How to use Canva - A beginners guide

 

Search in video

- What's up guys, Ziovo here, and welcome to a

brand new video on the channel.

Now in today's video I'm going to be teaching you

how to use Canva in ten minutes.

Canva is a free publishing software

where you can make a bunch of different things

such as banners, fliers, YouTube icons,

thumbnails, and much, much more.

What's great about Canva is that it's completely

free and you can get a lot out of it in the free version.

And I would argue that for making YouTube content

it could even be better than Photoshop

because it's very simple and easy to use,

and has a lot of pre-built content.

Now if you guys want to see more videos like this

where I cover an entire software in

ten minutes in a short tutorial

let me know down below in the comments.

From now on I'm going to be uploading

one to two videos per week, so be

sure to stay tuned for more in the future.

And with that being said, let's get started.

(funky music)

- So the first thing you want to do is go on canva.com

and click on sign up to create your free account.

Now once you've made your account

you can see that you're going to be

given a lot of different templates

that you can start off with.

We're going to go to file, and create a new design.

Now we're going to be using custom dimensions,

but as you can see you can choose

from a variety of different templates.

And we're going to be making the width 1280

(clicking noise)

and the height 720 to make our thumbnail.

And we're going to click on create new design.

Now the top tool bar is used to modify your files

so you can resize, go to file, you can change the margins

as well as save and download your file,

or you can also download it by clicking

this button over here or by going to

publish and then choosing the variety of

options you have at the top.

Now once you start selecting different

content on the main canvas, which is over here

the top tool bar will be changing

according to what you have selected.

Right underneath the top tool bar you'll

also have the option to add notes, add a new page,

as well as copy the page that you currently have.

And on the left side of the page

this is where you are going to be accessing

all of the different kinds of content

which you're going to be adding to your main canvas

to make the design that you're trying to create.

Now, if you wanted to use a template

all you have to do is click on the template

and then go through whichever page you want to utilize,

click on it, and it'll automatically show up.

Now once you're template shows up you can hover

over the different components of this canvas.

To see the components that your template

is made out of and you can click

on each component to edit it.

I'm just going to undo that because

we are going to make our design from scratch.

So once you understand how templates work

what you can also do is go to photos

and add a lot of the content

that Canva already has available.

Some of these are free, some of them you're

going to pay a royalty or access the pro version.

We're going to be making a thumbnail

for a cooking video, so we're going

to be using our own image.

So you can go ahead and go to Google Images,

I wanted to find a pie on a table,

so I Googled, "pie on table" and I found this image.

So I'm simply going to copy it

and paste it to my canvas.

Now, once you have an item selected on Canva

you can see that the top toolbar has changed

and you have a variety of different options

on how you can modify the content that's selected.

You can add various effects to it,

you can add a filter as well as change the colors.

So we're going to add the Dalliance filter

to change the hue a little bit.

We can also adjust different components

of the content by each of its variables.

So I'm going to go ahead and click on adjust

and then make the image a little bit darker,

because it's going to be the very back of the thumbnail.

We can also crop it, but I don't need to crop it

so I'm going to click on done and if you

wanted to flip it, we could also flip it,

duplicate it, and also align it to the page.

Now on the very right, you have the option to

change the transparency of an image.

So, if you were going to do some text, for example,

on top of an image, but want to see the

image behind it, you can shift this bar.

You can also go ahead here and link the image

to any external links if you're making

a PDF or brochure or resume.

And then you also have the option to lock an image.

So what locking does is that once you're done

with editing an image and you don't

want to accidentally click on it, you can lock it.

And then finally if you wanted to delete it

you can press the delete button.

All I'm going to do to this image is hold shift

and drag outwards so that the image

is the same size as the canvas.

But an even faster way you can make

your image is the background image

is simply right clicking and clicking on

"set image as background" and there we go,

it's automatically been fit

to actually match the background.

Now we're going to be adding elements

to this thumbnail that we've created

by going into the elements option.

Okay, I want you to ignore the trending elements,

but what you can see is there's a lot

of different elements that you can add

to Canva that are already available.

Some of which are even animated

and they're all free to use, as you can see,

because they don't have the pro icon.

So, this is a really powerful feature.

I'm going to go ahead and search "pie"

because I want a pie icon in my thumbnail

and I'm going to click enter and

as you can see this pie looks delicious,

so I'm simply going to click on it

and it's going to show up over here,

and because this is a Canva element

now if I look at my top editing tool bar

I can actually modify the different colors of the pie.

So if I was making a darker pie

I could go to the color over here

and I could go to new color and make it even darker.

And so this is a very easy way to edit images

and elements already inside of Canva.

Now I'm going to go ahead and shrink this pie icon,

I'm going to rotate it, which is available

within the image once it's selected,

and then duplicate it.

And so, now we're going to go ahead

and look at the elements once again

and we're going to add a shape this time.

So I want to add a square, which is thankfully free.

And I'm going to change this box so that

it is going to cover the left half.

And then this is where I'm going to also add my text.

Now one thing I want to do is,

I want to bring these pie icons in front of the square

so I'm going to go ahead, click on it,

and then I'm going to click on the second pie

by holding shift, I'm going to right click

and click on bring to front,

and because each component is layered,

it's going to bring the pies to the front.

Now I'm also going to change the color of this

rectangle because I think gray is a bit bland.

So once again I can click on the component

and the component settings come up at the top.

I'm going to click on the color,

and I'm going to make the color the same dark red

as the pie filling, and as you can see

it automatically saves your most recently used colors.

Now I'm going to go ahead and add some text.

Now I think this font looks really cool,

and if I wanted to reference to it later on

I can click on these three dots

to get the name of the font.

And to add it to my thumbnail I'm going

to go ahead and click on it

and it's going to auto-populate.

As you can see right now, the text is broken down

into two components, so I'm going to go ahead,

select the bottom component and delete it.

And then I'm going to change the text of the main component

and type in "How to Bake a Pie".

If I want to center align this text

I would go ahead, press control + a

or just highlight it all and then

I'm going to go ahead to alignment

and it automatically shifts through the three

different alignment options there are.

(chill music)

And as you can see if I resize this text box

as well it will automatically adjust.

Now I think that this text is also

a little bit close together,

so I can go ahead, select it, go to spacing,

and then modify the line height

so it's more spread apart like so.

And then if I want to drag this text

what I can do is I can just drag it like so.

And as you can see, there's alignment grids

already in place when I move this

so I can align it just by dragging to the red box.

So as you can see the text and the

square are now aligned.

Now another way you can align different components

is by clicking on the first component,

clicking on the second component,

and as you can see the top component tool bar changes,

and then you can either group the items

if you wanted to make them one item

or you can go to position and you can

go ahead and you can top align the text to the box,

but we're going to go ahead and middle align it

and it's already center aligned.

Now Canva also has some other elements that you can add,

which we're not going to be adding to our thumbnail,

but we're going to be going over.

So you can go ahead and click on the music tab

to add a bunch of different songs.

If you are making a presentation

and wanted to add a video background

you can also go to videos

and see all of the video content that's available.

You add it the same way, just by clicking on it

and then the settings for this video

will appear at the top, so you can crop it,

you can trim it if you only want the first

three seconds of the video for example,

and then hit done.

And then you can also go ahead

and modify the volume once again.

Now we're not done this thumbnail just yet,

I still want to add an icon of a baker on the right side,

so that the thumbnail grabs more attention.

So I'm going to go ahead and go to uploads

and upload all of my files.

You can do this as you go or what you can do

is just add them at the very beginning

so that it's much more efficient.

And I'm going to add this image of a chef.

And then I'm going to click on it

and it's going to show up on my thumbnail.

I could once again add and edit the image at the top

just like how I would with the icons

or any other image,

but there's nothing that I really want to add,

I'm just going to move it over here to the right side

and then make the icon larger,

and then drag it so it's aligned

with the text and the red rectangle.

Now, if there's certain content

that you actually like, such as certain photos,

and background videos, you can actually like them

and then access them where your likes are.

And then finally, if you click on more

you can also add other external components,

for example, going on the YouTube video

you would just search for the video, once again.

There are some interesting things trending,

but we're not going to be adding any YouTube videos.

If you go to file, and save to folder

then you can add this to the folder

of your mock-ups and whatnot.

We don't have a folder, so we're not going to do that

and instead we're going to download this right now.

You can download it by clicking

on this download button on the top right,

or you can click on publish and click on download.

Now we're going to download it

as a PNG at it's regular size,

but if you wanted to make smaller or larger

you can drag over here.

We do not want a transparent background

because it's a thumbnail and it's a very small file

so we're not going to compress it

but you have the option to do so.

And then we're going to click on download.

And there you have it, hopefully now

you have a firm grasp on how Canva works

and you can use it to make your own designs.

Now obviously Canva isn't as robust as Photoshop

you can't, use a magic wand tool or add drop shadows,

but I think it's great at what it does,

which is creating content for publishing.

So hopefully this video did help you out

and if it did, be sure to hit that like button down below.

And as always, thanks for watching,

my name is Ziovo and I'm signing out.

(chill music)