that's what you want to do, but just so you know, anytime you bring in a circle by hitting C or a rectangle by hitting R, you can type into them and just have your text directly within them, as well. It's probably just a little bit of personal preference, I'd say. Alright, so this is going to be number one, and I'm just going to use the arrow keys on my keyboard to bring this perfectly in the center, and it's not going to be this crazy green. We're going to change it to maybe a darker version of my background color here, something like that. Yeah, I think that's quite nice. So this is going to be the first plant, and then I'm going to just maybe group this together. But we'll see depending on the number, it might have to adjust this, so I'm just going to hold down Option on a Mac or Alt if you're on a PC. And you'll see that because this is one big design, it's sort of saying, Hey, place this right here because that is where this previous number was. And again, that is such a big benefit of doing this is that you know exactly where other elements in the design are placed, and it allows you to adjust for that. I think that actually is almost perfectly in the center. I think the two needs to go over a slight bit, but I think that's pretty pretty close. And then we would just also go for number four. I'm not sure which corner each of them is going to be in, but I just like to vary things up a little bit. I would just ungroup and move the four around a tiny bit. So that's looking pretty good. Also, if you're ever not quite sure if these are on line, you can use your rulers here. So you'll remember from our previous lesson, we went to settings and Show Rulers and guides or hit Shift R. This will allow us to bring in these extra guides, and that will basically allow you to line up any additional elements. If you're not quite sure if things are aligned, this is how you can go and do that. And then you can always hit Shift R again, and it's going to make them either appear or disappear or you can just move them around. So I'm just going to copy and paste this across and bring in some text and then work on the additional elements on our page. Mm. So that's already looking pretty good. Now I'm going to use the same functionality that I did to find these two to find some additional plants and then maybe bring in some extra elements, some circles in the back there, maybe even some textured circles. So in the elements tab, maybe I would look for a circle, texture circle line, circle dots, something that is still a circle, but maybe slightly more textured funky version. So I think this could work for our design. Or something like this where it's still in that shape and we can use that to overlap with our solid color circles as well. So I am just going to speed things up here a little bit, so I can be respectful of your time, but we are just going to be covering exactly what we just covered. So nothing new is being covered. I'm just going to copy and paste and throw in some plants and really pretty much exactly what we just did. So I am going to speed it up so you don't have to watch me painfully do this for 20 minutes. And then we're going to pause again so that we can chat about some next steps. M Alright, so this is already looking really good. I've added in last slide here that has a bit of a call to action to learn more in an epic eBook, so I could say something like comment the word plant in the comments and get my eBook, and then I could have a marketing automation setup to do that, or I can just say, you know, share this, save this, comment something. I just really like having a call to action at the end of this. So for our purposes, just for demo purposes, I've created a dummy version of an eBook, and we will go into how to design eBooks, how to design eBook covers, and all of that later on as well as how to do mockups and some more advanced mock up techniques. So we'll go into this in a deep dive way later on. I just wanted to do this for now just so you can see it in action. So yeah, I just made an eBook called How Greater plays and other Important Questions because I could not come up with a better title than that. But again, it's just demo purposes only for the time being. And if I wanted to make this a little bit more dynamic and showcase this ebook, I would go to Edit and then in the app section, I would go to Mockups. Now, you could put this on an iPad, for example, but I actually like seeing this in print. And yeah, it's entirely up to you. But yeah, I really like the print functionality where there are actual hands holding these books. Of course, they're eBooks, so they're probably not going to be printed, but it just makes it a little bit extra special, I think. So I would have that on my last page, and then I would just make sure to tweak things around that, so it all sort of fits in where it needs to just like that. So it's a little bit plain. I would potentially grab an element like this one and move my Zizi plant right back to where it was and then maybe bring this over. Just like with our frames in the previous lesson where we talked about Linked in banners, sometimes when you put elements on top of mockups, it'll try to snap it into place. So to avoid that, you can just hold down command on a Mac or Control on a PC, and then that way, you can place elements around and behind your mockups without them snapping into the place of the eBook. So now I can use my command and left square bracket to bring that behind my element, and that makes it look a little bit more nice and dynamic. So in terms of the overall design, I basically just layered things on top of each other a lot of the time. I put a few elements behind it. Sometimes I combined two elements like I did here, where I looked up the word stool, and then I looked up a nice potted plant, and I put them together. Or sometimes it's nice to put things on a bit of an angle, so it's a little bit different. And then I just made sure to kind of curve my text around the elements on the page. This is entirely optional, but I really like doing this. It just sort of brings the graphic to life even more. Now, you'll notice that each of the individual plants that I'm talking about in each graphic aren't really overlapping much with the images next to them or with the graphics next to them, except for maybe this paths here. But then there are some elements like this one up here and this one up here that do overlap as well as my solid color elements. So that gives you that nice cohesive look without making it look too chaotic. And that's my preferred way of doing these carousels. So hopefully you enjoyed that tutorial. And in the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to split up this image so that we can post it on Instagram. Then we'll also talk about how you can do that and export it as a PDF so you can utilize it for a platform like LinkedIn. I'll see you in the next one. 36. Post Your Carousel on Instagram: Before we go into splitting our image, I just wanted to go to File accessibility and check the design accessibility here to show you something. So my topography is all good, but there's an issue with the color contrast, and it's actually not really an issue. What it is is this plant is probably too close to my text. So if I just adjust the size of the plant and then I can use my arrow keys just to move it slightly away from this line here, it'll then say, that's all good. So that's why I always make sure to use the accessibility tool before I export a design because sometimes it's little things like that that you wouldn't really even think to check or at least I definitely wouldn't now, Canva do actually have an image splitter app here that you can look for. I just really don't like it. You can basically add any file of yours or you can export this design. So I'm just not going to worry about the export options here. And then it's going to ask you how many rows or columns you want to split this into, which is great. So we want to have no rows. We want to have six columns, in this case. Yes, we want to split the image. But this is where it starts to get to be messy because then it says, Do you want to add this to your design? Do you want to add the images as new pages? You can't actually you don't have an option to save these, which is really irritating because then you would have to make them part of your design and then save L, it just it doesn't work for my brain. For that reason, I'm just going to hit Share, Download, and then download this is a PNG. Of course, if you've got other designs, it's good to know that you can split images within Cava. It just doesn't quite work for this purpose. Instead, I would encourage you to go to pine toools.com and then look for split Image. I will give you the direct link in your course guide, so don't worry about that. But then you can put your beautiful image in here. And then you can just say, we want this to output the same as input, and this is a little bit confusing, but we're actually splitting the image horizontally, which never quite makes sense to me. I always thought it would be vertical. But anyways, it doesn't matter. It should just say rows and columns, but whatever. So it's got six blocks, and then we split the image. And then I'm just going to download this as a zip file and then unzip it. So then I can transfer this across to my phone, and then we can look at how we would post that on Instagram. But you can also download each image individually. Then heading out over to Instagram, in the upper right hand corner, I'm just going to hit the plus icon, and then the second one down, I'm going to say, I want to create a post and then I can create this sort of multiples icon or tap on the multiples icon so that I can be sure that I am selecting all of my beautiful carousel images. And of course, I would be starting with the four plants you won't kill and then going through and making sure I'm selecting them in the right order. So that's all of my six beautiful images there. Then I would go to next. And then I just would cycle through and make sure that's correct. That all looks good. Go to next. Now I'm not going to have a caption, and this is a private account, so no one's actually going to see it. I'm just going to share posts. Perfect. And now I can see it there. So now I can see my beautiful carousel that is seamlessly aligned and everything looks absolutely flawless, similar to if it was done in Illustrator or a different kind of professional software, but it was all done in Cava. So hopefully you enjoyed that one. And in the next lesson, we're just going to take a look at how to do things slightly differently if I was doing this for Linktn. So I'll see you there. 37. Post Your Carousel on LinkedIn: So in terms of LinkedIn, you don't quite have the same flow on the app as you do on Instagram. So this kind of seamless pattern is maybe not quite as necessary as it is on a platform like Instagram, but it's still really cool. So let's say we're using the same design. Now, you do have the option to export as a PDF directly from within Canva, whether it's in this case, it would be PDF standard. If you have a printing, it would be PDF print. But then you would have to go through the process of chopping that in a different app. But because I have the images from the previous lesson, I'm actually just going to convert those into PDS using PNG to PDF, a tool that I have linked you to in your course guide. Now while we're waiting, let's head on over to LinkedIn and just see how people are utilizing Carousels. Obviously, on the mobile app, you would just swipe through, but on desktop, I will just have to click through. So the difference is that on LinkedIn, any of these kind of carousels are actually uploaded in as documents as opposed to PNGs. So that's a little bit of a different format, but this is an entrepreneur called Justin Welch, and he does some beautiful stuff with Carousels on LinkedIn. So you'll see him kind of going through, telling a bit of a story and then potentially showcasing some results and then talking about his solutions to the problems that people are facing and then possibly having some sort of call to action for people to purchase his program and work with him further. That's the kind of stuff that works really well on LinkedIn. So this one obviously has a lot of pages to it. I think it has 18 pages. So this is definitely longer than something I would publish on Instagram where, you know, quick, short, sharp things are a little bit more worthwhile than something that's quite that long. I do think that carousels are really, really worthwhile on a platform like LinkedIn. Even if maybe the industry that we're talking about with our plant retailer is maybe not quite the right industry for this platform, I still think it'll make for a really cool PDF. The thing you want to do is you want to make sure that these are in the order you want them in before they get exported and they're exactly in the wrong order here. That's not frustrating at all. But anyway, as you can see it says column one, two, three, four, five, and six, so you can check whether that's correct. Then we would download that as a PDF, and then I'm going to head on over to a dummy company page that I've created on LinkedIn because you can't really create a fake personal account, but you absolutely can create a fake company account. So that's a little bit of fun. Then in the post section, I would just say, post is going out to anyone. That's fine. I'm just going to add this as a document. I'm going to choose my file, and then I can cycle through it and make sure everything looks good. I'm going to hit done. I'm going to post this and I'm just going to post it without any kind of caption there. And then we're just going to have a look at this on the mobile app as well, because that's sort of what this is more designed for rather than the desktop app. But of course, it looks good on both, as well. So here's how it looks on the mobile app. And this is also why I said that that cohesiveness in your carousel matters a lot less on LinkedIn because you have gaps between the images. So it's not this kind of nice, cohesive look. I still think it looks really cool, but it just means that it does break it up a little bit more. So it's not quite as critical to have that flow, but I still think it looks really cool. So that looks good on both the mobile app and also on Desktop. The text is really easy to read. The contrast is definitely there, and I'm really quite happy with that one. So hopefully you enjoyed these lessons on how to create captivating carousels, and I'll see you in the next one. 38. Exercise: Fix My Mistakes: So we've gone through a lot of different designs in this section of the course, and rather than asking you to actually create one of these, I'm going to do something a little bit different and actually ask you to have a crack at fixing a design that isn't quite right. So in your course guide, I've provided you with a link to a project file that has a few issues. I'd like you to copy this design into your own Canva account and help me fix it by applying the things you've learned about text hierarchy. Contrast accessibility, creating space in your designs to make sure they stand out, et cetera. So in a second, I'm going to tell you to pause this lesson and go and tackle this exercise, and then I'm going to show you what I would do with this if I was going to recreate this design, knowing some of these principles that we talked about. And I just want you to know that the beauty of this particular exercise is that I could ask 100 people to do this, and they would probably come up with 100 different versions. In fact, if I had to do this exercise, I would probably come up with at least 15 different versions. So there is no one way to do this. The point is really just to put your thoughts and your skills up to this point into action and really start practicing and also to recognize just how much you've actually learned because the thing is, I think, as much as I've learned by practicing and doing and creating designs, I've learned just as much, if not more, by actually helping my students fix little tweaks within their own designs and actually helping others. This is such a key thing in our learning process and how we learn as adults is we learn so much by helping others solidify their learnings and their skills, and that's how we acquire new skills. So hopefully, by helping me sort of fix this design through what you already know, it's going to allow you to feel really confident about what you've learned up until this point. And just to be clear, you do not have to keep everything in this design. The point here is to also logically think about if this was, let's say, a Facebook graphic that was coming across someone's feed, whether it was an ad or an organic post, which information could potentially go in the caption and not in the design itself? And how is it going to appear on a small mobile screen? Is it going to work if the fonts are these sizes, et cetera, et cetera. So don't feel like you have to keep everything in here and try and make it work in a design. You can also add stuff. All of these are Canva free elements or pulled in from other external free resources, so you'll be able to twist and turn and shuffle things around however you see fit. So go ahead and pause this lesson and then come back and we can talk about what I've done with this version of my design. So I'm hoping you've had a chance to do the exercise. And now let's talk about my version of this and a few choices that I made. So just as a reminder, this was the original post, and then this is my variation of it. I'm going to be honest, this was not an easy exercise, even for me to do, and I tried to make it a little bit harder than just making this into a simple Instagram post with a couple of sentences. I think the information overload was kind of key here, so it gets you thinking about what's important, what is and it was really difficult to think about what to cut out. But I was thinking this would probably come from a Facebook page called Maggie's pet sitting service. So I don't think the name needs to be there. The rates would be quite obvious that these are rates. So I didn't think that that needed to be there. I think this quote is something that would work really well in a caption, so I would leave that there. Same with the contact information. I don't think that necessarily needs to be there, but if you manage to squeeze it in, I think that's great. And then I think the areas we cover is really important. Of course, I wanted to minimize the number of fonts we use, so I intentionally put in a lot of different fonts and a lot of different colors so that you could practice minimizing that. And I've kind of just tidy things up in a content hierarchy sort of way, so the eye sort of knows what to look for. So obviously, you've got these big, beautiful pet photos, but then your eye goes to the actual rates, and then at the end, you also see the service areas that we cover as a service. Like I said, there are million different ways to approach this design, and I'm sure whatever you've come up with is also fabulous, even if it looks totally different from this. This is just how my brain approached it where I was thinking, What's the most integral, important information to go into a graphic like this in a way that makes it still mobile friendly and the fonts can be large enough. And also the most important part is for it to be captivating. So I wanted to make sure that my beautiful photos of my pets were as large as they could possibly be without obstructing the information. So that's kind of where my brain went with this. I also minimized the number of fonts. So I just went with black fonts and dark fonts here. And then I tried to play around with it in slightly different ways. So it's still kind of fun and playful. So I've added in this marble texture background because I thought that it being just purely white just seemed a bit blind, especially if people have their Facebook in light mode, which I'm not sure everybody does anymore, but a lot of people still do, so that can just make it look really plain. So I thought having a bit of texture in the background is nice. And plus, this dog is obviously getting a bit of a pamper treatment. So I would say that Maggie's pet sitting service has quite a boogie pet brand, even though my rates are actually very affordable because I completely made them up. I'm not even sure these make sense, but anyways, that's fine. I think this just kind of goes well with this fake brand, and then I added in a slight gradient here to match the colors up top here. So I think there are a few different ways that you can still be really playful with a graphic like this one without overloading it with too many fonts and colors and sizes where your brain doesn't really know what the most important information is here because everything is sort of looking exactly the same. Once you create blocks like this, it makes it much easier for the eye to go, Okay, these are the rates. And then this is almost like an afterthought, but to go, Okay, I like the rates. I wonder which service areas they cover. Oh, these are the service areas. Yes, that works for me and my pet. And now in the next section of the course, we're going to talk about how you can use Canva to create beautiful videos like these. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 39. Introduction: Canva for Social Media Videos: Section of the course, we're going to start looking at adding animations to your designs, incorporating videos, layering videos and images on top of each other, adding some captions, and even designing for video ads, if that's something that you're interested in learning more about. But I did also just want to say that there are some platforms at this stage that only accept a particular kind of animation or video format. So we're going to be working with both the Gift format and the MP four format, and there are platforms like Facebook, X, Twitter, and LinkedIn and the YouTube Community tab that will accept the gift format as well as video format. But then there will be other platforms like Pintrs, Instagram, and Tik Tok that only accept MP four format. So the reason I wanted to say that is if you're trying to post something and it's not working and it's not telling you why, it could be because you're using the wrong kind of format. So we are going to go through how I would export in different formats, but just know that if you're ever trying something and it's not working for a particular platform, it could just be because it's in the wrong format. And you will also start to notice as we're going through this section of the course that there are particular search terms within the Canva video library that I'm using to find really cool collections. So I think it can be really helpful much like with everything else within Canva, that includes fonts and images. You know, I really like creating folders for everything, so I can keep things organized. But I also really like to keep a list of the search terms that I've used in the past for really cool collections of images and videos that I've found within Canva. So I have provided you with a couple already in your course guide, but you may want to start creating your own, as well. So, for example, these are just a couple that I've really liked using that I've included in your course guide, which is Canva natural beauty. And then I've got work from home, and this is just blurry background. And this is Canva Health. This is natural aesthetic, plant shadow. And pastel gradient. So I would then keep a file with these search terms in it, and I would also do the same thing for images and elements and anything else so that I can always kind of come back to these if I'm looking for collections that are sort of similar in vibe to the ones that I found in the past. But that's just what works for my brand. It has to work for yours. You might want to actually create folders within Canva, just full of the images and videos that you found. Whatever works for you, it's just nice to kind of keep organized, honestly, because sometimes you find a really cool collection and you're like, How did I search for that? And sometimes the search terms are so obscure. I mean, you'll see it when we go through the section of the course, but sometimes the things I'm searching for to find this stuff, I'm like, How did I even come up with that? How did we get here. But anyways, it's nice to actually keep a reminder of how you got to a certain place. Anyway, Look, lots of really exciting stuff coming up in this section of the course. This is where we get to really, really play around with the Canva tool. So I'm really excited to get into everything with the next lesson where we take the carousel from the previous section of the course and we bring it into a new light with some video components. So I'll see you there. 40. Animate Your Carousel: So with carousels, it can be really cool to integrate some animated videos like this one. This was made with an app called Jitter, which has free functionality for you to use because I know inevitably you're going to ask or someone's going to ask about how this was made, and it's not something you can make within Canva, but it is a cool thing that I actually was able to make for free, so I will link you to Jitter. But this was just a video on its own that I exported and added into the carousel sequence, but it's not sort of seamlessly integrated into the rest of the design, whereas something like this is obviously a part of the design because I've image of myself here on the right and this little Tesla robot on the left. So that means that it needs to be part of the carousel as you're designing it, and then be sort of chopped up and exported in a way that makes it look nice and cohesive still. So let's take a look at how to do that. Alright, so let's get into it. I am going to duplicate this design so we don't mess with our beautiful original and I'm really only going to be animating this last page because, of course, you can insert additional videos into your carousel, but it just gets a bit messy if there's too many of them. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to erase this plant here and potentially remove this here. Also, my cutou plant here is overlapping a bit, so I'm just going to bring that in, so it's not kind of taking up too much real estate on my last canvas here. And now we can bring in some animated elements. So I've already got a couple that I like, but essentially the way that I went about finding them is I just look for plant and animated. And then we just would go into graphics and find ones that are similar style. So remember, when we were talking about graphics and graphic elements, we want to make sure that we are finding a couple of different elements that still have the same sort of look and feel to them even if they're potentially created by different artists so that it doesn't completely throw off our design. So for example, this little leaf here, I'm going to put in the upper right hand corner here, and color wise, it's not really going to match the other element that I'm going to bring in, but I think the style suits it pretty well, and I think that they play together pretty well. So in this case, I would probably move my text up a little bit, and then the second plant that I would choose is this one. So this is quite different because it's a little bit more watercolory. It has a bit more of a natural look, whereas the first one is very much a crisp animation. But I do think that these play together really well, as opposed to if I had selected this one and then I was going to add in something like this. That's completely different. It's got gradients, it's bright and colorful, and these two just do not play together very well. So that's why selecting elements that are kind of similar and then also maybe going through the magic recommendations, for example, this little leaf here, as well as even a more similar tone to that blue one here. And at any point, just remember, you can just click on the three dots and say, Okay, I want to see more like this, and then you can find some really beautiful collections of elements that maybe are by the same artists or just look very similar. So in this case, I'm just going to actually remove this pink one. I do really like it, but I'm just going to try to keep things nice and simple. And I'm just going to use the command and left square bracket to move this behind my design here, maybe adjust the sizing a tiny bit. So I'm quite happy with that animation, and one additional thing that we will dive into a lot more later on, but I just wanted to show you just since we're here because I do think it's something that works really well for carousel specifically, is to make this a mock up video. So instead of this kind of static image, what I can do is take that same picture and bring it into my design. And then instead of making it a static mock up, I would still go to the same place, so we would go to edit, and we would go to mockups. Instead of a static image, we like these ones over here, we go to the video function. And then you can, of course, have it on an iPad, for example, as an e book, but I quite like the physical ones that I think work really nicely for these kinds of graphics. So I think there's one just down here that works pretty well with our design as well. So similar sort of tones, it's a little just a hand coming in and bringing a book in, so we could kind of crop it out. It wouldn't have that seamless pattern integration like our animation, which is what we're going to be exporting, but you would export it the same way, you chop it up the same way. It's just an additional little feature that I thought I would share with you because I really like these video mockups, and we will play with these a little bit more later on as well. But I really, really like these. So definitely utilize them whenever you can and whenever you want to. And you wouldn't necessarily need to have these as part of this kind of seamless carousel, because obviously that's much harder to integrate than anything else. Alright, so I'm just going to move this behind all my elements here and just play the video and make sure that the book is not too overlapping. So I'm actually just going to move this down. And in this case, I would possibly change the color or remove that circle element in the upper left hand corner because I don't think it really suits the style of this graphic anymore. I think those colors don't play together very well. So in this case, I would probably just remove it and then make sure I'm removing it from this graphic as well before exporting the rest of the carousel. But yeah, that's just a nice little easy way to get a video as part of your lifestyle in your carousel. But keeping in mind, it wouldn't be quite as of a carousel as if we just use animations like this. So that's a little bit of a bonus point, but now let's talk about how to actually chop this up in a way that allows us to make this sort of seamless transition. So you'll remember from the previous lesson, we put these kind of transparent rectangles in the back here. So this one's locked, so we're just going to unlock. Because we're actually going to use this as a guide of where things are actually placed in this tile, and then we're going to transfer this across to a different document so that we can download this as a separate MP four. I promise it'll all make sense in just a second. So we can just highlight everything that's on the page. It's going to then allow us to just command C or control C if you're on a PC. And now let's bring this over to a blank Instagram post that's in the dimensions of four by five or 1080 by 13 50. So this is the exact dimensions that we want to be looking at because that is the dimensions that the rest of our carousel is in. One thing it's not going to probably bring over is our background color, so that's something we might have to bring in separately. But now if we just command V, we can bring everything in, and you'll see this little rectangle here. That's essentially what we want to be lining up with in order to make sure that it's in the right spot. Everything is sort of exactly where it should be. In relation to where it was in the previous graphic. So just want to line that up. I know this is a bit tedious. So if you're like, This is a lot of work, and I'm over this, that's totally fine. I completely appreciate that. But it does mean that you've got that beautiful seamless integration. So I did want to show it to you for the times that you're feeling adventurous and you really just want to play around with a few things. So the thing that I want to grab is my background color. So it's a little bit trickier because I have so many elements on top, each of these has that transparent rectangle as well. So I'm just going to go to position, and that'll allow me to go all the way to the bottom of the layers and choose my background color here. And now I can just grab this hex code, Command C, and I can come in here. I can technically erase this background rectangle now, so I'm just going to get rid of it. And now I can adjust my background color, Command V, Perfect. So now I can actually adjust this a little bit. I can play around with it because this is not something that's overlapping with any other elements. So adjusting this is not going to make a difference, and now I can head to share. I'm going to download this as an mp four, and I'm actually going to post this on Instagram with our new end tile, that is a nice animated video here. And at the moment, everything looks really good and seamless. But sometimes the MP four does compress a little differently once it's posted, and the color might be slightly off. So it is possible that there may be some discrepancies between the overlapping elements that you have between your graphics. You may just decide to remove those elements for videos for this reason, but I actually really don't mind. I still think it gives you that nice, beautiful, cohesive look and feel. So I really like using these graphics, and then we're just going to see how this also looks on our profile. And making sure that everything looks good. Alright, so this is our carousel, which is exactly the same as it was before. And then this is the slight difference at the end. So you'll notice as I'm swiping through, there's a teeny, tiny color difference at that green circle at the top there. It is just literally like tiny, tiny hexo difference there. The background has blended seamlessly, but that particular color has maybe exported slightly at a slightly different shade. So if this really bothers you, it would just come down to removing these sorts of elements. But I don't think 99.9% of people would ever notice that, and I think it gives you a really nice, beautiful, seamless look. Then when we look at it on our profile, obviously, these are both of the graphics there, so they are exactly the same. But we can see that everything looks nice and sharp. It's all displaying exactly as it should, nothing's cut off. And yeah, I really, really like the look of this carousel. I hope you do as well, and I will see you in the next lesson. 41. Powerful Pinterest Pins: Alright, let's talk about Pinterest. Pinterest just wants your love and approval, and I think it's quite heavily misunderstood. I think Pinterest has so many opportunities for businesses, for solopreneurs, for freelancers and everyone in between. And I think that video and animated content on Pinterest is still quite underutilized. Of course, you can just create static pens, as well. I think these do end up doing really, really well on Pinterest. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with just sticking to static pins. But obviously, we're here to elevate your skills. So we're going to talk about how to create animated pins. You will often see people re posting their videos from other platforms. For example, this was a reel that I posted, and that tends to do pretty well as well, depending on the context. But then you can create just really simple, beautiful designs that have just a slight animated element, whether that's an embedded video like this one or maybe some animated text, and that really helps to bring it to life. Let's have a look at how to create something like this. So within Canva, you will notice some slight variations in the dimensions, but largely the pins that you'll see will be the 1,000 by 1,500 template, which is the optimal pin size for the time being, it may change. But then you'll also see some more vertical posts that are a little bit longer. There's nothing wrong with posting this. I would say stay away from any square or just really short pins because it just doesn't give you the good amount of real estate on the platform. There's nothing wrong with long pins. It's just that pinchers themselves have said that these are the optimal dimensions. So largely that's the design, size that we will be designing. I know we always start from scratch in this course, but in this case, I'm actually going to start from a template because I want to sort of shortcut our way to success a little bit and start with something that's already beautiful and think about ways that we can make it even more beautiful. Alright, so let's just start by removing a few things we don't need. And we can say something like trending right now or in store now, and we're just going to make this pretty much the width of the pin. I really like this font, actually. I think that works really well, I might reuse this one for something. I really like it. Mmm. Nice. Okay, so I'm just gonna I'm in my own little world sometimes. And I'm just gonna adjust the crop here just to give us a little bit more real estate. And I'm gonna hit R on my keyboard and bring in a bit of a rectangle. And the website, you'll remember we can type straight into our rectangle here. The website's gonna be called my cool shop.com. Let's just hope that's not an actual website. I mean, it might be, and that's okay. Free promotion. Okay, so that color definitely doesn't work for us, and that font style probably also doesn't work for us. So, look, it's a little bit funny with rectangles and canvas. Sometimes I like dragging it out to the edges and beyond the edges a little bit because sometimes it will give you a bit of a white line if it's just kind of perfectly aligned at the edges. I don't know why. So I like having a little bit of a gap there so that the color is definitely all the way to the edges. And then I would probably make that color the same as my font and the actual font inside, I would probably make white. Bold so we can read it, and maybe a little bit larger and maybe adjust the spacing, a teeny tiny bit to give it that nice, cool, trendy look. Actually, do you know what? Let's go smaller fun. I think it works right like that. All right, so I think that's already looking pretty good. We would adjust the image just so that we can have roughly the same gap between here here, I'm just eyeballing it, so it doesn't have to be perfect. Remember, it's going to be smaller once it's actually posted. But I think that looks really cool. And now we could do a few things to animate it. So we could add a video to the background. We could add a video in here. We can do lots of different things, but in this case, let's play around with the animation elements here. So we're going to animate this, and we've got lots of cool options for animations. It's going to give us some really, really cool options here. Oh ho ho. I like that one. That looks really cool for this. But in this case, I'm actually just going to have this quite intense movement for both the enter and the exit. So it's going to kind of jump in, but I'm going to remove the animation from the top there. It has given me an animation for that as well. So I really only want to be animating this here and then making sure there's no animation at the bottom, because I'm going to essentially now duplicate this page. So remember, you can always right click and duplicate the page, but in this case, I'm just going to hit Command D and create four different pages so that we can have this photo tumbling in and out and swapping with a different photo. I've uploaded a couple of photos of a model that is just modeling a few different clothes so that it just cycling through. It looks the same because it's the same person, but modeling slightly different clothes there. All I think that looks really cool. Now at this stage, we can go to duration so we can play this and see how it might look. That's going to be way too slow. Way way too slow for Pinterest. So what we need to do is go to our page. And just go to the timer option here, and let's make this maybe 2 seconds, maybe even like 1.7, and then just apply that to all the pages and see how that might look we want it to be nice and dynamic and relatively quick, as well. It's going to tumble in. So it just gives us enough time to view each photo without spending too long on it. So I think that looks really cool. Of course, you could play around with a few additional animations, but I think let's keep things nice and simple. And then let's just do one more pin design here. So I'm going to duplicate this again, and I'm going to pop in this other image, which is much more bright and colorful, which means it's probably competing for attention with the background here. So it potentially just tone down the background a little bit. To make it a little bit less intense. So we're just going to have a look at some options. But one thing we haven't talked about yet, which is really cool function within Cava is anytime you have an element, and you're like, I wonder how they found that. What do I have to search for in order to get this? If you right click and go to Info, it'll say what keywords this would be found under. So things like gradient background, pastel background, grainy texture. That's how we would find this particular image. And so if we zoom it, you can see that this is not a clear gradient. It's kind of got that nice little bit of texture. So that's why it would be found under grainy texture. And that can be a really handy thing if you're like, Oh, I really want to recreate this look for future designs, then you have those keywords in your repertoire. But we can use the same thing to look for videos as well. So let's say, yeah, grainy texture, background, pastel, would be some of the keywords that I'd be looking for. And in this case, I would be looking for videos. So because this image is quite light, I might, Whoa, that's hectic. That's too much. We just want to find something that is nice and Patti. Of course, it would have to be on brand for the particular client or business that we're designing for. I think this purple works pretty well. And we're just going to twist that and replace the background. I think that's pretty cool. It definitely makes our photos stand out. If we play that, we can see is it moving around? It's only a subtle movement, but I don't actually mind that. So obviously, our text now is not all that user friendly, so we would want to make sure we're changing that to white. And in this case, I'm going to remove the bottom there because I'm going to change this to be a slightly different kind of graphic. So we're just going to duplicate our text here. And I'm going to make it really, really teeny, and I'm going to say something like shop now, and maybe two spaces, two spaces, and then shop. Now, again, might even have to be three spaces, to be honest. Three. Three? Okay. Now I'm just going to duplicate that and do it as many times. Ooh. That's not how we spell now. Now, that's also not how we spell now. Oh. Okay, there you go. Shop now, shop now. That's also not how we spell Shop. What is going on with me today? Okay, there we go. Shop now. That looks good, and I want to make sure that I've got three spaces at the end there, and we're gonna keep duplicating it. And now we can make it really nice and long. Potentially, it can be a little bit bigger so that people can really read it. I'm just gonna zoom out. And essentially, we're going to make this into a nice little banner that's just gonna slide across. Wow, that's gonna be so good. Alright, we want that to kind of be in the center there. And it's totally fine that it's completely off of the actual graphic itself. Now we're going to go to animate and we're gonna be using we're gonna be using an effect called drift, which is going to make it just go across. We're gonna go in the other direction. That looks good. And then we can adjust the intensity, depending on how fast we want it to go. It also depends on how long the pin is actually going to be. So at this stage, maybe the video in the background is going to skew how long the pin is because the video is 10 seconds. So potentially, let's trim this down. Pins only really need to be kind of let's say 4 seconds, in this case, maybe five. That's all we need. We would remove this tectonic or this tumble animation because I think that's a bit hectic for a single pin. So we would change that to photoZoom or something really nice and subtle. And it would probably be scaling in I think that looks really cool. Alright, so let's go ahead and play that and just see how it looks. Ooh. Yeah, I really like the look of that. I think that would work really nicely for Pintris because it's really bright, it's colorful. It would definitely stand out against just kind of blend pins, and it has that nice, beautiful subtle animation that really makes it pop. But now just before we go to export these and pop them on over to Pinterest, I would just do a little check with my Pintrest pin dimension here. So this is not as critical for Pinterest as it is for other platforms, but technically, there will be a timestamp in the upper left hand corner, and when the video autoplays there will also be a little sound icon, whether there is sound or not in the kind of upper right hand corner on the phone interface. So that's just something to keep in mind. You may or may not decide to change your design. As part of this. You may decide it doesn't really matter because essentially with Pinterest, it's all about people tapping into the pen or clicking into the so as long as enough is visible before that happens, I think it's not that dramatic, but just so you know that that is where certain icons will be placed, especially on the mobile version. So I'm just going to use my blank template here and we'll see that, yeah, unfortunately, that word is going to be cut off by the timestamp, especially on mobile. So I would potentially adjust things a little bit. So I'm just going to hit Shift R on my keyboard and bring in some rulers as my little guides here so I can see exactly where that timestamp will be. I'm not as bothered by the little a speaker icon. That doesn't hugely matter to me. But yeah, so maybe we would just say something like brand new. And then that way, I know it's definitely not going to be blocked by that particular icon. I am going to leave the other design, as is, I think for now, it doesn't hugely matter. I think let's leave it as is so we can see how it appears on the platform. And now I'm just going to download pages 1, 24 of my design, which will be my first pin, and then I'm going to download the second pin just as its own page video. Now on Pinterest, I'm just going to go to create a pin, and I'm just going to drag my first pin over, and we're just going to call this a demo pin. Now, if this was for an actual ecommerce store, I could tag my products in here, which would be really cool. But in this case, we don't have any products. The main thing I want you to be mindful of is to always select a cover image. Otherwise, this is going to be your cover image. And not all videos will auto play on Pinterest because that would be Mayhem. So you can't have old animated and video pins playing all at the same time. So it'll only ever be one or two playing at the same time as you're scrolling through. So you want to make sure that whatever your kind of static cover image is looks really nice. Now, I'm going to put this into a secret Board so no one will be able to see it. And then I'm just going to go ahead and create one more pin, and we're going to do the same thing. It's going to be called demo again because I'm feeling super creative today. And we're just going to put it in the secret Board, as well. And we're just going to make sure we pick a nice cover image for this one, as well. Okay, that's looking good, so we're just going to publish that. So because they're secret pins, they're just going to be in the saved section, not in the created section because no one can see these, and only one is ever going to autoplay at once. And you'll see that space is now clear where the timestamp is, whereas with this one, it's a little bit overlapping. And I don't think it's that much of an issue. I think it's just something to keep in mind. If you want to accommodate for it, absolutely do so. I have the templates there for you to use, obviously. But I think with Pinterest, it's a little bit more forgiving than it is with other platforms. But I think that's looking really good. So hopefully you enjoyed that tutorial, and I'll see you in the next lesson when we start to talk about Instagram stories. 42. Intriguing Instagram Stories: For this lesson, we're going to be once again using an actual brand that exists out there in the world. So we're going to be using raw superfood infused beauty, and we're just going to grab a couple of images from their website that we can utilize. We're not going to be as focused. I mean, we weren't in the lesson when we were talking about mad mortgages, either, but we won't be too, too focused on getting obsessed with their actual branding in terms of the fonts that they use and the exact colors for this purpose. I just wanted to grab a couple of images so we can just have a bit of a play around because Instagram stories, after all, are supposed to be kind of on the fly, so you're not supposed to be making them too far in advance, like I am here. So a lot of the time, you would just be making it from within the app or sharing some behind the scenes content. It wouldn't necessarily be this kind of preplan thing within Canva. But that being said, for brands like Raw, who are a pretty big skincare brand, they might create a lot of really nicely branded content for their stories. This could also work for ads. It could also work for reels. So I thought it would be nice for us to just cover a few different bases in this way. Alright, I might just grab one more yeah, I'm just going to grab this image. Okay, perfect. So we're going to bring these into Campa, and we're just going to start with an Instagram story template, but you could also start with reels or what have you. The dimensions will be the same. But the way that you utilize them, obviously, will be slightly different in terms of the length of the story. That's primarily what we're going to be looking at your Instagram stories will just be much, much shorter than something like a real would be and a little bit more interactive, as well. So I'm just going to drag in our designs here. And now let's have a look at a few different things that we can do. So the first design is going to be just a flat out fully customized within Canva design that's going to allow people to click through and shop a product on the website. So I'm just going to go ahead and grab a frame first. So within frames, I'm going to search for something like arch. Yeah, let's go with this one. So that means that my image is going to kind of pop down from the top and come in, I can always adjust this if I need to making sure we're in the center there. And I would actually add a little bit of a border to this because why not? That makes it quite. All right. I like that. We will just drag in our image. So I think for this one, I'm going to be using this image here, and I'm going to be looking for a bit of a creamy kind of texture, maybe cream or creamy texture background as a video. So ideally something. Now, this is an oil, actually, oil might work better than cream here. I think that would work really well. I'm going to replace my background here. Now, let me just actually check the color. I think I'm going to go with a slightly off white for this one. I'm going to just use my color picker and maybe go with a nice little subtle beige here. And now I can replace my background and have that video there, but I'm going to just adjust the transparency down a tiny bit so that it's just nice and subtle. Now at this point, I would just adjust this down to be definitely 15 seconds or less. So in this case, I would say 15 seconds is fine. And then I can also hit M on my keyboard just to make sure that video is nice and muted. Otherwise, I can go to audio and mute it here, but obviously, it maybe didn't have a video. It didn't have audio in the first place. And in terms of the product description, I'm just going to copy and paste it across because I got it from their website. The fonts that I am using here are called Hagrid texts for my heading font, and then TT chocolates for the paragraph font, which are really fun. I really like them. And because it says we've got coconut water, we've got avocado oil, I would probably try and look for something like coconut hand drawn or coconut line. This seems to work pretty well to give me these kind of nice subtle designs. And remember that we want to find designs that are sort of similar. So the lines will be quite thin in both of the designs. So I don't want to be choosing this image because it doesn't go with this one. So I want to find one that's as similar and as close to the one that I have originally selected with my coconuts. And I think that plays together really well, so they're not the main star of the show here. We're just putting them at the very bottom to give us a little bit of extra little bit extra fun, I guess. So I think it can be this color, but I would probably adjust the transparency down to around 80, just so it's not super, super overpowering, and that's the same color, so we're just going to go down to about 80 with that one as well. Alright. And now I just want to add in a little bit of a button. So I'm going to add in a rectangle by hitting R on my keyboard, and I'm going to say something like buy one, get one free. So this is a customized button, and not a lot of people know that you can do this within Instagram stories, which is why I love showing people this where you can add it in afterwards, so it's still clickable. And I'll show you exactly what I mean in just a sec. I'm just going to make that bulge. It's already uppercase. I'm just going to adjust the letter spacing a teeny tiny bit. That color doesn't quite work for us. I think we're going to go with something nice and bright. Ooh. That's a wacky color. I am going to put a border around it, so it's not going to look quite so intense, and I'm going to make that border nice and round. And my font is gonna be black. Alright, that's already looking pretty good. I think the font of the button can be relatively small. It doesn't need to be quite so big. I just wanted to be a nice, gentle touch, and I'm just going to adjust this color because I think I went to lead a bit overboard with it. Yeah, that's good. Ooh. Yeah, okay, like that. Okay. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to duplicate this page now that I know what my design is. This first design, I can download with or without the button. It doesn't really matter. But with this second design, essentially, all I'm going to do is actually add this to its own page, and then I'm going to download this as a transparent image so I can place this button on top of the link once I'm within Instagram stories. I promise that will all make sense once we're in Instagram stories, but that's essentially our very first design done. Now, let's talk about a few other things that we can do within Instagram. I'm just going to select this image here. And remove the background here and we're going to make our own sort of mock up. So this already has a shadow of its own, so we don't have to add it in, but we'll also look at a different image where we're going to add our own shadow so that you can get really familiar with how to do both. And in this case, I would be looking for something like wall texture as an image to put in the background here. I think that looked quite cool. And I'm just going to replace my background here. Wow. Yeah, I quite like that. And now I'm just going to add in some plant shadows. So I'm just going to go to Graphics and find some beautiful palm tree shadows here. And again, we want to make sure they're not too too intense, but I think that that works quite well. And that's just a nice little image that we're going to add into Instagram stories and we'll play around with it once we're actually in the app. So we're going to leave that one there. And next, I'm just going to bring in an image, and you could easily just do this directly within Instagram stories. So you don't necessarily need to create this within Camma because I'm actually going to leave it there. But the next story that I want to do is going to have some drop shadows. So we've already grabbed a couple of transparent images from the website, and now we can head on over to Edit. And we're going to go to shadows, and let's go drop shadow here. So this is where I want to talk about where to place your shadows. You can see in this image, there's a light source coming in from over this side because there's light here, and there's a light source coming in from this side because there's light here. So in this angle, we basically want the shadow to probably be directly behind the product because we've got light coming in from both ways. And then I would just blur that and in this case, I'm going to have something a little bit special behind it, so you don't necessarily need to change the color, but I already know the color in the background is going to be quite a bluey hue, so I would maybe change it to just a nice subtle, dark blue instead of that black. And I want to make sure the numbers are similar for the second object because they're both going to be on the page next to each other. So I could either try and remember these numbers, which can be tedious, or I can use my little paint brush icon here to just copy the style of this image. And then paste it onto a different image. This is a tool that I use a lot for pasting over textiles and just general image editing styles. So you'll see me utilize it a lot throughout the course. It's something that I absolutely love using. So definitely play around with it. And then at this point, I would just size this up and maybe just twist these guys around teeny, tiny bit they are essentially going to just be something that's going to be placed on top of another video that I'm going to be adding to my story. So I just want to see which one looks better on top. I think that that looks better, and the background is just going to stay white. So I'm quite happy with that. And then I'm just going to grab another image of, let's say, something like tropical tropical background. And oh, I really like this one, but maybe a bit too distracting. Let's just go with the pool here. So I'm going to set that image the background. And in this case, I would maybe actually desaturate. There's a teeny tiny bit, so it's not super, super overpowering. So I just go to adjust and let's have a look at either the saturation or the vibrance, maybe both. Just bring that down a teeny tiny bit because I'm going to be placing elements on top of it inside of Instagram stories. So I think we'll leave it there with our designs, and in the next lesson, we're going to jump into Instagram and bring it all to life. So I'll see you there. 43. Share Your Instagram Stories: Alright, so first, I'm just going to download these. So this one is a video, so I'm going to download as an MP four. This will be an image. This will be an image and an image, and then these two, I'll just download as PNGs with a transparent background. So number two and number five, I'll download separately as PNG transparent background. I'll go through and download all that and drop it to my phone, and then we'll open up Instagram and go from there. So now switching on over to Instagram, I'm going to go and tap on your story, and I'm going to tap the multiples icon here so we can bring in a couple of the different images that we've created and hit next. So with this one, all we really want to be doing at this site is going over to Sticker and Link, and I'm just going to hold down paste so I can bring in the link, and it's a super long link. So I would customize this text to say something like, click here. I'm just going to make it a tiny bit longer, but it doesn't matter because it's going to be covered up by our custom button. So now I'm going to go back to the stickers function uptop and then add in a photo and I'm just going to bring in my beautiful transparent button here. So now I can make it nice and large and just cover that sticker underneath. So that's going to still make it nice and clickable. I can adjust things slightly, but I think that kind of works in terms of placement there. So that's beautiful. I could also click the music icon if I wanted to add a song to this. In this case, I can't do that for licensing reasons, but if you wanted to do that, I would absolutely add some music to your stories. And let's do this one first. So I'm going to hit the stickers function again. And instead of images, I'm actually going to make this a question. So this would be something like what your favorite part of your skincare routine. And then people can respond and DM me. Now, you'll also notice asm in this in the middle of that upper end of the story. There's a little color circle icon. If I tap this, it's going to allow me to circle through a few different options of colors. But I think for this brand, white actually works pretty well for them. And then I can still go back to stickers and take advantage of the gifts function over here so I can look at something like black lines and see if there's anything that I might be able to utilize to just kind of bring this to life even more. So, of course, I could have done that within Canva, as well. But if there's anything that's quite cool, that I might be able to just potentially make this stand out a teeny, tiny bit more. Let's make it. Black arrow. Ooh. Yeah, I like this one. So I can just use my fingers, twist this all the way around. You know what? I think that squiggly line in the upper right hand corner probably makes no sense there. I'm just going to drag it and erase it. It's okay to make mistakes, you know? I think that looks alright. So that's just really kind of finding a background to the interactive story that we've got there. And then for this middle one, I thought that might be a fun little background for a testimonial. So I'm going to go back to the stickers function, and I'm going to be looking at the photo. And I brought in just a testimonial that someone had from their website that I could add into this. So I think this is something you could easily add within Canva, as well. So you don't necessarily need to be adding this within Instagram stories. I think actually probably would even be better within Cava because you could add a little drop shadow, but for our purposes, let's just leave it as is. And then I can just go back to the stickers function and add in a gift of five stars, or I can add in a review. Ooh. Fun. Will this work color wise? Yeah. I think that works really well. And then I could just get really fun with it and be like, I don't know, see if there's It depends on if it's right for the brand, of course. But if it is, I would add in some fun gifts. Honestly, I think that that's just a really fun way to utilize stories. So those are three stories. We've got a little bit of a review. We've got some interactive buttons. I'm going to post these, and then we're going to take a look at one more thing that we can do that requires us to actually share content from within raw beauty. So I'm going to search for raw cosmetics here, and we're just going to take one of their reels at random. And look at how to share these our stories in a way that's nice and branded. So, for example, this reel here, even though the cover for it is actually really beautiful and branded, the reel itself isn't is totally fine. Obviously, it's quite off the cuff. But if we go and share this to our stories and we click Add to Story in the bottom left hand corner there, this isn't all that nice and branded. So here's what we can do about that. We can hit the stickers icon, go to Photo, and first we'll bring in our background. Size that up. And now we tap and hold, and you'll see these little lines and dots pop up in the left hand side bar. If you kind of slide your finger, it means you're bringing it behind the reel and on top of the reel as almost like a layer. So that's quite cool because then what we can do is go to stickers again and bring in our transparent image here that we created within Cava that's got our little bit of a drop shadow there. Occasionally, you may need to go back and readjust, so I would now hit my reel and bring that into my middle layer. But that's a really nice and easy way to make your reels beautifully branded, even if maybe the actual content within them is not. If that's something that you want to do for your brand. So I'm going to hit, add to a story, and then we can go and have a look at our stories all up and make sure everything looks nice. And branded. So pretend we're raw cosmetics, obviously. So this is our first story here. I just want to make sure this button is clickable. It is, which is great. And then this is our testimonial, which looks really nice. And then we've got our answer a question. I'm going to go ahead and say something like waking up in the morning because my skin caraten is limited. And then we've got our beautiful real. So I think that those all work really, really well together. Hopefully you enjoy that tutorial. And I'll see you in the next lesson where we continue talking about how to add a bit more of your personality and a bit more humor into your posts. 44. GIFs & Memes: When it comes to gifts and memes, it has to be right for your brand. It's not right for every brand. I mean, I would like to live in a world in which it is right for every brand, but I want to acknowledge that it probably isn't. But if you can find a way to incorporate these into your content strategy, it can be such a powerful way to really connect with your audience on such a different level because these can be so sharable. But that's also really key. I think it's really important, no matter what gift or meme you're creating that it's relevant to someone outside of yourself because this is a trap I've fallen into where I created a gift post where I thought, This is hilarious. And then I posted it only to realize it's actually relevant to me and maybe a very small portion of my audience. But the best kind of gifts and memes are the ones that somebody can look at on their feet and go, Oh, my God, that's me, or that's totally my partner, or that's my boss, that's my co worker. Yes, that totally applies to my industry as an occupational therapist. This is hilarious. So it doesn't necessarily, that doesn't always work out that way, but the more that you can really think about something that are almost pain points or irritation points that your audience has. And think about a way to make that a little bit more humorous for them in a way that people love to laugh at their pain, honestly. I mean, that's pretty much what meme and gift accounts are all about because everyone loves to kind of share, you know, this is a hilarious part of my existence that, you know, is unfortunate. But let's all laugh about it. It's really nice to actually be able to be the person who brings a little bit of humor into also traditionally quite stiff industries. So if you're thinking, Oh, I don't know if this is right for my business, I would say, with the exception of, you know, funeral homes and a couple of other industries that I can really think about, there are so many, even professional services that could really utilize the power of gifts and memes in a way to connect with their audience on a much more human level. So just think about it outside the box. I think it's a very useful skill to have and understand how you can create these within Canva, regardless of whether it's something you want to make as part of your content strategy, but just know that these really can be so powerful if they're used correctly. When it comes to memes, you can either draw inspiration directly from within Instagram or within Canva itself. It's got a few different options there. But for us, I really want to focus on how to actually integrate some gifts and create memes of your own. So we're just going to be working with the Instagram real template so we can start getting comfortable with these dimensions and where things need to be placed. But the first thing I would suggest is figuring out what your gift or your meme is going to be all about. What is the text that you're going to be writing on your design because everything else will go around that. So all of the images, all the gifts, everything else that you drag into this is going to be centered around whatever the sort of hilarious, humorous aspect of your graphic or your video is going to be. So for me, I'm going to be making a graphic or a video in this case that's going to be on the topic of me posting this to my audience on the topic of new social media managers because I think this is something that is so real. When I was first becoming a social media manager, it really thought. Social media is not going to take over my whole life because why would it? Because I'm going to be different or something, but either way, it definitely does. So me as an experienced person in the social media space, I would then be like, Oh, yeah, you're definitely not right on that, so we need to find a gift that represents that. But before we get into gifts, I did just want to cover one more technique, which I think is really cool. I thought we could incorporate it here, which is a glass effect. So I'm going to show you what I mean by that. If we go to elements, because this is going to be on the topic of social media management, I would look for a cafe or co working space because that's where new social media managers will often be looking to work from. So I think something like this could work. Wow, that's a nice loft. So instead of just right clicking and setting this image as a background, for this effect, I'm going to actually stretch this out myself and crop it exactly to the dimensions once I'm happy with the placement. So I'm just going to use the edges here. And take that all the way in. And now I'm just going to command C and command V and duplicate this on top. This will allow me to create this kind of glass effect on top of this. So I'm just going to head on over to Edit, and I'm going to blur this image, and I'm just going to blur the entire image. And let's see how blurry we want it. Let's go with that. You might sometimes see this on social media where people kind of place this image on top of an image or part of the image is blurry. I really like this look and feel, and I think it kind of works for our purposes here. So I thought we could cover it. And anytime you need to adjust this image that's on top of the background image, just make sure you're not moving it because then it'll get out of place. So instead, anytime you need to move it, just use your cropping functions here and here in order to sort of kind of move it around. We'll adjust the blur effect, and I would also adjust my corner rounding here, probably. I can't see it very well, so I am going to add in a bit of a border yeah, that looks good. Maybe a white border, in this case. Yes, so I can see where my corners are a little bit better now. I think that looks really cool. I think the blurring is a little bit too subtle, so I'm just going to go and adjust it and make it a little bit more intense. That's really cool. So I'm going to just command and left square bracket to move that behind my text. Obviously, the text is not all that readable at this stage. I am going to have to adjust it. But first, I'm going to go ahead and find my gift. So within the app section of Canva, you can head on over to the Giffi integration and find a gift that's suitable. So in this case, I might be looking for a search term like awkward or yikes or dreaming or something like that because that's really kind of on point. I think this one could work really well, but I don't know if it suits the design exactly. So oh, I like this one, but I don't like the text on it exactly. So I think we're going to go ahead with this one. I think that works really well. Yeah, I think that works for our purposes. And I could also put a border around that just to kind of make it pop out a little bit. I think that works well, and then maybe I would make this white as well just to bring it in line. That's already looking really good. I could potentially bring down the brightness of my glass effect, as well, just to kind of help separate it from the back there, just a little bit. And then potentially, I'll actually make this white text. So I'm going to go with quite a bold font here. I might actually go with my brand font and make that white. But obviously, I think this is not going to be as readable as I'd like it to be. So I'm going to go to the Effects panel, and I would either use Lift, which might be a little bit too subtle for our purposes here or the dropshadow function. And I will just make sure that that's set to black. And I'm just going to make sure that that is a little bit blurred. I think that looks pretty good. I would just do the accessibility check at the end, just to definitely make sure that it's all looking exactly as it should. And then I'll just play around with this a little bit just to kind of bring it out. But I think that's turned out really well, actually. So this is something that you could just publish as real as it is, or you could add music to it within Canva. I would prefer to add music to it within the Instagram app. I think that just works better. And these gifts are looping and they're quite short, so you may want to just adjust the actual duration of your page. Either by utilizing the timer function or you can drag it on the timeline. So with reels, it's right to just have it quite quick. So you could go maybe 10 seconds, and that gives it just enough time to continue to loop and also give you a little bit more room to play with in terms of the audio tracks that you want to use, because sometimes if you make a two or three second reel, then the music is all off. So I prefer to make my video longer within Canva, and then I can always cut it within Instagram. So I might even bring this up to, like, 20 seconds, and then within Instagram, once I then find the music that I'm looking for, then maybe I'll just cut it down to the part of the song that I think works really well for the reel. Now, before downloading it, one last thing I would do, as we have done with a lot of our other designs, which is to do a final check using Maggie's favorite templates, famous templates, famous favorites. So you've got templates for TikToks and for reels, as well. So here is the template I would like you to just kind of use as a final point of check because in Instagram, here's where you're going to have a few things covering your screen. So you definitely want to make sure every important element is within this transparent section, which we good on this front, and then I've got the same thing for TikTok here, which is just a little bit more restrictive but still pretty good. So once that's checked, I can go ahead and save that as an MP four and we'll be able to bring that over to our reels. 45. Make Yourself Into a GIF: So let's step things up a notch and have a little bit of fun and talk about how you can make yourself into a gift like this one, or maybe even this one. Or maybe that one. Maybe a few others. I've got some ideas in mind, so let's have a look at it. So let's first talk about how you might be able to utilize these kinds of gifts. Let's say you're in an Instagram story like this and you tap on the sticker icon, and you tap on GIF. And then you can search for, in this case, it would just be under my name, but it would also come up under a few different search terms. And I basically want to pick one where it looks like I'm saying no or shaking my head, and then I want to pick one that looks like I'm saying yes or celebrating. Let's go with this one. I do have some weird gifts, but these are really handy because it just brings certain things to life, honestly. I'm just going to do it like this. And let's say one would be a no, and one would be a yes. So this would be a no and let's turn this one around, and this would be a yes. So it just makes your pole a little bit more interactive in this way. I don't know. I really like using these for a lot of different things. It brings things to life. And of course, you can utilize other people's gifts. But if you can bring yourself into your own branding, anytime you can do that, it's just a little bit of extra fun. So let's talk about how to create these gifts and also how to make them discoverable so that you can add them directly within Canva or your Instagram stories. So let's first talk about what you don't want to do. You don't want to be recording these kinds of videos where you've got too many distracting objects in the background and the lighting's not ideal. This just isn't going to work for these purposes. Instead, I would say, make sure you're shooting in a well lit area where your face is well lit and against a blank wall. So I would say I didn't actually do that very well here. I was a bit short on time, but I would say, shoot against a completely white wall with no distracting objects in the background and make sure you're well lit and also make sure you're wearing a top that has a good enough contrast between you and the wall. So don't wear a white shirt against a white background sort of thing. That will be really, really key. And then you might want to make a list of a couple of poses that you want to do. So generally for me, I like to keep the camera rolling for a couple of minutes while I do two to 3 seconds of each pose. So if I'm doing a pose where I'm shaking my head yes and then maybe taking a break, then shaking my head, no. Just a couple seconds will do, but then that means you can then cut up this long clip into all the individual gifts that you want to create, but you don't have to necessarily take them as each individual video. So I would just make a list of poses that you want to do that might make sense for your business. If you're an accountant, you might want to have one with calculator, if you're a photographer, you might want to have one with a camera. So whatever makes the most sense to you, of course, you can use Instagram for inspiration or Giffi for inspiration, which we're going to look at in a little then you want to cut this down. So I'm just going to be using QuickTime to trim my clip, but you can also do this just with your phone, you basically just want to find the spot where you're kind of starting whatever your pose is. So I did one where I'm just doing a little thumbs up, and you'll notice it's just a couple of seconds. So if I play that, it's me just going, ya and yes, you're going to feel super silly doing this. Absolutely, you will. But it all works out in the end, I promise. And then I would just save that and I would save that as like, ya gift because that way I know what it was. And then I've got a couple of other ones in the same footage. So I've chopped a couple of them up, and we're going to have a look at how to actually make this into a transparent gift. You're then going to head on over to unscreen.com, which is a tool we're also going to use a little bit later in the course, and then you can upload your clip. So you'll see that this is why we want to make sure that we're filming in a horizontal format with plenty of white space around us because there's a little watermark here, which isn't visible because this is the area that's being cut out. But if this was overlapping with me as a person, then that would be a bit of an issue. So you want to make sure you've got plenty of white space, and then we can go ahead and download that one. Then I also trimmed a different part of the video that I want to play around with in Cava with you to show you an even more advanced gift making technique. So within Canva, I'm just going to bring in a little less than five second clip that I trimmed from the same video, which is me just pretending to take a camera snap. And one cool thing that we could do with this is actually have a little animation happening when the camera comes up. So I'll show you what I mean. I'm just going to get this onto duration so we can see this in all its glory. We're going to zoom into the timeline and basically put this at the spot where the camera appears when I bring it up to the lens. And this is where we want to be bringing in an element. So I would search for a camera flash, and going to graphics, I would probably just search for animated graphics here. And then just pick one that works for my purposes. I think this blue one works pretty well. And then we're going to just set it to time in the spot where my camera comes up. I'm also going to just right click on this and set my video as my background so that I know exactly what size it is. And now, you'll notice this is here, but if it wasn't here, I would just make sure to right click on my element, and I would say show element timing so that I can adjust it to only appear once the camera comes up about there and make sure it's in the right spot as well. I think it's a little bit teeny, tiny bit off. And then it's also going to disappear pretty quickly. So let's go ahead and play that. I think that's about right. Yeah, that's pretty good. It's a little bit off to the side. I think it needs to move just a teeny, tiny bit. Let's just play that again. Yeah, that's cool. Okay, so the other thing that's cool about Canva is because this video is unedited, so it's not all that pretty. You know, it's pretty raw. So I can come in here and use some of the filters to bring it to life even more, maybe adjust the contrast, play around with a few different things to really make this gift work for my purposes so that it's not this kind of dull, you know, blend. I mean, I would normally edit that within my final cut pro, but in this case, I just thought it's a fun thing to be able to do within Canva. And now we can just go ahead and export this and save this as an MP four. And then we can play around with it in the same way that we did with our previous gift. Then we're going to head back to unscreen and remove the background from this one, and then we can head on over to a different tool called Easy Gift so we can crop it to make sure that only the middle bit appears. So with an easy gift, I'm going to head on over to gift Maker, and I'm just going to drag in my gift. And at this point, I could do lots of things. I could add some text, I could resize it. I could reverse it. I could do lots of things, but really the bit that we're interested in is cropping it so that it doesn't that you can't see me actually walking into the frame or walking I'm just going to click and drag and essentially just try and find a box that's as close to the top of my head without actually cutting it off and starting sort of when I first walk in and then ending right when I walk out. So it kind of looks like a looping gift, and now I can go ahead and up. And I think that looks really good, so I'm going to go ahead and save that. And now we can head on over to Giffi and actually upload our gift. So you'll see my 41 uploads which have gotten 13.7 million views, which is quite freaky, if I think about that many people looking at my gifts. But anyway, it's totally fine. And you'll notice a lot of these are quite well optimized. So as I said, they will have my name, but always some searchable search charms for other people. So if anyone's looking up like Yikes or A or this would be me drinking a cup of coffee or me pointing. All of those search terms would be there as hashtags. So if you want to make your gifts really discoverable by other people, then make sure to put those different keywords in. In this case, we're going to go ahead and upload because we already have our gift, and we're actually not making a gift. We're making a sticker. So I'm going to go ahead and choose our file. And at this point, I would just rename this, not that it really hugely matters, but that's just my preference. And it looks a little bit fuzzy in this case, but that's just because it's quite large. It's never going to be seen that large. And now I would put in hash shag, Maggie Star. Hashtag photo, hashtag photographer. Not that that's what I am, but that's what people will be looking for. Take a photo. And then this would just be my website here. So it'd be HPTPS and it's not a part of a collection, and I can go ahead and upload that. So it does need to be public in order to be searchable, but you can also upload private gifts if you want. Now, even if you have an active account, it is going to take a little whilt for these to be able to be seen within the Giffi integration in Instagram and in Canvas. So just keep that in mind, it does take a little while for them to actually show up. And also, one thing to keep in mind when you are signing up for a Giffi account is that you do have to have a branded company address, whether that's your own brand or a different brand. I just can't sort of be mg@gmail.com. It does have to be a custom domain address in order to set up a creator account. But then if you don't want to make your gifts publicly available for others to use, there's still workarounds to this. So if you airdrop this gift to your phone, let's say, like I have over here, I can click that little Share icon in the bottom left hand corner. And copy this photo, and then I can jump on over to Instagram and tap the text icon and tap and hold and paste this in as a sticker instead. So that is a workaround on iPhones. This is much harder to do on Android. So there is another workaround to this. If you just want to use your gifts in your Canva designs, so let's go and have a look at that now. Let's say we have a design like this one, and we want to add the gift of ourselves, of course, we can head to the Giffi app and search for the search terms that we have under our gifts. So in this case, I would just search for Maggie Star, but it's not going to come up with anything because these are actual solid gifts. And then if I put in the word transparent, that's when you can see my beautiful cutouts with the exception of the one we just uploaded because it is not live yet. It'll take a little while. When you bring in stickers, sometimes from Giffe, you'll notice that this what background will also come in, which is unfortunate. Sometimes it's just a little bit of a Canva glitch. When that happens, just refresh your page, and that will go away. So let's go ahead and do that. So that's now much better, and this will allow you to just use it straight in your designs. But of course, every time you do save something from within Giffi it's going to put it into your uploads folder anyways. So you might as well just upload everything into Canva, and then you can organize this within a folder that's all just your custom gifts to use in your designs. So you don't even need to have your gifts publicly available to use them within C. And so that's exactly what I did with the gift that we just created, where I can just bring this in as its own independent gift to then use in my beautiful designs, however I want. So while I know this technique is not right for everybody, I would just encourage you to think outside the box with your content creation process and try to bring in a bit more of you whenever possible. So I hope you found that one fun, and I will see you in the next lesson. 46. Easy Tweet Reels: So you'll remember earlier in the course, we talked about these kind of moving tweet ex post reels that you can create. And I've posted these both on Instagram and also on Pinterest as these kind of longer, more vertical pins. So these are relatively easy to make. This particular movement that I have here. Uses a much more advanced function that we're going to cover in the more advanced section of the video creation part of the course. So we will cover that a little bit later on. But for now, let's talk about how you can really simply take a design like this, which we've already created and just make it into a reel. Nothing super complicated. Let's look at how we can do that. So as we already talked about, if you're a Canva Pro user, you can directly resize and make this into an Instagram reel. If you're a Canva free user, all you would do is you would just create an Instagram reel project, and then you would just copy and paste across. So there's absolutely no harm in doing that. I'm just going to do it this way, so it's a little bit quicker. Alright, so that's pretty much all we have to do, and we could actually save this, even though this is actually just an image at this stage, and so is this one. If we adjust this to, let's say, 15 seconds or so, much like previously, I would probably go err on the side of caution and go a little bit longer with it and then tweak it within the Instagram app, depending on the audio that I choose to pair with this. But let's say I make these into 15 seconds, making sure my shadow is in the right place. So I could just export that as an MP four, and that pretty much makes it a real if I add music to it. Ah, if you want to go a little bit further with it, you want to go a step further and make it a little bit more interesting. First of all, I would probably highlight this middle bit and make it a little bit larger, so it has a little bit more real estate. Of course, we will do our final check afterwards to make sure that it all looks good. But I would go to elements and maybe look for grainy, pastel background, maybe and look for a video that has a similar vibe to this. Yeah, I think that looks pretty cool. So I just twist this around and replace my background. So if we play that, it's just a nice little subtle video clip, and it's now really brought this beautiful tweet or post to life, really. It's just elevated a little bit further. Of course, I could add audio from within Canva or within the free apps or free websites that we looked at as well. Obviously, it's trying to look for grainy pastel background as my audio search term, which is not accurate. I just prefer to add the music within Instagram and also for legal purposes. I can't be adding this in here, but I think that that works really well. So now it's 15 seconds of this beautiful, beautiful tweet, and it's such an easy way for you to make reels, a little bit more dynamic as opposed to just static posts. So I would still definitely encourage you to test out a blend of both as well as carousels and everything else. But I think this works really well for attracting new audiences, whereas static images will often largely reach your own audience. It's a super quick and easy way to do that. And in the next lesson, we're going to cover something very similar with your quote graphics, which we designed earlier in the course. So I'll see there. 47. Quick Quote Reels: So let's not talk about how we can transform our beautiful, but, you know, plain static graphics here and turn them into beautiful reels. So once again, if you're a Canva free user, you'd have to just do a little bit more legwork by opening up an Instagram reels template and then just copying and pasting across. But for us, we can just copy and resize. Now I'm going to do my best to actually not change the font, as I add in videos, which is a challenge for me. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to stick to that, so don't hold me to it. But I think that the fonts we've chosen are quite interesting because this one, for example, I think will present a challenge because it's quite thin and in video format that may or may not work. So let's just have a look at what we can do. So we want to kind of keep the theme of this real or this post, which is woman power, quite feminine, whether it's for a yoga teacher or wellness retreat or something like that. I think let's keep the vibes there because I think that works really well with the fonts that we've selected. So in the elements, we're going to look for woman walking, but you could also look for nature, waterfalls, something like that. So I think there's a few really good options here. I like looking at videos that have a lot of empty space above them where you can place a lot of text. But then there are some like this, for example, which I think are a little bit challenging potentially. So let's select this one just to have a look at how we might be able to do that. So I'm just going to double click into it. And move my little model across and see how she's going walking wise. So the text stands out a fair bit, but not quite enough. So first thing I would do is potentially shorten this to just the portion of the video where I finally have a little bit of text. So I would probably remove the first bits. So I'll just go ahead and click into my video, and then we'll just shorten this until the woman kind of moves away from where my font already is. And I think the rest I can work with. Okay, I'm quite happy with that. So now, how do we kind of make this standout? So keep in mind, once we put in our Instagram reels template at the end, we'll know exactly which parts are going to be cut off. But chances are we're going to have to go a little bit more narrow with this. Maybe not quite that narrow. But depends on how big we want to go with the font. Because generally speaking, you might want to go a little bit bigger with it. So we're going to probably go something like that and then maybe move that up a little bit. So there might be some parts where her head is overlapping with the author's name. It's not super dramatic, but I think one thing we can do is hit on our keyboard and bring in our beautiful gradient rectangle. So this time, I think what I'll do, instead of having it just straight down, as we have previously, I'll just turn that on a bit of an angle because of where she's kind of coming in from. So there's a little bit more lightness to the direction she's coming in from. And then I'm just going to make my text nice and white. Now I could potentially make this bolder, but I think this could actually work just as it is. So I'm just going to adjust my line spacing down a little bit, and I would potentially just Command C and Command V and separate out the author's name in this case. So I can bring it down just a teeny, tiny bit because we don't really just want to be adding in a video, we absolutely can. But I think it would be nice to actually animate this, as well. So before we go into the animation stage, let's make all of our designs first, double check that the dimensions work for Instagram Reels, and then we can make sure that everything looks good. But I think so far this works pretty well. And because the text is now white, it doesn't really matter that she's sort of walking behind it. So I think that works. I'm just going to duplicate this to show you how this would actually be much, much easier if we had selected a real video like this one, where the text, obviously, I would have to go with a darker text here. But this would be the easier choice where it's just on top of a really nice solid color there with a really subtle kind of video to it, but this would be a beautiful kind of reel to make because it doesn't require any extra finasing. So that's normally the types of videos that I would go for. I was just trying to make things a little bit more interesting. Okay. And now let's just do one alternative to this kind of much more masculine, bold quote graphic just so we can have a bit of a difference here. So I'm just going to command D so we can keep the text in place, and let's just remove our background image. And let's bring in maybe a businessman walking. And in this case, this is a lot of horizontal videos, so I'm just going to use my filters here to only look at vertical videos because it's going to make it much, much easier for us. So once again, I would look for something where there's a little bit of empty space for us to work with. I like this one because he's kind of introspective. I think that could work, definitely. Potentially even ones where someone's on the phone. Basically, anything where we have a little bit more real estate around where we're looking. I think actually something like this could also work. Yeah, so let's choose this one because it's sort of the harder of the two options. And once again, we want to make sure we hit M on our keyboard or we're going into the audio and just making sure that the audio from the video itself is not actually there. And I would also make sure I'm moving this behind using the layers function or using my keyboard shortcuts because it hasn't actually made it my background there. And then I would move my gradient down just a tiny bit and potentially move that text up a little bit. So once again, for something like this, I would probably just squish this down so I can work with slightly bigger text to give me a little bit more real estate. And again, I would copy and paste this across and try to separate out the name of the author for our animation purposes. So I'm quite happy with how that's turned out. I'm just going to remove the author from this first textbox and bring this up here. So I think that works well. Let's go ahead and I'm just going to delete this page, and I think we're going to ignore this last one for now. So we'll just work with these three that we've got. And then let's bring in our Reels template. So I've got it already sitting here. So I can just bring that over here and make sure that my text is where it needs to be. So this is why we do this check because essentially this area here is the area that's going to be blocked within the app a little bit, not hugely, but I really do like putting any really important elements underneath this line. So just move things down a teeny, tiny bit just so we're really definitely within the space, that's going to be visible. All right. I'm going to copy that across and delete it from this particular reel. I would potentially work with my gradient just to move it down a tiny bit. I think that looks pretty good. And then let's go ahead and check this one. So once again, we would probably have to move things. For this, I would double click into my video and just bring it down a little bit. Now I can bring this down. All the way over here. Alright, let me check with my template. That looks good. And let's do the last thing. This is probably going to be the trickiest. Yes, so that's definitely going to be cut off. So we'll probably have to do the same thing here where we make this a little bit larger, and let's bring all of this down a little bit. Alright, let me see where that is. Alright, that sits pretty good. Let me just check the actual video. Okay, yeah, I think that works really well, still. So we know that everything is in the space that we want it to be and now we can animate. With this one, because it's quite a feminine sort of look and feel, I would probably go with a really slight animation. I think that the shift works really well there, and then you can go based on character by character or word by word. I think word works really well here. And then deciding on whether you needed to go on Enter or exit or both. I think, in this case, maybe just Enter and then we can adjust the speed, but I think we can go quite light on the speed because it's a longer real, and I would either do succession or maybe breathe. I think let's do breathe. And scale wise, I'm happy for it to go quite large. And go out. The one downside to this is that they're both coming in at the same time, which I think is a little bit distracting. This is where we can click into our author name and right click and go to, in this case, hide element timing because I've already got it displaying. But if it's not there, I would right click and say show element timing this will allow me to basically see when this is going to come up. This is going to start right at the beginning of the reel. Then I want this to come in just after my text animates. I can just adjust this to basically say, the font above is going to animate, and then as soon as it does, my author name is going to come in. Let's play that all up. And element timing is something we're going to work with a lot throughout the course. So if you're a bit confused by it, because it is a new function and it can be a little bit scary, we're going to work with it a lot. So this is how the reel is going to look, and then the author name is going to come in really nice and gently. I think this reel is almost too long. I think it could cut at about 12 seconds, maybe even 10 seconds, and then just loop. But once again, I like leaving my reels a little bit longer until I know what music is going to go with them. For my second reel, I would probably actually copy this across and use the same thing for my second reel. I would just line it up because I already know that this spacing works exactly as I wanted to, and then I would just remove that gradient because we don't need it. Now I'm going to go to position and layers and just remove the previous text, which was black previously and keep my white text, which I'm going to now make black, but it's already going to have the animation present because we worked with it in the previous reel. It hasn't taken over the timing because we're in a bit of a different reel here, but you can see both elements are selected here. So I can do the same thing where I can go, Okay, at this point, the entire first paragraph is there, so I can adjust my author's name to come in around here. So we can play that and see how that looks. Yes, I think that works really well. I think those kind of animations play together really well for these more feminine reals. And then we can have a look at our more masculine, you know, maybe finance, male dominated industry sort of reel. So as an animation, I think we're going to go for something. Oh, no, that's a bit too hectic. I quite like clarify, actually. It's quite trippy. It gives you a bit of a mystery. But I think for this particular target audience, we're going to need something that's a little bit more snappy. And I'm just going to say, we want this to animate on Enter, and we would probably go word by word. And I think let's slow it down a little bit. I think that works pretty well. And then let's adjust our author. To go and maybe go a little bit less intense or a little bit slower. And once again, I would just adjust when that comes in depending on when the rest of the real appears. So let's go ahead and just play that and make sure that that works. So I think those work really well. I think something like this would be really beautiful for a platform like Instagram. I would also check the Tik Tok dimensions, but because we haven't actually put anything in these areas, I already know it's going to be fine for that platform, and you could also then repurpose these for something like Pintras. Hopefully, you really enjoyed that mini tutorial. And in the next lesson, we're just going to go and look at how these will actually post on Instagram once they're live. So I'll see. 48. Post Your Reels: So before I head to Instagram and show you how to actually post everything, and the reason that that's important, obviously, we're not going into the nitty gritty of how to post and how to grow on platforms. That's a whole separate topic. But there are a few things that I really need you to be aware of in terms of how things display on these platforms so that you can incorporate these into your design. And that's where I also want to talk about some of the templates that I've provided you with for Instagram specifically, one that we haven't spoken about is this one here. So when you create your reel, this is essentially going to show you what's going to appear on your profile. So this middle bit is 1015 by 13 50, which is confusing because it's not quite 1080. And that's just a Zuckerberg thing. I don't know. I don't know why they made it slightly smaller, but we've already covered that. In the previous lessons. It's the same thing for reels. So you are going to have some slight cropping on the edges, and then it's going to crop it to that 13 50 dimension. So with a reel like this one, what you can do is you can upload a separate cover photo that accommodates for this if you'd like. You can do that with any of your reels also, sometimes people don't really care if things get cut off, that's also fine. But you also have the option to basically select whichever frame you want from your video once you're in the app, and then you'll be able to move this kind of, you know, this 13 50 by 1015, it doesn't necessarily need to just be the center. You can move it up or down. So that means that you could basically say, Oh, I actually just want to take this top bit, and I don't care about the bottom, which means then you'll have heaps of room for the icon to appear up here. So it's not that dramatic, just something for you to be aware of if you're creating a design with a lot of elements on it. And you don't customize your cover photo, then just be aware that there's going to be a little icon there that's potentially going to block things. So that's why you have that template here. And then the second template you have, which will sort of show you what's going to be visible within the regular profile feed. So not in the reels feed where everything is nice and full screen, but when you're actually just on your profile scrolling through posts and carousels and reels, and it's all jumbled together, this kind of dark purple area is what's going to be visible in that bit. So that means that if you have any text up here, that's not going to be visible unless somebody taps into that reel and actually sees it full screen. So that's just something to be aware of. Obviously, we do want to keep everything within this transparent area here, but just so you know, I'm just going to copy and paste this across that I would definitely just check this and make sure that all of my beautiful content can be seen. So I would say that this is actually getting a little bit too close for comfort. I'm actually going to leave that so I can show you what I mean. I'm going to leave it close to the edges so we can have a look at how this posts. It's not overlapping, so there's no dramas, but just so you can see that when it posts, if someone is just scrolling through and seeing this reel, it's a little bit too close for comfort. So if this was a real case scenario, I would definitely move that down. But anyways, I'm going to go ahead and just download these videos and one beautiful thing that you can do within Canva, which you didn't used to be able to do is if you've got multiple videos in a document like this, you can say, I'm going to download my pages a separate files if you're on Canva Pro. If you're not, that's totally fine. You would just go one, page one, then download that page two, download that page three, download that. So it's not all that dramatic. But for my Canva Pro users, if you have Canva Pro yourself, you can do this. And if you've got 50 videos in a document, you can download them all as separate Amp fours, which is. So we're going to go ahead and download that, and I will also download my tweet wheels, which we created previously, and we're going to jump into Instagram and see how it all looks. All right, so we're just going to go to the plus icon, and we're going to scroll across to Reel. And at this stage, let's just go ahead and post this quote reel so I can show you what I was talking about. So I'm just going to go to next. Don't have any music to this, so I could just hit Next and then add some music at this stage. I'm not going to be doing that because I can't actually play it out loud for you, but that would be a really good option. I'm going to go to next. And then in the Edit cover option, you can add from your camera roll if you had a specific cover or you can just go to Profile Grid and see how this is going to appear. This stage is actually showing us that it's not going to be too cut off, but there is going to be that icon that's going to cover part of that text. So what I would do is I would probably just click and drag it all the way down so that I can make sure that it's not going to be completely blocked by that little icon. I'm just going to hit done, and then I'm going to share that. So that's now posted, and it looks quite good in the feed. And then if I was to tap into it, I can see that everything looks nice and isn't obstructed by that reels bit and nothing's cut off. Obviously, I would have a little bit more information because at this stage, I don't have a caption and things like that, but everything is nice and readable. So I'm just going to go ahead and post all the rest of the reels, as well just so we can take a look at how these work. Now with this one, I want to make sure I'm editing the cover and choosing a different frame from the reel, because the one I selected, much like when we were looking at Pinterest was not quite right for me. And then making sure I'm sliding that down because of where that text is placed so that it's nice and visible on my profile. And I would do the same thing with this one, hit done, and share. And then you'll remember with our last reel, this was actually just an image that I exported as an MP four. So there's nothing to it at all. I would have to add some music because there's no movement at this stage, but that's okay. And I can always have a look at what that's going to look like on my profile. I think that looks good, so I'm going to hit Share. Alright, so these all look really nice. The text is really nice and readable. Now with this one, you'll notice that it's quite high. We purposely left this one a little bit higher so we can see how that interacts with the other elements around it, whether it's just in someone's scrolling on their feed or if someone's actually in the four screen option, you can see that it's a little bit too high. It's not actually being blocked by any elements, but I'd say, in this case, I would have if this was a real case scenario, I would have moved that down so that it could have a little bit more real estate and it wouldn't be kind of too close to the other elements around it, but it's not actually being blocked, so that's good. Alright, now we can have a look at how that all appears on our feed. So we can see that none of the quotes are being obstructed by that icon. So that's really important. And then in the actual reels tab, it doesn't matter because we don't have those reels icons. So that's not all that dramatic. And, of course, this is a private profile, so these reels are never going to be seen by anybody. But that's just a good tip for you to know, even though you might not be responsible for posting your creations onto a platform like Instagram, it's still good for you to know that you're design for this platform, so you want to be aware of how that's going to appear once it's posted. So hopefully that was helpful, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 49. Layering Images & Videos: In the previous lesson, we talked about how you can utilize video content and also utilize animations to bring your reals to life. But let's now also talk about how you can layer images, just pure static images on top of some text and videos to also help bring it to life a little bit more. So this is something that I think works really well for platforms outside of just Instagram. Of course, you can use it for Instagram and Tik Tok, et cetera, et cetera. But I think this also works really well for lots of other purposes and lots of other platforms. So I wanted to cover this as a skill set because I think it's really, really useful. So these are images that I pre selected ahead of time within Canva and made a little collection here, so we don't have to spend time sort of chasing things down, and I'm also going to be using my background remover function here. So that I can really beautifully and easily crop this out, and I'll do the same with this one. And we can also utilize one additional really cool tool that we haven't used yet. Now, this white one, this white image doesn't have any kind of real dynamic look to the background, so it's not quite as necessary, but we'll still use it for this purpose, but it's largely going to be beneficial for this second image, because essentially what I want to do with this one is I want to stretch it all the way to the edges, and I want to stretch this one all the way to the edges and have this kind of white versus black contrast. But of course, I can't really do much with this image at this stage. So I can head on over to Edit, and in the magic studio, I am able to go to Magic Expand if I'm a Canva pro user. And let's say I want this to pretty much be the entire width here, and I'm going to say expand, and it's going to sort of make it look like the image was already this size all along. So that's a really, really beautiful feature. Again, with the top one, I don't think it's going to be as complicated. I think you could probably put a solid color in the back there and maybe just use your gradient blending feature to get rid of it. But I think with this one, it's going to be really nice to be able to use. Yeah, so I don't think it has to be perfect. I am going to be making this nice and transparent, so I'm quite happy with that as a version, and then I'm going to just do the same thing for this one, as well. I'm just going to make it nice and large. We are going to be adjusting the transparency here, so it doesn't have to be perfect, but I think that that's done a pretty good job of making it look rather seamless. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. So I've got my transparent image on the top there, and now I'm just going to join these so that they are kind of doesn't have to be perfectly in the center, but just so that each sort of covers a good enough space there. Now, I'll probably do it so that this image is, actually, maybe let's do it this way. He's reaching out from the top. I think that could be quite cool. Now I'm just going to use my command and write square bracket to bring that to the front. I think that looks pretty cool. All right, so we're going to leave that there. Maybe I'll actually adjust the sizing of this one just to really bring it. But I am going to be adding some text to this. I want to make sure that that works as it should. I'm going to hit T on my keyboard and we're going to say something like love. And that's going to be black or let's just go fully black. And I'm going to be using a font we've already used previously, which is called Chinsl or Tinsel. I never know how things are pronounced in Canva. And let's just go maybe go bold. No, that's maybe too much. I quite like this one. Okay, perfect. So that's going to go behind my dancer here somewhere around there, and I'm going to use my command in my left square bracket to bring that behind my dancer. And I'm going to copy and paste that across, and this is going to say dance. Which is going to be in white. And again, we're just going for that nice kind of contrast between the two dancers, because one is in all Black, one is in all white, and we're just going to bring that to the back there. I think that works pretty well. Now, we want to bring that to life even more, I would say. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to now think about how we can incorporate any kind of video content. So because this is already a pretty beautiful image, I think you could easily post this as is. But let's just bring a little bit of movement to it with some of the videos that I have here. Now, the videos that I've selected are already kind of slow motion. You'll notice with both of them, and I selected videos that kind of look similar in terms of vibes to the images that I chose in terms of the dancer here is wearing black. The dancer there is dancing much more kind of modern ballet style and is wearing white. But now I want to adjust things, but I just wanted to say, in case you have a video that is high speed and you want to adjust the speed and actually bring things and make them slower, you can always do that with any video. But for this one, it's already kind of in low speed, so I don't need to worry about that. Alright, so I'm just going to go to Edit and I'm going to adjust the saturation here because it's just going to be playing in the background, but I don't actually need to necessarily be noticing it. And same with this one, now, I would also want to make sure these videos are the same length because this one is 20 seconds. This one is 9.5 seconds. So I'm just going to bring them both to 9.5 seconds so that it doesn't create this kind of glitch effect because I want them both to just be looping at the same time. Now what we can do is we're just going to bring this to the background, and then we'll adjust the transparency of our image there. I'm just going to use my command, less square bracket, bring this all the way behind this image, and then we can take this image and adjust the transparency so we can see the video just in the back there. We'll do the same thing with our top one here. We'll just bring it all the way to the back and adjust the transparency of this image here. Just slightly. Alright, so now we can full screen that and have a look at how it looks. So you'll notice it's just got a little bit more of a dynamic feel to it. I really love doing this effect for layering videos and images on top of each other. I think it really adds something extra special. And in this case, something we haven't done until this point, so I thought it might be quite a fun thing for us to do, which is to add in a song. So I brought in some music from Upbeat, which we talked about a little bit earlier. I'm just going to drop it into my uploads folder into audio. Of course, I could be using the audio from within Canva, as well, but in this case, I just want to be looking at it, and I'm just going to hit duration so we can look at our entire timeline. And once that's loaded, I'm just going to drop it onto my timeline. Now what I can do is I can take that music and adjust which part of the song actually appears at the front or within the time frame that I've given it, which is the 9.5 seconds. I can change which part of the song appears. But I think for this one, because I've chosen quite a gentle song, I'm happy to keep it as is. So now we can go ahead and play that and see just how it looks a little bit. It brings it to life even more with the soundtrack. So I think that looks really nice. I noticed a little bit of a glitch in my cutout here. So I would have to move that across because I think it's just slightly off of where it needs to be. So I might just need to grab it and move it across. Yeah, that looks really good. So I think that's a really cool skill to add to your skill set if you are creating things for the likes of LinkedIn, for Facebook, for other platforms where maybe you don't have assets that have video content, or you just want to create something simple, yet impactful, add in a little bit of video movement, add in a little bit of music. I think that this is a really great way to go for. And the next lesson, we're going to continue working on your already amazing video skills with another lesson about creating beautiful animated posts, so I'll see. 50. Professional Animated Posts: For this particular lesson, I'm not caring too too much about the actual dimensions here, so I'm going to go with this Facebook post, which is 1024 by 768. So this is going to be a conference. Announcement, and this is going to be a sort of a gentle introduction into the match and move feature, which is a transition feature which we're going to talk a lot about throughout the course in later lessons as well. So I'm going to be looking for grainy texture, past, probably gradient, M. We'll see. Let's see what comes up. So I'm just going to build my background here. I quite like these images that have a little bit of grain to them. So I think I'm going to go with this one. I'm just going to replace my background. And I'm going to build out my design and then we'll look at the match and move feature. So I'm just going to hit T, and this is going to be something like Mint, our amazing speakers. And then I'm going to introduce the individual speakers with a really animation. I'm so excited about this one. I don't know why I'm whispering. But hopefully you're liking it. It's a bit of ASMR, really. So I really like this bold font here because I think this background is quite like, futuristic, holographic, and then I think this font goes really well with that. And then I would add in just one little kind of animated element here, which would be an animated audio wave. I know this is not actually going to be introducing sort of a podcast. It would probably be more of a panel. But I just really like this. As a quick little animated element, I think that works really well. Alright, so now we're going to pop in our speakers. So the first thing I'm going to do is hit C and bring in a couple of circles. Now, we're going to use these as a background for our speakers, but I need it to be a color that works well with the background we've got there. So I think we're going to go with a Ooh, maybe quite a vibrant pink. I don't know what kind of conference this is for, by the way. I'm making this up as I go. But I quite like this. I think it works well with the background, so we're just going to go ahead and just going to come in see actually, let's hold down option. And just bring these guys in. Now one thing we haven't looked at so far, which is if you have elements like this where you definitely want them to be in line with each other, you can always highlight these elements or hit Shift and then click your elements. And if you right click on them, and you can say, Let's tidy this up or let's tidy it up just vertically or just horizontally. In this case, I'm going to tidy it up both ways, and that's going to bring everything nice in line. That way, I can move things around, and it's really, really nice. So that's a really handy feature that I use quite a lot, actually. And the next thing I need is a frame. So I'm just going to bring in my circle frame, which is going to essentially act as a way for me to bring in my speaker photos on top of this as a little cutout. So I'm going to use my own image here for the first one, and then I'll just recreate it for a couple of dummy speakers based on photos that I select I'm super photogenic, so no. I've got some really ridiculous photos in here. But we'll bring in I don't really know which one we go with. Ooh, let's go silly. Yeah, let's go silly. So the first thing is I'm going to just remove the background from this. And I'm going to adjust it to look the way I want it to look before I actually pop it into my frame. So with these, because the background is quite colorful already, I'm actually going to desaturate this one. So I'm going to adjust this to be just all the way down, bring down my saturation. So I could either do it that way or I can utilize my filters here. So there's some really cool black and white filters at the bottom of this. I particularly like the noir one. It gives you that really nice kind of deep look, and you can adjust the intensity according to how you like it. Then I'm going to use one more little feature. It's going to me in my little apps here and it's going to be the screen feature. I really like this one because it gives you that dotted look. You do have to play around with it a little bit to get the look that you want. You can never remember. I think Lino cart is the one that gives you well, lines and then this one gives you dots, which is quite cool. You can play around with it, and I think that works really good. Th doesn't actually matter because that's not there. I think that's really cool. It just gives us a little bit of texture on the image. I think that works really well. So I'm going to save that. But you've got all these different options here, and of course, it has to be right for the design you're creating as well, which it won't be for a lot of other designs. And you will have noticed that in the upload section, it's essentially uploaded as a separate image for me. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to command C and Command and just duplicate these on top of each other. And then I'm going to select them both. And as I'm dragging them, I'm just holding down command so that it doesn't snap into that frame for me. So I'm just holding it down a little bit. I think that's actually in a pretty good spot now. So now what I can do is I can snap this one in place, and hopefully that has made it kind of similar dimensions to where I want it to be. It's maybe shortcut my way to success a little bit. And you'll remember from a previous lesson when we were looking at this, in the linked in banner lesson, you just want to line things up and you can turn down the transparency just to see where you're at. Oh, that is a perfect lineup, actually, I think. Let's have a look. If I crop that. Oh, that's really good. There's a tiny line there, but I don't actually think anyone would notice that. So I think that looks really good. That's a ridiculous photo of me. But anyways, I'm going to recreate that for the other two photos, and then we'll continue creating. And now, I'm just going to pause here for a second to sort of show you that you can copy the style across. So because I've already applied the desaturation in my noir filter, I can now use my paintbrush and copy this style over to my last image. I can't actually copy across my effect, but I can copy across any adjustments I made to the image prior to applying the effect. Mm. H So we now have all of the assets on our graphic that we need for animations. And you'll notice with the job titles, I got really creative with the names and the job titles, obviously. You'll notice that there's a little kind of transparent line there, and that's really important for the match and move animation. And the reason for that is because technically, you can now take all of these titles and move them just out of eyesight, but they're technically still part of the design because that little transparent bit is still there. If that wasn't there and you just moved the text out of sight, it may not actually come in as an animation. So that's really important. So we just want to move it out of sight. This is the initial part of the gift that we're going to be starting with, and then we're going to essentially make each of these guys bigger as we're introducing them. Now, I have grouped these elements together so that they don't get out of whack, and now I'll go to duration. And now I can command D and duplicate this and create our first animation. So I'm going to introduce myself first. So I'm just going to make myself a little bigger here, probably still align everything, and then I'm going to bring in my job title just like that. Then I'm going to duplicate this again, and I'm going to make my job title disappear. I'm going to make myself smaller again. And a line in the center. And in this case, I'm going to now make Piper awesome really big and bring in her job title as long as they kind of look like they're the same. I'm happy with that. And let's make Gemma nice and big. Now, that's going to be a bit tricky to line because that circle is not quite the center of our graphic because of where her cutout sits. So we just need to kind of guess a little bit. And then we're going to bring in her job title. Around there. And now we're just going to essentially end up exactly where we started from. So I'm going to remove that. We're going to bring Gemma down. I think maybe she wasn't quite big enough. Let me just see. No, I think that's pretty good. We're just going to adjust the timing to be, let's say, 3 seconds across all the pages, and that'll allow us to add in a transition. If you're not seeing the transition there, you can always right click and add the transition there between pages, but we can see it there now. If you can't see it, it's probably because your pages are not the duration is a bit too short. In this case, what we want to be going with is the match and move. So the match and move is a brilliant transition because it'll allow you to move any elements around the page on the next page, and it'll smoothly and beautifully kind of create a transition between the position of that object or that element on the first page and the second page. So I'll show you what I mean if we then say, Okay, let's apply this between all our pages, and let's have a look at how that looks. So it's going to make me it's a little bit too long, I think, but it's going to basically make me bigger, make me smaller, and that looks really good. So definitely too long for these pages. I think I had it right the first time. I think we need to go about 1.5 seconds and see if it still allows me the transition at 1.5 seconds. Yeah, that's pretty good. I think my first and last page only really need to be about 0.5 seconds because they really only exist as the book ends, I guess, in a way. So let's go ahead and just play that and see how that looks. Yeah, I think that works really well. Potentially in the future, I would make those subtitles or the job titles a little bit thicker because I think that could be a bit hard to see on a mobile screen. But I think for our purposes here, that looks really good. And now I can just download that as pages 1 to five and download that as a gift. You could also download it as NMP four depending on the platform you're going for or just personal preference, but I really like gifts. I think it works really well for this kind of announcement to autoplay across the different platforms. So I'm going to pop it onto different platforms for you so you can see how it would look in action. Alright, so this is how it would look on Facebook, on the desktop interface. So it's compressed, the colors a tiny bit, but I think it looks really nice. This is how it would look on LinkedIn. So, yeah, I think my gut feel is that the job titles are a little bit thin and a little bit small, so I would probably adjust that because I think on a phone screen, that's going to glitch a little bit. And then, lastly, I would say that X has probably the least amount of compression, but still, I think, yeah, the job titles would probably have to be adjusted. But I think that looks really beautiful and works really well across platforms. So hopefully you enjoyed that lesson. And as I said, we're going to continue working with Match and move a lot. There are the lessons in this course, especially in the advanced section, so you're going to get super familiar with it. If it feels a bit overwhelming right now, I promise it won't be by the end. But now in the next lesson, let's take a look at one additional really cool thing that we can do with avanil before we move into some more advanced video ads as well in the following few lessons. So I'll see you in the next. 51. Audio Posts (with Cool Captions): So for this lesson, I wanted to dive into ways that you can create beautiful customized captions like these within Cava, even if you're maybe not comfortable jumping on video like this because these kinds of videos are obviously really popular on Instagram, but you may also just have a need for having audio only content. So, for example, even Amy Porterfield, who was in that Instagram real, has a large part of her YouTube channel dedicated to audio only recordings of her podcast because she doesn't actually record her podcasts on video at this stage. So she just releases her podcast episodes as audio only with a little bit of a graphic. Now, this one doesn't have custom captions because on YouTube, you have audio captions, but I think she could bring it to life even more with some of the tips from this lesson. First, I just wanted to grab some audio, and we're not covering AI at this stage. It's something we're going to cover later in the course. But Notebook LM is a free tool created by Google, where you can basically get it to tell you anything about anything. And the brilliant thing about it is that if you wanted to create a podcast episode for you with two AI bots essentially talking to each other about a topic that you're interested in, instead of just giving you a bit of a summary of what's going on. So this is one I just did about the Brisbane property market. And talking about whether it's a good time for first time home buyers to enter the market, it then will allow you to put together an audio, and it will essentially create a dialogue about the topic so you can listen to it instead of reading it. So I'm not diving into this tool tube much because there's not that many use cases for it, but it just has allowed me to create a bit of an audio clip for us to use. So I was able to save that, and we're going to bring that into Canva to create our captions. At this stage, Canva has a bit of a limitation with audio files. In that they actually have to be in MP four format. So as you can't just drop an audio file into Canva and create these customized captions. So that's where you can use tools like free convert. In this case, it was a different format to an MP three. If you've got an MP three, it's got converters for that as well. You would basically just convert it into a blank video to put into your document, and then we're going to kind of hide the video. So we're really only using the audio. This is just for the purposes of extracting that audio but for some reason, at this stage, it might change in the future, but at this stage, Canvas not allowing us to just import MP threes or audio files to do this. So I've pre created a design for us to use that's not leveraging any techniques we haven't already covered, but just know that within Canva, at this stage, only the social media templates and video templates allow for captions. And I'll show you exactly how you find out whether or not you are able to do captions. If you're not seeing that option there, it's probably because you're in the wrong template format. Just created this in the dimensions of an Instagram post, which would also work on something like LinkedIn or Facebook, and I've created it using all the skills that we've already talked about maybe with the exception of this nice textured background, and you could find that by looking up something like texture, grunge, background, grainy texture, also a good one. And then going into graphics, and you can pull from any of these. So this one's just the first one that pops up, but there's lots of beautiful ones to choose from to give you a little bit of texture to your template there. And then let's go ahead and just pull in a couple of images to represent James Bond here. So I literally just looked up man smiling and woman smiling because I'm so creative. So we're just going to edit one of them, and then we'll use our paint roller tool to copy everything over to the other one. And then we're going to get working on our captions. So just want to make sure that I'm actually clipping this to just the area that I need before I go through editing it. Now I'm going to edit that and let's just go for a filter to make things nice and easy. That looks good. And the only other thing I want to do is add in a bit of a shadow, but instead of a shadow, it's going to be an outline. And instead of a black outline, let's make that a white outline to match the background there. I think that looks quite good and we're just going to line that up here, and then I could just overlap it with the name a little bit just to make it. Interesting. And I'm just going to use my arrow keys here to bring this down. Actually, I'll bring that forward. Now, that looks better. Okay, I'm going to use my paint roller tool, and we're just going to copy that style over to Skipper Jacobs, which is a name that I came up with. I'm sorry for any Skipper Jacobss who feel like I've stolen their identity, I promise that was not my intention. So I'm just going to use my arrow keys here to move that around. And that's essentially all it takes to create a little graphic and this at the top there, the audio wave is one that we used in a previous lesson when we were talking about our conference speakers, where you can just use an audio wave within the elements tab as an animated element. Now let's bring in our captions. In the upload section here, if I go to audio and I've got my Brisbane housing market audio file, if I was to drop this in, I just wanted to show you what it looks like. When I now go to text, you'll see in the dynamic text option here, all I have there is page numbers. So that's not what we want. There's something that's not quite right if that's what's going on, and that's simply because we need to save this as a blank video here, bring that into actually don't need to be snapping that into place. I just need to bring it into my timeline. And we need to pause that. And now it's also made our graphic the entire duration of the video, which is brilliant. So you could, of course, crop it if you wanted to. But in this case, let's just leave it at 6 minutes and 16 seconds. And all I would do with this is I would just move it behind an element. So you can use your keyboard shortcuts, or you can just go to position and arrange and go to back. There's always ten ways to do something, of course, and that just puts it nice in the back so that now if we had to text, we can see in the dynamic text option, it's also got captions here. So now I can say, All right, give me captions, and the video has to be selected. So at this stage, it is because we can see that little play icon. If it wasn't selected, we would make sure it's selected, but I'm just going to go ahead and create that. Alright, now it's created captions for the entire show. Now, what I can do is just adjust this. I can make it nice and branded. I can adjust the sizing. I can adjust the color. So I think this effect that it's got in the back there, I don't think I need it because I think I'm just going to go with just black probably or maybe this dark blue. And I'm just going to change this to the same font that I have for the heading there, which is Mont and perhaps make that nice and bold, so it's easy to read. I think that looks pretty good. And then I can play around with the sizing here. So if I only want this to be on two lines, that works pretty well. I'm just going to mute this, actually, so we can have a play around with it. So I'm going to play the podcast episode, but you're not actually going to be able to hear it. So you can just see how the captions work in action. The issue that exists is as soon as you mess with the captions too much, where, let's say you want to clip the video or you want to adjust anything a little bit too much, then as soon as you do that, it kind of all gets out of whack. That might change in the future. But at this stage, all you can really do is you can kind of adjust things in here. You can delete certain lines, but you can't adjust timings very well. So there are limitations to this. I prefer to work with other tools outside of Canva for this for longer videos, especially if I'm doing a 20, 25 minute video. I would do it outside of Canva I think for short videos, this is a really, really handy tool to use. So definitely play around with it. I think it looks really cool. And I'm just going to play you a little clip just to kind of end on so that you can also hear how the AI sounds. But I think that looks really nice. I think a design like this would do really well on LinkedIn. It's quite professional. Obviously, this is a made up brand, but if they were doing a podcast on the property market and what new home buyers need to know, I think something like this works really well. And I think a lot of people who have audio only content and don't have video don't end up posting anything on social media because they think that there is no sort of in between. And I think something like this could be a really great way around that. So definitely play around with it, and I will see you in the next lesson. But even a single question can give us a ton of stuff to think about. Absolutely. So let's get into it. Yeah, let's do it. Buckle up, everybody. Is Brisbane going to be the next big real estate boom, or are we looking at, you know, maybe a bubble about to burst? 52. Using Frames for Videos: So for this lesson, we're going to be designing an ad or an organic video pops for a local gym, which is super fun. So I'm going to start by just adding it a little bit of text here, and we're going to go with something like eat, sleep, gym, repeat, maybe a dot at the end there. Now I'm going to change this font to yeah let's go with something a little bit more narrow and maybe bold. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Now I'm just going to twist that and if you're ever having issues with your rotation, by the way, you can always head on over to position and then just type it in here in case you're ever just like, Oh, I just don't really want to bother going one degree by one degree because that just, yeah, it can be annoying. And then we're going to go and just change the letter spacing a tiny bit to give us a little bit more real estate. And now I'm just going to hit L on my keyboard to bring it a line, but, of course, we could grab it from within the elements and shapes tab as well. And once again, I'm going to try to get to 90 degrees. Whoa. Did it on the first try. Okay, and now with lines, at any point, you can hit shift as you're moving them, even if you're just moving this way and this way, it'll allow you to basically move without adjusting too much because otherwise, it can be hard to try and keep things straight. So if you hold down Shift, it's going to make it much, much easier for you to work with lines within Canva. Okay, so we're going to be working with the video, but before we do that, I'm going to go to elements, and we're going to head on over to frames and bring in some letter frames because people just don't know that you can use frames for videos within Canva, and it's such a fun thing to play around with. So we're going to be using these letter frames, but make sure you're grabbing them from the same category because the ones at the bottom here are quite narrow. So it doesn't matter which ones you use as long as you're using the same ones. And I'm going to be spelling out the word power. But I just need to make sure that all my letters are the same size, same height, so that everything looks nice and equal. So I'm going to stack these on top of each other, which means they have to be quite tiny for me to make that happen. And let's just stack these. Don't have to be super, super neat at the beginning. We're going to adjust things a bit obviously, they're a little bit too big still, so we need to adjust our height to be able to stack everything. Okay, so I am probably going to overlap things a little bit, so I'm just going to use my arrow keys here, and we won't really know exactly where things are placed until I bring in my video. But let's just roughly go with that. Okay, so now I can just drag that all the way to the edges so that I can be sure that it covers the entire length, and I'm just going to bring that over to this side to give me a bit more real estate with my video. So I'm just going to bring in a video that I have brought in from pixels, but, of course, you could do it from within Canva, as well. I'm just going to crop my video, and we're just going to make this nice and stretchy here. So that's pretty cool. I could actually maybe flip this so that our trainer here has a little bit more real estate, so I'm just going to flip him and put him on the other side here and maybe adjust my crop. So he's just kind of on the edge of it. Yeah, I think that's going to work a little bit better for us. So let's leave it at that. And we're just going to crop this over here. So this video is not the highest quality. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to edit, and I'm just going to either I could use some filters, or in this case, I'm just going to completely desaturate it and then bring down the temperature so it makes it nice blue because I think that kind of works for gyms. I think it's got quite a Jimmy Jimmy kind of look. So I think that works really well. Now, I want to make sure that this video is positioned at the very start of the clip here or at a point that makes the most sense. I think for me, the start usually makes the most sense, which will allow me to really easily kind of line up my shots. So now I'm just going to bring that all the way to the back, just go to copy it over so we can paste it, but I'm basically going to crop it until about here. Maybe even go a little bit beyond that and maybe I'll adjust things a tiny bit. I'll put my P over here, again, using just the arrow keys on my keyboard. Okay, I think that looks really good, but there's a little bit of an edge at the bottom. So I'm just going to highlight my frames and make sure they're brought all the way to the bottom there. Okay, that looks good. My O has a little bit of an edge there from the video, so I'm just going to bring in a circle by hitting C on my keyboard and just bringing this to the back of my oh so that it gets rid of that little edge. And I'm going to hit Command and left square bracket to bring that to the back there. Okay, I'm quite happy with that. So now what we need to do we need to align our videos within each of these tiles so it looks really nice and seamless. Alright, so I'm going to paste my video in, and we're going to make sure it's at the right time of the video, which is at the very beginning here, and we're going to start popping it into each of the frames. Now if we click into our frame, it's at the wrong part of the video. So we're just going to have to adjust that a little bit because it's going to make it really hard to line things up when the videos at the wrong frame. So instead, we're going to go to trim. This is a little bit tedious, but it does sometimes happen when the video autoplays. So we're just going to go all the way to the front. And in playback, I'm just going to say don't play it automatically for now and see if that helps us. Alright, now, I'm just going to align this. Teeniest, tiniest bit off. Well, it's good. Alright, now let's keep going with the rest of the letters. Mm Okay, that looks good. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to export it because sometimes when you play this within Canva, it glitches because there's so many videos on top of each other. But I'm going to create one slight variation to this, so I'm going to hit Command D to duplicate this page. Just to show you, it can also be a really cool function to kind of dim the main video and really bring out the word, as well. So that's an alternative option. I'm going to export both, and we'll take a look at the final creation. So this is our first video, and I think it looks pretty good. I think there's a teeny, tiny, super, super slight issue with the O there because I can see the frame, the tiniest little bit. If you have a look. It's the tiniest bit choppy there. So I would probably adjust that frame. There's probably just, you know, half a millisecond off maybe or something like. But the rest of them are really, really lovely and seamless. So I think that that design worked pretty well. These are tricky letters to do. A lot of the time, people pick really simple letters or pick simpler shapes or less shapes. I know this was quite a challenging thing to do. So I did think it would be quite a fun thing to demonstrate because it's a little bit challenging. But I think that turned out really nicely, and we'll just have a look at our second design here. I'm just going to bring that one over, make it a teeny tiny bit smaller so we can see it better. And that looks really lovely. In this case, I think the O doesn't really matter because it's got that nice distinct difference, so it doesn't need to blend in. So I think this one works really perfectly. So I really like this effect. I don't utilize it a whole lot, but when I do, I think it's really captivating and it helps to elevate your videos even a step further. So hopefully you enjoyed that one, and I will see you in the next lesson when we start talking about video ads. 53. How Are Video Ads Different?: So this is not a paid ads course, but I did want to cover this because it is a very in demand skill, and you may be wanting to run paid ads, paid video ads for yourself, as well. So I thought it'd be really useful to cover the ins and outs of it because it does have some additional complexities to just running organic content. So for example, if you're running meta ads through Facebook and Instagram, you might be designing in either vertical format for reels and stories, or you might be designing in square or portrait format for in feed ads. And then there are also some additional placements that require things like horizontal placements, but that's a little bit more niche and they're not quite as common as the others. So what it means is that you have to really think about what platform am I creating this video for and also what placement on that platform does it need to actually work for. So if you're not familiar with running ads and you have someone else actually doing this portion of the job, then I would just discuss it with them and say, Where do you actually want to run these ads? Because I need to know in order to design it correctly. But effectively, you want to make sure that whatever you're designing is able to kind of be a bit of shape shifting needs to be able to happen in order for it to work across different placements. And then the other thing to also consider is the length of the video, because there are definitely some placements that have much stricter restrictions on the length of the video than others. So, for example, if you're running an in feed ad, it's going to have much more flexibility than, like, a reels ad or a stories ad. So these do sort of keep changing because Mark Zuckerberg, you know, has a moment and just changes everything, and that's fine. That's just part of marketing. But it's always good to make sure that you're checking the duration of your ads before you start designing them. And I say this because I actually recently had this issue where it's been so long since I've actually run paid ads for a client and I had to do it. And I just felt like it was the Wild West and I had no idea what it was doing. So I designed it with the knowledge that I had previously from a few years ago and realized, actually, that didn't work for the formats and the restrictions that are in place right now. It definitely didn't work for the length of the videos that I was designing so it just meant that it was a lot more work for me to take the assets that I had created and then have to adjust them afterwards. But I guess the good news is that if you can wrap your head around how metaads are run, which is what we're going to discuss here, the other platforms are much easier. Like, much, much easier. So to give you an example, this is a promoted pin that I've run quite a bit, advertising this exact course, actually. And you'll notice that it doesn't really look any different to any other kind of organic pin. But then if I were to look at this Instagram rail design, if I were to then run this as an ad, it would have to look totally different because there are different areas that will be blocked by different ad elements. Plus, I'd have to make sure that any audio or music tracks in the background are licensed for me to freely use. So I can't exactly have Taylor Swift kind of running in the background of the paid ad because they just don't have that kind of budget. So I've provided some guidance on this in your course guard, and we're also going to talk about this in the following lesson. But I did just want to say that these things are always changing. So always make sure that you're checking up on the resources that exist out there, specifically provided by Meta, as well, because they keep those up to date, probably more so than anyone else. So before you sit down to design, even if you I'm 100% good. Mag said this is exactly how I do it. I would still always just double check that nothing's actually changed because like I said, our friend Mr. Zuckerberg just likes to change his mind on things, and things just shift a lot. So definitely make sure that you're keeping an eye on things. And in the next lesson, we're going to start designing an ad for a fictitious childcare center. Where we're going to be creating a square video ad that's a collection of videos and images. So it's going to give you a good blend of how you can utilize both, and we're also going to start to look at some animations and things like that. But will allow us to basically create an ad that would work for Facebook feeds. It would work for Instagram feeds. I would even work for LinkedIn feeds if you're feeling really fancy. And then we can also look at how we would then resize this ad so that it would work for other placements, and then I can show you how I would utilize the templates that I've provided you with to make sure that none of the elements within my ad are going to be blocked within an app like Instagram, for example. So let's get into everything in the next lesson, and I'll see you there. 54. Captivating Video Ads: So we are going to be starting from scratch. And if you actually look at Instagram ad or Facebook ad within Canva, it doesn't give you a whole lot to go off of. It will naturally try to get you create a portrait graphic, which isn't wrong. I think this is a really good idea in terms of placement, but potentially some of the placements you might be looking at might require it to be a square graphic. So we're actually going to be going with the square dimensions here just to be on the safe side and making sure that it works for more placements. But, again, it's completely up to you and depending on how you're going to be using these ads. So I'm just going to rename this. This is going to be let's say, our daycare. And now I'm effectively going to be recreating an ad that I actually did do recently for a daycare center, one that performed pretty well for us, and I think it's a really good blend of both photos and videos. So I thought that might be an interesting one for us to cover because a lot of the time, you might be designing for a brand that doesn't necessarily have a lot of video content because not everybody does. And that can be really tricky when you want to create video ads, but you don't actually have video clips used. We're going to be creating this as almost like a search bar, which is also quite captivating. It makes people want to see more because each of the slides is going to have a different search phrase. So let's start with just putting in a little video to start. So we're going to look at let's say daycare. Okay, so we're just going to bring in a couple of videos and a couple of photos and kind of overlap them. So I'm going to right click on this and set my video as background, and then I'll just double click into it and just move it to a section that's going to allow me to play some text on top of it without it being too distracting. Okay, so now we need to create our search bar. Of course, you can grab a search bar directly from within the graphics here, but a lot of these are pro elements. So if you don't find one that's suitable, you can just create your own as well by hitting R on my keyboard, and we're just going to round out our corners, and let's make this nice and white. And within elements now, we can look for a search icon and add this in so we can make it exactly how we kind of want it. I like this one. And then on the other side of it, I'm going to have a little microphone icon. And I want to be looking for a microphone icon that's sort of the same thickness as my search icon. So these are a little bit different. So I might need to find a search icon that's a little bit thinner so that it plays a little bit better with this one here. Let's go with this one that's a little bit thinner. And then I'm just going to make sure to flip that so that it's in the right spot. I just want to make sure that they're kind of the same size. I'm going to hit shift and select them both and just bring them down to size to bring them into my little search bar here, making sure that they fit now the benefit of actually making your own search bar is that you can make it the dimensions you want. Whereas if you pick an element from here, like a search bar like this one, for example, which is essentially exactly the same thing. But you can only size it up or down in the dimensions that it's in, you can't make it longer or wider. Whereas, if we create it ourselves, we can absolutely do it this way. So I can make it less and chunky if I want to. So that's kind of nice. Alright, now, I'm just going to bring in a bit of a drop shadow. So that it helps to stand out. Now, we've got a few different options here. Either I can just bring in a drop shadow underneath my search bar, which I think I would do regardless because it will kind of help it stand out. But then I can also bring in, like, a little shadow just around the entire search bar so that it helps to stand out from the video, and I'm going to hit Command in my left square bracket until I move it to the back. And then I'll just move everything. Ooh. Let me select my little microphone icon here. We'll just move everything to the center. Okay, so now I'll say that I think this search bar is going to end up being way too thin, but let's just bring in our text and then we can kind of widen it out. So I'm going to hit T on my keyboard, and we can just make that nice and black so we can see it. We can say something like, find the best daycare near me. And then I'm going to make that nice and big and possibly go with a different font depending on how this looks if it's bold. I think that works right. Okay, so now I'm just going to go ahead and widen this out a little bit. So that I can make the text nice and big, so it stands out when it's actually in ad form. Just going to make my microphone a teeny, tiny bit smaller so that it kind of works with the search icon there. Okay, I think that looks good, and then I'm just going to have to make my actual drop shadow a bit bigger as well and move this other dropshadow. Okay, now, before grouping my elements, I want to make sure I'm animating my text. So I'm just going to animate this probably just on Enter, and then we're going to just see how fast that is. I probably want it relatively quick. So exactly, so it sort of looks like somebody's actually typing it, and I would type it in character by character. And I think that looks really good. You could include other animations, but I think for now, I'm quite happy with that. I'm just going to hit Shift and combine basically all of my elements and group these except for that big kind of main shadow in the back there. Might try and find one that is a little bit wider. Let's see. Alright, I'm going to bring that to the back. Yeah, I think that works a little bit better. I know these are a bit hard to see, so you always have to sort of experiment with them because it'll take a little while to find the right one. And also, if you're in Canva light mode, you will see these better naturally. So I think that works really well. I'm going to go to duration because I'm not sure how long this is. I think it's about, that's 7 seconds. That's a bit too long. So this is how it looks when it plays. And then we're going to go to the next slide, but I definitely want to make sure that that's not that long. It only really needs to be, I would say just under 3 seconds, and then it'll go to the next slide. Now we can get working on the rest of our slides. And I would search for something like toddlers eating because I'm going to be talking about an incredible onsite chef that exists at the daycare center. So I'm just going to choose this image here. Of course, if I was doing this for an actual brand, I would be using their specific daycare images, not just the ones from within this library so that the actual daycare center would be consistent, the teachers uniforms would be consistent, et cetera, et cetera. But for now, we are working with what we've got. And I would just animate this as either breathe or photo Zoom or something like that, that gives it a slight animation, even though it's a photo. And then I would just bring this down to probably about 2.7, 2.8 seconds as well. And then I can essentially copy and paste across my search bar. The reason I would do it this way as opposed to just duplicating this paint and changing up the background is because sometimes when you're putting in the breathe animations, it tries to apply it to everything else on the page, and that can be frustrating. So I just prefer to do it this way, and then that way, when we bring this in, and let's say, in this case, we want to bring it down here instead, then when we go to play this, it's going to animate the back, but then this is still going to be a nice little typewriter. It has. Even then, it's actually animated the search bar as well, which is just a little bit annoying. So I'm just going to go ahead and select our elements here, and I'm going to have to go to clear animations. So let's try that again. Yeah. Okay, so it's remove the animations. My little microphone icon there seems to be missing, so we're just gonna go ahead and bring that in here. I'm making sure that that's still part of my search bar. Okay, cool. So now I'm going to say something like with an incredible on site chef because that's important to me if I'm looking for a daycare center that I don't have to cook my kids' food. And then I'm just going to keep going through and just listing a couple of things that I would be searching for as a parent when I'm looking for a daycare center. And then we will pause again. So I'm going to speed this up because I'm essentially just going to be duplicating exactly what I've just done with this photo Zoom or breathing animation by having a slightly different image in the background and then a little bit of different text here. And then we'll take a look at how to bring it all together. Okay, so now I just need to clip some of these video clips because I did add in a couple of video clips. I would want to hit M on my keyboard just to make sure that that audio is not there. In this case, it's actually completely great out. Anyways, so that doesn't really matter. It doesn't have any background audio, but I would want to make sure that each of these is only about 2.7 seconds. I know that seems like such an obscure amount of time. But basically 2-3 seconds is what we want to be going for in terms of our video. So I would just say 2.7 seconds. I would probably choose the part of the clip where maybe people are smiling and something's happening. And then making sure that each of these is about that same length. Now, my last slide says Book your tour of our Center today, and I would probably not make this a type writer animation. I would probably just make that a nice breath or maybe a succession as long as it's quite slow, so I'm just going to animate on Enter, and I'd probably slow that down a fair bit. And yeah, I think that looks really cool. Okay, so now I'm just going to add in some transitions here. And in this case, I would probably just go for the Dissolve transitions to make it nice and although you could go with something a little bit more colorful, like the color wipes, because that works pretty well for this being a daycare center. But I think, yeah, let's just go for Dissolve and apply that between all our pages as a 0.5 second transition. And then let's go ahead and just add some music. So I found this happy ukulele children's music on Pixabay, and then you can always have a look at their content license to make sure that you're able to use it. But I know this one, in particular, we can, and it's 54 seconds, and my video ad is only less than 20 seconds or around 20 seconds. So I think that's going to work well for us. So I'm just going to go and head to the audio section of my uploads folder. I already know that I have this in here, and I can just drop it onto my timeline here. And, of course, I can then use this to kind of drag the part of the song that I want. But really, at this stage, I probably actually wanted to start from the beginning of the song because that's probably going to work the best for me. So now that's dropped in, we can head on over to fade. And then, in this case, I may not need it to fade in, but I would probably need it to fade out, even just by a couple of seconds so that it's not this kind of abrupt end. Let me just see how this plays. Yeah, so that's fine. It can start when it starts, but then I would want to make sure that it sort of fades out at the end. Alright, so now we can go ahead and play that so you can see this in all its glory, and we can also pick up any last minute errors because I'm sure there's gonna be something that I pick up. Then I think, I don't know about this. So let's go ahead and play that. Okay, so super quick, in this case, I would add in a little bit about the actual center that we're talking about, because that's essentially sort of saying, R center is the answer to all of your questions. We have all of these things. And in this case, I think that this is a little bit hard to read. So I'm just going to hit R on my keyboard, and I would probably bring in my little gradient rectangle here, which we've done a lot in this course, so hopefully you're not getting too sick of it as a technique, but I do actually utilize it a fair bit in my design work, and hopefully you might as well. So yeah, I would probably bring that in just a little bit and adjust the transparency. It doesn't have to be too too noticeable, but I think just to make that text really nicely pop. So if I now play that. Okay, so that gradient needs to stretch out. Otherwise, when it animates in, or I would just remove the actual animation, then it doesn't actually look like it's showing up. Let's play that again. I'm just going to mute this so we don't have to listen to happy ukulele music all the time. Okay, I think that works really well. Perfect. Now in the next lesson, we're just going to go into how I would resize our beautiful ad for different placements. I'll see you there. 55. Resize Your Video Ads: Okay, so let's talk meta ad placements. This makes it seem so overwhelming, but it's true there are so many different placements for your ads, and it can make your head spin. But effectively, these are all just sort of the same dimensions for the most part, if you look at it, really. Instagram profile feed, Facebook feed, video feeds, all of these explore, even marketplace. These can all essentially be square or they could be portrait format as well, which they haven't added in here, but yeah, that could get even more confusing. And then you have these nice 1920 by 1080 or 1080 by 1920 vertical posts that can go into reels and into stories. So you don't necessarily need to be creating that many different versions of your ads. You do need to be aware of things that are going to be blocking them, especially in terms of reals and stories. In terms of actual in post or marketplace feeds and things like that, if you have a square video like the one we created or square image, there's going to be nothing actually blocking it, so it's a little bit less restrictive. But if we take a look at the recommendations from Meta themselves, the amount of space that you actually have to work with for your vertical videos is very limited, which is unfortunate. When you look at it this way, you're like, why can't I design here? There's nothing there. But it's essentially saying in some instances, there will be things here that will be blocking this, not in all placements, but in some. So when you're designing, you've got such little space to work with, which can be a little bit frustrating, which is why I've made you beautiful templates to account for this. So once again, just like we would with any other design, we would just resize this if we're Canva Pro user using the magic resize function. But if you're a Canva free user, you would just go in and create a different design and copy and paste across. So I'm just going to copy and resize this into my Instagram reels dimensions. Then we'll take a look at some intricacies of that particular dimension. Okay, so it's done a pretty good job of resizing it for us. One thing I did want to mention is that if you go into apps, Meta does have its own app within Canva. So it's a meta design checker, which sounds really great except it doesn't do the very best job. Yeah, I can just be really, really tricky. So let's say, okay, we want to do a design check basically for our entire video as it is. I haven't actually moved anything, so there's definitely a few messy things because, for example, at the end there, it's screwed up our gradient. I would say the text is a little bit small. There's definitely going to be parts like this that would be blocked, especially on an Instagram reel. So it's sort of checking it, but we'll see. Maybe it will surprise me this time, but I found it to be not as accurate as it could be. Maybe in the future, it will change. Right. So it said my design is good to go, even though there's going to be parts of this that aren't going to work. These would probably actually work for reels that are just going in the feed, but definitely not real ads. And I would say that even in terms of actual rails, it doesn't quite work out. It just doesn't don't know. Maybe it'll change in the future. So I have provided you with some templates for stories and for reels. I would just go with the reels one unless you're specifically designing four stories because it's the most restrictive of the two. So this will basically tell me, right, this is going to be completely blocked, and so I need to really move things up. Now, just so that I can actually have a look at where these restrictions are across all my designs, I'm going to hit Shift R and bring in some guidelines here to make it a little bit easier for me to work with. And roughly around there, around there. I'm not going to worry too much about this area here, so I can just delete this, and of course, we'll do a final check at the end, as well. Alright, so now I'll be able to see if this is sort of within my guidelines here. I would maybe potentially just test this on a mobile screen and see if this needs to be a tiny bit bigger. But for now, I'm just going to leave it as that. Now let's have a look at this one. It's just on the edge, but it still definitely fits. I'd say that that background image needs to be double clicked into and just moved across so that it actually makes sense with what we're talking about. I will actually highlight these and just use my arrow keys to move these up a teeny tiny bit just so it looks a little bit better as a design. Now my little microphone icon hasn't really traveled with us. I'm just going to move that up. Plenty of outdoor spaces. Is that within my guidelines? Yep, perfect, open on school holidays? All right. That's not quite where we needed to be. Going to highlight everything, and I'll just use my arrow keys to move that up. And I would potentially use this video and actually double click into this one as well and just make sure that it looks quite nice. I'd probably bring in the educator there. That looks good. This one, I think is okay. Yep, I think that works. I'll double click into this just because of where the teacher is facing. I think it probably makes a little bit more sense for that to be the placement there, and this one's definitely not right. So, and my microphone little icon has disappeared off that one. Interesting. Okay. I'll have to bring that back in because the perfectionist to me, will not let things go, and that's okay. Alright, so we're just going to line that up. Over here, and I'll double click into this. Yeah, I think that's probably a nicer part of the image. I'd just bring my little microphone icon across and copy and paste that in. But I have to probably zoom in to be able to place it in Oh, it was there. I was there all along. Okay, there you go. So that looks alright. And then my last frame is probably not within the boundaries or just within the boundaries. But I would say maybe the text is a little bit too small and my gradient is definitely not in the right spot there. So I would probably maybe even put this on three lines and make that nice and large because that's kind of the primary call to action. The real. Alright, so that looks pretty good. So now I know that everything is right where it needs to be. There's potentially, as you'll remember, from this kind of guide, there's a tiny, tiny, little bit of a square area that's also going to be blocked. So it's going to be blocking the little microphone icon on this particular slide. But I don't really that's just being a little bit pedantic. So I don't think it really matters. And then if we bring in our stories template, you'll see that it's not nearly as restrictive. As the reels one. So anything that was visible in the other one will be visible on this one. But of course, a lot of the time, you'll be designing a specific ad just for stories. So, for example, this is too long. We're at 18 seconds for stories, it would have to be 15 seconds per video. So you could have sort of multiple stories in an ad, but each of them would only be 15 seconds. So I would probably design something really specific two stories, or I would just remove one of these slides. But I would say I generally design very specifically for stories and specifically for reels. But I think that that works really well, and I would just make sure to obviously check that on a phone screen to make sure that the text is large enough and everything plays as it should. But that gives you an idea of how I would resize an ad that was sort of designed for the in feed placement and take it to a reels or a story's placement. And I'll catch you in the next lesson. 56. Exercise: Canva for Social Media Videos: So we're at the end of this section of the course, and it's time for us to put our knowledge into action once again and really test out what we've learned in this section. So I'd love for you to challenge yourself and utilize one of the techniques that we've learned in this section of the course and create your very first or your next social media video using Canva. So as a reminder, you could create a quick Instagram story, a post with a gift in it, a tweet style reel, or a quote reel, an audio only reel, or even just a project where you're layering images and videos on top of each other. Or if you're feeling really fancy, you could even create an entire video app. Choice is entirely up to you. The point is really just to practice at this point because later in the course, we're going to get much more advanced with our video techniques where we start creating videos like this and this and even this. But before we get there, in this next section of the course, we're going to dive into Canva for business, where we're going to start talking about how to create amazing eBooks, print some awesome business cards, create professional posters, animated email signatures, interactive quizzes, and so much more. So make sure to pause the course and go and make your social media video so you can practice your skills. And whenever you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 57. Canva for Business: So many other elements to presenting a business online and offline that don't involve a social media content strategy. So it's kind of that experience when you click through a beautiful pin on Pinterest, and it's so gorgeous and it looks great. And then you land on a website that just looks like it's from a different world to that pin. And it's such a disconnect in customer experience, which is exactly why it can be so handy for you to have these additional skills in creating other forms of web content that can help so in this section of the course, we're going to dive into looking at things like creating amazing eBooks, also printing your business cards, designing websites, and designing interactive quizzes, and so many really cool things, including actually putting together mockups of things like your eBooks. And that can be really handy if you're either giving these eBooks or your designs away as lead magnets to get people's email addresses, or you're actually going a step beyond this and looking to sell your designs on platforms like Etsy and Creative Market, which is something that we're going to cover a little bit later in the course. But there's so much beautiful stuff to cover, and a few additional things that I'm going to keep secret for now, they're not actually secret because they're the titles of the lessons in this section of the course, so you could easily look up what they are. But I was trying to sound with serious. Anyways, lots of really cool stuff to cover. So let's dive into everything in the next lesson. 58. Set Up Your eBook Design: So to get started with eBooks, I would recommend going to something like creative market and just looking for either just eBook or something specific within your industry. If you're looking for something within real estate, something as a coach or consultant or maybe a particular vibe, if you're looking for a really colorful eBook or a really minimalist one. You could search for all of that, so it narrows it down from 11,000 different eBooks. But it's important at this stage that we're not necessarily just looking for Canva templates. It's okay for them to be in in design or other softwares because we're just drawing inspiration from these. And then I would go through a couple of designs that I really like and take some screenshots. Now, as I say that, I do want to say and mention and preface this by saying, we're just taking a couple of screenshots from each design. We're not sort of saying, we're going to recreate this and not pay for it. If you really like the overall design, just pay for it. Make sure that the artists and the creators are getting the credit that they deserve. This is more of a case of, you know, maybe from this entire design, I actually only like this page, and I'm inspired by something that has really stood out to me. So maybe I will just screenshot that one, and maybe I want to create a full screen kind of page like this one, so maybe I'll screenshot that one, and then I'll move on to other designs and keep gathering a bit of inspiration. So it's really important that if you're going to draw inspiration, you're doing this from three, four, five, six different designs and that you're recreating it and making it your own and not just outright copying. Then what I do is I create a mood board within Canva like this one, where I just drop a bunch of these screenshots into one document. They don't have to be super high quality. I mean, these are teeny, tiny, so they're really, really glitchy. But it doesn't really matter. I'm sort of just inspired by little elements in each different screenshots. So, for example, with this one, I really like the arches here. So I thought, Oh, maybe I would design something with an arch frame, same with this one. And then this one, I really like the phone mockup. So I thought that could be a cool thing to do. This was more of an inspiration for a list. So it doesn't necessarily need to be super high quality. And then I like to also make a separate page where I just gather a bunch of my images. So just to be clear, I'm not this fancy. This was a template that I just dragged my images into. I didn't actually go through the effort of making these circular frames and all that. It was literally just a mood board template within Canva. And then I dragged in all the images that I want to be using for my eBook design, which in this case, is going to be an interior designer, E so we're using a lot of boho kind of home shots and quite minimalistic, earthy kind of colors. And then I created a little bit of a color scheme just by using the color picker and picking a couple of colors from each image and tweaking them a tiny bit so that they work for my purposes, and then selecting a couple of fonts that I think will work well for my design. This is something I'm going to drag to my other screen just off the side, so you won't be able to see this, but it's something I like to keep open as I'm designing. And with my actual color scheme here, I would group this, and then I would just copy this across to my actual e book design because then I can essentially choose from my document colors because my document colors will appear as soon as I bring this across. Now, in terms of eBook templates within Canva, this might change in the future, but right now it's just so limited. And a lot of the time, you might only get a couple of pages or just a cover like this one. This one has ten pages within it, which is pretty good. Sometimes you might get two or three pages. For example, this one has four pages in it. I don't know who creates an eBook with four pages in it, but I definitely don't I think it does mean that you're a little bit limited with what you can do with these designs, which is why I'm going to be teaching you how to create it yourself and also really important to keep in mind that we want to make sure we're designing it in the right dimensions. So we've got the A four format, which is sort of a document format, but it's really important for you to know, are you going to be printing this? If you're printing it, what dimensions are you printing it in or do you want to give people the option to print it? In which case, you're a little bit more limited with how you design it. But A four seems to be a relatively safe dimension. So that's the dimensions we're going to be going with for this lesson. Now we can rename our document here, and we're just going to command V to paste in our color scheme and our fonts here so that anytime we're designing this E book and we're changing colors, it's got my document colors in here. And anytime I want to change fonts, it's going to have my document fonts in here. So my heading font is the seasons, and my paragraph font is called glacial indifference. So now we can set up this project to work for us. So let me just change that back. Where it's going to get a little bit technical, but I promise it'll be worth it in the long run. So we want to make sure we're heading on over to file settings and show margins, which is going to definitely allow us to essentially not have any text going outside of these lines, so we can make sure everything is nice and aligned. And then we want to do one more thing. We go over to settings and show rulers and guides or hit Shift R. And now we're going to bring in our center line, which is going to naturally snap into place, as you can see at that 105 millimeter mark, and then we're going to zoom in and we're going to want to go 5 millimeters on either side. So we're just going to go to 100 here and 110. Perfect. So that essentially gives us a tiny gap on either side. So when we bring in paragraph font and we want to have these two beautiful columns, they're going to be evenly spaced. And at any point, as you'll remember, you can hit ShiftR if this is bugging you or you don't think you need it, you can just make it go away, but it will make it so much easier for you to design. Let's talk about how to actually design this. I'm going to hit T on my keyboard and bring in some paragraph text, which is obviously we too big. We want to be definitely going at at least 11 points, but we can sort of tweak this and play around with it, depending on the look and feel that we're going for. I'm just going to go ahead and make that font size at 11. And now we want to actually bring in some paragraph text so we can design around this. If this was for a live eBook, I would definitely want to make sure I already have all the content that I need before I start designing because it can be really frustrating when you make the perfect design, and then you get the content, and you realize it doesn't fit within your design because you have way more text than you thought you would or way less texts than you thought and you have to change everything. But because this is essentially for a template, we just need kind of dummy text at this point. So for this purpose, I would encourage you to just go to lipsum.com, which I've linked within your course guide where you can say, Okay, I want five paragraphs, and it's going to create essentially dummy text. That doesn't mean anything, so people aren't distracted by within your beautiful design. And then you can just copy it across. So I only ask for five paragraphs. I don't even think we'll need quite that many. Let's just copy four across. And then we can head into our design, paste this in and of course, it's going to be a huge mess, and that's okay. But now we can adjust this to where our margins and our guides are. So that's going to make it really nice and easy to work with. And I would either love to align this or justify it in terms of my alignment. But in this case, let's go justify. I think it gives us a much nicer look. And because this is a nonsensical text, we can actually just put line breaks wherever we want. We can copy the text across however much we want. We can play around with it so, so much because it doesn't actually matter. I mean, it's nothing. And then we would just add in our headings, so that could be a separate textbox, or in this case, it can just exist within this textbook. I think I'm going to bring it in as a separate textbook just so we can always kind of adjust our placement. So here, I'm just going to say heading goes here. So people know, and now we can make that into the seasons. And let's make that a teeny, tiny bit smaller and left aligned. So this I would probably just adjust my spacing a little bit because I think it gives it a much more kind of editorial look with more spacing, and we'll just see if it sort of fits. And then I would just bring this down, so my heading and my paragraph font have a nice kind of division, and they're not too close to each other there. So that's how I would easily set up my design for a beautiful eBook with multiple pages in it. And in the next lesson, we can actually start bringing in our other creative assets and putting it all together. 59. Design Amazing eBooks: So now that we have our general setup in place, we can actually start designing. So I'm going to hit R on my keyboard to bring in a bit of a rectangle and bring in a little bit of color here. Obviously, this is not the color I want to be going with. I'm going to be choosing my document colors here. So maybe a nice dark clay color here. I'm not great with color names. I want to be really honest with you. That's not my jam. But then I'll head on over to elements and either select frames or we can just select arch in this case and then head on over to frames this way. And I might actually create a separate page or just on my main page here, drag in a couple of frames with arches in them that I think might be cool to use for the design, so we don't have to kind of keep coming back and forth. I think I like this one. It's good to be careful, though, because a lot of the time, these will also have some additional elements like this golden frame here that may or may not work for your purposes. So definitely keep track of what additional elements are there. I think that looks pretty good. Okay, I like this short one. It does have a little line around it, but I could always match that to the color of my background. So don't mind that too much. And I like this little narrow one. So I think I'm just going to bring those in for the time being, and I'm going to copy this one across to my second page here so that we can use it. And I would actually probably move it off to the side. So I'm going to use it in a slightly different way, perhaps like this. And then I can bring in my images. So I did make a collection of images for the specific project, creative assets, and I'm going to go ahead to my folders, and I've got a lot of different it's within this folder. So this is going to be within my background images and videos, and inside of images, I've got a collection of kind of scandy minimalistic sort of images that could be used for our purposes here. So I can just snap a couple into place and then play around with the background color and the actual image here and also the sizing, if I think, Oh, okay, maybe that's stretched a little bit too far. Maybe I kind of want to keep it within the margins. I can definitely do. And now, one thing that I really like doing is adding in another rectangle by hitting RMI keyboard and just making sure there's a web address at the bottom of each page. This is entirely optional, but I do think that it makes it a little bit harder for people to steal your work, and it gives you a little bit more real estate in terms of promoting your business. No, not real estate. It's really hard to talk and type different things sometimes. So I would say something like really great site.com because at this stage, this is just a template. Maybe I would adjust the letter spacing to give it a nice, kind of, again, minimalistic look maybe. And just bring that down in a tiny bit, it doesn't have to be super huge. And the color I would probably differentiate from the color in the template itself to something a little bit lighter. Maybe even that and then just making sure my text is nice and black. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. So I'm going to hit Shift R so we can see this without our guides. And that's essentially my very first internal page, and I'm going to replicate this for the rest of my internal pages by adding in variations of this exact same thing. So I am going to speed this up a little bit so you don't have to watch me do this for 30 minutes straight because it can take a little while. But if there's anything that's new that we're doing, I'm going to pause and we're going to talk about it. Mm M Mm Alright, so now we can go ahead and delete our first page. Like I said, it's a lengthy process designing this stuff because I'm always looking off to the side at my inspiration pages and also just trying to come up with really slight variations of the designs that I already have. So I'm just going to hit Shift R on my keyboard to get rid of our guidelines here, and then let's go to Grid view so we can have a look at all of our internal pages. So I will probably play around with the colors a teeny, tiny bit because I think this color here. Stela I don't know, something about it is really throwing me off. And I don't know if it's just because I don't actually like the gray as being part of my color scheme. Maybe we just need to go with a brown. Let's give it a go. Let's see how it might look if it's Yeah, it might just look a bit better. I don't know. I liked it conceptually, but I think in reality, it doesn't quite work. So I have just made slight variations of every single thing that I've created, you know, brought in those beautiful arch frames and have a couple of listicles here. So anyone could take this design and this template and just move things around to make it really work for them. I've got things you know, the first, let's say, this was four tips to something, so I'd have a first tip, a second tip, a third tip, and a fourth tip. I have a quote page. I have a couple of kind of, you know, highlight pages where they can bring in some author's quotes or something like that, and then a couple of kind of listicals things like that. And then I've kept my title page really simple. But again, this is something you can actually get a lot of inspiration from within Cava because cover pages for eBooks is the one thing that Cava definitely do really, really well. So just remember, you do have access to all of these templates, so you can grab the template of this exact E book that we just designed so you can go through it and really kind of understand exactly how everything was done. So you will have noticed that I had my little guidelines if I hit Shift R. So I was able to align my paragraphs to these. But then also sometimes things get completely thrown out the window and you decide, Ooh, actually, you know, I'm going to align things to something totally different on my page. And that's fine, as well. So it's just there to guide you. It doesn't mean everything sort of set in stone. So definitely go check out the template. But before we head into the next lesson, I just want to show you that within Cava, at any point, you can hyperlink things that are going to then make your beautiful links clickable. So you can always right click and link here or just hit Command K on a Mac or Control K on a PC and then bring in a hyperlink. So let's say this is going to be going to mystar.com. So we can definitely test it out on page 13, and it's automatically going to underline it, but you can remove this, and it's still going to be nice and clickable. So anytime you click on something that has a hyperlink, you'll be able to see it there. And you can also hyperlink between pages. So let's say this is going to be my list page, and of course, you can actually title things properly. So this is going to be my fourth tip. This is a really great option if you've got a really long e book and you want to have a menu at the start and you want to have things be clickable and people will be able to jump through to that exact section. That's a really, really good option. Alright, so this is clickable here, and then this heading, we're going to again, Command K. And now we can actually make it jump down to our fourth tip. So let's say this was my menu and I would say, Yes, I want this when people click here to go to that particular page in my eBook. So I'm going to remove the underline here. But when we download this, we're going to check out how that works. Now, I am just going to really quickly create a to do list on the last page here, just so that in the next lesson, we can take a look at how we would make this eBook fillable, which is a really good option for anyone who is creating sort of workbooks or anything like that. So I'm just going to really quickly do this and make it in our exact style so we can take a look at how we would do that in the next lesson. Okay, cool. So that's just a quick to do list I grabbed from a template so we can have a look at how we would make that clickable and fillable in the next lesson. And then I would just go ahead and download this as a PDF standard if you don't need it to be printable because it's going to make it much, much smaller, and we're just going to go ahead and download that and I will see you in the next lesson. 60. Clickable & Fillable PDFs: So in terms of having fillable PDFs, you've got a lot of options. CDA, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, is the easiest and best sort of free tool that I found at the moment. I might change in the future. But just bear in mind that if you're on a free tool, pretty much any free tool out there, you're going to be limited with the font styles that you can choose for your fillable fields. If you really want to change the look and feel of the font styles as people are typing in, you might need an upgraded version of these softwares. Now we have some options we can add in their signature. We can white things out. We can annotate things, we can add in images. But really, for our purposes, we want to be focusing on the forms section. And in this case, it's going to be just a way for us to do text. So this is quite large. I would say, we're probably going to limit that to about font 12. But in this case, it's a single line textbox. If you wanted that to be multiple lines, then you would change that there. And then, in this case, I also want a check box to be over here, and I would make that the size of my square there. And then I can just go in and duplicate this for the next field, and you can see these lines there are helping me to make sure that that's aligned. And same with this one, I would just duplicate that once I'm happy with it, and these lines will come in and tell me if I'm kind of in the right spot. Okay, so I'm only going to do two for the time being so that we can demo this. But obviously, you would do this for all of your lines there. So we're going to apply our changes. Now, within this tool, you can also compress your PDF, which is something we're going to talk about in the next lesson. I would just download this with the fillable fields, and let's have a look at that and the hyperlinks, and then we'll use a slightly different tool for this in the next lesson, but just so you can technically compress and do lots of other things within this tool as well. Okay, so now if I open up my eBook and roll through, make sure everything looks good, make sure the text is readable. If I decide this is a little bit too small, I could adjust it. It's really a very good idea to always full screen things as well, just to make sure everything looks as you wanted to. Now, we're now on this page here, and you'll remember that we hyperlinked things here. So this really great site.com has gone to my own website, so that's now clickable. And then when I click the heading, you'll remember in the previous lesson, it now goes to page 15 because we interlinked that within the PDF itself. So that's all working, and now we can continue going down down and go all the way to the end where we have our to do list, and you'll already see a few things are highlighted here. This will allow me to tick things, and then I can type straight in here. So, like I said, you don't have many options in terms of how this appears, but it is nicely fillable. Whether people open that up in their browser or they actually download it onto their computer, either way, it's going to make it nice and fillable for them. So that's how I would make clickable and fillable PDFs. And then next lesson, we're going to take a look at how to compress these and also compress our image files for reasons which I will reveal in the next lesson. So I'll see you there. 61. Compress Images & PDFs: To kind of test things out, I did actually go through the Compress function onsta.com just to see how much it compresses and whether I'm actually right about this. So it says it's gone down to 3 megabytes. I've downloaded it, and it's actually 2.6 megabytes down from our original 10 megabytes. This second eBook is just the fillable one, so pretty much the same, and it's gone down to 2.6. So that's pretty good. But if we go to smallpdf.com and then go to Compress our PDF, if we take our original eBook, which was 10 megabytes or our fillable one, which was just under that. And compress this even on the free version of small PDF. I believe it will be much better than 2.7 megabytes. So we're going to compress it, and then let's talk about why we're compressing while that's happening. So a lot of the time, you might be attaching eBooks to emails for your email marketing newsletter, or you might be sending it to people just via email from email to email. The way, there's lots of reasons why you might want to transfer across eBooks or just in terms of actually storing eBooks in something like your Google Drive, you don't necessarily want to be storing these huge files. And this was only a 20 page eBook, and that was already 10 megabytes. Imagine if it was 100 pages, try sending that to somebody over email. It's not going to send if it's 30 megabytes. So you want to have these tools at your disposal so that you can compress your files and be able to send them without any issues. So if we look at our original eBook, and then we look at this compressed version, which is 1.4 megabytes, they're identical. I couldn't possibly tell you which is which. There's no kind of issues in terms of quality. It just means the file size is smaller. If you were to print it, possibly you might be able to see some issues, especially if you've got gradients in your eBooks. Maybe there might be a slight glitch here or there, so you might want to check that. But otherwise, it's actually exactly the same. It's one for one. It just means that your actual file size is much, much smaller. I love using small PDF for this purpose. And while we're on the topic of compressing, I did also want to talk about compressing images, specifically images that go onto your website or into your email marketing. So a lot of the time when you're sending newsletters, you want to include some images. And if your images are gigantic, whether on your website or in your email newsletters, it's going to really slow down your site or it's going to affect the deliverbility of your emails. So that doesn't necessarily mean you need to create these teeny, tiny images in terms of their dimensions, but you need to be able to compress. For example, this image is one I made within Canva, and I cut out the background. I add it in this little squiggle in the back there, and then let's say I go to Share and I'm going to download this as a transparent PNG, and I'm just going to be downloading my current page. I then have an option. So I can say, Alright this is 1920 y 1080. That's probably bigger than it's ever going to display on my site. So I could maybe go down in size and say, Okay, I only really need it to be, let's say, almost half the size that it started with. And then I could potentially also use the compression section here if I'm a Canva pro user. Look, this is something that might get better over time. As it stands, I don't think it's all that good. I've just found it to really glitch a lot of the time. There's just been times where I really do feel like it affects the quality of the images. I know it says lower quality, but the actual file size is still relatively large, but the quality is, it's not a great tool for compressing. So I use an external tool for this. So I'm just going to show you. I'm going to download this so we can see exactly how big it is in its initial size in the new dimensions, whether or not you choose to change the dimensions, of course, you could download it in the original dimensions, and then I would head on over to tiny PNG. It doesn't just do PNGs, it will also do JPEGs and other image formats, but it will allow you to download something that was once 369 kilobytes and now we're down to 117 kilobytes. And that is without any kind of loss of quality. If I pull these up side by side, you wouldn't be able to tell which is which except for the fact that in terms of file names, you can see that one's going to have one in it. So that's obviously the second one, but they look exactly the same. So that's the brilliant thing. Yes, potentially gradients can always stitch you up a little bit in terms of compressions. But I would say that Tiny PNG has never let me down in terms of compressions. And you can use 20 images per day on their free plan, which is more than enough for what you need on a day to day basis. And it will do wonders for website loading speed. So if you are putting images on your website or in your email newsletter, absolutely, make sure you're compressing things first. It will also save you a lot of space in terms of your Google Drive or Dropbox or wherever you're storing your images. So it's always best practice to try and compress your files whenever possible. So I know this is not the most exciting lesson in the whole world, and I promise we're going to get back into the exciting, creative stuff in the next lesson. But I did want to cover this because I see this being a really big mistake that a lot of people make where they make beautiful giant designs, but then it's really not actually working for them in the purposes that those designs are created for. When it comes to social media, you do not need to worry about this because the platforms themselves will compress everything for you. So this is much more isolated business sort of uses, as opposed to designing for social media specifically. Alright. And now let's get into the more fun and creative stuff in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 62. Animate Your eBook: So we're not quite done with the E book yet. I wanted to show you one cool thing that we can do by hitting Share and going into CEO, and you can either scroll down or you can actually find hazing flipbooks and say how many pages you want to turn your flipbook into. Okay, look, I probably don't need all of them for this animation, but let's just say we want to do all of them because we're over achievers, and then it's going to create a sort of magazine flipbook for us within an external app called Haze. Then we want to view this in hazing flipbooks. Okay, then it's going to ask us if we want to register. Otherwise, things are going to delete. We don't really care if it deletes. It's going to have a few things that you can only influence if you're subscribed, which we are not. So we're going to have a few little elements that we need to get rid of, but that's okay. I'm just going to go to Page effect and remove the sound. And then you can also play around with how things look. In this case, I'm happy for it to look like a magazine. Let's play around with the background a little bit. So I'm just going to want it to be sort of a solid color, and I'm going to just put in a hex code here based on the hex code of the project that I'm working with in Canva, or you can just go white or your brand color there. Then you've got options for styles and things like that, but I'm quite happy with how that looks. Then let's talk about controls. So I'm just going to remove some of these elements here. I don't need the Zoom button, and let's have a look at the navigation. I don't need this here. And as I said, we can't get rid of the logo, unfortunately. So that's the best we can do. Now, I'm just going to zoom out on my keyboard by hitting Command and minus until my eBook has a nice bit of real estate around it without the logo near it. So when I then use my arrow keys, my left and right arrow keys, I can record this and not have the external little elements around it. That's exactly what I wanted. Then in terms of how to actually record this, you can either use something like QuickTime on your computer or you can use something like awesome screen recorder as an awesome free chrome extension. So I'm going to go to record. I can only record this in 720 P, which is a bit of a downside of not being on their paid version, but I don't really mind, in this case. So I'm just going to go ahead and record that, and I want to move my mouse far away and then basically just hit the arrow keys and scroll through my beautiful eBook at a good pace so that it records this as a video. I'm probably not going to make a gift out of all 21 pages because that would be extreme, or maybe not. Let's see. I'm going to hit Stop. And now we can download this as an MP four. And we're going to head to Easy gift and go to video to GIF. But actually, we're going to crop the video first before we make it into a gift because otherwise, it's just going to sort of compress it more than it needs to. So we're just going to crop the part of the video that we need. Again, if you're using something like Quick Time on your screen, it would be a little bit easier because you could basically get away without doing this bit. But I'm aware that not everybody has that functionality. So I just wanted to show you a way to do it with your free chrome extension. Alright, so now I'm just going to show the part of the gift that I want to include somewhere around there. I think works. That works pretty well. Let's just crop that, and then we can continue working with it and turning it into a gift. So let's go ahead and make that into a gift. Now, it's not going to start from the beginning because I didn't start flipping the page straightaway. So I kind of want to go to the bit where I start flipping my pages. Ooh, somewhere around here. And then I can say, use current position. And I think the end is also a little bit long, so I would end there. So let's see how long that is. Let's give it maybe about 20 frames. And then let's say we want to optimize for static background so that it's not going to be as huge a gift as we needed to be. And let's just see how that turns out. We might need to play around with it a little in terms of the start and end times and also the actual frames per seconds, I don't always get right on the first go. Now, in this case, I think there's a little bit more space here than there is here, so I probably didn't crop it very well. So I would probably continue cropping that further, but for our purposes, I think I'm just going to leave it at that. So I think that actually looks really nice. And we're going to import it into Canva, but I just wanted to show you why I like the idea of matching the background color to wherever you're going to be putting your eBook into you may sometimes be putting it just on a white background, in which case it's not that critical. But, for example, I have mine in my actual about sections of my courses on Skillshare, and I really like the idea of matching my eBooks with the background. So I will just take a screenshot of whatever the background is where I know my eBook is going to appear and then use the color picker to get the hex code from this within Canvas so that I can match this before I actually make it into a gift. I really like this style because it makes it much, much easier than trying to remove the background of a video and all of that, that can get a little bit messy. So this is a much, much easier way of doing it. So I've made this sort of template that I would make just for an Instagram story, and I'm going to bring in my gift. Now, keep in mind my gift is huge. It is 17 megabytes. So I would probably compress it with an easy gift if I was actually using it for a website or something like that or a newsletter. But because this is going on social media, I don't actually mind that it's so humongous. And because I already pre designed this before I actually created my hazing flipbook, I was able to figure out what my background color was going to be and then adjust that so that we can get that nice cut out look. Alright, so we can pop this in here, and that blends pretty seamlessly. And obviously, the other colors that we have within this template also work pretty well. And now we can just align that to the center. It's going to be off a little bit because Again, I think I cropped it incorrectly, but that's okay. Yeah. And that's pretty much it. Look super, super simple. This design is not winning any awards, but it's probably relatively complimentary to the actual design of the E books. I don't mind it. I don't mind super simple stories designs, especially when the main thing that I want people looking at is my flip book there. So I think that looks really beautiful. Then, yeah, I could say something like, come the word eBook below, and I'll send it to you via DMs, or you could say, click the Link here and we could utilize the strategies that we looked at in the Instagram story section of the course. But either way, I think that this is such a fun thing to play around with and so many different use cases for it. So definitely go and play and just be creative, even if you don't have a huge use case for it right now, it's just such a fun thing to do. So go and play, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 63. Business Cards That Impress: So just like with every other design with business cards, I would definitely start on something like Pintris so that you can get a good amount of inspiration for your design because a lot of the designs in Cava, I don't know, they don't quite work for my brain, but it does depend on exactly how much of a creative industry you're in. If it's something really simple that you're looking for, then it might suffice for you to work with what's within Cava. I just prefer to get really funky. If I'm going to be giving somebody something three dimensional, something physical, and handing it to them at a networking event or just over a cup of coffee, then I want it to be really fun. I wanted to kind of take them back a little bit and be like, oh, that's different. So obviously, there will be some restrictions in terms of what you can do with the actual style in terms of the paper that you're using or the shape. There will be some on Pintas that are much more advanced and would require a very specific printer and would also be quite expensive. I would say a business card like this one would probably set you back a fair bit. Just depend on how expensive you want to go and who you're printing through. That's really important, as well. So for our purposes, I'm actually going to be printing this through Canvas so I can show you how that works. And because it's something that's available in my country, it's not all that it's not available in every country. Not every type of printing is available in Canva and every country, so it does depend on what's available to you. But you can always use an external printer. I really like moo.com for a long time. I printed my business cards through them, especially because they have some really cool dimensions. So they don't just have the regular standard sized business cards, but they also have their own sizing, which is slightly different than they have square ones, which I love. And then they also have these little mini cards. These are really cool for, yes, adding tags to things or even just having something that's slightly different. If you just want to have a business card that just looks a little bit different or you're using it for different purposes. Either way, you can use the different dimensions, but just make sure you know who you're going to be printing through so that you can make sure you're designing in the right dimensions. So with something like Mo, they're always going to show you what their template guidelines are based on the dimensions you choose, and then you can download it in various formats. So for Canva, you'd be downloading this as a JPEG and then putting that into your Canva design, you would create your design in the highest dimension, that would be 2.91 times 1.26 " within Canva, and then you would pop this design in there so that you know that the majority of your most important elements are within this dotted line, but your actual color of your card extends all the way out to the blade area. But if you're going to just be designing in Canva and printing in Canva, you don't have to worry about all that. I just want to cover it so that you know that it's always an option to use external printers, as well. Main thing is that we want to make sure that whatever design or sizing we choose that we're doing it in either inches or centimeters, definitely not pixels, so that Canvas sets it up correctly as a design for print. So any of these templates are already going to be in the right dimensions for ones that Canva knows that it can print. So if we just jump into one of them, you'll see it'll say it's 8.5 by 5 centimeters. And then in here, it'll tell you whether you can print this with Canva, which I can, which is cool. But you'll notice it's always in centimeters, might be in inches in some instances, depending on where you are in the world. But definitely you need to make sure that if you're doing this as a custom design, let's say I'm creating a design and I'm making it custom because I want to print a square business card through MU, I would definitely be using their dimensions anyways, which will be either in inches or centimeters, but definitely make sure that you're utilizing these formats, not pixels. And then we can also export it as a PDF for print, which is going to make sure it gives you those beautiful crisp colors. I'm just going to start with a random design here, and we're going to customize it. And in this case, I'm going to be pretending to be a copywriter just for something a little bit different. And I'm actually just going to delete both of these pages and start from scratch. So because I'm going to be pretending to be a copywriter, I thought it would be fun for us to bring in something like a paper texture as a photo, even though I know as a copywriter, we're not going to be working with paper, but, you know, it's just a bit of fun. So we could either make our brand color the background and adjust the transparency. But I think that's going to make us lose some of this beautiful texture. So instead, I would adjust the color of the paper with our duo tone function, and we're going to be making up our brand colors in this case. So let's just do the best we can with what we've got. But it means that you can adjust sort of the highlights and the shadows and you don't lose any of that beautiful texture. So I think that works really well. I'm just going to right click Set Image background, and I'm just going to duplicate that for the back as well. Now, for the front, I'm going to hit T on my keyboard, and I'm going to say something like you're just my type bit of a copywriting pun. I think it's hilarious. Would I be game enough to present this at a networking event to a high power CEO, executive of some kind? I don't know. Maybe this is very on brand for me if I was a goopy Runner. So I could see me doing this, but maybe I would have two different versions of this business card, maybe one to give to people with a cheeky sense of humor. And then one for people I'm not sure about yet. I think that could work. But you know what? I think it's hilarious. If somebody saw that as a front, they would be like, Are you hitting on me? Is this a date? What's happening? And then, on the back, we would explain it. So I'm just going to bring in this information that I've pre designed for us because I don't want you to have to go through the effort of watching me design this. But basically on the back, I would say, Eggy Sara, pun enthusiast, captivating copywriter. So that kind of explains the front, and then that tells you what I do. And then we've got these icons with all my detail. Now, I also did put in a little bit of my initials in the back just to give me a little bit of extra texture and make it a little bit more interesting. But of course, that's an optional step and then really what we want to focus on is this left hand side here. But before I go into that, I would just say that depending on who you're printing with, you want to make sure your type or your font is the right size for your printer. Some printers will have minimum requirements in terms of the font size. So always make sure you know if they have this, if their minimum font size is seven or five or whatever it is that you're fulfilling that. Because within Cava, I'm pretty sure they'll just print whatever you design, but some external printers will require you to do something a little bit diferent. Okay, so now let's talk about this left hand side here. I am going to be adding in a bit of a QR code. So within apps, I can go to QR code. Either QR code generator. There's a few different apps that all do the same thing. I would try to not overcomplicate it. I would just go with the QR code option, but of course, you've got lots of options. I just think it can ruin your design if you're trying to do a little bit too much with it. But I do like inserting QR codes into print materials because it then means you actually don't even have to put in your information here. You can just put in a QR code, and people then just get the information that they need from the website that you point them to. But one thing I would say, and this is a mistake that I see people making a lot is you don't want to just say this URL or this QR code is going to my main website or a specific lending page that I can't influence in the future, because you never know, especially if you're printing 100 or 200 business cards, you don't know where you're going to want that to point to in a year from now or two years from now. So I think it's a really good idea to have a redirect link, and I've added resources on this in your course guide so you can understand a bit more about redirect links. But essentially, what this is is you set this up on your website and you say, This is where I want this QR code to go to, and then you decide where that points to. So magistar.com forward slash Business Card. At the moment, points to my Link in Bio, which is a one page website, I have set up for my Instagram bio. Because that has a lot of the information that I want people to have. But maybe a year from now, I wanted to go to a page where there's a video of me saying, Hey, it was so nice to meet you at this networking event. You want to work together, whatever it might be. So you want to make sure you're not kind of boxing yourself in this way, and I really like having the flexibility, and I have seen people get a little bit stuck with not necessarily doing the wrong thing. There's no wrong way to do this. I just think it's nice to have the flexibility in the future, especially if you're printing a lot of these things, which often people do. Okay, so I'm just going to make my business card something similar to the actual design. I'm guessing I would probably need to know my hex codes. I'm just eyeballing at this stage. I'm not sure if this is even remotely close to what we're going with, I'm going to generate my code, and we're going to add it to our design and see how we did. Oh, pretty close. So it blends in, but it still stands out enough for people to scan it. Now, unfortunately, because this is not a rectangle of its own, I can't actually snap anything into place. I don't know where the center of this is. So I'm probably going to just detach my image from the background and just crop it to the area that I need so that I can use it. For my guides, and I'm just going to come in and left square bracket to bring that back. And now I can see that nice guideline that tells me that's the center, and that's the middle and happy days. So that's looking really good. One thing I would say is, do not put QR codes in social media posts because people will be using their phone to look at the social media posts so they can't necessarily scan. Make sure you're reserving this for print materials, for YouTube videos. Basically, things that people generally are watching on other devices. I mean, YouTube videos are a bit tricky, but I've seen people kind of say, either hit the link in the description or scan the QR code. So if they're watching it on a TV or on desktop, they can scan the QR code. If they're on a mobile device, then they can click the Link. But I think for things like Instagram, this doesn't work because people are going to be on their phones, actually looking at the QR code. So you want to make sure you're reserving the power of QR codes for placements where people can actually bust out their phone and actually scan the QR code. So when we go to print with Canva, you're going to have some nice mock ups here. If I was doing this for our client, this is what I would send them screenshots of so they can actually get a sense of what this is going to look like once it's actually printed. Of course, I would send them the actual design as well, but I think that this brings it to life a little bit more. So that gives you a bit of an idea of how it's going to look once it's printed. And then, of course, you could print either through Canva directly, or you can head to share download. And then either PNG, some printers do still accept PNGs instead of PDF. I don't know why, but most professional printers will say, I want it in PDF and print form. In which case, you would do PDF print, either including the marks and bleed if that's something they want, or I would just flatten it or not flatten it. It doesn't hugely matter on that front, as far as I know, and then you would make sure you're in CMYK, which is going to give you the best resolution. If you are not a Canva Pro user and you just printed an RGB, it's not a deal breaker. It just means your colors might be a teeny, tiny bit different, probably not all that different, really. CMYK just gives you a wide range of colors for printing. So it's going to be probably the closest to your digital file once it's printed, whereas RGB might be a teeny, tiny bit off. So it's not a huge hindrance, but if you're a Canva Pro user, definitely for print materials, export and CMYK. And in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how I've done this for my own business card and what it looks like once it's printed. So I'll see you there. 64. Print Your Business Card: So because I'm feeling super organized, I did actually pre record my screen as I ordered my Canva for print business card so I can show you what the process of ordering it looks like, and then we can have a look at the finished design. So I've got the two pages of my business card set up as the front and the back. And I would go to print with Canva and then just make sure the mock ups all look good. I mean, obviously, the mock ups will only take you so far, but it's just nice to see how your product is actually going to look once it's printed. Then we want to make sure that we select the right kind of paper. So I'm going with premium paper and map finish. And then in terms of the amount of business cards, it's pretty negligible 50-100 business cards here. So I'm actually going to go for 100, even though I definitely don't need 100, but that's okay. Then it's going to tell me if there are any issues, which in this case, is just to adjust the edges for printing. So I might have a slight issue probably with the element that I have on top of the back of the card. That's okay. I know it's fine, but I would definitely download the PDF to make sure that everything looks good in the actual setup. And then we can open that up and zoom in and make sure that everything looks good. Everything looks crisp. It's exactly how I want it. It's got this little bit of a grainy texture, which I thought might be quite a cool little feature. And once we're happy with it, we would just go through to ordering and check out. And then I've obviously blurred out a few details here, but you'd want to make sure your address is correct, and the business card you have on file is correct. And then whether or not you need express delivery there. So when it actually came and came in a little canva box, I feel like a YouTube inflencer right now, it's very pretty. And then it's got all my business cards in it. Now, I wanted to play around with the idea of having this sort of wrap around effect for the business card with my design. I knew it probably wouldn't work exactly because of just where the bleed and the actual cut off of the business card is, so I knew it wasn't going to be perfect, but you know what? It's pretty close. So essentially, what it means is if you put two of my business cards side by side, the pattern sort of almost completely perfectly overlaps. So I just like that. So basically, it's just because I'm a personal brand, it's a little bit easier for me to just have a photo of me and my logo, which also happens to be my name, so it's not just completely mysterious as a card with nothing but a QR code on it, like I'm a gentlemen's club. It has a little bit of context to it, which would also help if I was actually giving this to somebody at a networking event. So they're like, Oh, yeah, I remember this girl. Even though I don't know I look that good at networking events. Sorry, no, I do. I do. I absolutely do. But anyways, it's got a little bit of context to it. I I I wasn't a personal brand, I would probably provide a little bit more context around it, especially if I was an employee working on behalf of a business or not an employee. I own my own business, but the business had a different name for my name. I would definitely make sure to provide a little bit of context. But for me, this works really, really well. And I'm not saying the QR code thing is right for everybody, but I'm going to just show you how it works, and then we're going to talk about it. So you're gonna get to see how dirty my phone screen is. No, I've cleaned it, I promise. So I'm going to attempt to do this this way. Wow. And let's see if we can scan this guy. So now it goes to my Link and bio page, which is something that I can definitely change because this is a redirect link, so I can make it to be whatever. If I was actually going to be handing this out at networking events, which I will probably from now on, because I have a lot of these. So I will definitely change that to a dedicated learning page where people are sort of guided to take the call to action that I want them to take. But the point being that, as I said, maybe a QR code is not the right thing for you and your particular industry. The reason that I like featuring this in this lesson is because it taps into something that is really primal for us, which is human curiosity. If somebody hands you something that has minimal context around it and just a QR code, which everybody now knows in a post pandemic world that they can scan and get more information. It's almost impossible to fight against the urge to scan it because you're like, What's on the other side of this? Like, what is it? Is it a video? Is it a website? Is it a free thing that I can get? It just your mind starts to wonder. So I can pretty much guarantee you that whatever the incentive is for the person to scan it, they're pretty much go to scan it. And that is so much more actionable than just a business card with an email address on it, even Instagram, Facebook. Everyone has that. So I think it's nice to be a little bit different. And I'm speaking from experience because once upon a time in a different life, I worked in recruitment, and then a few years after that, I worked in business development. And in both roles, I had stacks and stacks and stacks of business cards on my desk at all times, and they looked exactly the same, all of them. And so it was really hard to actually feel passionate about contacting someone when their business card looked exactly the same as the other hundred business cards on my desk. So I just think that it's nice to think outside the box sometimes. So hopefully you enjoyed that tip. But I do also know that the Cava for print option is not available in all countries, and you may want to print with a different supplier. So for that reason, I also wanted to show you what it looks like when you print with someone like moo.com. So this is a design I did for my mum that was going to be printed by Mo. So I made sure that it was 2.71 by 2.71 " because that's what they've specified on their website. And I made sure to bring in their template in here to give me these rulers and guides around the side. So I know where was my sort of safe print area. And then we printed it, and this is what it looked like when it came, and everything looks really nice. The QR code worked really well. And then the front also printed really, really nicely. So we were really happy with the result. Now the next lesson, we're going to jump into talking about designing amazing professional posters, so I will see. 65. Make Professional Posters: So let's continue talking about ways to make different print materials with posters. Posters, invitations, fliers. I think posters are just fun because we can make them a little bit large, and we can work with them in the following few lessons when we talk about mockups and video mockups. So I thought we would just go with poster. Of course, we would want to make sure that we know the dimensions we're creating for, especially if this is going to print. But in this case, I think we're just going to fake it till we and just go with the dimensions that it's given us. And this is going to be a poster for dance auditions. That's not how we spell auditions. Dance auditions for a university. I know that's a very specific thing, but I thought this would be a fun one for us to work with because we can work with a lot of movement, and that will help me demonstrate how you can utilize these different functions that we're going to be covering in this lesson. So, we're going to look at two different apps and two different styles of posters. So the first app that I want to bring your attention to is called Font frame, and it will allow you to take whatever image you're bringing in here. This one is from pexels.com and basically make it work with whatever font and text that you're putting in here. So I'm just going to stick with Rubik. It's not really a brain font, but I like that it's quite chunky. So I think we're going to leave it, and then I'm just going to remove the border around this for our purposes, and it doesn't really matter if it's left aligned or right aligned, and I'm just going to use my selected image. Here, I might have to adjust the zoom. Yeah, so it's not really where I want it to be. I want to make sure that it kind of aligns with what I want to do for my cutout. I might have to zoom into it a teeny, tiny bit. Ooh. I think that works. Yeah, let's leave it there. So we're going to add that to our design, and then we're going to layer on top of this using our background remover. Just going to be so fun. So this is what we have so far. Just the word today. Nothing too exciting. That's okay. We're going to bring this guy on top, so I'm going to hit Command in right square bracket to bring him on top. We're going to use our background remover. Let me exit out of this and zoom in a little bit so you can see it a little bit better. And now we essentially want to do exactly what we've been doing when we were looking at our frame cutouts of our text letters and our videos. But this is much easier to line up because we're just working the static images. So it's not quite as complicated as doing this for videos, and I would probably adjust the transparency down a little bit just so we can see what we're working with here and then just try to line it as closely as we can and might just have to use my arrow keys to move up and down. I think we might have got it. Alright, let's see. We're teeny, tiny bit off. I'd have to go down and touch where are we at. Okay, that looks pretty good. Okay, so this guy's obviously jumping out of our text there, but that's not really all that fun. We want to make sure that it has that nice cutout feel. So I'm just going to do one thing. I'm going to command C and command V and pase this on top of my cutout and one more time. And that way, I can essentially crop around some of these elements to just bring in little bits here, for example. So that's just going to be his foot. My other cutout is going to be his other foot here, and then my main cutout is just going to be his torso. So it might be a little bit tricky here because that Ds quite in a tricky spot. So we might have to use the brush to just sort of brush this out. Otherwise, I'm going to have to leave his butt in place. I don't like the sound of, so let's go to the background remover and try to get rid of that line there and see if we can do it. It's a little bit tricky to know exactly where we're cutting this, but I think around there, we can always come back and adjust, Oh. First go. Yes. Hey, that looks pretty good. Think he's a teeny, tiny bit off because I can see a little edge there, so we might have to just move him across anyway. That looks good. So everything just has to adjust a tiny bit off. Yeah, cool. So this way, his torso is kind of popping out, and so is his foot here and his foot here. So, it gives us that nice kind of leaping look. I could probably adjust these a little bit just to kind of play around with it a little bit more. So just depending on the look that I'm going for, but I'm quite happy with that, as is and now I'm just going to have a little bit of text around this because obviously, at this point, this is not really a poster. It's just one cool effect. So we're going to bring in a little bit of text by hitting T on our keyboard, and I'm going to say something like. So this is going to make today count because we're trying to get people to take or go to the dance auditions. We want them on our dance crew. I guess you don't know how funny that is because you don't fully understand at this point how bad of a dancer I am, but I am genuine b. Like, I I'm good at a lot of things, but I am a genuinely terrible, terrible dancer. So that's why it's a little bit hilarious that I've chosen this as the design to make. But anyway, it's fine. We all have our strengths, you know? We really do. And that's okay. This is just not one of mine. That's fine. I would probably I might go with an even thicker font here. Let me just see. If we've got a thicker font. Something that matches this? Yeah, that's a little bit better. Okay, cool. And we're going to move that behind our dancer here by using command in the left square bracket. I'm just going to hit Option and drag this to the bottom, and it's going to say make today count. Now, I'm just going to hit Shift R here and just bring in a bit of a ruler because obviously this was much easier to align because I can see it there. But it's kind of hard to know where the end of that Y is. So I want to make sure that these are nicely aligned, and I want that spacing to be roughly the same as it is here. So let's have a look and see if that's big enough. I think that works. I'm going to hit Shift R again and get rid of my roller there. And I'm just going to command V and bring in a little bit of extra texts that I made, which was dance auditions at Star Hall, 7:00 P.M. On 3 December. Imagine if I actually had my own hall, that would be pretty cool. So color wise, let's bring it in line with the rest of the design. And now let's just bring in a little bit of texture to the background so it's not this kind of dull bland color. So I do have this particular image that I like, but I think it's a little bit of a warmer tone, but I think I found a really cool additional image that we can bring in under the keyword of white blue gradient background. So there's a couple of good ones here that have some nice dimensions to them. I think let's test out this one. We're going to right click and set the images background. Yeah, I like that. It's just a slight bit of dimension. And I'm going to also look for dropshadow and into graphics, and I think, let's try this one. It's just a really nice, subtle sort of drop shadow. Ooh, or this one. That's already kind of angled, which we can adjust. But I'm essentially just going for a drop shadow that can kind of act to give us a little bit of extra dimension there to make it look like our dancer is really popping off the page there. Just going to align it so it just looks like it's right underwear. He's jumping, and we're just going to adjust the transparency down a fair bit. It doesn't need to really be there, just a little bit to give us a little bit more of that dimension. Now I'm going to hit Command and left square bracket again, just to bring that behind our font. Might just need to make that a little. A bit bigger. Okay, so I'm quite happy with that. I'm just going to basically select everything and just make it nice and big, so it stands out on my poster, but not too close to the edges, especially if I'm printing. I would want to make sure that I make this printable and I'm not too close to the edges. Obviously, I would double check that with my printer depending on who I'm printing through. And let's make this nice and large so people know exactly what it is that we're hoping to advertise here. Now, that's pretty good. So I'm just going to make one slight variation of this in a darker color so we can have a look at how that would look. I'm just going to duplicate this page. And then the keywords that we're looking for here would be something like stage, spotlight, smoke, something like that. And in the photo section, there are a few different options there for us. So I'm just going to paste in one that I already know I like, but lots of different options to play with both in terms of images and videos as well. Just going to ra click and replace my background. Now, I don't need this drop shadow anymore because I'm essentially going to have this guy kind of jumping on the stage. So we're going to just move things around a little bit and bring this down. Now, I just adjust this text, and I'm going to hit shift so I can select both of them and just make it nice and light, so it stands out against the background, but still slightly different color than the actual image itself. So now I'm just going to bring this down and making sure that's in the center. And I would probably make that black just to make things nice and easy for us. I just wanted to show you one other cool app that we're going to work with. So I'm just going to need to save this as an image. I'm just going to create another page. We're just going to select our dancer, and I'm going to bring it over here, and we're going to save that as an image so that we can use this for a reflection. So I'm going to download that as a transparent PNG, and I'm just going to be looking at our current page here. And then the app that we want to be working with is called Transform. So there is another app called reflections that works as well. But I think for this purpose for just the actual space we're working with, I think transform is going to work a little bit better. So we're going to just select our transparent PNG here, and now we can use our mouse to essentially transform this to whatever we want. So in this case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of move my mouse down and have it kind of like that. I think it's probably going to take a little bit of finssing. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. And I'm just going to add that to my design, and we're going to flip it so that we can make it look like it's almost a reflection. So we're going to flip that vertically, and adjust the size of it, and I am going to desaturate it because if this was a reflection, it obviously wouldn't have the same colors because that would be weird. But of course, it depends on what you're doing with your design, whether or not you decide to keep those colors. I just prefer to desaturate things and also make them really nice and transparent. So it's just a really, really light, more of a textural thing. That's about right. Again, I'm probably just going to hit Shift R, bring in my rulers, so we can see exactly where that T sit. It's just, it's trying to snap into place of something there. Okay, I think that's roughly right there. So I think that's pretty good. Okay, so now we're going to select this. I'm going to go to edit and adjust, and we're just going to bring down the saturation, and then I'm just going to bring down my transparency. So it kind of exists in the design, but not in any way that's too distracting. I would play around with things a little bit. I think that that works a little better there because the reflection works a bit better on the black background there. We could also bring in a bit of a drop shadow behind the word count there so that it stands out a little bit more against the background. So hopefully you enjoyed seeing the variation in these two designs and the different effects that you can create within your posters. And in the next two lessons, we're going to talk about how to convert these into beautiful mockups. 66. Create Captivating Mockups: To get started with mockups, we're going to head on over to apps and down to mocks. And then we've got all these beautiful categories, including tech. We've got print packaging, and then we've got additional categories within these. So yes, you can access the mock section within your actual Canva project file editor, but you've got 8,000 mockups if you access it here, which is, let's face it, many, many more than what you can access within your actual project. So I really like it for that reason. Also, if you look for particular search terms, it's going to give you some options, which is great for narrowing things down. So you can look for portrait business cards, US business cards, EU business card this case, I think we're just going to go for business cards general and have a look at how these mockups actually work. So you just select the scene that you are looking for and then go to Select, and either you would upload an image file or have an image file in here, or because it's Canva and it's super cool, you can also just make mockups out of your designs. So let's say for this, we've got our business card design here, and we can basically skip the step where we would normally be downloading it as a design and then uploading it in here. You can see these little white lines on the edges, so that means we need to go to adjust image and go to fill just so that it covers everything, and I would probably save it just like that. So that looks really great. And now we can go to save, and we can either download it as an image or we can just go straight ahead and use it in a design if we wanted to, let's say, adjust this image and add in our text and continue creating it into a social media graphic, we could just go and create it in a design straightaway. Let's do one more for our eBook. We would just look for book because obviously, eBook, as it stands is not actually a category. We could either do an iPad or we would just do it as an eBook. So there's going to be a lot of landscape ones. We could have easily just looked for portrait eBooks. That might have saved me a bit of time, but this way, you get to check out some nice designs. And I would just pick one that's going to work with the design we created for our eBook. So something like this might do because we went for those kind of minimalistic colors. And that looks a bit stretchy. Let me just select our eBook and see if that works. So just downloaded the first page of my eBook as an image. No, that actually looks really good. So I'm just going to go to adjust and make sure that fits. Ah, that fits perfectly. That's handy. And now I would just save that as a mock up, and then I could essentially add this to my website or a newsletter or social media and say, Hey, I've got this new eBook. Do you want to download it? And it makes for a much nicer promo image than if I was just using the flat image. So that's a little bit about how to do this for specific mock ups of things that are pretty standard, like eBooks, business cards. Those are pretty standard dimensions. It gets a little bit more tricky when you're trying to design for, let's say, you find something in here that you like, and you want to design a label, for example, for a cosmetics brand. That's where things get a little bit tricky because you don't really know the dimensions they're looking for, and that can make it a little bit hard. So I'm just going to show you how I would go about doing that or how I have gone about doing that, and then I'm going to link you to a video where I explain how I actually designed the labels in case you want to go dive into that a little bit further. So I designed a fake skincare brand called Maggie Skincare which you'll see in the video if you don't want to have a look at it, it's essentially all just Canva elements that you already know how to create with the exception of a fake barcode, which is just an element. It doesn't actually mean anything. It is just for a mockup. I designed this kind of in random dimensions, to be honest. I pick dimensions, and then I tweaked it based on the packages that I wanted to have a look at. So let's say I had this design, but I want to make it fit with this packaging. So what I would do in this case is, let's say I'm selecting my initial design, and it's not going to work because it's going to have weird dimensions. I think this looks really off. I would go to adjust image. I'm going to fill it, and I'm just going to adjust things down a little bit. But essentially, what I would do at this point is I would just take a screenshot of where the edges of this are. And then I would bring this screenshot in here and adjust my design to fit these dimensions. So that's exactly what I did on page three of this design, where I kind of went, Okay, these are the dimensions we're looking for roughly with this design. I would then hit Shift R, bring in a bit of a guideline here. And then remove that image and then make my design fit within those dimensions. I don't necessarily need to open up a new project. I just kind of need to make the top half of this design work so that when I then go to this original design, I can now remove this image. I've downloaded that second image, which is basically just a shorter version of that really long image. And now when we try to adjust that, we can adjust it to fill and just show the top of this. So the bottom is really cropped out. This is a lazy way of doing it. I'm very aware this is a lazy way of doing but it means that when you go to save it, you know that it's going to fit the dimensions of that mockup. So that's kind of quick and easy, quick and dirty way of making sure that if you're doing this for the purposes of building your design portfolio, for example, and you want to show people your skills and you're doing this with fake made up brands, but you want it to look really realistic. This is a really nice and easy way to do that in a way that you can make sure the dimensions are correct and all the elements that you want within that mockup are going to be there. All right, and now, lastly, within this mockup section, if you go all the way to the bottom of a particular category, which this might take a little while you will get these kind of nice just image only or product only photos that you can use in your designs. So I'm just going to go ahead and make one for Maggie skincare, and then we can have a look at what we can do with this within the cava design space. So I'm just going to adjust my image just to make sure it looks pretty good already, but there was just a teeny, tiny bit of an edge. That's better. I'm going to save that mock up. And we're just going to bring it into this project where I'm going to set this image as my background, and I'm going to bring in my beautiful, new I don't know, moisturizer, something like that. And this is how you can sort of create your own scenes. I mean, obviously, it could just be a graphic. It doesn't necessarily need to be a photo. The reason I chose a photo is so I can show you one additional core app within Canva that we haven't used before, which is called the reflections app. So I'm just going to type in easy reflections. And because this is sort of sitting at the top of the water here, I can say, Okay, so this is going to be reflecting in the lake, and I'll just up my opacity. That's fine. You can tweak this and play around with it. So let's say, I'm going to maybe put this on a bit of an angle. So let's go minus four degrees here. So that means we need to go four degrees in the other direction. And then we would try and light it up in terms of sizing so that it really does look like it's a true reflection. So that's a nice and easy way to kind of make your own little scenes within Canva. And then while we're in here, I'm also going to show you just an easy, easy way of doing this when you're within a project and you've got an image and you just want to make a really quick mockup. You can also do it within here, which you've seen me do already throughout this course. But I just wanted to show you. So let's say we've got an image. Let's do our eBook, and we can go to Edit, and you've got your mockup section over here. And in this case, we would probably go to print, and we've got our eBook over here, or we've got other scenes that we can utilize as well. So you can always do it within here, which is what we've been doing within the course, but like I said, just a little bit more limited with the amount of designs that you've got access to. Whereas within the mock up section that we looked at previously, you've got a lot more options. Alright, now in the next lesson, let's dive into video mock ups. 67. Video Mockups: So in an earlier lesson, we did look at the fact that within the edit section and in apps and mockups, you do have video mockups. So this is relatively straightforward. You can basically pick a scene. We're going to pick one for a poster, ideally with people, ideally with young people because this was a poster for that's a good one for college campus or this one. Yeah, I think both could work for this particular poster. So I've just downloaded this as a PNG and put it in here so we can use it for our video mockup. And this is pretty straightforward. So currently, the video mockup section doesn't exist in the actual main mock up dashboard with the 8,000 assets that we looked at. In the previous lesson, it only exists here. That might change. But for now, that's where this is where we're kind of working with it within your actual editor. And then, in this case, we would just adjust it to the size of the graphic, and this could be something that we put on social media, for example. I think it's really fun. So that's a great way to really quickly create these little video assets. Again, just for social media, if you don't just want to post a flat image or even just a flat mockup, this can be a really fun way to do something a little bit different. But then I also want to talk about video mockups that can be integrated within your designs. So I'm just going to bring in my main image of my eBook here again, and we're going to go to edit. And we will do a video mockup. But these are a little bit more of a cutout feel. So obviously, because it is a video, it's never going to be truly cut out. But when you scroll to the bottom, you've got products that are on a blank background here. So that makes it really nice and easy to control the scene a little bit more. And as you hover over them, you'll be able to see what they look like and pick the one that suits you best. So let's say I wanted to advertise this eBook in a Facebook ad or on my website, and I just want something a little bit more dynamic. Now, you are a little bit restricted in terms of the background color of the video, but as long as that doesn't bother you too much, this can be a really nice way to create something a little bit different. So with this, because it is a flat background color, I can just take my color picker and select the color from the video and seamlessly blend it into my slide here so that when this plays, if I actually just go to duration down here, we play it. It's a little bit lighter, actually, as it's playing, so I would probably adjust that back. Yeah, that's better. So it was off just by a shade or two. But now it kind of seamlessly integrates into the rest of my canvas, and I could essentially now place a little bit of text here, some call to action buttons, and all those sorts of elements, so I could say something like download this amazing ebook today. I would probably want to be a little bit more creative than that. And then I can put it in a little button or put it in a photo of me pointing at the Ebo, it's getting a bit crazy. But it means that you can kind of integrate it into your design, which makes it really nice and cool. You could potentially also animate your text, which brings it to a whole different dimension. And that's a really, really handy thing that you can now do with video mocks. Hopefully, that will also continue to expand. In the future, you might be able to choose different backgrounds. At the time of recording this, this is probably the best we can do. One last thing that I wanted to cover, which exists a little bit outside of the scope of what Cava has capabilities for, but it's something that I've done myself and I really like doing is to create a video mockup out of a static mockup. So bear with me. Essentially, because we have so many beautiful static mockups, and the video mockups are still a little bit limited. Whether we do it within this section where we have fewer options or within the main section, doesn't really matter for our purposes. Let's just say we're going to create a mockup here. So it's going to just be a scene. I think I would probably go with something without people because it's going to make it look a little bit less awkward that they're not moving. And then we can select this. Obviously, I've just chosen a black image just so we can get the actual mock up scene. You can also find some mock up scenes within the Elements tab if you go to photos and you look at something like MacBook, there will be mock ups here as well, but sometimes they're twisted off to the side, which makes it really hard to use them for the purposes that we want to use them for within this particular lesson. Okay, now that we have the scene, I'm just going to stretch this off to the sides. I think this looks a little bit fake. I don't know about this plant. I'm sure it's actually a photo, but it looks a little bit off to me. Anyway. Now that we have our scene, we can insert a video into this. So let me show you what I mean by recording a quick video of my website here. So I'm going to be using Awesome screen recorder for this one, and I want to record this whole tab. Don't necessarily need to be recording my microphone unless I want to, but for this purpose, we're going to remove that, and we're just going to go ahead and start recording. So we're just going to scroll down that's going to bring in all our nice animations, if there are any. And now we're just going to go ahead and stop that. So it's only a couple of seconds, but it'll be enough for what we need. So I'm going to convert that to MB four, and we're going to download that and then chuck it into Canva or place it gently into Canva. And I would just have to crop out the beginning where I was kind of adjusting that thing there and basically just go to the bit where I actually start scrolling, wherever that is, about there, and then I would probably adjust the very end. Not sure quite when I stopped. Let's have a look. I think that's about right. So I'm going to go ahead and click on Done, so it's only 14.5 seconds. And now I can adjust that down. I might have to play around with it in terms of where the screen dimensions are, so it may not be perfect. Oh, it's pretty close, though. That's really good, actually. So that basically turns what was previously just a static image into a video because of something that you recorded on your screen. So it doesn't necessarily need to be a website, in this case. I think this is something that's really cool for website developers or designers that can kind of showcase their new creations and use that for attracting future clients, but it can be absolutely anything that you record on your screen, and it helps to, again, bring it to life. And something like this definitely works really well for ads. I should have probably clipped that video at the end there. I think it went a little bit too long, but I think that looks really cool. So something like that is just a really easy thing for you to try out with the static mockups within Canva, while recording parts of your screen. And now in the next lesson, we're going to jump into animated email signatures, which is one of my favorite things and such a great way to stand out against the huge crowd of people who are not doing cool things with their email signatures. So I'll see you. 68. Animate Your Email Signature: Going to bring in a photo of me here as a cutout so we can have a look at just a few things that we might be able to do. So let's say we have a flat image like this one. We could go on over to elements and look at something like let's say likes and go to graphics and look at maybe just animated elements or just select from the ones that are already displaying here. So me having worked as a social media manager, this is quite relevant to what I do for a living. So I would maybe select something like this or the actual likes and just change the background to my brand color, maybe. Maybe something like that. So that's the easiest way to animate your email signature is just to have an animated element with a flat image. Then there's kind of the next level of complexity where we potentially put in a little video in the background. So let's say we want a gradient. That's a video. Ooh. That's funky. Ooh. Let's move that to the back, and see how that works. I think that's gonna really clash with my sweater, to be honest with you. Let's pick a different picture. So I'm gonna just go to my brand pictures, and we might be able to basically pick anything that doesn't have my red sweater in it, because that would be crazy. Okay, so let's say we've got me with a black sweater on, and then in the back there, we've got a video playing. So I'm going to go to duration, and we can just have a look at how that looks. Now obviously, that's 20 seconds. I wouldn't have it going for 20 seconds in an email signature, maybe two, three, 4 seconds. But still, that's more advanced way, I guess, of animating it. But it can make your file size quite big depending on the quality of the video and the size of the video. So it's probably not my preferred way of doing animated signatures. Preferred way of doing animated signatures is to create it with animated text. So if I bring in an image of myself, let's say this one of me on my laptop, and I'm just going to stack an image of me on the couch on top of an image with the background removed. I'm going to copy and paste and stack these on top of each other and remove the background here. Now we can stretch this all the way to the edges, and we're going to be able to animate some text on top of this. Yeah, something like that, so that even when it's a really small image, I'm going to be able to actually see it. So I'm going to adjust this or remove this duration thing so we can see it a little bit better. And now I would bring in a bit of text. So I'm just going to write my name, Sara, and I'm going to use an Interpunt, which is a word I just learned, which is the name for this dot, and then just grab that off of Google. I did not know what it was called, just to be clear. If you did, then you're a much better person than me, basically. And let's just have a look at some fonts that we can use. So I don't know if this one's quite gonna work for us. I think it's perhaps a little bit intense. So I'm going to actually use a font called TT drugs. I don't know. Don't ask me why people name fonts, what they name them. They're just a bit wacky sometimes. Okay. Okay, so now, essentially, what I'm going to do is duplicate this as many times as I can so that I can form it into a circle. So I'll show you what I mean in just a second. And then let's go to affix and curve, and we're just going to curve it all the way around until it forms and I circle. I think this is going to probably make the font actually quite small. So I might remove a couple of my maggis there and then see if we can curve that instead. And we basically just want it to be a nice circle that's going to be able to spin around and create that animation kind of around my head. So now I'm going to use Command in less square bracket to bring that behind me, I have a nice little hallo there. Oh. And we're going to go to animate. And now we can look at these add on effects at the bottom there. If you use the rotate add on effect, it just gives you this forever going loop, which is really cool. So if I click on this page, I can adjust how long this is going to go for. So at the moment, it's just 5 seconds. I think that works pretty well. So we can now export this as an animated gift and then be able to use this in our email signature. Just because we're already here before we exit out of this, I did also want to just show you there's one more app that you may find use for if you think, Oh, I really don't actually want to have a photo of myself in my email signature. I just want to have a little bit of text, but I want it to be fun, and I think this animation is not doing it for me. There is an app called Motion Type that will allow you to essentially put in whatever text you want, adjust your font, and let's say I'm just going to make this W that's not my name. Maggie Star. And I mean, just for simplicity, I'm going to leave the font as what it is, but we could always change in terms of my text color, I would maybe even leave this and then just change the background to my brand color. So I'm just going to go ahead and add that to my design, and then we could adjust the duration of the animation if we want it to be a shorter gift or a longer one. So now I could stretch this out to the edges, maybe move or change the background to a brand color, and essentially have this as a logo, even though this is obviously not my logo, but it's just a fun and quick and easy way to make an animation. Just as another side note, if you ever want to make an animation that's even simpler than what this is here, let's say you just have an image and you just want to do something a little bit special with it, you can always just duplicate the image and change the background color. So let's say, I mean, this is going to be hideous. I'm going to be really honest with you. It's just for demo purposes. I would basically allow this to be, I don't know, zero point probably 1 second in terms of the timing. Same with this one, it would be 0.1 second. And then I would just select these and then hit Command D and duplicate them and duplicate them again and duplicate them again, and then just say, Alright, pages 2 to nine is what I'm going to export as a gift, and that will still make it a nice gift, even though you don't technically have any moving elements, but because you've now created this as almost like a stop motion animation, I suppose, that's probably the simplest way to animate something if you just want a little bit of something fun, but you don't really want to use actual animated elements. So this is how that ends up looking. It's probably a bit too hectic. I would change the duration so that it's not too hectic for people, but just so you know that changing the background color, duplicating the slides, and exporting it as a gift is also an option. So I'm going to go ahead and export these as gifts, and then we're just going to take a look at how to put it all together in the next lesson. 69. Set Up Your New Email Signature: So to actually put this all together, there are lots of tools, but I like using HubSpot's free email signature generator. There are definitely paid tools that are even more advanced, but for our purposes, I think I'm just going to leave it at HubSpot. So I'm just going to leave the rest of this blank, and oh, maybe I'll put in a website, actually. Let's make this maggistar.com, and hello at maggistarm.com. And I'll put in my LinkedIn and Instagram. And then I'm just going to remove the created with HubSpot section. Now let's go to Styles. And my general theme color, I think I'm just going to make it my dark purple, and I'll do the same thing for my actual links there. In terms of my font, I would probably choose a slightly different font that's a little bit more fun than aerial. And I think font size wise, medium is probably a good spot for me to be in. So you can create some custom call to action copy that's clickable. I really like doing this, but it's completely up to you whether that's part of your email signature or and then when we head on over to images, this is where we actually create our either profile pictures or company logos, and then we can look at templates to see our different layouts. You'll see if you hover over this that they no longer accept Google Drive images, which is a bit of a shame. I've just had to upload these onto Dropbox instead. It's not super dramatic. Dropbox do have a free option, and I've just uploaded three of them so we can just have a look at how they all look. So this is just going to be a share. I'm just going to basically need the link here. It's copying. And it says anyone with the link can view the file. That's important. If that didn't say that, we would manage that. And now we can pop that in as our profile photo. So that looks pretty good, and then we can head on over to templates and see what options we have. I kind of like the first one, to be honest, so I would probably leave it at that. But, yeah, I just wanted to show you how the different images that we created would appear as part of an email signature. So that's our first one. Then we have our animated logo text, I suppose. So I'm going to pop that in instead. That's nice and simple. If I was going to do that, I would maybe remove my name from there. So that's always a possibility, but I think that flows really well with the rest of my email signature. But finally, let's have a look at our animated scrolling text there or looping text, depending on how you look at it. And yeah, that looks really good. So now I'm just going to create the signature, and it's going to ask me some questions. I'm just going to say, My sa and confirm and submit. Do we have a number? We do. So you'll notice at the bottom, it tells you how do I add it to Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo mail, Apple Mail. So you can go through and go through the instructions there. I'm just going to be adding mine to Gmail. So within Gmail, you would want to go to settings and see all settings. And then in general, we would scroll all the way down until we see our email signatures, and we would just create new. This is going to be test two. And I would just basically paste it in there. So that looks nice. You'll notice that this has now snapped into place. In our preview, it was kind of weirdly left aligned. I don't know why that happens. Sometimes it's a bit of a glitch, but that's looking pretty good. And so I've named this test two. And if I wanted this to become my official email signature, I would just have to specify that down at the bottom. So where it says signature defaults for my email address, I would say, for new emails, use test two. For reply, use test two. It's going to be hilarious. If I forget to change this. Actually, it doesn't matter. It's got my correct information there, so that's totally fine. And now if I go to compose a new email, it's going to have my beautiful email signature in there for me. But also, if you wanted to change and find a different email signature, you've also got other options in here as well. So that's just a quick and easy way for you to bring new life to your email signature. And I will see you in the next lesson when we talk about making beautiful desktop backgrounds that are going to keep you organized, but also going to keep things fun. 70. Brand Your Desktop Background: So let's talk desktop, wallpapers, desktop backgrounds, whatever you want to call them. It's probably one of my biggest pet peeves when you come across somebody and they've got, like 1,000 screen charts all filling up their desktop. It makes me so anxious. So that may or may not be your case, but if you're someone who wants to keep things nice and organized and turn on your computer every day and have a smile on your face because you know everything is in its right place, I don't know. It just makes me happy. So this lesson is for you, if that sounds like you. This is an imitation of what a messy desktop might look like because so I sort of disorganized things so we could organize them again. But within Canva, if you go to DesktOp Background, they do have a lot of options for what they call desktop wallpapers, desktop backgrounds. Either way, you've got options for just really neutral ones. Then they've got ones like these, which I've never really understood because, I mean, yes, okay, let's say it is August, and let's say it's August 11, it's a static image. So then the next day, I guess you have to replace the image. I just don't really understand that. You can get calendar widgets that actually update to put on there, but I wouldn't make it part of the actual design. I think that's a bit wacky. I think if you want to actually commit to changing it every month, you could at least go with just having the actual date there and maybe not highlighting the day, but just going month on month. I still think that's a big commitment, honestly. But you can definitely start with any of these templates. The main thing is you want it to be 1920 by 1080 unless you're working with different dimensions for your screen. And same with something like notes. That's not something you can update. You can't write it into this because it's just an image in your background. So that's a bit confusing to me. Generally, I just like to have little organization kind of boxes for the different folders that I have, and then also having a little bit of a box for random screenshots on Mayhem that, you know, I film videos throughout the day, and I just want to check that in there, and I want to feel like it's somewhat organized. And then I also like to have this sticky notes app as a reminder app that I can place in there. So yeah, things like this make no sense to me because you would have to actually change it every day, which is bit wacky. So I'm going to give you my template, which looks like this. Obviously, this is nice and branded with my brain colors, but you can make it work for you. So I think the main thing to start with is figuring out what your categories are and how many of them you have based on the folders that you have. So it might be a good time to reassess how many folders you have. Do they have logical sort of buckets? And if they don't, can you rejig things a little bit so for me, for example, I have four main categories. So I've got personal folders. I've got my business assets. I've got things that I'm working on with courses, and then I've got my work in progress, which might be client work, it might be random projects, I might be my YouTube videos, reels, things like that that I'm actively working on, so I need to access those really quickly. Then I just genuinely really like having quotes in here because I life is just hard sometimes, and it's nice to have reminders of why you're doing what you're doing. Of course, feel free to change the fonts of these, change the quotes. Everything is editable. And then, for me, I really like having this little reminders section because that's where I put a little stickino and that's where I just kind of brain dump ideas throughout the day. And then I organize them in my project management app as I go. But I just like having random thoughts in here. And then this is my area to kind of brain dam screenshots and just have random assets throughout the day that I then organize into my other folders at the end of the day if I'm feeling extra organized. And then I just like having, you know, this is like a little shadow. I've popped in here, and then there's a little bit of texture in the background, but you can optimize it. You can change categories, however you want. Obviously, I'm not going to give you a template with my family photos in it. You're going to get this one that has neutral photos in it. Unless you want photos of me and my family as your background, that's okay, as well. That's entirely optional. But I'm going to give you this one so that you can be starting with something that I think just makes a little bit more sense than what Cava have within their system. But of course, if you prefer Canvas, that's totally fine. I'm not going to get offended. In fact, I'm not even going to know that you've downloaded theirs instead of mine. So that is totally, totally fine. I'm just going to show you how I would then basically make this my desktop and organize all of my folders. So if you were just working with one screen, you'd be able to go into your Downloads folder and then just set this as desktop picture. It may or may not work. It probably Oh, it does work. Yeah, because I've got a few screens, sometimes that does glitch, so then you would have to just do it within settings, but that worked pretty well for us. And I'm just going to organize things. So I've already kind of got these in categories. So I know this is going to be my personal. This is my random screenshot section and my hard drive here. I've got my little sticky notes app here. This is all of my work in progress. These are all of my business assets. And then this is my course stuff. If at any point things feel like they're out of alignment, you can always right click on your screen and just say, clean up. It's going to make things really nice and symmetrical, but you might need to move things around. A little bit afterwards. So it just depends on how much you want to space things out. But if you're not great at kind of eyeballing your alignments, that can be a nice way to just quickly tidy things up. And then if you're not super familiar with the sticky notes app, if you're on a Mac, you can just use your search function and search for stickies, and it's going to open that app for you, and then you can select and create new notes and change the colors, the fonts, and everything else. It's not something that's I mean, it does sort of stay there unless you close it, but people do accidentally close them. So don't keep super important information in these, I would say. It's really just for you to put in reminders as you go as opposed to having to put pen to paper, I suppose. But, yeah, that's something that I really like having on my desktop background, and this just works for my brain. So hopefully, it's something that's helpful for you as well. And maybe you can make it nice and branded with your brand colors. So every time you open your laptop or your big monitors, depending on what your work setup looks like, you can be like, Yes, I'm awesome. How great is my brand? Everything looks beautiful. And that just makes your day a little bit better. Alright, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 71. Powerful Presentations: So let's talk presentations. We're just going to create a new presentation so that we can look at a few cool things that we can do if, let's say, by some chance, we kind of know what our presentation is going to be about, but we don't actually have any content for it yet. So that's when we can go into design and use the AI function and say something like give me the eight benefits of hiring Aggie to help you create an amazing online course. Now, of course, it doesn't know me, so it doesn't really know what these benefits are, but I'm curious to see what it comes up with. In the meantime, while this is all processing, just know that you could always look for online course or real estate or HR or marketing or anything in here, and it's going to come up with templates that are already pre designed around this topic. This is just in case you're a Cavaprouser and you want to use the magic design feature to just go sort of beyond the generic templates that are out there. So I quite like this. I think it's not quite 100% my style, but I think it kind of works. As we're going through this, let's say you choose a slide deck that you like. You can also just select the media that you already wanted to incorporate within your slide deck. So at the moment, it's using stock images, but of course, it can just use your images. And then same goes for your brand. So you can just say, right, just utilize this particular brand kit and show me all of the templates that it's created within my brand colors. I prefer to do this sort of afterwards, not right upfront because I think it's a little bit easier to work with, but of course, you can do both at the same time. Okay, so I'm just probably going to go with these guys. I'm going to say apply all seven pages. But let's say the green is quite dark for me, I can always just head back on over to styles and then adjust my combinations. Now, sometimes with the presentations that are generated by magic design, this glitches, both layouts and styles can sometimes glitch. For example, this is not actually taking on board any of the content from the slide, and the styles is not appearing. If that ever happens, just refresh your page. So we're going to refresh, and now we can go back to design and back to styles and hopefully, I'm not a liar, and it's all going to be here. Perfect. So now I've got my main color palette and my color palette variations, so I can cycle through these and maybe just find a few things that suit a little bit better if I wanted to have some alternative versions of these slides. Same with my fonts. If I wanted to change my fonts as well, I could definitely do that, but I'm quite happy to keep it at and then, of course, with layouts, as we looked at in one of the early, early early lessons, you can look at different layouts for any one of your pages, and it's going to give you options based on what's already on that page. So, of course, it's trying to incorporate these kind of external elements that are not really part of the slide, but it really thinks that they are. They're really just there for design purposes. So that can be a little bit tricky if it's trying to incorporate them in the style. But I think a lot of the time, it does give you just some little options and tweaks that are a bit different from what you originally had. For example, I quite like this one. I think that works really well. Okay, so I would probably just unlock the elements. So let's talk about some things you can do with presentations that we haven't done yet. Let's talk about data. So let's say you've got Google sheets like these and you want to bring them into your presentation. You can just highlight part of your sheet and then command C if you're on a Mac control, see if you're on a PC, and then jump into Canva. I'm just going to zoom out because I know it's going to import it really, really, really huge. I'm just going to command V, and now we're going to need to just work with this a little bit to size it down. Just a teeny, tiny bit. It's moved it's moved across slides. That's not what we want. So it can be a little bit tricky in terms of the sizing, so you just need to work with it a little bit and making sure it's not kind of moving out of the slide because then it's going to be kind of lost in the universe somewhere. But once you get it, and of course, the fonts might be the thing that's throwing it off as well. So, for example, these fonts, I think are quite big. So I can just command A to highlight everything and bring the font size down a little bit, and that'll allow me to kind of squish this down and bring it to just the one slide here. Any point, as well, you can use the three dots here to say, Let's size these rows equally. Let's size the columns equally. Of course, in this case, it's not actually something we want to be doing because we want these to be kind of quite narrow, so to give us a little bit more space. But, for example, maybe my rows, I want those to be equal, but maybe my columns, I don't want these to be equal. You can always test and see what works as long as it kind of fits within your page. And then, of course, just like you can within Google Sheets or anywhere else in spreadsheets, you can just highlight. So in this case, I'm just going to click Hold down Shift and then click again, and it's going to select the whole row and I can say, or make this my brand purple and then click and hold Shift and click again and make this purple, as well. So you can customize things, but just so you know, you can bring in external data that is still adjustable within Canvas, so you don't just have to bring in screenshots because sometimes I see people building or bringing in really ugly screenshots of spreadsheets, but you don't necessarily need to do that. While we're on the nerdy subjects, let's talk charts. So if we go into apps and we look for charts, got lots of different options directly within Canva, in terms of bar charts, line charts, area charts, hierarchy charts, and they're all really beautiful and interactive. So just go with whatever works for you and you can always change. So just because you've picked one particular style doesn't mean you're stuck with it. You can use the same data across a different slide style or a different chart style. So that's a really nice option within Canva. And then you just input all of your data here. You can label your X axis, your Y axis, and yeah, that's just a really nice way to kind of represent the data. And if you're presenting when you're hovering over things, you can kind of talk about them there. But it can be a little stiff. I don't know. I just really prefer to look at these things in a much more interactive way, I suppose. So if you are interested in adding any sort of interactivity to your charts, you can do it with a bit of a custom animation. So let's have a look at how to do that. I'm just going to go to elements, and we're going to look for a person icon, and you know what? I'm just going to keep it nice and simple. I'm just going to go with this one. Then I'm going to hit C on my keyboard and just bring that into the back so we can change the color there and then command and left square bracket to move it to the back, and I'm just going to adjust my color here. Of course, I could change the actual color of the chart here by using these colors, but in this case, we're just doing this for demo purposes. So let's not worry too much. I'm going to group these guys together. Now we're going to be creating a little bit of a custom animation here. I can glitch a teeny, tiny bit when you have a grouped object or grouped elements like this. So if I was to just create the custom animation here, sometimes it gives you a little bit of grief. If that happens, just make sure you go to position and layers and select the actual layer together. But in this case, it's selected both of these elements, I think. So let's give it a go. Yeah, it's done really well. So now we want to just go and make the custom animation. Ooh. And now I can say, Alright, how fast do I want this to go? And do I want this to happen automatically or do I want it to be after somebody clicks? Because if, let's say, it was important for the animations to appear in succession, then I could change that. But in this case, I'm happy to just go with that speed. I'm going to click on Done, and then I'm just going to copy and paste this across to this one. Of course, I would probably change the colors, so I know which one is which, but in this case, you know what? No, that's going to bug me. I am going to change it. Because otherwise, how are we going to know which employees doing the best? You know? Okay, there you go. Now we know which one is going to perform the best for us, and I'm just going to go and animate the other two. So you'll notice it's grabbing a few things there. So now if I try and move it, it's not actually grabbing the second element. So that's exactly what I was talking about. I don't know why this happens, but I'm just going to go to position and select the actual layer. And now we can go and make a custom path. And I'm going to have to do a new path for this one because it's a different line. That looks good. And now, same with my last one. I'm just going to probably select a layer just to be safe, and we're going to make it into an original path that's different from the one that it had to do. Look, it's a rough job, but you get the point. I think it just makes it a little bit more interesting for people when you're presenting it rather than just looking at a blank static graph. Another alternative to that is the Flourish integration. So I'm not going to go too deeply into flourish because I also don't have the data to really work with it, but flourish is an external app that you can use for free. Once you have a flourish account, you can go to Flourish and set up these kind of graphs and charts that are interactive and move in a much more dynamic way. And then you can come into Canva and sign in with the Flourish app and then you can embed these into your presentations. So I just went and set up a couple of them within Flourish here so that I can just embed these into my little presentation. So there's just kind of ongoing movement with this one. And then this one will allow me to click and look at a few different elements of F four screen this. Once I go to present, I can say, Oh, this is what's happening in Queensland. This is what's happening in South Australia, and I can sort of talk about it while presenting in a way that's a little bit more interactive and dynamic. So definitely give Flourish a go if data presentation is something that's really important to your presentations and your slides. Now, let's talk about how to make your designs really fun because I think it's such a missed opportunity when people are not putting animated elements into their presentations. Of course, it has to be right for your brand and whatever project you're doing this for. But I think there's just so much beautiful opportunity to do some really fun stuff with your gifts and stickers and other imated elements. Maybe you have your brand colors. So in this case, let's say, our brand colors are something fun. Let's make this into a gradient. Ooh. That's fun. And now I can make it the gift kind of semi transparent. So I'm just gonna bring down the transparency, just to give it a little bit of movement. And then, let's say, just bring in a bit of text, and I can say something like, Are we feeling excited? Because let's say this was a very, very long presentation, and people are kind of getting a little bit bored with everything and listening to the sound of my voice. That's where I can just pop in and be like, Alright, we've got this cool thing coming up. Let's talk about it. I really like doing this, especially in live presentations, but also in webinars, I wish more people would actually understand that learning is a state dependent activity, and people do need to get a bit of a hit of endorphins every once while we're talking about animations, you can also embed videos into your presentations. Let's say we've got a video like this one on my YouTube channel, I'm just going to open that up. I can just grab the link from the browser or from directly within here, and you used to have to create it from within the actual embed function, but now you can just Command V, and it's going to embed that video into your presentation for you. And then you can just play it directly when you're presenting. You can do the same thing with music. So let's say we were doing, I'm just going to hit T and go say something like enjoy your three minute journaling. Exercise. So let's say you're doing this as an in class presentation and you want people to just journal on something specific for 3 minutes. You can go to something like SoundCloud and choose a song. Obviously, because I'm talking about this being a three minute exercise, I would want to choose a song that's at least 3 minutes. And then similarly to a YouTube video, you can just paste it in here and it's going to embed that for you and allow you to play that when you're going through the exercise. Then when you go to actually present this, so if I just present this like this, if I hit any number on my keyboard, it's going to start a countdown timer for me. So if I hit the number three on my keyboard, it's going to start a three minute countdown timer, and then I can say, e, we're going to start the timer, and then I can start playing the song just by clicking on it, and then it's going to essentially give us this journaling exercise and a little timer so people know how much time is left. So that's a really brilliant thing if you're ever doing these kind of exercises mid presentation, which personally, I love to do. Another really cool thing you can do with your audience is if you go to share and we're going to share this maybe as a collaboration link, can say anyone with the link can view, we can copy this link. And now we can create a little QR code for people. So let's say you're doing the presentation and people are scrambling notes and they're not really listening to you. You can say, Hey, PS, I'm going to give you a code so you can look at this presentation anytime in the future, and you can just say scan this and view the slides. Or alternatively, you could do something like this with a review at the end. So if you're giving a presentation and at the end, you're like, I would love you guys to review me on Google or on Facebook, you can use a QR code at the end to get those reviews, or you can also do this for polls and quizzes and things like that, which we're going to talk about in the next lesson. But this can be a really nice way to just get people to pay attention, so you can say, at the end, I'm going to give you access to all the slides that we presented today. And by giving them the link to the slide deck and not just a PDF, it means that any interactive elements like these are still going to be there. Any videos are going to be clickable all of this is a little bit more tricky when it comes to PDF format. So I really like doing it this way so that they can really get to full experience once they leave that presentation. Now, you'll also remember that earlier we talked about lottis. So this is a really good option where you can kind of go in here and let's say I do Command C because I want to bring these into my presentation. And then what I would do is I would bring these in as the last slide and make them the brand color that I want. So because my slides are all quite dark, I would probably change these all to be something lighter. So I'm just going to grab a couple of these and change these to purple, and then I can just select a couple of them, copy them, and use them in my presentation because it can be really nice to have a couple of animated elements, not too many, so I would never actually have all of these all on one slide. I would probably only ever have one or two. And same goes for elements in here. You know, you can have someone like, let's say, clicking. As an animated element. So, of course, we could go into animated only. Let's say you've got something that you really want to point out in your presentation, I would just bring in a couple of little animated elements to just bring it to life a little bit and make it a little bit more interesting than if it's just a static presentation. And now, lastly, let's talk about how you can actually present this. So in the presentation section, you also have the option options to present. You also have the option to present and record. Don't have my webcam set up with this at this stage, but if you go through to present and record, it means you can record yourself talking and going through your slides, and you can send that to somebody as a video in case you're not able to present live. So that's a really good option. Alternatively, I know some companies are actually quite strict on this. So within the presentation section, you can also export in PowerPoint format. That means that you can then convert this into Google Slides as well. So if you import your PowerPoint into Google Slides, it means that if your company is really strict on you using Google slides and not Cava to present, you can do that. I would just make sure that whatever fonts you're using are also available within Google slides because otherwise things can get a little bit out of whack. So I would make sure you know what fonts you want to use within Google Slides. Come into Canva, make sure that you're using those fonts, and then you're going to be able to export it and then utilize it within Google slides if that's what you want to do. Now, of course, if you are presenting within Canva, I would also add in some transitions on whatever is kind of appropriate for your brand. Let's say for this one, I'm just going to apply this flow between all the pages, and I can always go to uration and have a look at how this is all going to work, or I can just full screen this and test out my animations that way. Obviously, I haven't actually updated the original slide deck that it has there for me, so this is a little bit of a mess, but you get the point. There are so many different cool ways that you can use interactive slides within Canva, whether you're utilizing your own content or the AI given content that it's provided for you. So hopefully that was helpful. I'll see you in the next lesson where we cover polls and quizzes. 72. Polls and Quizzes: So let's talk about poles and quizzes. If you go into elements and go down to poles and quizzes, you've got the two different options there. So there are some slight variations between them. I'm just going to pull two of these into my design so I can show you. So this is a quiz, this is a pole. The main difference is you'll notice that a quiz will have a submit button, and it will have a right and a wrong answer, whereas a poll doesn't have a submit button, and it's just a general opinion or statement. So people can still only select one option, but that might change in the future, but there is no sort of right or wrong way. It's just sort of a feeling people have, whereas on here, you actually testing their knowledge on something. This could be a powerful thing to add to your presentations to kind of knowledge check people or understand where people are at. So like I mentioned before, you would have to create the poll or the quiz outside of your presentation, which I'm going to show you in a second, because I've created this for us. You would create it in a separate document, and then you would link that document with a QR code as part of your presentation. So you would say something like, scan this, let me know your thoughts. Something like that. Obviously, you would make it much nicer that's design wise than this is, but you would say something like, I've got a quick quiz for you, scan this, and the new design would pop up on their phone, and they'd be able to submit their answers from there, and you would immediately in lifetime, see the stats. So if you're in a room, then obviously that's much easier for you to have a look at. But let's say you're presenting this in a pre recorded format like what I'm doing right now, you could still essentially get the data. So if I say to you right now, obviously this is not the QR code to scan because that's the code to this presentation. If you had a QR code to a particular slide deck that had the quizzes in there, you could do it, and I would still get the stats and the data from here until eternity as people continue to fold us out. So that's a really good way to just get a sense check from your audience. Look, it is a little bit limited. Cava can't do everything. There are other options which we're going to talk about in the next lesson because we're going to embed a few things into our live website. So I'll show you some more advanced versions of this that you can utilize as well externally, but it is a really quick and easy way to do something like this within Canva. You're actually going into this, you can edit the colors. At this stage, you can't edit your fonts. So I think it's a pretty good idea to just remove the header so you can have your own font as the header, and then you would just put in a yes or no. You would edit the quiz options, and then you would also make sure you're selecting which one of these is the correct answer because obviously this one will have and a wrong answer. You can add additional options. You can add up to ten, and then you can change the actual button. With your pole, there is no right or wrong answer, so you won't see this option here. But likewise, you can remove the header and then just add in your options. At this stage, we cannot edit the font styles in here, so it's a bit tricky, but you can edit things like your borders, and you can edit the corner rounding. So you can play around with a few things. You could add in a little dropshadow, but and it's a little bit limited. Anyways, I did make a live version of this where I've got a poll and a quiz. So we would just head on over to share and within the public view link, we would make sure that this is the link we're grabbing and turning into a QR code that we put in our presentation or in a PDF or wherever else, you want to use it to gather people's responses. It does have to be a link to the design. You can't just download the design as a PNG or something like that and then try to get people to vote. It doesn't work that way because it has to be responsive. So you can only link to the existing design in order for this to work. Just going to open this up in an Incognito window so we can come in and vote. So did we enjoy today's presentation? I'm going to say, Yes, I did. And because I voted just as a dummy vote, I can see the percentages of people that voted in different ways. And then I'm going to say, which of the following is not true? Online courses are fun. Animated elements make presentations more interactive, and adding vacation photos to a corporate presentation is a fantastic idea. So I can say, Alright, this one, I think is the one that's not true, and it's going to tell me whether that answer is correct. If it wasn't correct, it would say that answer is not correct, but it would show me the correct one. So people can sort of test their knowledge. There's no dramas if they get it wrong. It's not like it's not going to let them go to the next slide. It's not that advanced, but it will tell them what the right answer. Now on the back end, if I click into each individual poll or quiz, I can see the responses here in each of them, but that can be a bit tedious if you've got ten of them in your entire document. So you can also just go to your analytics up here, and then you'll be able to see your poll and quizzes responses all in one go. So I have four responses here, and then one response here. I can't see who it's from, though. So if I actually go into each of these individually, and I really wanted to know who each response was, if they are not logged into Canva, like I wasn't in my Incognito window, it's going to show up as anonymous. If I'm logged in, it's going to actually have their username there. So that's all about polls and quizzes, and now in the next lesson, we're going to start talking about websites, so I'll see there. 73. Design a Website in Canva: So we do have lots of different website templates we can choose from. We're just going to jump into one so I can show you how website templates are different from other templates within Canva. So we're within the 13 66 by 768 dimensions. Personally, I think those are weird dimensions, but they do work for a full screen experience. So that's the only thing we really care about. The main difference that you'll notice as opposed to other designs is that you have this full screen experience. But of course, you will always have the option to look at the thumbnail view, just like you do in all the other designs. And you can keep switching between them. And when you're in your full screen experience, because you don't have the same functionality up here to add your new pages, you have everything on the left hand side bar to duplicate pages, delete pages, add new pages. All of that is there. And the beauty of doing it this way that even though you're in a full screen experience, each of these is its own page. So when you're aligning elements within that page, it's going to give you those guides to tell you you're in the middle and the center of this particular section. So this is both a pro icon because it means if you're doing something in here, it's not telling you how that's aligning with something up here. So that's why I would say, turn on probably margins because you can essentially use these to align your elements. But sometimes, especially with templates, you'll see they're not aligned to that particular area. So I would just hit Shift R and bring in rulers instead. So, for example, if I'm like, Okay, my image is aligned to about here, and the text is aligned to around there. Yeah, that's about right. Then I can use this as a guide for the rest of my template. And I can make sure everything is adjusted to these guidelines, and all the way down, those are the margins that I'm using. So that's the brilliant thing about rulers and guides. I utilize it a lot. I've used it a lot throughout this course, as you know, but I think for websites is when it becomes really critical. Other thing I will say is that it's really critical for you to rename your pages, which is something you may not have done until now, but with websites, absolutely, this is critical, especially if you're going to be utilizing a navigation menu. So when you're in your thumbnail view, you just want to make sure that let's say this was a I mean, this is not a services page, but let's say this was a services page. I would want to make sure that I'm actually labeling each individual page. This will allow me to have a navigation menu when I publish, but also it allows you to interlink. So let's say I want this Learn More button. To go to a particular page. So if I hit Command K or Control K, if you're on a PC, we can now go to the pages in this document and say, earn more is going to go straight to services, let's say. And just like we did in our eBook lesson, we can remove the underline, but it functions exactly the same way. Anytime you have a button or a link in your website, you can interlink your different pages, or you can, of course, link out externally as well. Now, some cool things that you can do within Canva that are a little bit more tricky to do in other website designers would be things like adding in videos, which is really cool. So because this doesn't actually load as a website, it loads as almost just a design document, means that you can play around with some more advanced, more heavy animated elements like our videos here. So just turn down the transparency, and of course, I would want to make sure to hit to mute this or just turn it down here. And playback wise, I would also say play automatically and play on repeat and maybe adjust the video speed if it's appropriate. But that means that when someone's scrolling through my website, I have this nice little background video there. Now, one thing that might happen on mobile screens is sometimes because this is going to stack vertically. If you're using a horizontal video like this one, it might preview a bit weirdly. So in that case, what I would actually do is utilize a vertical video. And only showcase a part of it on the desktop view and then make sure that it will then show up in full form on desktop, or on mobile, sorry. So yeah, this is going to look maybe not as amazing on desktop. It still looks nice. Maybe the other one was a little bit nicer, but it means that it's going to appear correctly on Mobile. But we're going to get into that once we start previewing my own website that I'm going to be giving you a template to on mobile so I can show you how you can customize things to here we are in my own template that I'm providing you with, and I've purposely done a few things, not necessarily wrong, but I know they're not going to stack as well as I want them to on mobile, so that we can talk about how to fix that because I'm here to teach you things that you can't learn just with Cava templates. So this is my templates, and one thing you'll notice with this is, if I ungroup this and just select my little circle icon, if I go to animate, it doesn't give me too many options for what I can do with this. That's a little bit of a limitation of the website interface, but a sneaky, sneaky little hack is if you make the animation from a different design and you bring it into your website template, it will still honor that. So this animation has that nice rotation aspect. You'll remember we created it as part of our email signature here. So I was able to basically just take this, copy it over, bring it into my website. And if I go to full screen this and go to the next page, you'll be able to see that that rotation is still happening, even though technically, it's not an animation that's allowed inside of the website editor. So if you do have any advanced animations you want to make, just make them in a different document and bring them in. This might be something that Canva change in the future. It might just be a glitch, but you know what? Right now, it's just a bit of a life hack. As you're creating things as well. So, for example, I made this original sort of services section. I purposely made it in a way that I know it is not going to stack well on mobile, which is, again, a very big limitation of the Canva templates within Canva. They are designed for desktop, but they generally look quite rubbish on mobile. So this is one that I actually took from a Canva template and wanted to test how it would appear on mobile, and it just doesn't really know what to do with it. So I've recreated it in a way that's mobile friendly. But because I have the side by side, one cool thing you can do with in Canva is you can hide or unhide pages. So I can actually hide this one from once it's published. So we're only going to see the bad version, and then we can essentially come in here and hide the bad version, unhide the good one. Twist a few things around. So if you're ever working with a live site and you're like, Oh, I don't really want to be messing with a live design, you can always hide the pages that you're working on so that they're not actually going to be visible for anyone who's looking at your website, and that is such an awesome new feature of this editor. So we'll take a look at the stacking functionality, but I've put in a few of my services, and I've put in a little bit of a video into this kind of cutout here, and I've put in some gifts from the things that we've created within this course. And then I embedded some videos, which is something we learned about in the presentation section. Again, I've also put these in here in a way they're not going to stack well, so we can think about how to fix that. And then I've put in some reviews. Now, these I actually have adjusted so that they stack really neatly for me. And the only thing I've really done is I've grouped them in groups of three so that on mobile, they just go one and then this one will go underneath, and this one will go underneath that. So if I wasn't going to do that, it would essentially just try and shrink this entire section into one tiny mobile screen. That's the only thing that I've sort of done there is just made it into a group of three. So on mobile, it makes it really nice and easy to stack. And now let's have a look at the next two sections and then we'll go through to publishing it and previewing it and fixing any issues. So this is your chance to embed a typefm. Now, you don't necessarily need to be using Typefom. You can use an alternative because Typeform can be a little bit expensive, but even on their free plan, this does work, whether you're a free user of Typeform and a free user of Canva, this will still work. And I do think Typeform is far superior to a lot of the other tools out there. So I wanted to show you how to do this. Within type form, I've created this really quick and easy questionnaire. I've just made it my own brand colors, but you've also got a whole kind of gallery of different designs that you can go off of. Some will be premium, some will be free. And then you can essentially just go through and go to ad content and ask for questions, add multiple choice questions, ask for their website, ask for videos. Ask for a date and also embed calendar, which is something we're going to talk about next. So you can embed that directly within type form. There's so many options to this beyond just what's possible with Canvas pools and quizzes, which is why I absolutely love it. So I basically just said, you know, what's your name? Do you have a website? Tell me about your amazing business. Then I've got some more advanced sections where I kind of what tools are you using? And I've also added in an option for people to add in their own because I think that's quite handy. People might be using totally different tools than the ones that I'm used to. And then I've also allowed for multiple selection here. If I change that, then obviously, that wouldn't really work for this particular kind of question. And I've made it a required question as well, so people don't necessarily need to answer it. So you've got lots of different options here, and then at the end, I just sort of ask them what the email address is that's best to contact them on. So now I can go ahead and publish that and we can go and share it inside of Canva. So this time, I can't just copy and paste that link into it. We're going to have to use an external tool called Embed or not necessarily an external tool. It's just a Canva app. And we're going to paste this link in here, and it's going to allow us to embed our beautiful type form straight into our design. So now it's going to be nice and interactive, and we're going to go through how that all works in just a sec once we preview it, and then we're going to go and talk about Calendly. So Calmly, if you're not familiar with it yet, is just a booking system that has an awesome free option, so I would definitely check it out. On the free option, you're only allowed to have one live event. So you can have other events if you want, but only one of them can ever be live at a time. And you can go through all your different settings in terms of when people can book in. It's also linked to your actual calendar. So if you've got options where you have booked out your calendar for whatever reason, it's not going to display those times as available. It's going to display in their own time zone. And you can set the duration. You can set notifications that people get before and after the call. And all of this, you can get to know a little bit more with the resources I have linked in your course guide. But for now, we really just want to link to this particular view for our website. So once again, we're going to be using Embed as an app, and I'm just going to add this in here. And I'm probably going to have to shrink it down a teeny, tiny bit, and I'll just pop it in. It's not exactly going to allow it to be all that responsive. So you might just have to play around with the sizing, especially once it's on mobile, but I'm going to leave it there for now. Okay, and then I've just got a section for people to be able to connect with me online. So I'm going to publish that, and I've got some options here, so I'll be able to publish it with a navigation menu or without. So we're going to publish it with a navigation menu just so you can see how that works. And you definitely want to tick Resize on mobile. Otherwise, it's just a mess. Then you've got some additional published settings in terms of adding in a description around your website. So that's what would appear on Google. But you can also say, do you want to just hide the visibility from search engines? Because in this case, I don't actually want people to find this site. And then you can also make it a password protected site if you wanted. But in this case, I'm quite happy with it being, you know, what's just called an example site, so it will take the name of your document as the name of your site. So you want to make sure that that's something reasonable. But for now, I'm happy to just publish that. Now, we're going to look at it on desktop and then I'm going to actually look at it on my phone instead of using their preview because I find their preview is not 100% accurate. So you always want to make sure that you are definitely maybe not as the first point of call, but you definitely want to make sure you're checking it on your phone at some point to see how it all appears. So these are all of the different options that we have uptop, so I can just click down to all the different things if I wanted to, or I can just scroll straight down. So everything's going to look pretty good on mobile. You can see that animations are working. You can see that I've only got the services page here. Obviously, this is a little bit cut off because it didn't design for a full full screen experience because my desktop is much larger than what it designed for, but that's fine, not super dramatic. This all looks good. There's some slight animations here. I can type into this. What's my name? You can see that that's really responsive. At the top there, you can see a progress bar is happening as well. So I could go through that whole thing and send that to myself in this case, and I can book myself in for a virtual coffee, which is cool, and then I've got ways to connect with myself online. So all of that works really well. Now, let's have a look at it on mobile. So in the upper right hand corner, we've got a navigation menu there if we would like to look at it. But for example, this image of me is really close to the edges there. I don't really like that, and we're going to find a way to fix that. I think this looks pretty good. That's all stacked pretty well. Our services are a mess as predicted, so we're going to fix that. This looks relatively good. Obviously, it's not all that mobile optimized. If I wanted to, I would move those elements farther apart so that they're more likely to stack neatly on mobile, but it's not too bad. And then my videos, as predicted, are a little bit messy, so we're going to fix that. My testimonial stack really well. My type form works and everything looks good. So people can still fill that out on mobile. People can book into my calendar there. And this all looks good. So just a couple of things to fix, and I'm going to show you some hacks for that. Okay, so we're going to have to edit our design, which means we're going to have to republish it if we want things to go live, that are changes. The thing I would do with these videos to make sure they stack accurately is group them with the elements that are behind them. So I'm just going to hit Shift and click on these elements and shift and click on these elements, which is going to mean that they're going to stack appropriately, and one's not going to be weirdly larger than the other. And this is the way that I sort of fixed this situation, so I'm going to now unhide this one. So instead of having these guys kind of just fending for themselves, I guess. We're just going to delete that. I essentially made this into a mobile friendly design here. So this is just going to basically have these either independently in there or in a group of two. That doesn't really matter. Anytime you group elements, you have a better chance of them stacking correctly on mobile. But largely, you want to give Canva a little bit of direction. So for this, I would maybe, yeah, just highlight a couple of things here, maybe highlight this, maybe group these together. So Canva knows, Okay, these are the things that you together on mobile, and then maybe these guys will be just above it. So we'll see how that goes and really, really easy hack of adding some spaces if you're ever like, Oh, I could really use a bit of extra space around this, or I just need a bit of help with formatting it. In the future, Canva might have a separate editor for your mobile view, but as it stands right now, we don't. So I would just hit RM, bring in a bit of a rectangle, place it around your image. It's not going to affect your desktop view at all. We're just going to make it completely transparent, and then we're going to position that in the back. So on your desktop, it's not going to change anything, but on mobile, when we group these guys together, it's going to try and display it with that transparent rectangle in place, as well. I think this kind of had a lack of a gap at the bottom, as well, so I would probably do the same thing for this one and just kind of group this whole section together. In a way that doesn't actually impact the text, really, I just would want a little bit of a gap underneath the button when it stacks on mobile. So I would just group these together, and once again, it's just going to give me a little bit more padding at the bottom there. So that's pretty much all I wanted to fix. We're going to publish our website once again. This time, I'm going to do it without a navigation menu. I just prefer the look of that, but it's totally up to you. Whatever works, it's going to look the same on desktop, so we're not going to bother with that view again. I'm just going to show you what it looks like on mobile. So those gaps look much better. There's also a nice gap at the bottom of my button there. My services look much, much better. And my videos are stacked correctly. So everything has been fixed just by grouping a couple of elements together. And once your site is live, you can check your analytics to see who's visiting your site. And you can, of course, have a custom URL, as well. So the moment I'm literally just using the Canva specific one. So mags dot my cava example site, but you can also go to adding in either your own domain or buying a new domain from directly within Canva. So if you do have a domain on your website or from another host, you can always add it into Canva here if you're a Canva P user. 74. Make a Link in Bio Page: So I just want to really quickly cover how you can create something like a Linkn Bosite on Canva. Because Lincn Bosite this is something that is often created by external apps and tools, where it's desktop and mobile responsive, but on people's phone screens, which is 99% of your Link in biotraffic through a platform like Instagram. Everything stacks really neat. And there is an option to do this really easily within Cava. So if you just look at Link in Bio or mobile site, you've got all these beautiful options. So they won't look amazing on desktop, but that's really, really not their purpose. Their purpose is to look amazing on mobile. So when people click through something like your Instagram bio, they will be able to come to area that essentially just covers their entire phone screen where you can link them out to different parts of your business. So let's say you've got a website, like a Canva website like the one we just created, you could link that here. You might have a portfolio on another website, perhaps something like Behans if you're a designer or somewhere else or you could completely rename these categories. This could say something like YouTube. Or it could say, give me a call and it could be your phone number, whatever you want it to be, and then you could include those links there. So this is such a really, really, super easy way to just put together a link in bio. You would then share that. And instead of sharing it as a design, you would just click to share that as a website. So you can actually publish almost anything as a website inside of Canva, and your URL is then going to be super super long, so this would just be Link. In Bio. But of course, I could add in my own domain. So this could actually be maggie dot star forward slash Instagram, for example, and then I would go through the published settings. I would publish this as a website and then take that link and put that into something like my Instagram bio. So definitely explore all the beautiful link in bio options within Canva, and I will see you in the next lesson. 75. Exercise: Canva for Business: So once again, it's time for you to put what you've learned into action. And at this stage, I would love for you to design a fake product and create a mock up of this product. And before you say no, and before you say, Max, look, I run a real estate business. I don't want to be designing moisturizer. I understand. But the point of these exercises is not necessarily for you to create stuff for your business. I know that seems controversial 'cause you might be here learning specifically for your own brand. But sometimes the skills that you actually add the most value to your life and to your career are ones that are completely outside of your industry are totally different from what you would normally create, and you still learn so much because you're thinking so differently. So if you can put your fun and playful and creative hat on for me, I would really appreciate if you just design something. It can be really simple. But I really, really love this exercise because this is something that we can then also take in the advanced video section of the course, and then we're going to be creating this kind of awesome dynamic reel with the mockup that you create. So I went with my fake skincare brand for this, and I've provided you with links in your course guide to the specific mockup that I use and the template dimensions, but I've also added it in here for you. So it's not going to be clickable. You'll have to actually go to Edit Link to get the link here. I thought I'll add it in just in case, so you have access in both ways. And then you've got your template here if you're a Canva pro user. So you'll be able to download these straight from here and then head to the mockup link I've provided you with and put them straight in there. So I have adjusted these, so they're perfect for this mockup so you won't need to actually adjust the fit. They're just going to automatically fit, no matter what design you put inside of that document. And then if you're a Canva free user, I've also adjusted these for a slightly different product that will still suit our purposes that looks like this. And the dimensions of this template are just slightly wider, and I've also replaced some elements with Canva free elements, so you'll be able to download this design and then head to the Canva free mockup. And then, again, the dimensions are perfect for this exact mockup, so you won't need to adjust anything. But you can absolutely change this up. It doesn't have to be skin care related whatsoever. It just the only stipulation I have is that it needs to be a mockup of a product that doesn't have a background, it needs to be a cutout Mc on with only the actual mockup showing so that we can create this kind of beautiful transition effect with the real. As you'll see, when we get to this particular lesson in the course, I've created these mockups in four different colors, which is going to make it really nice and easy for us to have that kind of slide in and out effect with four different products. So I would encourage you to just create slight variations in four different ways. That seems to be kind of the sweet spot in terms of the amount of products that we can feature in a real or in a story like that. But feel free to play around with these templates in a way that you see fit. You can make your own skincare brand. You can just be really playful with it and just remember to have fun. I want to encourage you to pause the course, go check your course guide for all the relevant resources and some more detailed instructions on the exercise. And now in the next section of the course, we're then going to dive into the exciting world of AI, where we're going to look at how to create really specific images, videos, illustrations, collections of images, and all the other exciting things. I'm really, really excited about this one. I know AI can be a little bit scary, but we're going to get through it together, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 76. Introduction: Working with AI: Friends, so this is where things start to get a little bit weird. But exciting as we dive into the magical world of AI. Hopefully, weird in a good way, obviously. But, I mean, yeah, AI is a weird space. I'm just going to say it, but it's also really exciting. And I think that as creatives and as creators, we can just feel really intimidated by AI because it does sometimes feel like the thing is just trying to steal our jobs. But I promise that if you can learn to work with AI, not against it, it can be such an amazing tool in your toolbox to make you better and faster at designing, rather than this intimidating thing that's just coming for your job because there's really no replacement and no substitute for your beautiful, human creative brain and the way that you think and put ideas together and your feelings that all go into the process. So there's just things that AI can't replicate, but there's so much that AI really can do for our design process, so I'm excited to dive into a lot of different topics. We're going to look into some tools that are only available for Canva Pro users, and then we're also going to look at some substitutes that are available to everyone no matter what Canva plan you're on. And we're going to look at things like creating images and videos and collections of images, as well as illustrations that if you like, you can also put on apparel and print and maybe make your own line of products that you then want to sell, which is something we're going to talk about a little bit later in the course. There's so much cool stuff that you can do no matter what your baseline knowledge of AI is. So we're going to dive into everything in the next lesson, and I'll see you there. 77. Magic Design & Studio: So why don't we start off nice and simple by looking at something that I'm not sure you're going to utilize a whole lot, but it's still good to know that it's there because sometimes it's just a nice way to start exploring some ideas if you're starting with a topic idea and you've got rough idea of what you want to do, but you're not quite sure what your design is going to look like. You could search in here, just say something like create a presentation or create a social media post on in this case, the five things you need to know before buying your first home. And it's going to obviously come up with templates. But yeah, I mean, these are not all that relevant. These are relevant to lots of different things because I've given it too many keywords for the templates to actually do its thing. But I've given it just enough keywords for magic design up here to essentially create a presentation for me on the topic of the essential tips for first time home buyers. So that's just a nice way to get you started if you think, Okay, I've got a topic. I don't really know where I'm going with this. Yeah, again, it's not a feature. You're going to utilize a whole whole lot, but it's good to know that you've got magic design there as an AI tool that you can utilize, so you can put in any prompt in here you want, and magic design is going to do its thing. Then you can also continue to customize this and say, Okay, well, make this in my brand style. With my brand fonts and my brand colors, I could add in my images. So similarly to the way that we would have done this within the actual presentation editor that we've looked at in a previous lesson, it can do that all for you without you actually having to create a project in this case. But then let's just summarize a few things that we've already kind of explored throughout the course a fair bint I just wanted to put it all in one lesson so you know that these tools are available to you if you're a Canva pro user and also know that we've explored some tools at the course that will allow you to do these things for free, as well. So these are all in your course guide if you're not a Canva P user. But effectively, when you have an image like this one, I'm just going to keep actually, I'm going to keep it quite small, so we can do a few little things with it. You can head on over to Edit. And, of course, we've explored the background remover a lot. We have explored some of these other elements, but not all of them yet. So I thought, Let's go and sort of summarize what's available to you within Magic Studio. So we have Magic Grab not a tool I utilize a whole lot, but it can be really handy when you've got maybe an image of a person in an image that you want to use and you just really want to remove them, or you just want to move them slightly, or you want to move an object slightly. It can be quite handy for those purposes. So it's something that I do utilize on occasion because my alternative is to just remove the background with the background remover. But let's say I want to actually keep the background, but I just want to move this image slightly off to the left because I want to put some text here, and this is an awkward spot for me to be able to do. So I can just click and grab it, and now it's sort of its own individual image, similar to the way that we would have used it with a background remover, but we can now place it to a different part of the image in this case. And then I can clean this up a little bit continuing on with magic Studio by utilizing the magic eraser in this case. So I'm just going to go ahead and just brush over this area here because it's looking a bit awkward because we removed our image from there. I could also mess with these ones at the bottom here, but I actually don't mind that bit of texture. So I'm just going to erase that there and yes, this can be really handy for clearing up any imperfections if you've got raw images of yourself or of other people and maybe someone walked in the background of your photo and you just need to remove them. I use this a lot for travel photos because let's face it, it's impossible to get a nice travel photo where no other tourists have gotten in the back. So I use it a lot for removing people from those kind of images. But of course, in your actual designs like these, it can also be really handy for these kind of tidy up purposes. Then we have looked at magic expand already, but let's say, I just want to make sure that this image becomes my whole page. I don't find magic expand to be I don't want to say perfect. I mean, none of these tools are perfect. But especially for textual images like this one that has a lot of texture to it, it generally does expand out, but it can be quite blurry or quite smooth. It doesn't necessarily replicate those textures every time, or than it just does something really weird. Like, add extra images of people. I think it's actually done a pretty good job of this. You can see the outside bits are a bit smoother than that middle original photo. And that's what I mean about the texture. It doesn't necessarily always bring it to the edges. But if that's not all that important to you, I think a lot of the time, I use it to expand images just when I have, let's say, a vertical image of myself, and I just want to play some text above it. And I just need a little bit more real estate. So I use magic Expand for that quite a bit. And generally there's just a white wall or something there to expand. So it doesn't really hugely matter that there's a bit of a textured issue. So it can be used for those kind of things, but again, it does work better with photos that don't have a whole lot of texture in the background or a lot of elements in the background. Then we can look at magic edit. Now, I know people on YouTube and on Instagram are going really gung ho about magic edit and how amazing it is. You know, you can say, Hey, make me wear a blazer and yeah, that sounds great in theory. I think it still has ways to go at the time of recording this. I think it's still not quite as good as it potentially will be in the future. But effectively, it'll allow you to brush over a certain part of your image, so I could brush over her shorts and say, make this into a blue skirt, or you can click into I'm going to click into the whole image here just because I'm not going to outline her hair here, but I would normally probably brush over her hair and say make this into brown hair. But in this case, I can just say make her have brown hair. Generally, when you click into the whole image like this, it's also going to change some other elements because it's going to panic. It's probably not going to make her into just, you know, cousin it full of hair, but it might also alter different parts of the image. So if you want to avoid that, you would just brush over her hair and say, Just change the hair. Yeah, in this case, it's changed the color of her shirt to also be a little bit darker than it originally was. But in this case, I don't actually mind that. I think that looks really good. So she's now gone from having blond hair to having brown hair. Let's say that's something we wanted to change. And now we've got her in a totally different part of our image. Yeah, so it's something I utilize for just the odd little occasions. I use the background remover 20 times a day, but these are kind of little tools that are just good to know where they're located and how you can use them. And if you ever have any images with texts on let's say, in this case, I would probably want to just remove the text, so I could use the magic eraser for this, as well. But if there is a case where you don't actually want to remove the text, you might just want to move it. It can be really handy for you to just be able to grab it and move it to a different part of the graphic. I do actually use this a fair bit when I have clients or students give me images that they've created and I want to play around with the text placement, I will come in and I will grab it and I'll move it to a different part of the image just to demonstrate what I think would help improve the graphic. And in this case, it's obviously not grabbed this last little bit. So for that, I would just use my magic eraser to just tidy this up, teeny, tiny bit and make it nice and perfect. And then, let's say, I want to add my own word on top of this so I could just type in a little bit of text and add that on top. So that's magic Design and Magic Studio. We have covered a lot of those tools throughout the course, but I just wanted you to know exactly where they are now that we're in the AI section of the course, and in the next one, we're going to start getting really nerdy with something called prompt engineering, so I can't wait to dive into all that in the next lesson, and I'll see you there. 78. Effective Prompt Engineering: Okay, so let's get super nerdy down with prompt engineering, which is essentially just the process of writing instructions for AI models to produce specific outputs, which in this case would be for it to come up with beautiful images. And the reason that prompt engineering is important and the reason I want to talk about it is because if you don't really know how to ask for what you want, AI can't really help you out. So Canva has Dreamlab here, which is currently just in the left hand side, but here, it may change in the future. But for now, that's where it sits, and that is now powered by Leonardo AI, which Cava have acquired, which has much more advanced functionality in terms of producing really high quality images, but you need to know how to ask for what you're trying to create. And honestly, it's not so easy to come up with the words for especially for things that don't necessarily exist if you're thinking, Okay, well, I want to see a photo of a pug riding a skateboard in Dubai and it's snowing. And there's also draft. You know, if you're confused about what you're trying to create, AI is going to create some very confusing things. So essentially going to reverse engineer a couple of things to get us ready for the following few lessons. One of those will be figuring out how to actually give AI instructions. Now, I do like dream lab, but we have such limited prompts here to work with. You will only sort of have a couple of reference images that people have created with this where it will give you a little bit of a prompt there that people have used to create this image, which is really cool. So we can kind of start with that and think about, okay, what are people putting in here to create these images? But, like I said, there's only a few of them. So I would definitely sign up for Leonardo AI or a different image AI tool of your choice. But I think Leonardo is really beautiful. It's a great place to start. It has a great free option, and it will give you all of these reference images of people who are creating on the platform in a public way so you can actually see exactly what they're creating. And then when you click into each individual image, it will have the prompt details there. If they've also used a negative prompt, which is something that's possible within Leonardo AI, where they put in a negative prompt of no crazy hands, no dead eyes, no funny hair or whatever the prompts are to basically say, don't create any of this stuff, then that will also be here as a negative prompt, which is really handy to get to know, as well. So I'm going to be doing this and then putting that into ChatCPT, which again, has a really great free option. Now, this is not a course specifically on AI. We could go into a IPT and Leonardo AI for hours and hours, hours in separate courses. But I just want to give you the sort of basics so you know how to create beautiful images in AI. So this is the Leonardo AI image that I'm choosing as my prompt here, and I'm going to put this into ChatCPT and sort of reverse engineer this to say, Okay, I want to create an image with this similar style of prompt. Can you generate a prompt based on the thing I want to create? So here's how I would go about that. So now within chat TBT, once we're signed into our free account, we can say, want you to act as my prompt engineer. I'm going to give you an example prompt that you will use to draft new prompts based on the guidance I provide Nick about what we want to be creating images about. And then I'm going to provide it with our example prompt that we grabbed from Leonardo AI. And hit Enter. And then Chat CPT is going to say, Yep, cool. I'm going to give it the same detailed style for your images. Now, I'm going to say something like this. Don't judge me. I'm just in a koala phase at the moment. So I want you to create an image of a koala sitting at a table at a cafe with a cup of coffee, working on a MacBook Pro and looking outside as it's snowing. The koala has a jacket and a beanie on, and it's wearing glasses, and the image style is photorealistic. Then it's going to create this image prompt for me based on the prompts that I already gave it. Now, I would say that this is pretty good. It probably doesn't feature too much detail about the photo style or the focus point or anything like that. So we'll see in the next few lessons what this actually comes up with when we put it into the AI tools. But it's a really, really great way to just get a sense of how to actually create a prompt. We will put both prompts, my original prompt, and this beautiful customized prompt into the AI tools, and we'll have a look at the difference. Okay, so now while we're here, we're also going to reverse engineer our brand voice because a lot of the time you might be writing slightly longer pieces of content than just a couple of words, and it can be really helpful to have your brand voice within Canva to adjust this for you for those times when your brain is just having a bit of a day and you just need a little bit of help. So I'm also going to say, In a minute, I'm going to provide you with an example of an Instagram caption that I've written for my business. I want you to analyze this caption and write a short paragraph about what you believe my brand voice to be based on this copy, starting with a paragraph this brand's tone of voice is. Now the reason that I've done this is because you can essentially take a piece of content that you've created that you're really, really proud of, and you're like, This is amazing. This was my best work. I absolutely know that this reflects my tone of voice. This reflects my branding. And I just want to make sure that every content that I create from here on out is going to have this similar style. And it just makes it easy for you to not really have to think about what your brand's tone of voice is because Chachi Buti will just do it for you. So now I'm just going to put in my caption, and then it's going to say, Cool, this brand's tone of voice is approachable, authentic, self reflective, with a touch of light humor, casual honesty. It's also going to say, got playful phrasing, down to Earth feel. We're friendly. You know what? I think that's pretty spot. So now I would take this. And within Canva, if we head on over to brand and our brand kit, if we scroll all the way down, you'll notice there's a brand voice section here. So this is where you can pop in your brand voice, and you can continue to evolve this as well, so it's not sort of set in stone. But each of the brand kits that you have within Canva can have its own brand voice. And then in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how you can utilize this in your beautiful designs. But this is where I would pop this into so that we can use it for our social media work and for our business designs. Alright, so I'll see you in the next lesson where we actually put this into action. 79. The Power of Magic Write: So let's talk about magic right in action. This is just one of my free downloads for my hat GPT prompts, which is very meta to be talking about at CGPTPmps in a lesson about AI. Anyways, I thought it might be appropriate. You could do this basically with anything that has written content, and you can do a few different things. So let's say you've got a paragraph like this one, I can click into it and you'll see a little pencil icon with these kind of stars above and when you have her over it, it'll say magic write. And then you've got some options. You can either do something with this using a custom prompt, which we'll look at in a second. You can ask it to rewrite it in different brand tone of voice, perhaps. You can fix the spelling if there's spelling errors. So for me, you can see there's already a couple of little lines when I have her over it. It's got some red lines, some blue some yellow ones. This is because I have grammarly installed on my computer and on my Google Chrome. It's a free Google Chrome extension. I use it for everything, and it'll sort of tell me. I mean, I just have the free version. So if you had the Pro version, it would tell you a lot more. But for the free version, it'll basically just correct any major spelling mistakes, and then also just some other ones that I get free per day. If you don't have that installed, magic can help to fix some spelling errors, which can be really handy. It can also shorten things. I can make things more fun, more formal, sprinkle fairy dust, just making it more magical. You can also adjust different brand voices if you've got different ones for your brand, which can be quite handy if perhaps you want to set up different brand kits and different brand voices for different parts of your business. For me, for example, I talk to course creators, but I also talk to aspiring content creators and aspiring social media marketers. And those are two very different audiences in my business. So perhaps they would have slightly different tone of voice. Kind of styles that I would approach them with. But in this case, let's say, I just want to apply my existing tone of voice. It's going to give me a preview of what it's thinking so that I can decide whether or not I think it's appropriate before it changes anything. So it's gone real casual with this. You've snagged this freebie, kudos to you. This is your one stop shop for all the hat EPD prompts we've been yapping about in our YouTube tutorial. Would I ever say that? Absolutely not. Maybe this has taken more of a social media marketing, social media caption approach to this as opposed to a more professional eBook sort of approach. But if I absolutely had no idea where to start with, I would start with something like this, and I would change a word like yapping to something like talking because it doesn't really make sense. But, you know, let's roll our sleeves up and get to work. I would say that. I think that's quite fun. I think that's a fun way to end that instead of me saying, All right, let's do this thing. You know, I would probably say, let's roll our sleeves up. Let's get into it. So I quite like it for that reason. But let's say you don't actually have anything that you're starting with, so we can just add a new page here and go to brand. And then down here underneath our front, we've got brand voice, and I can say, generate in a brand voice. I could say something like, let's say, give me the benefits of using AI to run your small business or for your small business marketing or something like that. And I can generate that in my brand tone voice. Maybe this is a paragraph I could add to a course guide or a little freebie like this because maybe I just want to fill a little bit of a blank area in the eBook, and I just want to write something and I just can't quite think of this is actually quite handy. You know, running a small business isn't a walk in the park. You know it better than anyone. That's where AI comes in handy. It's like having a super efficient assistant who never sleeps. I love that. I mean, I would probably come up with that, but it would take me like 3 hours, whereas Cava came up with it in 5 seconds. So I love that it shortcuts things for me and does it in my brand tone of voice. And if you think, Okay, yeah, this is good, but it's not quite there, you can say, create this but make it a tiny bit more formal because maybe this particular audience is a little bit more formal. Okay, now it's gone really, really formal. It's operating a small business is no simple endeavor. You are acutely aware of this reality. I would not say that ever. So yeah, maybe I'll stick with the first one, but just, you know, you can keep iterating on what it gives you. And that's a really nice sort of feature that not a lot of people are utilizing within Cava, especially when it comes to using the other additional magic write features where you can get, Okay, this is cool. This was a good paragraph, but I actually just want to shorten this and make it a couple of lines max because I don't have the space. Think this is much better. So you can continue playing with it with Magic Right. If you don't have the Canva pro feature in this case, so you can't utilize this directly within Canva because you don't have brand voice. That's totally fine. You could just do this within ChatPT. So you would effectively do the exact same thing. Once Chat chPT has your brand tone voice, you would say, Awesome, now that you have my brand tone voice, can you write me a paragraph about the benefits of using AI for my small business? So you would just do the exact same thing that it's doing in here and do it in hat CPT and bring that text in. So like I said and said many times throughout the Canvas pro features are generally just trying to condense you using ten different tools to do something into just using the one tool. But there are always workarounds to so many things that you do within Canva. And let's continue the fun in the next lesson when we talk about AI for image creation. 80. AI for Image Creation: So let's first talk about what's available to us within Cava in terms of AI images, starting with Magic Media. So magic Media is an app directly within your project that you can utilize to create really quick images, and you will actually see some reference images here that you can take a look at. When you click on them, it'll tell you what the prompt was and you can try and recreate it, which is quite fun. But the limitation to this is if I try to put in a long prompt like the one that we generated within Chat GPT, it cuts off because it doesn't really like long prompts. So with this, I would probably have to go with my initial prompt, which was just a really short one like this, saying, you know, I want a koala sitting at a table with a cafe, a couple of lines, that's pretty much all we can do. We can then look at styles and add a little bit of context to the styles that we're looking for, and then we can also look at dimensions. But in this case, let's just go ahead and generate an image based on our original. So you know what? I'm actually pleasantly surprised. I think these have turned out really great. I think also because I gave it enough information there. It wasn't a super simple prompt that I just said, you know, call it drinking coffee. It had enough detail that the AI was able to use it. I think that looks really good, especially because I put in that the image style is photorealistic. I think that worked out pretty well. There's a few little awkward bits, like, there's steam coming out of the laptop for no reason whatsoever. But I think it's done a relatively good job. So let's now compare that to the other tools that we have available to us. If we use the same prompt within dream lab, and let's just say we're happy with the Oh, actually, let's go square aspect ratio just for fun. And then we're going to give it the more advanced prompts that we generated with ChachBT and see the difference if there is one. So apart from this image where there is a coffee cup floating in the middle of nowhere, I would say that these are much more detailed images because we're powered by Leonardo AI in dream lab. So when we compare these beautiful images to this generated by Magic Studio, I think this just looks a teeny, tiny bit more cartoony and less realistic. Whereas with Dream lab, we're looking at a really beautiful and interactive photo almost of this koala drinking a cup of coffee while working on a laptop. Now, let's go ahead and put in our longer prompt and just see if there's a difference. So now we're getting really, really detailed with it. I would say there's always going to be some flaws like this floating coffee cup. And for example, in all of these images and these ones, it seems to also be snowing inside and outside. So I would probably have to adjust my prompt to say, don't have snowflakes inside. The snowflakes are on the outside, not inside. I mean, I thought I've sort of done that, but I would maybe have just tweak things a slight bit to make sure that it adjusts itself, so the snowflakes are on the outside. But it's looking really nice and detailed. So, you know, you can see the grain in the wood on the table here. So that's why we're getting really, really beautifully specific. I can see the steam coming out of the coffee. Whereas if I look at my original creation, it's still really good. I can see the texture in the jacket, but definitely look more like renders and AI generated images than they do kind of more natural photos. I think that's already looking really good, but I'm going to jump into Leonardo AI and take the same prompt and show you just a few cool things that you can do directly within Leonardo. I'm not going to go into every feature that exists inside of Leonardo AI, but definitely go and check it out because it's got some really powerful features. I'm going to go into image creation either here or here to just use our prompt and just show you a few cool things that we can do. So we're just going to put our prompt in here. Then we've got options for, let's say, photorealism. I think that one is actually paid. So we've already said it's photo realistic. That's fine. Okay, now that's popped up. So you'll see this little V two in certain things that means it's a paid feature if we were on the paid version. Otherwise, you have 150 tokens per day, and then you can use those, and each prompt takes about six tokens. If we're generating two images. If you're just generating one, it's less. But you will not be too restricted if you're not using the paid features. One cool thing you can do in here is have transparent images with transparent backgrounds. So that can be cool if you're using this to generate any kind of graphics that you want to import into Canva. You can also decide exactly how big your image is going to be in terms of the width and the height, which can be really handy if you're looking for very specific dimensions for a blog, for example, or for an email newsletter or something like that. That can be really cool, and the rest would be probably around the models. So a lot of these are paid models, but you've got some options for the free ones. And then a few cool things that you can do is add in some styles here. So if you're not quite sure how you want this to be generated, there are some really cool options here for surrealism and abstract line art and a few different cool things. So we're going to test that out. But you can also add negative props, which is what we were talking about earlier. So that can be really handy. And you can also look up some resources on exactly how to structure your negative prompts. But that's where you can sort of tell Leonardo what you don't want to see in the image in terms of extra hands, extra feet, dead eyes, eyes not looking at the camera, all those sorts of things. In this case, we're just not going to bother with that too much. We're going to generate our images with six tokens here. Just to see how it appears, I actually find that Dream lab sometimes does a better job than Leonardo, with all the default settings, I think Dream lab does a really, really good job of creating images. So yeah, I would say I'd actually prefer what Dreamlab came up with, especially because it sort of ignored my instructions to give the koala some glasses, and it's next to this, like, super large cup of coffee. Don't think either of them have a laptop. So I think it worked a lot better in terms of dream lab, but Again, if I was to tweak a few things within Leonardo, we would definitely get there. I just think it's a little bit easier within dream lab if you're just working with your prompt. But if you're looking for some really cool styles, this is where Leonardo can really shine. So let's have a look at maybe this glow wave option. A maybe psychedelic. Let's go psychedelic art. Oh, let's not do both. That would be a bit wild. Let's have a look at psychedelic art, and then you can say how much of a weight you wanted to put to the psychedelic art, in this case. I'm just going to say the default, which is the 0.8. And now we're getting into some weird spaces, right? I think that's a really cool image. So you can start generating some really cool stuff with Leonardo. I think the glasses are a bit off, but otherwise, yeah, this is definitely psychedelic. So that's where you can start to play around a little bit more with some of the settings. So you just know that this is available to you outside of just what's available within Dream lab because within Dream lab, you could still probably generate something like this, you would have to make sure you put it inside of your prompt rather than just having a few little clicks here and there inside of Leonardo. One last thing I did want to mention is that sometimes I have students who want to use images that are not licensed for them to freely use like this one from Getty Images for Unsplash that has watermarks and is a paid image. So in this case, what we can do is we can use it as almost like a reference image. So you can take a screenshot of it, upload it to ChachEPT, ask it to describe it and generate a prompt that you then put into something like Dreamlab or Leonardo. Workaround to this is then to use a website like No More copyright that allows you to essentially put in an image or a URL and then say, Okay, create me something like this that is not copyrighted, and it's actually a license for me to use. It sometimes glitches a little bit. So I think doing the prompt within Chat GVT might give you slightly better results, but this is definitely quicker. So it just depends on which way you want to go about it, but just so you know this is a resource that you can utilize. Of course, the licensing laws and rules always changing in terms of how you're able to use generated images to always make sure you're checking this. And, of course, this was an image of four people in the ocean, walking, holding hands, but from the back, whereas this is an image of them from the front. So whether you really needed it to be from the back, also, they all look like freakishly similar. I don't know if this is like siblings who are dating, who are dating dating each other. Anyway, this is much more complicated. So this is what I mean. I think sometimes it just generates very interesting results that you may or may not have been going for. And you can always refresh it and continue to generate. But just so you know, that is a resource that exists if you want to create some beautiful I can't get over this image. Oh, no, Luke, it's really great. They all have all their fingers. They've got eyes. It all works. So I will say, for this website, they do generally generate images of Pep quite well. So it is a resource for you to explore, and I will see you in the next lesson. 81. AI for Illustrations: Okay, so let's now talk about illustrations and graphics. So within the same magic media app, if you go into graphics, I'm just going to tell you straight up, most AI tools that I found don't do word illustrations very well. They might do image illustrations pretty well, but word illustrations is where they get stuck. So if you want to have illustrative text, that can be a bit tricky. So, for example, if I say something like create an illustration, of the text, be kind to your creative mind in a bold, organic feel. And I'm just gonna leave it at that for now. You're gonna get a mix of results, but none of them are going to be accurate or grammatically correct in my humble opinion in my experience. They're beautiful, but they just don't really know what to do with text. So for these purposes, we're going to look to two other tools. The first of these is called Idea gram. And it's definitely the best tool I found for generating illustrations in terms of written illustrations, but it's quite limited in terms of how many tokens you get per day. So that's just something to bear in mind that you just have to be a bit careful with how you utilize it because you won't be able to go nuts and create ten, 15, 30 images per day. So that's just something to keep in mind. It does also do other types of image generations really well. I mean, this is really beautiful. Felt image. Oh, that's so nice. I never even thought about creating something like that. So whenever I do come across images like this, I would just save the prompt somewhere for future reference because I think that is just such a cool thing to generate. But people do come here to also generate illustrations. So that's where I like to save these prompts, which actually went off of an original image as a reference, so it didn't actually have a prompt. I did already find an image that I like that I copied the prompt of so we can have a look at how that looks. So this is the image I found, and I really like the prompt it made a lot of sense to me in terms of how it was laid out. And, of course, also diagram, just like with Leonardo, it will give you variations. So when somebody put in this prompt, it came and created four different images. Some are better than others. I think this one was pretty good, but this one's definitely the winner in terms of what would make for a good t shirt graphic. So I copied this prompt across and then essentially just customize it a tiny bit to make it less dumpling related. And here's what we got. So this is my prompt. High contrast thir graphic with a playful brain illustration. The text, B kind to your creative mind is integrated dynamically using a bold, slightly curved or hand drawn font. The composition focuses more on the graphic section. The background is solid black, and the elements are white or light colored for contrast, the style is clean and modern. So it did generate a couple of different designs. I don't know. Some of them, I don't know this I mean, I guess, technically, it'll follow my instructions. But again, this is definitely the clear winner. So let's try that again just so I can show you if we just go through and copy this across, and we can generate it again. Here is where you can also have a look at some different categories for how you want it to generate. So in this case, I'd probably say generate this as a design. Also, you can look at your aspect ratio, whether it's public or private and some color palettes, which, again, if you are on the paid version, you could generate through different color palettes if that's important to you. But I'm on the free version here, which is a little bit limiting, and if it's something I would utilize a lot in my design work. I would definitely pay for the pro version, especially because you're then able to export things in a slightly different way. So let's just have a look at the graphics that it's created for me. Oh, I quite like these. I think these are quite funky. This is maybe a little bit too I don't want to say childish, but too playful depending on the context. If this was a design I was creating for children, I think that that actually works really well. Otherwise, I would probably go with something like this. So let's look at the actual export options. We have the option to upscale our design. We have the option to remove the background. We have so many different things, including exporting this as a PNG and 100% quality. So those are all things that I'm not able to do because I'm on the free account, but that's not too dramatic because I can do a few things within Canva. Even when I'm on the free account within Ideogram. So I'm just going to go back to my original creations, and I'm just going to pick this one because I know it's going to be much easier for me to work with within Canva. I'm going to download that as a JPEG, and then we're going to jump into Canva and have a look at what we can do in there. So I can bring my design into Canva and I would just remove the background of this. Now, I already know this is going to be going on a dark T shirt. If this was going on a light T shirt, I would change the design a little bit. And this is a little bit of the limitation of me having a free version of Ideagram is that there are still some slight lines. You won't be able to see them once it's on a dark T shirt, but things are teeny, tiny bit fuzzy. So I would definitely pay for the upgraded version if I was going to be utilizing this a lot. Potentially, I would remove this line here. I don't think that really needs to be there. In terms of a design. So you can tidy things up. And then we're going to export this as a transparent PNG, just so I can really quickly show you how I would put this into a mock up if I was trying to demonstrate to somebody what this might look like on a product. So I'm just going to put this in as yeah the current page, transparent background, download. Obviously, these are probably not the right dimensions because I'm in a presentation template format here, which is a bit awkward, but for demo purposes, it's okay. Then I might go to something like place it to just demo what the picture is going to look like. I know you can do this within mock ups within Canva, but we've got thousands and thousands of different apparel designs and all other kinds of mockups in here, and you can change the T shirt color a lot more seamlessly than you can within Canva. So I just prefer it as a mock up generator for something that's actually going to print. And yeah, that's just my sort of personal preference. But of course, you can just go with whatever works for you. And then as I'm kind of moving this around, you'll see where it appears on my mockup. I can say, Okay, do I want this to be just across the entire t shirt like this, maybe up a bit higher so we can see it in the mockup or do I just want it to be in the upper right hand corner of the design, it's going to appear on the left of the shirt. Whatever works. So, of course, at the moment, it's going to have the made with place at Watermark there. So for that reason, I would probably make it as large as possible. But of course, it just depends on how you're actually planning on printing it. But let's leave it at that. I think that looks pretty good. And then we could save this as a mock up. So I'm not saying that you're only going to use AI for illustrations to print onto a peril, but just so you know that that is an option, and it generally prints pretty well, even if you're using the free version of Ideagram and going through the background remover option. Just one other tool that I did want to point you to is called recraft. I really love recraft because A, it does actually do illustrative text really well, similar to diagram, and it also does really cool stuff with image sets and image generation in general. So if we're just looking at images and we give it the same prompt that we gave Ideogram in this case, I would remove the fact that it's a T shirt design because otherwise, it's actually going to generate an image of a T shirt. So I would just say it's a high contrast graphic, and then we can go into making that an illustration. So at the moment, we're in Raster N vector, we can look at photorealism illustration, vector art. So in this case, we just want illustration, and let's just go with the generic illustration, and I'm going to Press re craft, which is their way of saying, I guess, submit, and it's going to give you some options. But it does do text relatively well. It also generates people quite well. But the reason that I really like it as well is because it creates cohesive collections, like what I have on this page. So I've got two options to choose from here. It's not nearly as good as Idiagram for this purpose, but it does at least give you legible text options, unlike a lot of the other tools. This is the other thing that I want to point out to you that you can create image sets. So instead of just blank images, you can create an image set like this of up to six images. You don't necessarily need to utilize all six, but then you have them created all in the same style. So in this case, let's just say, Okay, I'm not going to get too specific with it, so I'm not actually giving it too many instructions in terms of where are they located? Are they in the ocean? Forest? Are they wearing glasses? Are they reading books? I'm not putting any of that in. At the moment, I just want to show you the power of just creating them all in a consistent style. So we're in illustration, and let's say we're just going to go for hand drawn as the style, and let's do one more. And I'm just going to craft that. So we just have a couple of them, and you can see that they're all going to be created in the same beautiful style. So if you're looking for a collection of images like this for social media post or something where you need that cohesiveness across. So you're not generating image by image, and all of them look a bit different, then recraft is a really good option for that. So I think that worked out really well. You can also specify the colors. So at the moment, it's just gone a bit random. I could say, Alright, do this in my color palettes, this kind of neutral color palette that I've chosen, and it's going to do it for me again, slightly different design, but in that particular color palette. That looks really good. So all of that is on the free version of R craft, and you've got these giant canvases where you can continue making more and more and more collections. You can even copy and paste these across, so I can just say, Oh, I'm going to Command C and Command V, paste this across. So I've got the same prompts already generated in there. But let's say I want to utilize a slightly different style for this this time. So let's say I want these in clay form. And that allows me to continue creating more and more and more variations. Rcraft also does product mock ups. It also does seamless patterns. So if patterns are something you want to get into, it still needs a little bit of work on both fronts. I've tested it on both. I'm not actually willing to include that in the course at this stage because it's not perfect. But in terms of collections, I think it does a really good job. Yeah, I think that's done a really cute job of putting that together. And it maybe gives you an idea of a few different tools that you can utilize for your AI for image generation purposes, and I will see you in the next lesson. 82. AI for Videos: So there are several ways for us to approach AI for video, starting with the video section in magic Media. So we're going to say something like cute orangutin sitting inside of a cozy cafe near a window watching the snow fall outside. So similar to what we use for our image prompt, but I thought we would switch up the animal life because, yeah, I just thought it would be a bit bit fun. So let's see what it comes up with. Okay, so that's generated. Let's go ahead and play that. It's only going to show us a couple of seconds. And then we can always click into it to add it to our design. Yeah, it's pretty cute. I would say I would maybe adjust the prompt a little bit just to make it a little bit closer up, but everything looks relatively good, and the orangutan is in focus. I don't know if it's super clear that it's a cafe. I would think this more looks like a pub. So I would maybe generate that again, but just for our purposes, let's also have a look at how this does when we try to generate a video of people. So I'm going to say something like dream like vibe of a foggy forest and a woman in a pink dress standing in the forest. Her head is entirely made of flowers and they're blooming as the camera pans around the woman, and there's slight fog movement in the background. Yeah, I think that's really cool. So that's quite nice and detailed. It's got a really good range of focus. I really like where it's chosen to focus on. I think it's definitely a foggy background. And the reason that it only does a couple of seconds is obviously then it gets much more complex if you start generating 32nd, even minutes long videos. So this is really just for really quick video generation. That might change in the future, but that's where it stands as of the time of recording this. The second way we can utilize AI for video would be to basically go in, and let's say we're creating a real in this case. And instead of trying to make the real ourselves, we're going to head over to design. And where it says, generate videos instantly, we're going to use magic design to basically create it for us. So I'm just going to insert a couple of clips here that I've just uploaded that are short, sort of vertical clips of me, and I would then say, I'm going to create a video that showcases the reasons why it's tricky to balance running a business with self care and family time. And generate that. Now, it's going to adjust those clips, so it's not necessarily going to place them in order, hopefully. It's going to add some transitions. It's going to add some text. It's going to add some music. So it may not be perfect. It won't be perfect, I would say, but it will give us a good starting point that might be well ahead of what we would have done if we had just started with a blank Canvas. Alright, so let's go ahead and play that. Okay. Okay. So that's really dramatic. I mean, yes, it was a video of a pool, but I don't know if I would necessarily say that. Yeah, okay, well, anyways, that's fine. It's done a good job. I actually don't mind the text. I think the animations are really nice. I like that it's used a couple of emojis. I think if I was talking about my family, I would probably try and use the video of me and my family. So I would probably swap those around a little bit. And I think the music doesn't quite work for theme, but that's alright. I would potentially add the music within Instagram anyways. But I like the transitions that it's chosen. And again, it just would give me a little bit more to work with than if I was just sort of starting from scratch. So now I can just go in and edit the text, make it a little bit more applicable, but it just means that it shortcuts the editing process for me with the help of magic design. It's about as far as Canva can go at this stage, that might change in the future. But at the moment, if you want to start completely from scratch, you don't really have any video clips. You don't really want to do your own voiceovers. You just want something to spit out content at you and you just want to give it some instructions. There's a really great tool for that as well. In video will allow you to do a few different things. It does also do video generation. Through prompts if you just want it to actually create videos for you. But it also does really great things in terms of piecing together content for the likes of reals and TikToks that are just it's using stock footage, not necessarily AI generated footage. So it's a slightly different section of N video. It does do both. It also has a really good video editing editor, and a lot of that is available on their free plan with the exception of, you know, there's some limitations as to what you can export, but it does have a lot of really quite cool functionality. If you want to go down this path, I would definitely recommend checking them out. Once we're logged into in video, in their free version at the moment, I can say something like create a roughly 32nd Instagram reel, talking about the benefits of exercise for new mums. The voiceover should be female with an Australian accent. The music should be uplifting but calm. I could also give specifications on the types of fonts and font colors I want to be using for the captions. But in this case, I'm just going to leave it at that, and we're going to say, we're going to generate the video. It's really great. It's actually saying it's researching safe exercises for new mothers, Australian guidelines. That's very impressive. I don't know I'm like I would have done that. I'm sure I would have done that if I was actually making this reel, but that's really great. And then it's going to ask you if you want to just use stock media or generative media. So depending on what you want to do with it. And then in terms of visual style, I would say realistic if you're going for generative media, I would probably just go stock Media for this one and just say, I want it to be bright. The subtitle style can be standard. And yes, the platform is Instagram Meals. But if you do want it to also generate the clips for you, you can definitely play around with. Okay, so let's have a look at what it came up with. If you're a new mum, then you need to hear this. Exercise boosts your mood, helps you sleep better, and gives you that much needed energy boost. Within videos, five minute workouts, you can start feeling stronger and more vibrant, even on the busiest days. Join our community of new mums supporting each other every step of the way. It's not about bouncing back. It's about moving forward. You've got this, Mama. Okay, so, look, it's never going to be as natural as if you did the voice over yourself, but it's pretty good. I really like using in video, and I've linked an entire video to how to use this amazing tool and how you can make sure that you're exporting without the watermark so you can put in your own footage or put in footage from pexels and how to customize captions and do all of that all within in video. So if you're interested in that, I put that all in your course guide. I know this is not something that's for everybody. I just wanted you be aware of this as a resource. And if you'd like to explore more, check out your course guide for that, but I think it's done a pretty good job, especially with an Australian accent, which is not an easy accent to do with an AI voiceover. So that's a little bit about AI for videos. And in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at one cool hack within Canada that you might not have heard of yet, so I'll see you there. 83. Bulk Create with AI: In this lesson, I want to talk about how we can turn one pin into 30, 40, or even 50 pins with just the click of a few buttons. But you could also do this for Instagram graphics, for any kind of social media posts. Really, anything that you need to replicate in a mouse way, this is a really handy tool for. But I should say this is only a Canva Pro feature at this stage. That might change in the future. But for now, it's honestly not a deal breaker. If you don't have access to this feature, just be mindful that that might be a restriction for you if you're a Canva free user. Let's first talk about how I'm going to design this pin to be suitable for this kind of project. First of all, I want to make sure that any text that's going to be placed on top of it, no matter what that text is, is going to be readable. So whether that text has four words or ten words or 15 words, it's going to work. In my case, I'm going to be going with interior design quotes. So I would like the images to stay as they are. And I just placed my little gradient on top of it, and I also just dimmed this image slightly with a black background in there and just adjust the transparency down so that it's a little bit darker. And then I've just placed a couple of these lines, and then I grabbed in a couple of quote elements just around the outside to make it a little bit more interesting. The font I'm using is called noto Serif display. But I want it to be large enough that it's readable but not too large, that it's overpowering on a pin. And the other thing that I definitely want to make sure I'm doing is heading on over to spacing. But instead of actually focusing on spacing, I want to be looking at the anchor text box. So the moment it's anchored at the bottom, which means that when we use this tool and it's going to place different forms of text in this textbox, because it's anchored at the bottom, that text is going to go and that doesn't work for our design. So instead, we actually want to anchor this down. So that way, any text that's placed in here is going to go down all the way down, so that's going to work really well with our design. The textbook edges are just wide enough that they're not going to be interacting with this too much. So I think that this works well. We won't really know until we do the bulk create thing. But I think so far that design wise works pretty well. So the thing that we want to do is we want to actually generate these 30 facts or 30 quotes or however many quotes or facts you want to be using. In my case, I'm going to go 30. So in Chat GBT, I'm going to say, generate a list of 30 facts about interior design. Make sure that each fact is less than 20 words. So that really depends on how large the font is that you're using. For me, I know it has to be quite large to be readable, so I think I don't want each fact to be too wordy. I think that works pretty well. And I'm just going to say, remove the numbers. From the list because this is going to be a bit distracting for me. I'm going to say the bullet points. Yeah, that's better. So that's on me. I should have given it more specific instructions. But effectively, I just want this to be a clean list of 30 facts. Then within apps, we can look for bulk Create, and it's going to say we can add our data through an Excel or CSV file. In this case, we're just going to enter our data manually because it's easy enough to do that, but of course, you could do it through a spreadsheet, and we're not actually going to have any emails. We're just going to have our fact and this second column, I can just right click on and delete the column because we don't have that second column. But then you can add a row for images. I'm not sure if I would entirely do this for this particular kind of project because I'm talking about specific things that I would maybe want to cater to with the images. So, for example, if it's talking about plants, brightening up a space. I would definitely want to make sure I'm using an image of plants. But in this case, you can also just preempt this and add in your images ahead of time, and it's going to do that as part of your design. So I'm just going to do it for art demo purposes, just so you can see what it looks like. I've already got these images. So I would probably create a folder that's specific just to my pins to make this easier. I think I'm going to leave it that. So we don't necessarily need to do the rest of them. We could always just add them in afterwards or even actually add in videos if you want to make a video pin. But let's just leave it at that. And now we just need to make sure we're connecting our data as it says. So essentially, what we want to do is we want to right click on the text here, and we're going to say connect data and this is going to be our fact field. So this is where all of our texts, either our facts or our quotes are going to be prepopulated. And then one step I actually forgot about is you can't have this as a background image. It has to be in there as a frame in order to do this. So we're going to make this a nice frame and just make it pretty much the entire size of this. I'm going to disconnect my image from the background, put it into my frame. And that's the only way it's actually going to allow me to connect this. So I can still adjust the transparency down like I had before, and now we can go back to Bulk Create and just make sure we're connecting our data. So now we can right click on the image and go Connect data. And that's going to be our image field. So if it's just a background image, it's not going to allow you to do that, but if it's a frame, it will. All right. So now we can click Continue and say, Yep, generate all 30 designs. That's now made 30 beautiful pins that we can continue to customize if we think each design needs to be a little bit adjusted, and we could add in some videos into the background instead of our images if we would want to do that. But it looks really nice. And then, of course, some of these will just have the generic image in the back there because I didn't actually specify what image it was going to have. Looks really good. One thing I did want to talk about is what happens if you have additional elements, not just facts. So, for example, if you're doing this for quotes, I would add in the name of my author here, and then the problem becomes that the author's name is going to be prepopulate, but the quote is it's going to be super messy. They're not going to be in alignment. So what I would do in that case is I would just select them both and group them. And then let's do this again, but this time with a quote and an author. So for Chat CiPT, I'll just say, now, do this again. But this time with 30 quotes about interior design with the quote in one column and the author's name in the second column. So that they are nicely organized for us and we don't have to do the legwork. So this is really cool, but I will also tell you how GPT to just remove the quotation marks because we won't need those, and then go to Enter data manually again. And now we're just going to paste this in. It's going to create a second column for us. So we would just label this as the author name. I'm just going to leave the images there. And we're just going to click on Done. So everything is linked except the author. So we just right click on this and say connect data. That's going to be our author, and we can continue and generate these 30 designs. So that looks okay. I think I had intended for it to have the little dashes on both sides. So that's been replaced because they weren't actual dynamic elements. They were just dashes. So it's sort of assumed that was just part of the text, but I could easily just add that in. Otherwise, I think that looks really nice. So that's just the way that I would do this if it was for quotes specifically. But otherwise, the process is exactly the same. Hopefully you enjoyed that one, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 84. Exercise: Get Friendly with AI: So hopefully, this section of the course has helped to take some of the overwhelm away from working with AI, and you're starting to see the real potential in working with it rather than against it. I'm going to be honest, I work with AI pretty much every single day, and even I'm not always super happy about it. I kind of miss the AI free world. Sometimes it definitely makes my life easier and faster. But it can it has its challenges. There's no two ways about it, but I do think there's so much cool creative potential in working with AI. So for this sections exercise, I would love for you to just practice using some of the tools that we've discussed in this section, whether you're a Canva P user and you can utilize the tools within Canva or you're on Canvas FreePlan and you can utilize a lot of the free resources we talked about to create illustrations or collections of images or just images and videos. I think the main thing at this point is just to practice and also really start to notice how other people are utilizing their prompts to create images and videos and illustrations because the more you can really start to tap into how to actually structure your prompts, the easier your AI creation journey is going to be. So as a reminder, I have included all of the prompts we covered here in your course guide, so you can use the and tweak them to start creating your cool AI generated images within Dream lab, or you could head to Ideagram and create some illustrations or create a collection of images within recraft. Whatever you want, the sky is the limit. The key is just to practice and get comfortable using these tools before we move on to the next section of the course where we're going to cover some advanced techniques where we create some awesome videos like this one and this one, and maybe even this one. So much exciting stuff coming up, so I'll see you in the next lesson. 85. Introduction: Advanced Techniques: Know, up until this point in the course, we've had a very logical section breakdown in terms of discussing our Canva workflow and social media graphics, social media videos, Canva for Business. These were all really neat and tidy sections because I was trying to break it down by skill level, so we are actually truly moving from a beginner stage to an advanced stage. But now I'm sort of leftover with a few really cool tutorials that I've just combined into sort of an advanced content creation techniques section of the course where we do some really cool, very advanced, much more expert level Canva animations. But I did also just want to say, before you move into this section of the course, I know that Canva or just the design, content creation process in general can feel really overwhelming if you're a beginner, and if you are feeling up to this point that your brain is so full of knowledge and you really just want to practice what you've learned up until this point, and you want to save this section of the course until you're really confident with the skills you've learned up until this point, okay. You can absolutely come back to this. You do not have to take everything in one big chunk. I will be here whenever you're ready, whether that's right now or in a week's time or in a month's time, mainly because this is a pre recorded course, so it's not like I'm waiting around. You won't hurt my feelings. You can always hit pause. Also, life gets in the way. Things get busy. I'm not expecting you to just binge through everything. In fact, it's definitely better that you are practicing as you go. So just go at your own pace and at your own comfort level because I know what we're about to cover. Can't get A to be tricky. We're going to do some wacky stuff within Canva. But I did want to cover these skills because I believe that they're so incredibly powerful and I wish that I had learned them earlier. So I want to definitely share them with you and show you everything that Canva has to offer that you can do inside of Canva because so many people are using Canva for years and years and years and not using it to its full capabilities, and they're really missing out on some of its most powerful features. So that's what we're going to cover within this section of the course, whether you're ready for it now or in a little bit. Either way, we're going to go and cover some really cool stuff. So I will see you in the next lesson. 86. Product Animations - Apparel: Oh So we have previously played around with the match and move transition function in Cava, but we're now going to take it to a whole whole new level. So at this stage, all I've done here is just popped in an image. Now, this is not set as my background. It's just a free floating image, and that's quite important for the animations we're going to do in this lesson. Then I've just got a little bit of text and the font is tener Sands, and the effect on that in the back there is just the background effect with kind of a slightly off black. I don't even know if that's a word. I know off white off black, I think, I don't know. It's just basically not entirely black. And we're just going to set up our duration so that we can start seeing these as almost individual video clips so we can start to see how we're going to move through them. So my very first slide is going to be just a couple seconds, maybe 2 seconds. I think I'm going to leave it at that. And it's just going to say, Look, we've got a new collection, and now we're going to start moving through the different items in the image. So I'm just going to hit Command D here so I can bring in a new slide, and now I'm going to take the image and zoom in on a part of it that I want to highlight in the next slide or the next clip. So let's say, in this case, it would be my dress, so I would say amazing dress. I'm sure the dress would have an actual name. That's not just I mean, it might be called amazing. That's also a possibility. But we want to basically grab an element that's going to allow me to point to the dress, whether it's an arrow or a line. So I've come up with line with dot as a pretty good search term. Don't ask me why for these kind of connector lines. And also, there's some really good arrows and things like that. But I think for this vibe, this works pretty well. That will allow me to then potentially also flip this and making sure that that's sort of behind my text there so that it just points to it. I think that looks really cool. Okay, so that would be my first slide, and yeah, we'll keep that at 2 seconds. Now I'm going to hit Command D again, and we're going to duplicate that. And now let's zoom into a different part of the image. So let's say I'm going to say, actually, no. You know what? Let's move around a fair bit just for something a little bit more dynamic. So I'm going to say, I'm gonna flip this, and this is going to be cool bangle. And then we're going to Command D again, Control D, if you're on a PC. And now we're just going to go over here and we're going to flip this again, and now we can go to this ring. Maybe I could zoom in even more just to give us even more of a dynamic movement here. I think that might be quite cool. I could say groovy. Ring. Okay, let's leave it at that because we really just want to see how we're moving through this. It's not I mean, we could keep going, but I think that works pretty well. So now I'm just going to hit Command D again, and at the end, we're just going to go back to the main shot of the entire figure that's squished down so we can see the whole thing and all of our different products here. Now I'll probably delete this and say something like Shop. Now. And just to make it a little bit more interesting, I think this could work just as it is. But then, of course, the reel, if this was going to be a real is going to loop, and you want it to be a little bit more interesting than it was at the beginning. So you would probably just make it slightly different by perhaps putting in a little bit of movement in the back there. So I'm just going to bring in a bit of a video with water in it, and then we're going to adjust our transparency down and give us that nice little bit of movement. Ooh. I don't know if it's actually that fast or if it's No, okay, that's not too bad. I thought it was just ridiculously fast. Okay, so I think that works really well. So obviously, she's by the beach, so I think this works well. We're gonna go to edit and I'm going to desaturate this because I want the primary focus to be on my model there, and we're just going to bring down the transparency. I think that works pretty good. And then I would just need to make sure I'm actually clipping this to be just a couple of seconds because otherwise, that is way too long. So maybe think because this is a call to action, we would leave it at sort of 3.5, maybe 4 seconds. The rest of the slides can stay quite short. Now, we're going to insert our transitions. So we're just going to click in between our slides, and we're going for the match and move transition. And we want to make sure that it's relatively long. So I would say however long it allows me to do. At this point, it's only allowed me to do about 1 second. It's probably going to require me to actually have each slide be a little bit longer in order for this to work. So we're just going to have to play around with it a little bit more, and I'm just going to click over to zooming in on my timeline so we can stretch this out. I think that might actually work, I might not need to be too too fast. Okay, so one thing that's happening is that because my little connector is the same, but the text is changing, it's kind of acting a bit funny. So I'm probably going to, and I can see a little bit of the connector there. So I'm going to have to just move this with my arrow keys, and I'm just going to select both of these and just group them together so that they act as one and they're going to appear and disappear accordingly. Because otherwise, if they're kind of solo floating, then it's going to create some weird animations for us, I think. So let's go ahead and play that. It's 10 seconds, so I think that works relatively well. And then I'm going to bring in a little bit of music, and we can see how that all works together. So we've got the initial slide. Okay, so I would say way too fast. And then that last slide had no transition at all for some reason. No, it does. It's all just a little bit too fast. We're gonna see if we can make it 1 second, if it's not going to allow it. We're just going to have to make sure that each slide is at least sort of 2.5 seconds. That way we can make our transitions a bit longer because otherwise, it just doesn't like it, does it? So we can make it, let's say, 1.3 seconds. Alright, I'm gonna do it manually because for some reason, it's not liking me today. That's fine. And then make this a 1.3 second transition, and then that last slide needs to be a little bit longer. So I'm just going to stretch that out to about 3.6 seconds, 4 seconds. Alright, let's have a look at it now and see if that's a little bit better. Yeah. Okay, that's much, much smoother. It's way less hectic. But that last transitions really not working for us. It does work when I kind of hover over it here, doesn't seem to be working when I'm actually playing it. So I would just have to export and make sure that it works, otherwise, we'd have to just try and fix it and see what's wrong. But I'm just going to upload a bit of music as well, so we can kind of get a sense of what this will look like. I've just grabbed a little bit of music from Upbeat, which is quite dynamic, and I think it'll work for this particular kind of project. So let's just have a look. If we start at the beginning here, and we bring it out. Where am I? There we go, and we drop it onto our timeline. Now, with music, there is something called beat sync, which you can experiment with within Canva. That's an AI tool that essentially is supposed to try and time your clips to the beat of the music. And in theory, it sounds really great. I haven't found it to be all that useful. I generally end up doing this myself manually because it also extends out your clips. So, for example, I know that these work well as two second clips. With beat sync, it might make them each four or 5 seconds to make it work with the music rather than the other way around. So I don't think it has been all that useful for me in the past, but definitely give it a go if you're a Canva Pro user, and you just want to play around with a few things. Same with enhancing a voice if you're using your own voiceovers for this. But for now, I think we're just gonna leave it. We're gonna download it and just have a look and see if that last little glitch has been fixed just by exporting, hopefully, because that does sometimes happen with Canva. Don't ask me why. Okay, let's go ahead and play that. Okay. Yeah, so all the animations are working really well. I think the audio works relatively well, as well. I would maybe just fade this out a little bit, maybe just a second or so at the end. It's fine for it to start dynamically at the beginning, but at the end, I would probably like it to have a slightly softer finish if this was a real and it would continue to loop. You kind of don't want it to be too abrupt at the end. But otherwise, I think that works really well. And in the next lesson, we're going to continue playing around with Match and move to see what other cool things you can create. So I'll see. 87. Product Animations - Skincare: So to start us off, I just created four variations of my fake skincare line of the same dimensions so that we can replicate our mockup, which we did in a previous lesson. So I've got my mockups in my uploads folder here and I can just bring all of these into my design, and I'm just going to shrink these down because the one downside of working with match and move is that you effectively have to have almost everything that you need for the entire project or for at least a part of your project in the first slide for this particular lesson. So that does mean that things are a little bit messy and bit of out of whack, but that's okay. We can get through together. So at the moment, I just have a little bit of text here that is same, great formula for new, amazing sense. Would we say amazing? You know what? We're just going to say amazing new. Yeah, that's better. Grammatically correct. Okay, so we're going to have these kind of in a wheel like formation so that we can spin through these. But first, I'm going to write a little note of what each of them is. So I'm just going to hit T on my keyboard here and we're going to have one that is grape. I'm going to change my font here to coleta and not have it all caps, just because Oh, it's because I wrote it in all caps. Okay, that's not helpful. There we go. So it's going to say grape, which is going to be my purple one. And then I essentially need to make this all work in one line. So I'm going to hit Shift R here, and I've brought in a little bit of central line here. So if you didn't already know how to do that, I know we've used it a fair bit throughout the course, but you would just essentially click and drag until it hits that pink middle line. And then I would bring in all my other scents. So I've got grape. I'll have ocean mist. Don't judge me. I'm not a person who names things, so this is not my cup of tea, but let's just say tangerine and By blast. Perfect. So now I just need to make sure that the spaces between them will allow them to appear one at a time. So I'm just going to space things out, and I'm just going to make sure that each of them is aligned in the center of the page, and I'm going to speed this up a little bit. Okay, so now what I want to do is I want to bring this out of my vision just by a little bit. So I did a couple of extra spaces before the word grape there so that it can just exist outside of here. But if I was going to go to position and layers, it still exists as part of that canvas. So now I'm going to hit ShiftR again so that we can get a little bit more visibility on this, and I'm just going to hit my duration tab. So once again, we can just see things a little bit better, and now we can play around with these and twist them around a little bit. So look, there's simpler ways to do this than the way I'm going to do it. If you were just doing these four products, you would basically just rotate them by 90 degrees. So you'd go 90, 180, 270, and back to the beginning. That makes it really nice and easy. I'm going to overcomplicate it a little bit, and I'm going to rotate them in a way that's going to allow me to have a fifth kind of gap for something that I want to show you. So that does mean that I'm rotating them by 72 degrees, which is not as pretty. I'm just actually going to go to position and we're going to add it in here, but I just need to make sure that these are in the right order. So we actually went grape, then ocean mist, so 72, then tangerine 144. The Berry Blast, which is actually going to be minus 144 because it's on the other side of the circle. Just to overcomplicate it a little bit. But I will actually show you a simpler way of doing this, as well. I math is not your cup of tea or you just don't want to bother with it, that's totally fine. There is a way to do this by just bringing in a shape that's the right number of sides with the products that you're creating. So for me, it would be a pentagon. It could be a hexagon, an octagon, depending on how many products you are featuring. But for me, a Pentagon works pretty well. So we just kind of want to roughly do it this way. And this would allow you to essentially line it up with the Pentagon and not have to worry about. It the way that I just did it. But I am still gonna use this so that I can get a nice gap between these guys because otherwise, they're gonna overlap. And I also want to make sure that each of them have a bit of a drop shadow because for my background, I'm going to use something like a cream background. So it's going to be nice and textural, but it's not actually going to be any solid dark color or anything. So I want to make sure that I can get that nice color from the drop shadow so it makes it stick out a little bit. Okay, so we've got our little cream background, and you can see there isn't a huge separation between these and the background, so I'm going to go ahead and add in some drop shadows. I'm actually going to go with a glow in this case, and I'm going to go with a pretty good blur amount, and I'm just going to choose my colors based on the color of the background that each of them is going to have, which I've sort of pre thought about. And then I can just use my little paint roller and bring that over to the rest of them. And then I'm just going to go in and just change the colors if I need to. Okay, perfect. So now I'm just going to make sure that the spaces between them are nice and wide. About there. I am eyeballing this, so it's not a perfect science, is it? But pretty close. I think I might have to go even wider than that, actually. Alright, that's about right. I'm just going to group these together and size them up to fit where I need them to fit. So you'll see that even if I'm just moving across, I can already see a little bit of this one. So that's why you want to create a decent enough gap that that doesn't happen, and it will still allow you to have that nice twisting motion. Now, for each of them, I'm going to be able to actually change the background color. But first, I kind of want a generic slide. So I'm just going to command D, and my first slide is just going to essentially showcase this empty space here and just have this text here. So that's all I want for the first slide. And then we're going to bring this up, and now we can twist this back into place. And I'm just going to hit Shift R to make sure that that's sort of in the center because it's not going to actually snap into place for me. And now we can bring in our text. So I'm just holding down Shift as I'm dragging this across, which is going to allow it to stay in that vertical line. It's not going to move around, so it's going to allow me to click and drag really seamlessly. Okay, that's pretty cool. And now we're gonna hit Command D, and again, I'm holding down Shift to bring in the next scent. Now I need to let go of shift. Otherwise, your actual rotation is going to be a little bit screwed up, so you want to make sure we're letting go of it there. I'm gonna have to bring it up a little bit, and we're gonna hit Command D again and twist again, and I'm just recreating it for all of them. Cool. And now all that's left to do is actually change my little background colors there so I can change the color to something quiet yellowy I want to make sure that the actual cream texture there is going to remain the same across all of them. I just need to make it a little bit more transparent. So I probably should have done that to begin with, but that's okay. So we're going to make a 40% transparency, and I'm going to do the same here. So we're just going to make sure that's 40%. And this one is going to be like a light orange. So essentially, I'm just going for colors that are opposite on the color scheme to the bottle packaging. So I'm going to set that as my background, and we're going to remove this background and set it as blueish, something bluish, and set this as our background. And lastly, we're going to do a green, which is opposite on the color spectrum to our red. Perfect. So that's how I also picked the drop shadow colors. You'll remember, I already kind of knew that this is what the colors were going to be. But because now I knew that these were the colors I was going to choose for my drop shadow, it makes it look much more neutral and natural that this is a dark blue shadow on a blue background than if it was red or just black. So that works really well, especially for a color like yellow. We have that nice, dark yellow shadow as opposed to a black shadow which would look a little bit off. Okay, so I'm going to hit Shift A and we're just going to bring in our match and move transition, and I'm just going to see if I can make this 1 second between all our pages, see if that's worked. Okay, perfect. And I'm not sure how long each of these is. Let's have a look at the duration. So I'd say that these are a bit long. Let's see if we can make them 2.5 seconds and see if it's capped our transition time. Okay, perfect. All right, let's go ahead and play that. Yeah, so I think that works really well. Obviously, we don't have any background music for this one. I just wanted to show you how you might be able to do something like this in a way that you're changing the background color and changing the products at the same time. You could go really nuts with this in terms of how you do it. You could add additional information about each of them, and those tag lines could also be coming in and out. There's a teeny, tiny error that I can already notice in the very, very bottom here, there's a little bit of the previous text that's here, so I would probably just make sure to move this guy over a teeny, tiny bit just so that's out of the way. But I think that that works really well. I think these are super, super fun, and even though that background color change is really, really sl, I think it just adds a little bit of something extra special. So hopefully you enjoyed that one, and we're going to continue working with a little bit of match and move, but in a slightly different way in the next lesson where we talk about infographic style animation. 88. Infographic Animations: For this lesson, I thought it would be fun for us to look at ways that you can animate some infographics in Canva in a way that's relatively simple but still powerful for your video content. So we're going to be doing this in Instagram real format, but you could do it in any format or video that you'd like. And my inspiration for this is going to be the new Happy Co on Instagram because they have all these beautiful kind of infographics that people can really resonate with and share. And they are relatively easy to also try and animate. So the one that I thought we would try and animate is this one here, so it's just a static graphic at the moment, but we're going to turn that into a video. Now, if I was actually posting this on social media, I would want to get their permission for using this design in this way, and then I would also want to make sure I'm actually tagging them in the actual image or the real and then also in the caption so that they get the credit that they deserve. But of course, we're not actually going to be posting this on social media, so it's just use it as an example of how we would animate something that is generally posted as a static image in this case. This stage, all I've done is I brought in a video of snow falling from the elements tab that we're going to right click and set as our background, brought in a little bit of text and brought in some circles. Nothing else has been done, so we need to work on our animations at this stage. But before we do that, I'm going to duplicate these circles, so I'm going to go Command C and Command and place these directly on top of these. And there's a specific reason why I'm doing that. Need to make sure that they're exactly on top of them. Not off. That looks pretty good. I have gone with a purplish shorter color instead of a black here, I think it just looks a little bit nicer. And I'm just going to highlight these and bring them up a little bit closer using my arrow keys to my text there. Okay, so there was a reason why I did that. I promise, but I'm going to now command D and duplicate this slide. So this one is just free of animations, and I'll show you why that is injustice sec. But first, let's animate this one. So I think my text boxes I'm just going to highlight, and we're going to go with a really simple animation like R I want to make sure that's animating only on entry, and then you could play around with the speed, but in this case, I'm happy with the kind of pre made one there or the default one, and then I'm going to animate these either as blur or succession. Not to difference, always, to be honest. I think it's pretty similar. Yeah, it's pretty similar. Okay, and we want to make sure that's also only on Enter. Now, of course, this doesn't quite work because they're animating the text first, then my circles, and that doesn't really play together very well. Obviously, I want this and this to go first, that and that to go second, and this to go third. But if I group these elements together, then I can't have separate animations for them. So that's why I've separated it out, and now we can right click on this and go to show Element timing. We would leave these guys to appear first. Then we would bring these in a little bit later. And about there, we're just gonna have to play around with it to see how it works. But I think that's about right. So let's just see how that plays. Nope, it doesn't work because these are two spheres on top of each other at this stage. So I would need to go to position and layers and make sure that both of the pink layers are selected, which is a bit tedious. I'm not going to lie to you. It definitely is, so I can stretch out my timeline here, but I need to make sure that both of the pink layers are going to be the same in terms of their timing. So I'm going to align that here. About there. My purple ones, I don't have to worry about, but I do need to select both of my yellow layers. So that one is right, but this one needs to be adjusted. So it's a little bit of extra work, but it will be worth it in the end. I promise. Okay, let's go and play that now. Okay, so I think this needs to come in a teeny, tiny bit quicker here. So we're going to go just about there. Okay. And now the pink lines have to come in a little quicker as well. The pink dots rather. Let's try that again. Okay. And then the last ones have to come in a little quicker than that. Somewhere around there. Okay, I think that works pretty well. So I need to make sure that my pink ones go all the way to the end. And now the reason that I duplicated this first page to begin with, is because alternatively, I could now duplicate this and now I would have to go in and remove all those animations for my second slide, and that's just painful. So that's why now it can seamlessly transition because this slide actually has no animations at all. So it seamlessly transitions, and we can just focus on animating the next steps. So now we've got these kind of spheres here. So what we can now do is we can bring them over here and make them larger because as you'll remember from our original graphic, they kind of go from small to really big, and then we change some of the text around. So now I'm just going to click and hold Shift to bring these three spheres down, and we're going to change their sizing. So I'm going to make them just large enough that they're clearly different in size difference from the ones above them, but not so large that they end up touching. So let's just see I've made this 230.5 very specific. So I can just copy these dimensions across, and that's good, making sure that this is locked, by the way. If it's not, it's going to make you an oval instead of a sphere. And I would just make sure they're lined up with their counterparts up at the top there and lined up with each other. That's pretty good. Okay, perfect. So now I'm just going to copy across the text from this section here so that it actually copies over the animation for me, as well, because as you'll remember, the animation on the second slide, there is none, so that would make it a little bit. Well, it's just an extra step, really, I just don't want to have to animate it. Okay, perfect. So now I'm going to go and just change this text, and then we'll continue working with this. Okay, perfect. So now, these are going to animate in, and we can add in our match and move transition. But, of course, it's a little bit aggressive there because it's coming down really, really, really fast at us. We don't need that, so that's going to animate up, and that's going to animate down. So now we need to just play with our text a little bit to make sure there's enough time to read everything and making sure everything is coming in nice and gently. So this can come in sort of after the spheres have already come down somewhere around here, maybe a little bit later. Then this one can come in after that. And this one after that. Okay, let's test that out. Okay, and I would just make sure that this is long enough to be readable. So not necessarily need to be that long. I'm just going to be doing one more thing with this. So I'll probably go around here and I'm going right click and I'm going to split this page so that I can grab just the end of it and actually use this to animate the elements out. So at the moment, they're all animating in, but none of them are actually animating out. And I want the end of the reel to sort of match the beginning, which is just blank so that when it loops, in this case, it is a reel, so it would if this was for a totally different video on something like Link In, which I can see something like this working for LinkedIn really well, then you don't need to worry about the end bit. But for me because I would want it to loop and make it really nice and seamless for people to continue watching this, I would just have that last little bit where I would animate this out. So instead of making this rise, I'm actually going to highlight everything here, and I'm going to make sure it's on blur on exit. And that can be relatively speedy. Yeah. So that works really well. I would want to make sure that this is only a couple of seconds or maybe even less than 1 second. Doesn't have to take very long. And this is maybe a little bit too long for us to need to read the text. We'll just play and find out. But I did actually upload a song that I think might work pretty well with this, so I'm going to try that out. So I'm going to move this across until it gets to a bit that's got a bit more of a beat to it. Let me see. Yes, I want that bee to be kind of at that transition phase there. So let's try that again. Mm. Okay, I think that works really well, but I'm going to need that audio to fade in and fade out. Just a couple of not even a couple of seconds. Just a quick little less than half a second. Alright, so I think that's going to work really well. I'm going to export this so you can see it in all its glory with the music as well, and then we're going to check it out. So one thing I did want to say is, if I was doing this for a real live reel, I would always want to make sure at the end, I'm putting in my reels template I've provided you with so that can be sure that nothing is going to be blocked within the Instagram app, but if I was doing this for demo purposes, which I am or for a totally different platform, then I wouldn't worry about that as much. Okay, let's go play that and see how it turned out. Okay, so it's probably on screen a little bit long at the end there, but it's still only less than a 15 second reel. So I think that actually works pretty well. It gives us enough time to actually read all the texts and absorb the impact. If I was doing this again, I would probably make these much smaller because you can't really go too much larger with these just due to the nature of Instagram reels and what's going to be around here and how it's going to get cropped. I would go much smaller with these just to kind of emphasize the size difference between the two topics. But otherwise, I think that turned out pretty good. So hopefully you enjoyed that lesson, and it's given you some ideas to think about in terms of how you can animate some infographics for your business, and I will see you in the next lesson where we continue talking about ways to elevate your match and move skills. 89. Quick Intro to Advanced Canva Editing: I wanted to jump on camera quickly before we head into the next lesson to sort of talk about the fact that we're about to get really advanced with this. And I'm not saying that to be intimidating or scary. It's just that I want to acknowledge that it's taken me years and years of working in Canva to get from opening canva for the first time to creating animations like the ones that we've already created in this section of the course, but definitely the one we're about to create. So I just need you to be really kind to yourself in this process and not expect yourself to go 0-100 overnight. The reason I wanted to feature this is so that you know what's possible, but also so that you have access to the template we're about to create if you'd like it. So that you can really see how things are done and kind of backtrack by diving into the finished product and then seeing the video and how it was done, if that's something you want to do. But the other reason that I really want to include it is because I used to do things like this all the time. So the video we're about to create is for my favorite Kombucha brand called RmedyKombuta, and we're actually going to be taking their existing assets from their website, including their images, their logo, et cetera, et cetera. And this is something that I would absolutely do at the beginning of my design career where I would go, Okay, look, I've got to practice my skills anyway. I could make up a fake brand. That's always a possibility. But I could actually use an existing brand that is perhaps a brand I would like to work for and just use their existing assets to create awesome videos that helps me to develop my skills. But then I can send this to them and say, Hey, have made this video. I think it really reflects your brand. It's completely free for you to use if you like. If you need any tweaks done, make sure to let me know and I'll be happy to adjust things to your particular brand style or what have you. So I would say that, you know, at the beginning of my freelancing career, that's quite a brave move for especially a really big brand. But now that I'm actually a client and I hire people for my business, if somebody took the time to get to know my brand and create a video or some sort of project with my brand and style in mind and go, here, I made this for you. That would stand out against the sea of emails that I get about people who have clearly just copied and pasted an email and tried to approach me not knowing anything about me and just sort of sending me an email that says, Hey, dear sir, Madam. So I think it's just a really cool way to get your foot in the door with some bigger businesses, even if maybe they're not looking for a designer at this stage. I just think it's a really cool skill to have because you never know when your design skills can bring new connections into your life. So I'm not saying you're going to be utilizing it for this purpose. I'm just saying that this particular skill really helped me develop in my career as a content creator. And also, I just think that it's such a cool animation that can be done within Canva, and I wish I knew about these kinds of capabilities of Canva earlier. So I know it's a longer lesson. But if you can stick with it and actually have a look at how it's all done, I know it's a long lesson, in particular, considering the actual end result is quite a short real, but that'll tell you just how much work goes into these kinds of things. And hopefully, you still find it really, really helpful to understand what goes into the behind the scenes of these types of ads. So that's a little bit of context before we dive into the next lesson. The key really is to just be kind to yourself, not get you overwhelmed if you think this just isn't the right time for me. To be looking at this kind of lesson because you don't have the time or the mental space or what have you. That's totally fine. Come back to it later. I just wanted to let you know that I do think that it's a cool lesson to definitely visit or revisit at some point. And I'm just really excited about it. So I will see you in the next one. 90. Advanced Product Ads: For this lesson, we're going to pretend that remedy are our client, and we're going to be working with their Kombucha range. So I've just gone and grabbed a couple of these images of their Kombucha cans and then also grab their logo and pop that into Canva. So I've just set up an Instagram reels document here. So we're in vertical format. We've just got the four Cs and I've also just dragged in a couple of videos that I think will work pretty well for our purposes. So the search term I use for this is colorful Fz, or color bubbles also works, but colorful Fz seems to be better. I don't know. Don't ask me why. And I've just dragged in a couple of videos of sort of the most colorful ones that I could find. But there's lots and lots to choose from. I just wanted to have something in the background that complements the product really well. So we're going to get started by talking about these as, let's say, new flavors, in this case. I know they're actually not new flavors, but let's pretend that they are. So I'm just going to shorten my videos. I'm going to leave this first slide in here because I'm going to be using it to kind of come into it and copy and paste a few things in. Now I'm going to hit tea on my keyboard, and we're going to bring in some text. So I'm going to say something like epic, new flavors coming, and then we're going to animate them sort of coming in. Now, we need a cool font. I would love it if we had their actual font, but it doesn't exist inside of Canva, and I'd have to actually purchase it. So I think we're going to go with something that's quite fun and bold and would just work for this kind of brand. So I think that this works pretty well in terms of what would work for their brand. So we're going to adjust our line spacing, and I would probably make that white. But I needed to sort of stand out against this video here because I don't think this is all that accessible. So you guessed it. I'm going to hit R on my keyboard, and we're going to bring in a bit of a drop shadow. I know I do this a lot, but it is really, really handy. So I just need it to be slightly dimmed, not too too dimmed. And then I would probably still add in a bit of an effect where we lift this out of the page so that we don't have to dim this quite as much. So I think that'll work. Let's play that. Yeah, I think that still gives us a nice pop what I'm going to do is I'm going to essentially transition from this pink bubble to this orange bubble here. I'm going to right click and set this video as my background and try and double click into it and find the spot that gives me the most bubbles. Now, I'm going to essentially have the abuchs flying in one at a time, so it's sort of introducing each new flavor. But in order for that to happen, I'm actually just going to copy these across and bring them into this page here, and I'm just going to kind of make them tiny and have them just off to the side. But remember with match and move, you want to make sure that at least a little bit of your object is still present on the page so that it counts it as a layer, and it doesn't make it completely disappear. So we're just going to hide these. That's pretty much where they are. If we now go into position, we'll still see them there as layers, but they're not actually visible. And now I'm going to just duplicate this page, and I'm actually going to detach this again and we're going to copy this across and remove our shadow, paste in our video, and replace our background. Now we have all the kabuchas on the page and we can erase our little text and have them flying in. I can't remember which one goes first. It doesn't actually really matter. But effectively, we want to just make sure it flies in and goes front and center. So that's going to be sort of the first slide. I don't really know how long I want these yet, but for now, let's leave it at that. Then we're just going to command D. And now, this one is going to go off to the side here. I'm going to maybe twist it, and the next one is going to fly in to the center. Oh. Now, if I was really pedantic about it, I would probably figure out the actual dimensions of this based on the position. If I go to range, it'll tell me the width and the height, and I would probably copy that across to the second one. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to eyeball it a little bit because I just think, Well, I don't know if it's more work. It's probably the same amount of work, but I'm just going to eyeball it. Now this is a little bit distracting in the back. So I would probably edit this just to maybe be either desaturated or blurred or something like that. So it's just in the back there. Maybe I just contrast a little bit. I think that works pretty well. So then this one is sort of front and center. Now when I hit the match and move function, we can actually just add it in now if we want, just to test it all out. So we can add it in here and we can add it in here. You can start seeing this in action. So this is how it's going to look. When this one sort of flies in, then it goes in the back. The next one flies in, and now we're going to do the same for the rest of them. So I'm just going to keep duplicating this and essentially bring one to the back and bring the next one up. So I'm going to speed this up a little bit, but we're going to be following the exact same process we just did them. Okay, so let's test this out. I'm just going to hit play, and the video is gonna probably have a bit of issue trying to catch up with the animations. That's okay. We just want to make sure it all sort of works. Okay, so that sort of worked. But now we need these to disappear. So I'm just going to hold shift as I click into these three. We're going to animate these out. So we're going to say, you need to blur on exit. And let's slow that down a little bit. So that's just going to blur out. Let's zoom into this, so we can see it a little bit better. I'm just going to copy this across, and we're going to right click, set the videos background, and I'm just going to bring this in. So this is going to just kind of transition into being the new background the transition I would probably use there is Dissolve. So these guys will disappear and the background changes color. But the Combucha that's in the front and center there will remain in the center. This slide is only going to be really quite short as sort of my transition slide. And then we're going to continue working with this one with the flavor sliding in and actually telling us what each flavor is. So I'm going to duplicate the slide and we're going to set it all up. So I'm going to go in and just bring my cans in again. I'm going to copy this across. These guys can come in here. So this one is going to be the first one that comes in at the top here, and I'm going to eyeball this at this stage. I essentially just want these sliding in and out and just saying, Okay, we've got this flavor, this flavor, this flavor, and this flavor. And making sure that they all fit. So I think the size I've chosen there is going to fit. I'm going to hit R on my keyboard and just bring in a couple of rectangles. So I'm going to try once again to use kind of opposite colors to the colors of the can there in terms of where they sit on the color spectrum, and I'm just going to bring out the transparency there. So now I just need to figure out whether this is going to stack. Well, I'm just going to actually make that a little bit thinner. And I'm just going to hold down option and bring this down. So it's oh, it's almost perfect, but I would like these to overlap just to not give us too much of an issue. So I'm just going to actually overlap them. I don't think I really care if it's off by a couple of pixels there. I think that still works pretty well. So I'm just going to actually use my arrow keys and overlap those. I don't need it to be precise as I sich, so I'm quite happy with that. Okay, so now I need these to be slightly different colors. So for passion fruit, I'm going to go with an orange because I think that works really well with the purple, with a blue. I'm going to go with a pink. I think that works quite well, maybe like a soft pink. And for our orange. Oh, I don't know. I might go for purple. You know, that technically purple would be yellow on the opposite of the color spectrum, but I just think that looks quite fun. So now I think I'm just going to make these slightly larger, just so they're a bit more prominent. So I'm just going to highlight them all so they're sizing up at the same time, and then I can kind of rearrange them a little bit. And then we're going to bring in their actual names as well. So I'm going to grab my text here and put in all of their different flavors. So I'm just going to speed this bit up. M. So now we're going to group these together. I need to only group these together instead of this one because I want this one flying in like this. And if I group it, it's not going to do that. But the rest of them will be grouped as a whole. And these are overlapping with two different slides, and that's actually not going to work when I group it because it's not going to allow me to layer things properly. So they can only really overlap with one at a time. So I can group this, group this, and group this. Perfect. Now, we do need to make this longer, and it's not actually letting me slide anything because 3 seconds is going to be much too short. So I probably need to adjust the length of my video. Yeah, the video has been clipped too much. So I'm just going to make it quite long. That way, we've got a little bit of Oh, very long. We've got a little bit of room to play with, so I can cut this down a little bit more. So it's got animations on both sides already, so I can have a look. I only really need it to be about I don't know, seven or 8 seconds for each animation. So let's go 7 seconds. Okay, perfect. So I need to make sure that everything is kind of aligned. This is going to go to the front, so we're going to come in and write square bracket to bring it to the front, and now we're going to make these guys disappear. So I'm going to hold down shift, so I'm just moving in line, and just out of focus is where I want it to be. Same with this one. We're just going to hold down shift so nothing gets out of whack. Same with this one, holding down shift and bring it to the end. And this guy is going to go over here. I just realize I made a crucial mistake with this. I need to duplicate this slide. I'm going to command D. The second one is actually going to have this slide coming in. So that's already going to be in place. I'm just going to use my arrow keys to bring it right in line. And this one is going to actually feature the big can. So this slide here already needs to have all of those little slides that we just created in place in order for them to animate properly. So that's a mistake on my part. We're going to fix it. I'm just going to go over here. We're going to grab this can. I'm going to come in see and we're essentially going to make this slide just a couple of seconds, and it's going to be kind of an in between slide here. So instead of having this little can here, it's going to have the big one. So it's just going to act in place of this slide here, essentially. So we want to have that nice animation that we initially had. So it probably needs to be a little bit longer in order for that to happen. Okay, so let's just see if that works. So this is going to disappear. And then, yes, this can should sort of fly in and then these guys will animate in the next few slides. Okay, perfect. So I'm going to command D, and we're just going to bring these all in holding down shift so nothing gets out of whack. I'm going to just use my arrow keys here to line things up, and we're just going to do that for all of them. Alright, so now we can kind of slide over it and make sure that all works. This one slides in, and this one slides in. That all works. Yeah, perfect. So I don't know about the timing yet. It'll depend on the music that we choose. But I know at the end, I want that to animate a slightly different way. So I'm going to hit Command D again. This is going to be really, really, really short slide. So I'm going to just remove this transition for a second, so we can clip this. This is just going to be a couple of seconds. And at this point, I want to make sure I'm ungrouping all of these elements. So they're just basically solo, and it'll allow me in the next slide, which I'm going to duplicate this, I'm going to erase all of the elements except for the cans. So I'm going to get rid of all the text, all these colorful elements, that's all going to go away. And these cans are going to now get really nice and big and cover pretty much the entire size of the screen. Now, we're going to make this slide a little bit longer because I'm going to put a little bit of text on the screen. And one thing we're going to do now is we're going to actually save this as a JPEg so we can just save it as a JPEgO in this case, I'm just going to shortcut this and take a little screenshot. But in a professional sense, I would definitely save it as a JPEg that way we can bring it in and create that kind of beautiful glass effect that we learned about earlier in the course, if you'll remember. So we can just stretch it all the way to the edges. We're going to make this nice and blurry. So I'm going to blur the whole image and just cut it down to the middle, maybe round my edges a little bit, maybe add in a bit of a border, not too much of a border. Or maybe let's make the border white. Then I could bring in a bit of text and say, which one? Are you trying? Now, this is going to have to be much bigger than that and obviously in our brand font. Now, I'd probably add a bit of an outline or drop shadow just so that it stands out a little bit, but in this case, I think the outline works pretty well. Now I'm probably going to make my little glass effect a little bit smaller because I don't think it needs to be quite that big. I think that works pretty well. I am going to adjust the timing of this because I want this coming in a little bit later. So I'm going to just bring this in a couple of seconds in and same with my font. So I kind of want that coming in about there. So let's add in the match and move transition again so I can just make sure that that's worked because it doesn't always. So these guys are good, and then it kind of comes in. So I think I need to actually animate these out in order for it to work properly because it kind of doesn't disappear quickly enough. So I'm going to animate these out. I'd say probably just the text needs to animate out. So I'm going to blur that out on exit, and let's see if that's a little bit better in terms of the transition. Okay, so I'm going to play around with this a little bit. I think it needs to be a little bit longer, and then maybe the text needs to just leave a little bit sooner. Yeah, that's a bit better. And then these probably need to have some sort of animation as they're coming in. So I'm just going to maybe make them blur in. They can blur in and out. That's fine. And then we're going to do one more cool animation with these cans at the end. So I'm going to command D again, and we're going to remove this box now, and we're just going to align these guys as they were at the beginning. Cool. So now they're all the same size, and I can just use my arrow keys to sort of tide up or I could use the tidy up feature and just make sure that they're kind of in the center and the middle of the page. So that is going to kind of animate out. I don't need this to be too long. It just needs to be a couple of seconds. And then I'm going to have my logo, which is going to be relatively simple, I think. I'm just going to set the videos background, bring my logo in. Yeah, I'm just going to make it breathe or it could be succession either way. And the last slide is going to be a flow. And then I'm just going to bring in the match and move transition here as well, so we can test this out so my red c is acting up a bit. It's not really working in terms of the animation, so I'm going to have to fix that. I don't know why, but sometimes it happens with the match and move function where it doesn't recognize that the object is the same as it was on the previous page. So let me just test this and see if it recognizes this as the same object. Okay, cool, it does. So now I can just bring it in line. Cool. I'm just going to bring that to the back and erase the original one and just see if that works. Cool. So sometimes you just need to play with it. I don't know. It's not always perfect. It's not a perfect system by any means. But I think that's looking really quite good so far. So now we can erase the original slide because that just has our cans on it. So one thing we haven't spoken about yet is the fact that for these, I'm using a background video that's moving, but I'm actually using the same clip at the moment. It's sort of using the very first second of this clip, then it resets again, and it resets again because I've just duplicated the slide. And that can cause a bit of a glitch in your animation, especially when you have these bubbles that are moving up, and then all of a sudden, they're back down and they're back up and they're back down. So when we're talking about these slides where there's not a whole lot of animation happening, we're going to have to try and line this up. Whereas with these down here, it's not as critical because it kind of blends in relatively seamlessly. Those bubbles are quite thick in the background. So I don't think it's going to be as much of an issue. Plus, we've got a lot of animation happening up here. So we're going to play it and just see if we need to line anything up there, but I don't actually think we'll need to. But with this because there's way less bubbles in the background, and there isn't much animation happening on the screen. We do need to probably line things up a little bit. So you'll see at the transition phase here is where this bubble here, which is quite thick, is not quite aligned because it's sort of essentially restarting from scratch. So we need to make sure that we're lining that up a little bit better. So the reason that this is tricky is because these slides are 0.9 seconds. But if we click into the video, the videos 1.4 seconds. It's not as straightforward as just clipping the video into 1.4 second chunks like this one, this one, this one, and then making those the background of the video. Because we have this match and move transition, it shortens the length of our slides. Yes, it's super annoying. It is, but you can do it. It's really not that hard. Once you find a focal point of the video that you can cling to that you go, Okay, this is the beat that we're trying to line up. We can see that it's a little bit off on the transition there. So essentially, all I would do is I would put my finger on my actual physical desktop screen. At the bottom of this bubble here, so I can tell, Okay, this is where I need to line it up, and then that's where I would be focusing with the next video. So I'm just going to do that now. And we're going to go to the next video clip. We're going to click into it, and I'm just going to grab it and drag it until that bubble gets to the bottom of where I'm holding my finger on the screen. So now, when we play that, it's going to be a much more seamless transition that bubbles going to essentially continue floating upwards. So I'm going to do that with the rest of these, and then we're going to put in some music, and we'll export and see how we've done. Oh, and I should say that you can absolutely use your guides for this, not just your finger. I don't know why my mind went so old school on this, and I just thought, I'm going to do this really manually, but you absolutely can use your rulers and guides to try and align different elements in your videos with the next slide. Okay, so I think I'm pretty close. I'm going to leave it at that because I think it's pretty close. I think this is one of those cases where good enough is good enough, and I'm just going to bring in a bit of audio and we're just going to line it up. So I might have to adjust my slide duration to match the music, but hopefully not too much. So I think the bit of the music that I want starts around there. So I'm just going to clip it to that I could just move this around, but I'm just going to clip it so I know exactly where we're starting. I think it's about here. Okay. Yep, that's about right. Cool. And that goes all the way to the end. So I am just going to export this, and we're going to look at it that way because when you have animations of this size, sometimes Kava just doesn't like it. And it's especially glitching because I'm recording my screen at the same time. If I wasn't doing that, it would be a little bit better. But when you're creating really complex reels like this one, then it does not like it when you're running too many things. But bear in mind, it's only 12 seconds, so I know that seems really, really complex, but it's actually only 12 seconds. So we're going to go ahead and share that and have a look at it. Alright, let's take a look at it. Watch out, math. With that das wage that Oh. Okay. It's almost there. I think this is a little bit too long. So I'd probably shorten that because it has this slide and this slide side by side. So I think it only needs to be a couple seconds here and a couple seconds here. I don't think it needs to be quite as long as it is. And I noticed something weird when this one transitions in. There's a little shadow there. So I think that's a layers problem either on this slide. No, so this one's fine because the red can is on top. Yeah, it's an issue with the previous slide. So because the red can was on the bottom, when it then animates in, the blue one was kind of blocking it, yeah, that's a little bit better. So it's just a layers issue sometimes. I think the rest of this looks good, and I think this slide is going to have to be longer, and the text is going to have to appear for a little bit longer because I think it was quite short. I don't know why. So we're going to just lengthen the text there. But I think the rest of it was pretty good. And I would probably just make sure the audio fades in and out because we're in the middle of the song, so I would actually fade it in and fade it out a little bit. Even just a couple of seconds, probably just a little bit on the way in and then a little bit on the way out. I think that's going to be better. So let's try that again. Watch out now. Watch out now. We stop. Okay, so I would say I actually did notice a couple of the glitches on the bubbles in the back there, just a teeny, tiny bit. It's super, super subtle, but it's definitely there. So I will probably take the effort of lining up the background video for this as well, just so that when you download the template, if you choose to download the template for this particular project, you'll have everything looking really nicely. But it's really, really subtle. I don't know if people would notice it who aren't super obsessed with the details of this, but it is looking pretty good. And with this, you can tell there's some slight variations in between the transition. So obviously, this bubble here is not perfectly aligned, but it doesn't hugely matter as long as the motion is there. Of course, if this was a video of people walking or something like that, then I would definitely make sure the alignment is perfect. But for something like this, you just want to make sure that everything's sort of moving in the right direction, and then people won't generally notice it. So I'm going to go ahead and line everything up perfectly for you, and I'm going to play the clip one more time at the end of this lesson so that you can see it in all its glory once it's all fixed. I'm not going to make you watch me try and line up a couple of bubbles because this is truly me just being a perfectionist. I just wanted to thank you for sticking with me through this lesson. I know it's a very long lesson, and hopefully I managed your expectations with the previous lesson to say that this was going to be complicated and it definitely was. So kudos to you for finishing it, and just remember if you do want to download the template, you have the option to do that. I'm just going to show you the finished product, and I will see you in the next lesson. Watch out now Watch down don't stop. 91. Video Background Remover: When it comes to the video background remover function, this is only available for Canva Pro users. If you're a Canva free user, you could use something like cap cut to do something similar. But in this case, we're going to be using Canva for this purpose. I've just brought in a video myself that is currently unedited. So maybe we would put in a bit of a filter. I really like the Fresco filter, but it's a bit strong, so we would maybe just bring the intensity down a tiny bit. And now I just copy and paste my video so that we can use the background remover feature on the video that's on top, but we still have everything that's on the bottom video. So now we've got this one on top that's been cut out, and we can just trim that so that I know exactly what I'm working with, and now we've got these layered on top of each other, and we can stretch them all the way to the edges of our canvas. Now with the background video, I would actually maybe bring down the brightness on this or maybe desaturate it depending on what we're feeling. Let's check the brightness because it's just going to make me pop a little bit more. So I think that looks quite cool. And now if we head on over to text in the dynamic text option, we've got our captions there. It will say one of two videos are suitable for this because they're both on the canvas. But obviously, we're just working with one, whichever one. And then it's going to bring in our captions, and we want to make sure we're muting one of the clips so that there isn't this weird echoy thing that can happen when you've got two videos on top of each other. And now the captions are a bit overlappy. So if you hit duration and you go to just a certain section of the clip, you'll see just the captions for that clip so you can check how it all looks. I would bring in our SM templates, which is just what I've called my folder, whatever you've called yours, essentially, just the social media templates and do, in this case, the real checker because this is a real that I would be doing and just make sure that the captions are within the safe zone, which in this case, they're not. So I would just squish them down so that they're in that transparent area, so they're not going to be blocked by anything. And then I would just double check at different parts of the video, there's no issues with the captions. Once I've already done the text box, it should be fine, but it's just good to check. And then we're just going to customize the look and feel if you want to change the fonts or the effects. So in this case, I would probably change the roundness here and maybe up the spread and change the transparency a little bit. But I actually quite like the text that it's chosen, the font that it's chosen, so I'd probably leave it there. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to split the clip. But once you split the clip, you can't really adjust how your captions look anymore. It can get a bit messy. So it's good to make sure you're making any adjustments to your captions before you mess around with the clips like this. I'm just going to zoom in on my duration timeline so I can see it a little bit better. And I'm just listening to it on headphones as to where I want to split it because I want to split it just before I say the word A. So background remover feature, and just before I say and is where I'm going to either I could hit S on my keyboard or I can also right click and split the page here, and it's going to essentially give me two video clips so I can mess around with the second one and still have my captions in place. So now I'm just going to hold down Shift and select both clips and make them larger while still making sure that I'm in the center of the video and that there's enough room over my head for me to bring in a little bit of extra text. So I already have some captions, but I thought it might be cool to animate some text that's going to come up sort of behind me in a way. So I'm just going to hit T on my keyboard, and we're going to bring in a little bit of text that's almost going to reiterate what the captions are already saying. So I want to make sure this is large enough and visible enough on the background, which is also helpful that I dim the background so that you can see this really clearly. And we're going to pick a nice chunky font and making sure that that's in all caps. Now, it is in white. We're probably going to just add a little bit of a pop to the background, and we'll play around with the positioning and maybe lift that maybe bring that over to the left, maybe actually up the intensity even more. So I think that looks good. And I can just hold down option and add in my second word, which is going to be captions. So this is going to pop up on screen as I say the words cool captions. I'm just going to play around with the actual adjustment of where this is going to sit in relation to my head because I want it to be really visibly behind me. So at this stage, it's all on top, but I'm going to move that video cutout of me on top of these captions on top of this text. So I can definitely just make sure that it looks like it's definitely got a bit of a cutout feature in there. I am going to just check where I start saying call captions. Again, I'm going to listen to it on my headphones so that it's not too distracting for you. But that's essentially where I want the timing to start. I want it to come in when I say Cool, and when I say captions, probably in succession so that it's not coming in at the exact same time because I'm also going to animate these and possibly give them two different animations. So with COO, I would animate it to be quite big, bold, impactful. Maybe something like stomp, stomp is a good one because it's huge. And because it's going to be coming in behind me once I place myself on top, it's going to be very clear that I'm on top, so that's going to be quite cool. And with captions, I would maybe just go for pop, which is a much more subtle animation. And then maybe I would have that doing both on Enter and on exit. And with Stump, I would maybe play around with on Enter. I might have to adjust this, but for now, I think, Yeah, let's just go for Enter on both. Yeah, I think that'll look a little bit better. And now we're going to go to position and make sure that that layer is on top of everything and making sure that my captions are still on top of that, so they're visible. But this way, the animations are definitely happening behind my head. So if we now go to the beginning and play that, it looks pretty good, but it's quite short, and I don't know that that animation works very well. So I don't know if it's the speed with which it's coming in, or I might just have to play around with the timing here. So I'm just going to speed this up a tiny bit. And that might just need to come in a little bit earlier, a little bit before I even say call captions, and maybe it'll go all the way to the end of this clip. So obviously, this is a very short video clip where I'm literally just saying, We're using this clip for the purposes of demonstrating background over and adding some call captions. Normally, you would have a video that's much longer than just 10 seconds, so you could go into a different video frame that then wouldn't have the words call captions on it. But I think in this case, that works pretty well. So now we can head on over to uploads and bring in a bit of music and drop that onto our timeline. So just adjust where the music actually starts and making sure it's quite dynamic from the beginning. Once again, I'm just going to listen to this one on headphones so that you don't have to hear it because, also, this is a little bit different from the other videos we've done in the sense that my voice is the primary thing that we want to listen to. So I'm going to fade this in and fade this out. But I would make sure to adjust the volume of my music. Quite drastically because it just needs to be really subtle in the background. This is something I could add in within Instagram, as well, but in this case, I'm just going to be adding it in here so we can have a look at how that plays. I'd maybe go even softer with this. So it's just really, really subtle in the background, and I'm going to play it back for you so you know exactly what it looks like at the end. Now, I'd say, this is pretty much there. I would just make sure that where it actually says cool captions that my reels checker actually isn't in the way of that, and it's not going to be cut off, so let's just double check that. All right, so the word cool is a little bit cut off, but in this case, I don't think it matters because it's just an extra element. It's not really integral information because we've word in our captions. So in this case, I would just leave that because it's going to be visible in someone's rails feed, and that's all that really matters to me. So I'm just going to go ahead and download both pages and making sure I'm not downloading those pages as separate files. And let's go ahead and play that. This is a video clip we're going to use to demonstrate Cava's powerful video background remover feature and have a look at how it can add some cool captions to our videos. So I think that works really well. I like the dimmed background there. I think that works really well. And I think the animations come in really nicely behind me. It's very clear that I'm caught out, which is all that I really cared about there. So I think that all plays together quite well, and it's really easy to create these kinds of videos within Canva, but it makes a real statement on social media. So hopefully you enjoyed that tutorial, and I will see you in the next one. 92. Looping Smoke Effect: So you might remember earlier in the course, we looked at a post that I had screen grabbed or screen recorded that I was inspired by to create a similar style post that had this sort of breakout social media effect. Now, I did find out that that original clip was made with breakout clips.com, which is this website that is a paid service, so we don't cover it in this course. And the one that I made was made with Final Cut Pro, which we also don't cover in this course, but lots of people have asked me how to do this, and is there a way to do it in Canvas? So we're going to cover that now. So firstly, you want to grab a video that is going to be great for you to loop. It doesn't necessarily need to be something that's going to loop in and out. It could be something with a green screen like a sticker that you remove the background from and then put on top of your graphic. But I'm just going to be utilizing this video of paint underwater from pixels. Just make sure that whatever video you're using, there's enough contrast between the foreground and the background that it's going to make it easy to remove. For example, videos like this would be a bit tricky because we're using free software, not paid software to remove this. So you want to make sure you're making it as easy as possible on your tool. Next, I'm just going to open this up with QuickTime on my Mac and only really clip the bit that I actually want to be using. So it doesn't necessarily need to be right at the beginning because I am going to be able to sort of move it wherever I want to make sure that it starts whenever it starts, but I just want to make sure it doesn't go past the point where the bottom of this is touching the bottom of the frame and the bottom of the video because that's not going to make for a very nice loop. I'm going to save this as smoke. And we're just going to head on over to unscreen.com and upload our quick clip. Unscreen is going to make this 5 seconds, anyway, but it's going to just take the first 5 seconds of your video, and it may not be the 5 seconds that you want to be selecting. So that's why I like trimming my video before putting it in here. So that's done a pretty good job, and now we need to figure out a way to probably speed this up a little bit and then also loop it so it comes back So for this, we're going to go to easygif.com. We're going to upload our gift if there were any glitches with this. So because it's a transparent gift, sometimes it might take a little bit of the background. You can always use the cut function within Easy gift to basically cut a few frames out of either the beginning or the end. Not necessarily the middle. That's a little bit trickier, but if it has any glitches at the beginning or the end, you can always cut your gift down in Easy gift, as well. So it has lots of functionalities beyond just what we're going to cover in this lesson. So I need to be speeding it up first, and I'm probably going to go with 175% or maybe 200% of the current speed. It's going to be a little bit glitchy while it's rendering, but that's right. Now, this is where it gets a little bit tricky. I'm going to save this. Normally, you would just go to reverse and you would just say, Run this to the end and reverse back to the start and don't repeat the first and last frame. And that's always worked for me really well. Lately, though, it's been a little bit glitchy. So if you ever have any issues, you can always just reverse it. Instead of doing this, you would just reverse it. You would save this gift, you would save the reverse gift, and then you would just go back to gift Maker and upload them both, and it would basically make you a reverse, a looping gift. If that ever happens, you've got a few different options to play around with, but it seems to be playing ball at the moment, so I'm pretty stoked on that. So we can save it and start designing in Cap Vab. So I'm just doing a LinkedIn post, which is 1,200 by 1,200 pixels, and I've just got my brand color and just a little cut ad of me at the moment. We want to head on over to LinkedIn, and I would go to the section where you have your own posts and activity. So you can screenshot two of your posts side by side like this with all the reactions and just screenshoting this section here. Now, we're going to tweak this a little bit, but before we do that, one thing when you're in this section is that there is no difference in color between your own posts. But if you're on a main feed, you'll notice that other people's posts will have a little bit of a bumper there or a divider. So you also want to make sure you're screenshotting this. I know this is a little bit tedious, but I promise it'll be worth it in the end. And now we're going to bring both into Canva. So we can set this all up to look nice and cohesive. I'm going to be removing some of these analytics. These are obviously back end analytics, and this also shows that I'm logged in, which someone else wouldn't be seeing. So I would remove that, and then I'm just going to copy and paste this across and just look at the underneath bit here. So I want to make sure that even though this is not the text I'm going to be using, I'm still going to grab that. And then in between here, I'm going to use my divider. So it looks like a native post within LinkedIn. I'm just going to space that down. Now, in terms of the reaction buttons, you could use the desktop ones, but I prefer to use the mobile ones. So I'm just going to bring those in here. And we might just have to move things around a teeny tiny bit, or I might just have to add a little bit more white space to this so that it looks really nicely, natively integrated. So that's kind of roughly how you want it to look. But of course, I may write less than this, I may write more than this. So I'm just going to hit R and bring in a little bit of a white rectangle and move that to the back. And just make that nice and white. So it gives me a little bit more real estate to write here. Now, in terms of text in the font, I would say that aerial is about as close as it gets within Canvas. So if I hit T, I can use Aerial in here. And that's about as close as it gets to the actual LinkedIn font. Then I usually write exactly what I wrote in this caption so that I can line it up perfectly. So I would say, like, more than 40 k and leave it at that and then line it up until it perfectly blends in and making sure that's left aligned so it doesn't get out of whack. But now I can effectively remove this and just be writing whatever my actual fake caption is going to be. So in this case, I'm going to say something like E learning isn't the future of education. It's the present. Let's innovate and shape it together. So fun. Okay. So now I need to obviously get rid of the thing that says you, the thing that says five months. Those are all things that I would remove. So we can just use the draw functionality for this and just go to white. I could also potentially use my spot remover if I'm a Canva Pro user, but you know what? This is just faster. So I actually don't mind using it. Okay, perfect. So these are just a couple of things I would remove, and that's pretty much it. So now we can bring in our gift and make sure we've got it in place, and it's large enough. Oh, so it's going to really nicely overlap with the entirety of our post here. That looks pretty good. Yeah, I'm quite happy with that. So I would just make sure that it doesn't appear straight away. Okay, perfect. So it's just out of frame that way. Alright, so now I'm going to hit T again, and I'm going to basically write into some disappearing text here. So I'm just going to say something like make magic happen. And we're probably going to put that on two lines and make that font much bigger and bolder. So this is going to be formula. Black, maybe. And we're gonna adjust our line spacing. And, of course, the color is going to have to match the background color, so it's kind of disappearing and reappearing text. That looks pretty cool. So far, we just need to make sure that the gift is exactly where the text is so that it definitely shows up when it loops. That looks cool. Okay, so now I need to make sure my cutout is at the top of all of this. So I need to make sure that it's the top layer. Ooh. And we're gonna bring it all the way to the front. And I'm going to make sure that that is about there. I could probably move a lot of this down because now I have this awkward white space here. So I would probably grab all of this and just move it down a teeny, tiny bit to give my cutout a little bit more real estate and give the gift a little bit more real estate, as well. And that's it. I think that looks really cool. I would adjust the font size and the font placement to make sure that it's definitely readable and it's accessible. But now, when this comes across someone's LinkedIn feed, it would essentially just look like a native post coming across their feed. And then we would just make sure we're saving this as a gift so that it definitely auto loops and isn't requiring them to actually press play. 93. Handy Canva Apps - Images: So there were a couple of more niche apps that I couldn't really fit within the actual course lessons, but I thought would be useful for us to cover. So starting with gradient generator, you basically pick a color palette. This one is locked in place, but you can basically randomize it until you find one you like, or you put in your brand colors, and then you lock it in place, and you can continue to randomize just the patterns. You can adjust the noise level, which gives you that nice grainy look, which I love. So then you can add this to your designs as, let's say, a little bit of background for your social media posts. So it's going to continue to use your color scheme, but in slightly different variations of patterns. So that's going to give you that nice, consistent branded look across. I really love this app, actually. It gives you much more advanced features than what you can just do within the actual color option within Canva. Then let's continue working with apps, which we found under the search term of Image blender. There are two apps that I want to cover, and they both sound very similar, but do very different things. So we've got blend image which is going to look like this. So the bottom layer is going to be this image here, and our top layer is going to be this image here, and it's going to essentially combine them based on the settings that you provided here, and then you can add that blended image to your design. And there are so many different use cases for this. I actually utilize it quite a lot because this is almost a photoshop function as opposed to a Canva function. So there are definitely lots of times where I need to actually just combine something without just adjusting the transparency. It needs to be combined in a much more sophisticated way. To give you an example, I wanted to create this as my powerful social media marketing course thumb now, but I just couldn't get these to not look hideous. I kept adjusting the transparency, but it just wasn't working for me. So instead, what I did is I essentially created these gradients and my icons as an image, and I exported this as a transparent image. And then I also exported this as its own image because it's essentially a few different things layered on top of each other and we need it to be a separate image. So then I can upload these in and use the image blender app. So I'm just going to click and set the image background. And we're going to layer this on top. Doesn't actually need to be because it's going to be creating a separate image for us anyway. But now, if we use the blend Image app, we're going to be able to use that as our bottom image and use this as our top image and then use these kind of overlay functions. I think the one I ended up going with with soft light. So it has those icons there, but just really, really slightly. So it makes it look much more natural than if I was just adjusting the transparency down because it actually takes in the background light there and all the other objects. So that turned out to be much more useful than me just trying to adjust the transparency. Alright, so this next to it, we actually have used in a previous lesson when we were talking about YouTube channel banners, but I wanted to revisit it here because it is so, so handy. So it is the Image blender app, and we're just going to select this image here, and it's going to essentially blend it with a transparent gradient. So it's removing the bottom or the top part of our image using this linear gradient, and then we can make that really nice and soft. So this can be a really great way to soften some edges of your graphics, especially if they have slightly weird cutout shapes, and you just want to make that really nice and soft, whether it's radio or linear. And then we can just hit Save. It's going to save it as an individual image in our uploads folder when we do this. But this means that it'll take on anything that's on in the background is going to be shown through that transparent section of our image now. Now, our last app for the image section of this is going to be something that you may not use a whole lot, but for when you do want to use it, it can be really handy. So I thought I would cover it anyways. And I'm going to be using my mobile screenshot of my website here, so I can show you how I tweak this if I needed to shift the perspective of the screenshot. So you can distort, you can skew, you can change the perspective. You can warp things completely. And this can be handy if you're making any specific design, for example, if I was trying to place the screenshot inside of an image where someone was holding a phone, but it wasn't necessarily a mock up, but I really liked it, and I wanted to put this on top of the phone, I can use this app to change the perspective of the screenshot so that it fits within that image. Okay, so those are some of my favorite image manipulation apps, and in the next lesson, we're going to cover some text manipulation apps. 94. Handy Canva Apps - Text: But Okay, let's now look at an app called Magic Morph, which is very niche and you may not use it a whole lot, but it's quite fun. So if you have any element on the page, whether it's text or a circle or a star or what have you, you can select it and say, Make this into bagels because maybe I run a bakery, and I just want people to know that I love bagels and I love food. So this is quite fun, and honestly, it's just fun to play around with, even if you never use it. So go for gold. It's something you may actually end up using a lot for personal use rather than business use, but there are definitely business use cases for it, as well. Then I can choose the one that I like the most, and then I could incorporate this into my design now that it's all beautiful and beggarly and making me hungry. So that's a really fun one to play with. Then let's look at a few kind of more designy type apps. So we've got type lettering, which gives you quite designer looking fonts and style. So you can actually choose the fonts, but you can't choose the styles because obviously, these styles are preset. But we could say, you know, make this into Bay Star then I could make this into my brand colors. So I'm not going to go through all of them, but just so you can sort of change every color in here to be your brand color. You can change the font. It doesn't have every single font that Canva has, that can be a bit tricky in terms of branding, but it can be a fun thing to just add to your designs if you're looking for something a little bit special with your fonts, and this is something that would take a fair while to actually design in something like Illustrator, it's quite cool that Canva have a shortcut for it. Then let's look at font studio. I'm going to create a separate page for us. That's similar to type lettering. These are just some additional things that you might be able to play with, so we could say, Hi there, kiddos, if we're making a birthday party invitation or something like that. These are very similar to type lettering, but just slightly more playful styles where you can change your colors for the outline, the projection, and you can play around with some special effects and lots of other things. This can be quite cool, especially for the neon and disco designs because I've definitely seen this becoming much more of a trend when it comes to even the cryptospace and the IT space, where the designs are quite dark and the text is quite light. So that can be a fun one for you to play around with. Let's look at Type Extrude. These are named in such specific ways. Type extrude is a really cool one because I really loved these designs when I was first starting on social media, and I never really knew how people did it. So we can create this kind of extrude effect. You can see the preview here because I've now scrolled down. I can make it in a particular angle. So let's say I want to go somewhere down here, and I want to make it really long. Maybe I'll change the angle a little bit. And then I can change the color to be my brand color or a darker color to make it work a little bit better. I can change the font to be probably, again, not brand font because it doesn't have every font under the sun in here. But there's lots and lots of really cool fonts. You can play around with a few cool things, and then of course, you can add it to your design. And even though this does show up with a light background, it's not going to be light. It's just going to be sort of a vector image in there for you. So it does have to play with the graphic that you've designed. Maybe this isn't quite long enough in terms of the tail I've created for a vertical post like this. But playing around with it, it's a really fun one for you to use, but just make sure you're only using it sparingly. Now for this last one, I'm going to jump over to my example website, and I'm going to copy this page over so I can show you how the app works in action, and it's the Translate app. So I've had a lot of students of this course over the years ask me whether they can have two different variations of their Canva website. And you definitely can and you can sort of link back and forth to them. So let's say my website in the very top could say, read this in English or read this in Slovak or Czech. Those are the only languages I speak. So I would have a hard time translating into other languages and knowing if it's correct, but I could say read this in English or in Slovak, and this could be the English site. So basically would just say, read this in Slovak and then on the Slovak side, it could say, read this in English and link to my English side. So that's definitely a possibility. And then I can say, Alright, translate this to Slovak and I'm just going to say, translate the text from the current page, but you could translate pretty much all the pages. I don't want to be translating this. I'm just translating these text boxes. Now, I've done this before, so I know it's not perfect, so it definitely helps to be able to speak the language. It's sort of the Google Translate version of translation. But it will definitely get you there. So if you do speak the language, you don't have to start from scratch in terms of translating things. For example, in English, there's no difference between the way you talk about yourself if you're a woman or a man in terms of the tenses, whereas in a lot of European languages, there are very big differences in how words are formed when you're a woman or a man and you're talking about yourself. So those are just subtle things that I would definitely have to change. But it's pretty good. I would say that that's a really quick and easy way for you to translate designs or translate websites within Canva and, of course, always make sure that you have a native speaker of that language actually checking over your work. But it's a really nice and quick and easy way to shortcut that. Okay, so those are some of my handy apps. Hopefully you enjoy that and I will see you in the next lesson. 95. Sell Your Canva Designs: Before we begin this lesson, I just want to say that I am actually not an expert on this topic. I am still learning a lot about it, and it's something that I really want to explore more in my business in the future. But I'm not an expert, so I have provided some further resources in your course guide if you want to go and explore this topic beyond this particular lesson. Is more of an introduction into this topic where we kind of cover the key things that you need to know, what you definitely cannot do when it comes to selling your Canva designs, then also how to set up your templates so that they actually work for this purpose. Then we're also going to be exploring how to actually present your designs in a visually appealing way so people want to actually buy them. And then we're also just going to briefly talk about some print on demand services. If you do want to explore actually printing physical products with your designs on them, but you don't necessarily want to hold all the stock. So if print on demand is still relatively new to you, we're going to cover that. And let's just start with the things that you definitely can't do. You can't sell existing Canva templates whether they are free or pro, and that also includes any templates you might have purchased outside of Canva, whether they've been on Etsy, creative market, or elsewhere. You also can't use any P elements to create your templates because not everybody has Canva Pro. And if you use P elements, then people are not going to be able to actually use your designs if they don't have Canva Pro. So anything with little pro icon or little crown icon is off limits for creating templates. So there are two ways around this. Either you can filter this by only looking at free elements. Of course, you have to be a Canva Pro user to have this filtering option, but you can't actually create templates unless you're a Canva Pro user. So that's kind of a given anyway, so you have to be Kava Pro user to create templates to sell, and then you can do this filter option and only use free elements in your templates. Alternatively, you can use sites like Unsplash that have all these beautiful images for you to use. It's a little bit of a limitation with other kinds of elements, of course, so it's best to just search for free elements within Cava to use in your templates. As you'll remember, Unsplashs licensing will allow you to do pretty much everything you need to do with these images, except sell them because they're giving them away for free, so you can't just take this image and sell it. And it's the same principle within Canvas. So you can't just create a page with this Canva free image and then just sell this as an image for five bucks because Canvas giving this away for free, so you can't profit off it. Unless it's part of a design. So as soon as you have two or more elements on the page and you make this into a graphic, then it's a template that you can actually sell. If it's just that one free element that's illegal for you to actually sell and profit off of because they're giving it away for free. Now, lastly, this is a little bit more niche, but don't mess with trademarks. So Disney, TV shows, movies, musicians, anything that includes phrases, logos, or anything that can be trademarked, is not legal for you to create paid templates around. Yes, lots of people are doing it and making lots of money, but that doesn't actually make it legal or right. So just don't mess with any trademarked information. So let's not talk about how to actually set up your Cava templates. Let's say you've got a listing like this one with this beautiful design, you go through to purchase it, and then you get given a PDF, usually. So it is a digital file PDF that will give you the link to this template, which I'm going to show you how to create that link, and then probably some instructions on how to actually customize it. That could be a video. It could be written instructions. The key is to not assume that everybody knows how to use Cava because obviously the templates I provided you within this course are designed for you already know what to do with because you're taking this course. But if you weren't taking this course, I would definitely provide really detailed instructions on how to use each and every template because I don't know what your baseline knowledge is. Personally, I would record a quick video to say, Here's how you use this template. But if you are going to really seriously get into the Canva template selling game, I would just go through and purchase a couple of these so that you can see how other sellers have done it in the past. Then you'll go and create your design using Canva free elements or elements from other sites, and then you to share and Template link. If you're not seeing it there, you can also go to C O and Templateink. And then you would go and create your template link. If this didn't already have a template link live, it would say, do you want to create one? You would say yes. And then this is the link that you would provide in the PDF that you give to people, which when they click on that link will then look like this, and it will allow them to press this button to say, use this template for a new design. Let's also talk about the presentation of your design. So you can use some mock up options within Canva, and a great place to start is to actually just look at template mockup and then see all of these different options in here because there's lots of really good ones that you can utilize to present your digital asset in a way that makes it seem a little bit more tangible, and little flat lays like this are always really popular. But one little hack that I wanted to show you is if you head on over to elements and you look at shadow overlay, it will allow you to bring a little bit more of a three dimensional feel to these types of templates so they don't just look really flat. Now, as I move this around, you'll see it snapping into place of the other images, so you need to hold down command while you're doing this so that it just places it on top of your assets, and that makes it really nice and three dimensional and gives it a bit more of a luxury feel. Now, lastly, let's talk about some print on demand options, and I've included some resources around this in your course guide, but I'm just using Print full here to demonstrate, and we're going to be using my Bkind to your creative mind, graphic that we created in the AI section of the course. Of course, this is a bare minimum version of this. It's not in super high quality. I didn't download it at super high quality, and I didn't save it at super high quality because I'm not actually looking to print this. But just to sort of show you, if you save a transparent design from within Canva or elsewhere, you can essentially use print on demand options to then sell your designs in a physical format where you don't actually handle the products. So you can hook up a shop like Printify or Printful with something like an Etsy shop where the orders come in through Etsy or through your on site, but they get fulfilled by these print on demand suppliers. So they do all the shipping and handling and all you have to do is a little bit of customer service, usually. So, as I said, this is just scratching the surface. If it's something you're interested in, I would definitely do more research, but hopefully that has been helpful in introducing you to the topic of selling your designs. And in your course guide, you're also going to find resources and tools that are specifically focused on Etzlistings that will show you how much an Etsy shop is making. And that doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna be setting up an Etsy shop. It just means that if you're planning on creating a product in a particular category, even on your own website or somewhere outside of Etzy, I think these tools can be really helpful because it'll still tell you, Is this profitable? Is this something that's actually likely to make me money? Because if you see an established Etsy shop that's making $10 a month, then you probably know, Well, this is going to be a tricky sell, even on my own website. Whereas if you see one that's making 100 grand a month, you're like, Oh, okay, this is a profitable area for me to get into. So I love analysis tools that allow you to peek into other people's businesses. So definitely make sure to check that out in your course Guide, and I will see you in the next lesson.