What Is Canva? a Guide to the Graphic Design Platform

Table Of Content

• How to change the background color of your photos in Photoshop to make your images more striking
• How to curve text in Canva's graphic design software using built-in tools
• Canva's extensive suite of features helps your photos pop
• How to create a custom PowerPoint template to use or share with others
• What is Canva? A guide to the graphic design platform's features and capabilities

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

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.

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

Canva's 2024 design trends: Pixelation, collages, and more – adobo Magazine - adobo Magazine

Canva's 2024 design trends: Pixelation, collages, and more – adobo Magazine.

Posted: Mon, 08 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

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.

Canva's extensive suite of features helps your photos pop

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.

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.

What are the paid-for Canva options?

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.

How to create a custom PowerPoint template to use or share with others

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.

How to use Canva for professional graphic design

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.

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.

(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.

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

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.

The "free forever" features include more than 250,000 templates, over 100 design types (social media posts, presentations, letters, and more), and hundreds of thousands of photos, font styles, and graphics. You can even upload your own photos and add them to Canva's templates using a drag and drop interface. It's like having a basic version of Photoshop that's free and doesn't require extensive photo editing knowledge to use. Obviously, paying to use Canva Pro will get you even more functionality.

All users with free accounts can also enjoy 5GB of cloud storage and the ability to invite friends to your Canva "team" to collaborate and comment on designs in real-time. Each free team can have up to 3,000 members, and you can create up to 20 free teams. One option that's worth looking at in more detail is the ability to change the color of the text. If you click the underlined capital A menu option to the top middle of your screen, your text color options appear on the left. Once uploaded, select the image you want to use from your Uploads area. You can even pay to have some of these professionally printed via the Canva Print service.