How to use Canva: A simple guide to the graphic design platform

Table Of Content

• What are the paid-for Canva options?
• Canva's extensive suite of features helps your photos pop
• What is Canva? A guide to the graphic design platform's features and capabilities
• How to change the background color of your photos in Photoshop to make your images more striking
• How to use Canva for professional graphic design
• How to curve text in Canva's graphic design software using built-in tools

It's a graphic design platform lets you create everything from Instagram posts to business logos, for absolutely no cost. Using it is simple and painless thanks to all the preloaded templates, images, fonts, and graphics, and it offers a very well-designed, intuitive, user interface. All you need to use it is to sign up with Google, Facebook, or an email address.

What are the paid-for Canva options?

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To change the text element, simply click on it to highlight it.

Canva's extensive suite of features helps your photos pop

There are plenty of personal graphic design options on the Canva platform, as well. In some cases, you can save money by making your own personalized versions of products you'd normally have to buy. If you click on the small square, you'll see the same color menu appear as for the text color options, allowing you to choose from existing colors in your design, or add in fresh new ones.

What is Canva? A guide to the graphic design platform's features and capabilities

In addition, your cloud storage allowance will get upgraded to 100GB; you can save designs as templates for anyone in your Canva team to use; and you can schedule social media content to publish at certain times and dates. With all the templates and features available on Canva, it can feel overwhelming knowing where to begin. Their Design School, filled with free video courses on a wide range of topics, is a good place to start. Canva Pro is a paid premium version of Canva with added features. From basic cropping and straightening to adding textures and color correcting, Canva's beginner-friendly features make editing photos simple. You can add a textured background to give your photo more dimension, insert text to create your own meme, create a photo grid, blur your photo, and more.

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This opens the template in a new editing window, which has your design on the right of the screen, your editing options in a bar on the left of your screen, and your download and share options to the top right. In addition, there is the choice to create your own Instagram post from scratch using a blank template, but we're going to use one of the pre-made templates. To open a template for editing, simply click on it and then click "Use this template."

(You can select Pro photos to use in your design, but they will have a Canva watermark on them.) Alternatively, you can upload your own images from your computer. Canva is home to thousands of free, professionally designed templates that, thanks to their drag and drop interface, can be customized with just a few clicks. Simply upload your photos to Canva, drop them into the template of your choice, and save the file to your computer. From here you can keyword search for what you're looking for and select the free versions available. Alternatively, you can scroll down through the elements menu to see what's available.

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How to change the background color of your photos in Photoshop to make your images more striking

Hitting share lets you share the image with your Canva team members, to an email address, or you can generate a link to your creation. We're going to take you through how to create a basic social media post using a simple Canva template so you can see all these elements edited and changed from the template to the finished product. With the free version of Canva, you can create a plethora of posts for many social media platforms, meaning you can make professional-looking content even if what you're selling is just your personal brand.

How to use Canva for professional graphic design

Going "Pro" allows you to create a "Brand Kit" to upload your own fonts, brand color palette, and logos to use across the entire Canva platform. You’ll also get access to Canva's impressive "Magic Resize" tool, which, with a couple of clicks, allows you to change a post you've created for Twitter, for example, to a perfectly sized Facebook post. Other templates that professionals from all kinds of industries might find useful are presentations, invoices, business letterheads, logos, proposals, flyers, brochures, newsletters, and flyers, among many, many others.

How to curve text in Canva's graphic design software using built-in tools

If you click the three-dot "More" menu at the top right of your screen, you'll see even more advanced options to change the transparency of the text and where it is positioned on the design. Then you can overtype the pre-loaded text with your own choice of wording. Once you've clicked the text element, you'll also see all your text editing options appear along the top of your screen. The Canva concept came from Perkins, who realized there was a gap in the market for an easy-to-use graphic design platform. As a commerce and communications student at the University of Western Australia, Perkins was frustrated by how complicated and hard to learn mainstream design software was. You can create design content for the special occasions and memorable moments in your life using the free platform too.

With this free tool available to everyone, there is no excuse for sub-standard social media posts ever again. Below the "New color" picker tool, Canva gives you exact matches of colors that are in your design. This includes a selection of colors that already appear in your document, and even more cleverly, colors picked out from any image you're using, even if it's one you've uploaded yourself. On a basic level, you can use Canva's pre-made templates to make a business card, to create your resume, and to write professional-looking letters. Next, should this suit your design, you can add in some free icons and shapes.

You can click to change each element separately, including the background color, this way. As we've already explained, Canva's design process breaks things down into elements. To change the image element, you can click on the template's image and hit the delete key. Now, if you click on the Photos menu on the left, you can see the photography available to you within Canva.

For free Canva users, this is whether you want to download your creation as a PNG, JPG, PDF, or GIF file. Use the drop-down menu to change from the default PNG option. Once you've signed up for a Canva account, you're ready to start designing. From the home page, hover over the "Templates" menu and a window will pop up with popular options. Once you've made a Canva creation, the platform makes it very simple to download it to your computer, share it with others, and, in some cases, post it directly to other websites.

Canva is a free graphic design platform that allows you to easily create invitations, business cards, flyers, lesson plans, Zoom backgrounds, and more using professionally designed templates. You can do a keyword search to find a suitable image, select from your "Recently used" photos, or scroll through the trending images for inspiration. There are a generous amount of free options, as well as others only available to Canva Pro users.

If you haven't already, sign up to this fantastic free service and enjoy getting creative with a bit of DIY design. From here you can search for a color by keyword, or by RGB HEX color code in the search box at the top. Next down is a color picker button; if you click it, it will allow you to choose any hue from the pop-up color chooser window.

This includes shapes, arrows, lines, frames, stickers, and a whole, huge selection of themed graphics. Once you click on what you'd like to add, these will appear on your design. You can position them where you want them, resize them by grabbing a corner and making them larger or smaller, or in some cases look for that small color square at the top of the screen to change their color.