Getting Started with Canva

Before we do anything else, we’re going to get you set up in Canva.  If you already have an account, you can skip the signup process. Otherwise, in this section, we’ll walk you through signing up for a free Canva account and outline the differences between free and paid accounts so you can consider if an upgrade is worth it for you.

Signing Up for a Free Account

If you already have a Canva account, you can just double check that you’re logged in at this point and move onto the next step.  If you don’t have a Canva account, follow the steps below, or check out the video to watch us signing up for our very own Dissin Design Team account.

To Sign Up for an Account

  • Visit: https://www.canva.com
  • In the top right-hand corner, you’ll see two buttons: “Login” or “Sign Up”. If you need an account, click “Sign Up”
  • A box will pop up, and you can choose to create an account using google, Facebook or apple. Choosing to sign in with one of those accounts will be the easiest (since you won’t need a separate password), but if you’d rather, you can choose to sign up via email (which we will show you in the video).
  • If you choose to login with a service like google or Facebook, just follow the prompts to connect those accounts.
  • If you choose to sign up via email, you’ll be asked to enter your email, choose a password and then confirm your account by pasting a code that is emailed to your chosen email.
  • Once you’ve completed the signup, you can start creating your designs.

Choosing Between Canva & Canva Pro

When you’re a small business or a solopreneur, the less you need to spend on software, the better on your bottom line.  With that being said, if you plan on making a lot of graphics and content through Canva you might be wondering if a pro account is something you should consider.

It might surprise you to know that we use a free account.  It does exactly what we need it to do, without all the bells and whistles. However, we also have access to pro-tools that you might not, which make it easier to fine tune graphics and create elements outside of Canva and then just import them back in.  So, since both the free account and pro account have their advantages, let’s talk about some of the big differences.

Templates

There are 250,000 odd free templates that come with Canva for all the different design types that they offer, so there’s really no shortage of options out there.  You get a little more than double that selection with the premium version, so if you want ALL the templates imaginable, you’ll need to upgrade, but 250,000 for free isn’t anything to sneeze at.

Stock Photos & Videos

There is a surprisingly large library of free photos and videos available through Canva for free.  You can also supplement that by uploading your own content and using some free stock photo sites to expand your library.  If you do choose to upgrade through, you won’t need to look anywhere else for stock photos and videos, the libraries available to you are basically limitless.

Branding Kits

Canva offers a neat feature that allows you to create a Branding Kit.  Basically, what that means is that you’re able to upload a logo or two, create a color palette that compliments it and standardize your fonts and text styles, so that every graphic you’re creating looks consistent.  In the free version you can create one palette, but that’s the extent without an upgrade.  Still the single palette will help you in keeping your colors consistent.

Content Planner

Another really fun feature in Canva (especially if you could be better at posting consistently) is the Content Planner.  The feature is only available through a paid account and it allows you to create graphics for different days, and visually see how much content you’ve created for the week or month.  As a cool bonus feature, it also highlights some key days that are prime for social media interaction and hashtags such as “Random Act of Kindness Day”, which allows you to create content to interact with those days.

Folders

This is one feature that makes us want to upgrade sometimes.  With Canva Free, you can only have one additional folder to store all your designs.  With the pro version, you’re able to create as many folders as you need, which makes sorting and organizing content A LOT simpler.

Storage Space

The free version of Canva gives you a ton of space, ringing in at 5GB.  However, the upgraded version offers you 100GB, so if you plan on creating a ton of designs and don’t want to lose the original fines eventually, you may want to consider the upgrade, but for most small businesses and solopreneurs 5GB should be more than enough to work with.

Magic Resize

Picture it: you build a graphic, only to discover part of it is going to be cut off when Instagram square crops. What do you do?  Magic Resize.  Canva offers a fun feature that you can use on any graphic called Magic Resize.  It’s only available in the premium version, but it basically lets you take one design and quickly alter it to suit any size you need.

Background Remover

This is a feature worth $149/year if you sell products.  The background remover is a one click way to cut out the focal point of any image, which lets you place it on different backgrounds or on top of photos, etc.  We remove backgrounds using Photoshop and years of training, while Canva removes backgrounds in seconds, without any of that jazz. It doesn’t get it perfect every time, but more often than not, it does a job that rivals a pro, with this feature.

Animations

If you plan on making videos (yes, you can do that), animated GIFs, editing IG reels, and so on, some of the premium animations might start to look like a feature worth having.  You get a pretty decent selection of animations to start out in the free version, but you get more than double the number with an upgrade.

So, is it Worth the Upgrade?

The premium version is pretty great. There’s a ton of value for the upgrade fee (which is $149/year); but the free version is also pretty awesome.

It really comes down to what you need out of it. If you don’t care about removing the background on images or having a ton of storage space, the free version might be fine, but if you want to make a million folders and have access to a billion tons of content, then you might want to consider the upgrade.  The good news is, if you’re still questioning, you can get a free trial for 30 days of Canva Pro to see if it will work for you.

Gathering Your Materials

Now that we have an account setup to create in, we’re going to want to make sure that we have everything we need in order to start designing.  In cooking it’s called Mise en Place which essentially means putting things in place or gathering them.  There’s no official word for it in design, but it’s an essential step, which will help you not only to make better graphics, but to stress less as you’re doing it.

We’ve included a checklist for you to go through before you move onto the next section. Go through it quickly, just to make sure you’re ready to rock and roll (and no one is going to have to pause to call their logo designer for a better copy).

If you’re making images for your brand, try to get some pictures that are personal. Stock photos are fine, but you at least want to supplement them with real images of you, your business and what you’re about.  Also don’t forget about video.  Take 5 minutes and record your studio setup, or a clip of you recording your new gig.  Take a quick clip of your new product or just you saying hello to your followers.  As you get better at it and start doing it more, you’ll start to get your sea legs and before long, you’ll be a pro at gathering your own content.

For the time being though, if you don’t have a lot of your own content, you can always use stock photos. Canva already has 250,000+ free resources built in, so you might also want to take a peek through there, but we’ve also included some of our favorite free stock photo websites in the resource section at the end of this course, if you want to check that out too.

Canva offers a wide selection of free fonts, but won’t allow you to upload your own, unless you’ve upgraded to their premium version.  Even if you’re using the free account however, you should be able to find something complimentary to your brand.

When you had your logo designed (especially if we created it), you should have been given a list of the font names that were used to create your design – unless it was hand lettered.  If you have that guide and you can find the name of your fonts in Canva, you’re off and out of this section, but if you need a little more help – stick around.

For those of you still reading, don’t worry too much, once we have some standardized fonts in place, we’ll use them to make basically a makeshift branding guide of your own so that you can just use that when you’re making graphics!

To Setup Your Makeshift Branding Guide

  • From your Canva (https://canva.com/) home screen, choose a post type (anything is fine), we’re going to use an Instagram post for the tutorial.
  • Drag a copy of your logo onto the Canva (having the logo to reference will make matching fonts a lot simpler. To do that…
    • You can simply drag your logo onto the canvas, move it around the area you’d like and move onto the next step. Or…
    • Click on UPLOADS on the left-hand menu (dark gray), click UPLOAD MEDIA and search for your image on your computer. You can also upload from Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook or Instagram if you’d rather.
  • Once you have your logo on the canvas, make it large enough to see, but leave yourself space and then click on TEXT on the left-hand menu.
  • You can either click on ADD A HEADING or you can click and drag it onto the canvas where you want it.
  • Once you have your heading, click on the far-left box in the top menu (it’ll likely say OPEN SANS). This will load your font options and get you ready for the next section!

Are you finding searching for fonts tedious? Let us create a branding guide from your logo for you! We’ll outline the fonts used, complimentary free fonts and a color guide for just $199. If you mention this book, we’ll offer it to you for just $150

Finding a Font Similar to Yours

You’re welcome to scroll through Canva with a cup of tea one night and just hunt for a few fonts that match with your logo, but we’re going to walk you through a slightly simpler way to find a font that will match yours well.

Describe It

Take a look at your logo.  Do the letters have feet? Then the font is a serif font.  If the bottoms of the letters are smooth like our logo, you have a san-serif font.  If you have a script font, or a handwritten looking font, that falls into a category all of its own.

Once you’ve determined the style of font, then you can start to describe it a bit.  Look at the letters and think of a few words that describe them.  For our logo, we’d say it’s:

Narrow or Condensed, Square, Sports, Sci-Fi, Thin.

Those descriptors let us search for our font, or fonts that may be similar, which will help you find something that matches a lot sooner than just scrolling through all the categories in Canva.

If you’re lucky (like us) and you know the name of your font, you can also check to see if it’s available, just by searching the name.

A Note on Using Font Identifiers

Someone is going to suggest this, so we’ll talk a little bit about these quickly. Font identifiers let you upload your logo and then digitally match the characteristics to fonts in their database.  The problem is that font identifiers only match your logo to that database, so if they don’t sell it – they don’t suggest it.

That said, they can be a very useful too – but not in a project like this, because Canva has a database of their own fonts that you can use, so even if you absolutely identify it, a paid font isn’t likely to show up in Canva, making the whole thing a swing and a miss for this kind of project.

Finding a Font that Compliments Yours

If you’re like us and are a one font logo (even if you’re not) you may have no idea how to choose a second to compliment your brand.

Every designer here will give you different advice, but our advice is this:  find a really legible and unique font to use for titles and headings, then find a script font to lighten the mood in imaging, lastly find a plain and casual font that you can use for body text and smaller things.  Three fonts is all you need for design bliss.

If your logo is a script font or a hard to read font, then this step is about finding something more legible for your compliment, but if you’re like us and you have a pretty slick typeface, then we’re going to be on the hunt for a complimentary script (and small font).

Like I mentioned above, if you know what you’re looking for – hunting for it in Canva won’t quite be as much of a chore.

Create a Branding Card

If you don’t have a branding guide, then we’re going to turn the canvas that we’ve been working on into one that you can make and save in your Cavna files for the next time you want to make something.

In addition to the 3 fonts you found, we’re also going to add 3 color choices to that as well and then save it so that you can always come back to see your fonts, your colors and your basic style guide.

To Finish Off Your Style Guide

  • Select ELEMENTS and then choose the square.
  • Drag it onto the canvas and size it to fit your remaining space (use the round handles)
  • Copy and paste two more squares and arrange them in the space
  • In the top menu, choose the color picker and start searching for a color that matches

Not to be harsh here, but you can not use a logo that you saved from the pictures in your Facebook profile.  You also won’t be able to use the badly cut-out logo that you saved in 1997.  If you don’t have a proper logo file, please have it redone.  It’s going to be one of the best investments that you make.

Low quality, small, pixelated logos communicate a less than stellar message about your brand right off the bat and frankly, you’re too good for that – so even if you want to keep it the same, have a designer (like us) retrace it and recreate it so that you have some good working files.

If you’ve recently had it designed, reach out to your designer and ask for a large (2000px wide) transparent PNG to use.  That size will do you for everything from business cards to graphics like we’re going to make.

Thinking caps on, folks.  We’re going to need to brainstorm a bunch of ideas, so that we have topics when it comes time to create the graphics.  To get your creative juices flowing, we’ve created a worksheet to help you generate some ideas.  You can download the free worksheet here.

Once you’ve filled out the worksheet, even if you have only a couple for some of the sections, you should have enough content to get started making some graphics.   In our sheet, we wrote that “Lightening Fast Service” is one of our greatest attributes.  So that’s what we’re going to put on our graphic when we move to the next section and start digging into making our first graphic in Canva.

Quick Review

Before you start designing, make sure you have everything together with this quick review.

  • How many graphics are you going to make?
  • Do you have content for each post?
  • Have you found a font that compliments or matches your brand?
  • Have you gathered at least one image/texture/background/video for each post?
  • Do you have a high-quality, transparent version of your logo on hand?

Making Your First Graphic

You should have everything that you need pulled together now, so it’s just a matter of taking all of that information and content and finding a beautiful way to display it.  This next section is going to show you how to actually use Canva, as well as provide you with tips and tricks that will help you to create visually appealing layouts.  Shall we?

Canva offers more sizes for graphics than you could ever need.  In general, we tend to design all of our graphics for social media in a square format (made for Instagram) and then just crop for the other channels when and where necessary. So, we’re going to work with the Instagram Post size, for this tutorial.  If you’d like to make something else, go right ahead – it won’t make much of a difference as we design.

To get started, let’s pick the topic that your graphic is going to be about from your Content Worksheet.

For this example, we’re going to choose “Lightning Fast Service” as our topic, so we might search for an image that either shows something being designed, lightning, or something that visually represents speed.

Make a quick little list for yourself on a scratch pad (or in your head) of what might visually represent or support your text.  Once you have it, it’s time to set our background and choose an image.

To Set Your Background Color

You can decide to make the background of your graphic either an image or a color. To start, we’re going to show you how to set a color.

  • From your graphic dashboard, click in the center of your graphic.
  • You’ll see a rainbow square on the top pop up.
  • Click the rainbow to open the background color selector
  • You can choose from premade color palettes or you can click the plus icon near the top (under DOCUMENT COLORS) to choose your own using the color selector.

To Set Your Background Image

Background images are always a good decision.  You can use the composition of the image itself to help guide you on where to place text and put in other design elements.  Solid colors are fine, but images tend to look a little more luxe. So, to set, crop and adjust your background image…

  • On the left-hand black bar, click PHOTOS. If you don’t see it, click MORE and then PHOTOS (Canva has a tendency to move around the menu, based on how you use it)
  • Search for a photo that represents your topic. So, for us, we’re searching for something that supports the idea of lightning fast service. That could be lightning, something that communicates speed or some sort of design. Use the search bar at the top to find images that work for you.
  • As you scroll through the images, you’ll see a small gold crown on some of the photos – that indicates premium (so if you’re on the free version you have to skip over them), but there are plenty of awesome free photos available.
  • Once you choose an image, click on it and hold your left mouse button. Drag it onto the canvas and towards the left side. As you move your mouse towards the edge, you’ll see it fill the space.  That makes it a background image.  If you don’t want that, hover until you see it smaller and then let go.
  • Once you have your image on the page, you can use the handles around it to resize. The flat handles crop and the circular handles resize.  If you’re working with a background photo; double click on it to adjust the crop.

We chatted before about making sure that you have a high-quality logo with a transparent background to use on your graphics, but I know some of you might not have been able to find a good quality version.

Don’t worry too much if you weren’t able to get a good copy of your logo, there are a few tricks to help you minimize the appearance of a lower quality graphic.

Tips for a Low-Quality Logo

If the image is small and a bit blurry, try to keep it on the smaller size and in one of the lower corners, so it’s present but not prominent.   If there’s a background to the logo, try adding a lower bar to your graphic (see our example), that will also let you keep the logo smaller and maybe add some text with your website or another call to action.

Using a High-Quality Logo

If you do have a great copy of your logo, the entire canvas is up for grabs! You might try featuring your logo prominently in a few graphics with just your website or another call to action, or you can layer nicely into a background image or your design.

Finding a place is a lot easier with a higher quality logo, so drag it around a bit and see where it makes the most sense in your design.

Choosing Your Color Scheme

If you worked through creating a Makeshift Branding guide, or you have a Professional Branding Guide, there’s likely no reason to worry about colors, since you’ll already know the predominant colors that you want to use in your graphics.

If you don’t have either of those – I’d recommend popping back up to here (link to branding guide) and working through that section quickly.

Once you have your colors chosen and ready to be used, you need to then find a balance between the colors in your brand and the images that you’re using in your graphic.

For example, we used a lemon yellow, a bright cyan and a dark blue as out primary color choice. We aren’t going to want to use all of those colors in a single graphic and since in our example we choose a lightening bolt, then it’s likely best to focus on the yellow color from our brand.

Once you’ve chosen a main color from your branding, you’ll supplement all of the other colors from the images that you’ve chosen, and Canva helps you do that by recognizing color palettes from your images.

To View Recommended Colors

  • Click your item that needs a color (text, elements, etc.)
  • Click the color palette box in the top menu at the far left
  • You’ll see each image that’s used on the canvas has a set of color options next to it. That’s where Canva automatically pulls the main colors from each image, which gives you a safe palette to work from.
  • You can also try and create custom colors by click on the box with the plus sign at the top of the color palette window.

Once you have all of your elements in place, it’s just a matter of moving them around and playing with things like transparency (opacity), color and placement.  Don’t be afraid to make a duplicate of your design if you’ve almost got it where you want it and just play around with the copy.  That lets you experiment, without the fear that you’ll have lost your design forever.

To Make a Copy

Just above your design you’ll see two pages with a plus sign in the middle. If you click that, it will make a copy of your design.  You can use that to make another design based on the first one, or you can use that to fine tune your design without having to worry.

Common Problems with Designs

In the video we’ve created some of the most common design problems and we’ll work to solve them as you watch.  Most times your design can be leveled up by removing something, changing an image or just moving around your elements within the space.  Below are some of the most common issues and some quick fixes to help you create beautiful designs!

It looks cluttered
If your design is looking cluttered, try reducing some of the things that are in it. If you have a lot of text, scrap the background image in favor of a single color or choose a background that doesn’t have a featured image, but has just a great texture or something more abstract.

It looks plain or basic
You can usually fix something that looks plain by changing the colors slightly. If you picked a lemon yellow, try to darken it a bit, or make it a bit more orange or green. Slight variations on colors can make all the difference in taking something from plain to beautiful.  Designer’s tip: Never use plain black, use almost blacks like dark, dark blue or dark charcoal gray – it will make your design pop and add some sophistication.

It just looks off
Sometimes an image just doesn’t belong. If you find your design just doesn’t look right no matter how many times you move things around, try changing the image (make a copy if you want to) but change it – that is usually the answer to a design that just won’t come together.

Once you’ve created a design (or several) that you’re happy with, it’s time to download your creations.  Canva offers you a few file formats to choose from.  We always recommend downloading your image as PNG just because the quality can be a bit better than a JPG. Once you’ve chosen your file type, all you need to do is hit the download button.  In the free version of Canva, you won’t be able to change the size or adjust the quality, but you can download and that’s all that really matters.

Once you’ve saved them on your computer, you’re ready to start scheduling them to your social media channels!

Quick Review

Before you start designing, make sure you have everything together with this quick review.

  • How many graphics are you going to make?
  • Do you have content for each post?
  • Have you found a font that compliments or matches your brand?
  • Have you gathered at least one image/texture/background/video for each post?
  • Do you have a high-quality, transparent version of your logo on hand?

Wrapping Up

That concludes our mini course on creating your own social media graphics.  If you’ve made a few now and you’re sick and tired of working in Canva, don’t forget that we offer Social Media Survival Kits, which give you 20 handmade, custom graphics that you can use across any of your social channels.  For a limited time, we also include free social media banners.

Want to upgrade your social media survival kit? For an extra $100, we’ll design your kit in your own Canva account so that you can edit and update your graphics yourself!

Thanks so much for learning with us! It was fun showing you the Canva ropes!

The good times aren’t over just yet.  We’ve included some of our favorite places to search out free resources to help you create stellar social media graphics!

Free & LOW-COST Stock Photo Resources

All of the resources featured below have no attribution required licenses, meaning that you don’t need to link back to the photographer (although credit as always welcome), and you’re free to use, edit and alter the images as you please. We’ve included the link to the licensing agreements with each resource so you can review for yourself.

Pexels | Free Video & Images
https://www.pexels.com/
https://www.pexels.com/license/

Unsplash  | Free Images
https://unsplash.com/
https://unsplash.com/license

Pixabay | Photos, Illustrations, Videos, Music and More
https://pixabay.com/
https://pixabay.com/service/license/

Stock Snap | Free Images
https://stocksnap.io/
https://stocksnap.io/license

ReShot | Free Icons, Illustrations, Photos
https://www.reshot.com/
https://www.reshot.com/license/

Foodies Feed | Free Culinary Images
https://www.foodiesfeed.com/
https://www.foodiesfeed.com/license/

Gratisography | Strange & Wacky Free Images
https://gratisography.com/
https://gratisography.com/license/

Focastock | Videos & Images
https://focastock.com/
https://focastock.com/license/