Canva Tutorial - How to get Started with Canva 2021 - Part 1

Canva Tutorial

Canva Tutorial - How to get Started with Canva 2021

Introduction

If you want to create beautiful engaging graphics for your social media or business but don't want to spend too much time learning a complicated app or hiring an expensive designer.

I got you in Article, I'm going to teach you how to use canva. let's do this hi my lovely people it's Abdul Ahad and welcome back to my site where i share super action ideas on content creation for entrepreneurs and creatives and in article I'm sharing how to use canva in around 10 minutes to start designing your own graphics for social media or other business purposes.

If you've not heard about canva it's a free graphic design tool perfect for creating social media graphics presentations posters or other visual content it's so much easier than photoshop and many other graphic design apps and gives you tons of beautifully designed templates to transform your brand image when you Read this article you'll learn all the basics to start designing by yourself and if you need an in-depth tutorial I've got one published on my Site already so you can check it out here all right on to canva.

Let's Get Started

First let's go to canva.com and sign up for a free canva account click on this button here and you can sign up with google Facebook or sign up with your email you can also use my link down below to start off with canva pro to test out some of the amazing features and it's going to give you a free account for 30 days.

So this is what the home page looks like you have the top panel with various navigation tabs to showcase different kind of functionalities and then there's the search bar which you can use to quickly find what you need and the account settings in here in the left panel you'll find your designs folders and other personal resources and in the middle you've got multiple canva templates in different categories like social media events marketing documents etc. 

Canva Tutorial - Canva Homepage

What I would start off with is setting up your brand kit with your brand colors fonts logos if you obviously already have them the brand kit is a kind of a pro option only so if you don't have pro then you have to choose the right colors and fonts manually each time.

But it shouldn't be a big problem because canva shows you the recently used fonts and colors when you're designing and of course it's an extremely useful feature to make your progress effortless so start off here so once that's set up we'll go ahead and create our first design so you can either create a design by hitting this button search for a particular type of graphic in the search bar or click on the ones that canva recommends already i'm going to go for the button here and you can use custom dimensions or choose a specific project like an instagram post for example and it will automatically pick the best dimensions for you.

Canva Templets 

So naming your design first is quite a good habit so let's do it now you can just click in here on the top and start typing whatever you want so i'll start with spring break instagram post and that's done so as with the home page the editor is quite similar in the layout you've got the top panel with the different navigation options and the exporting options in here the left panel with the different functionalities and the main editor which i'll go through while we start designing so you can start designing by using one of the canva templates created for this dimension specifically from this panel to the left in here or you can start from scratch which I'm going to do just now so let's change the background color.

First, I'll select the background go to the top and here and click background color and then you've got the different options so you've got default colors proposed by canva you've got the main color palette which is actually my palette which I added to the brand kit at the very beginning then you've got document colors which displays all the colors that have been used in this particular design and then you've got the new color option which if you click on it it shows up this little screen in here and you can play around like this to choose something that you like or enter a specific hex code.

I'll go with main color palette in here and use my baby blue one so let's add some photos to the design first so as you can see when you go to the photos it displays the different trending ones and when i scroll down i actually don't see anything that I would like to go for so let's search for something springy because it's a spring break post let's scroll down and as you can see when you hover over an image it shows you if it's a pro element or if it's a free one like this one so if you've got a pro element that means that you'll actually have to pay for it if you don't have a pro account so let's scroll a bit further and i actually like this image in here.

so I'm thinking i can actually use it as a background as well so let's rotate it it shows you the 90 degrees in here let's drag it by the corners and this now acts as a background just like this and when you click on it again you see that actually kind of cropped to the background in here and obviously when it's selected you've got the different top options at the top as well so you've got the different effects which you can remove the background which wouldn't really apply to this particular image you've got filters you can adjust the brightness and various different sliders in here you can crop it or you can flip it as well so i can flip it vertically or horizontally like this so next let's go and add some text to the design let's click in here in the left panel and as you can see i've got different fonts added from the brand kit but you can also use the pre set up font combinations from canva.

So let's see what I've recently used so let's use this one i actually really like the way it looks and how it flows with this particular post and as you can see when i clicked it added a group of different texts with different fonts so let's hit in here ungroup and that will separate all the different layers so you've got the this one in here with play for display you've got this one with glacial indifference and then this one with glacial difference but that's probably a different one so let's say happy spring break and you can actually make it bigger by dragging it like this or you can just adjust the size in here.

So let's select these two like this drag them down just to separate them from this particular one and i can actually make it more narrow in here and as you can see when I'm trying to move that particular one let's move this one to the bottom and here and this one in here i can actually just get rid of that bottom one like this and we can select the two and if you go to position um you can align elements perfectly using the pre-existing canva line elements so you can click on middle and that will take it straight to the middle but as you can see i have two elements selected so that one went to the middle as well.

so I can just drag it down in here like this and as you can see this solid line appears in the middle so that means i'm right where i need to be right centered in the position in here and let's change the color of this particular element so maybe let's go for this dark blue for my main palette and this one as well in here but this design lacks something so let's go to elements and find something that we can actually use so if i go to elements in here you've got the all the different types of elements that canva offers so you've got frames which you can put photos into you've got shapes we can which can add a bit of definition and the lines different lines as well. 

So let's maybe start with a line so i've added this line in here first off again let's change the color let's drag it down here and as you can see you've got different options for the line so you've got line weight in here let's make it thinner maybe not as thin but c3 and you've got the different types of lines in here so you can make it dash you can make it dot it you can make the ends of it a bit more rounded and you've got a classic line in here maybe let's put it at the top and here and you can just drag the ends of it to make it look a bit like this but actually i don't love this particular one.

So let's search for a different element so let's type in race to maybe find something like a sunshine something to add a bit more to the design but still keep it on theme and i actually really like this one so let's click on it it's got the completely wrong color so let's change the color and here you can make this nice blue in here but obviously it's a circular option so you can click crop and i can just make it half and this way I'll have a nice element like this to add on top of my design.

So let's put it in here like this and as you can see when i dragged it it actually kind of grabbed it and put it with this dashed line which means it's aligned with the element below which is the happy spring break text so this is how you would navigate in canva it's really intuitive and canva helps you out to align different elements photos perfectly let's play around with the colors i like to keep it quite monochromatic.

So let's stick with that particular one and you can select these two to maybe drag them a bit lower like this so let's say we want to make this design a bit more interesting so we can actually animate it so let's add animation if you click on animated here you see all the different types of animations that it can actually give you so you've got fade pan rise tumble drift all the different ones and some of them are only available for pro so let's choose fade for this one and if you click on here you can actually adjust how long you want this animation to last.

So I'll pick 10 seconds and you can view it like this in here I'm happy with this one so let's close it now and I'm ready to actually export it so if you want to export it as a regular post you can go to PNG this would be my go-to format to actually do it and you can just hit download and it will start start downloading in the bottom in here and if you want to export it so it shows the animation you would have to choose the mp4 video or maybe a gif.

But let's go for the suggested one in here let's download it and again you can see the mp4 video rendering and then you'll be able to download it brilliant so that's me done I've got the two different designs I've got one PNG file which is a simple graphic.

Or i can use the little video to maybe add a bit of oomph to my blog post if you want to know more about canva check out this comprehensive tutorial here and if you'd like to learn some of my top tips and tricks read this Article. 

Next, hit that like remain with our site and channel for more content like this thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here have a wonderful day and I'll see you next time.