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

Table Of Content

• Canva's extensive suite of features helps your photos pop
• What are the paid-for Canva options?
• How to create a custom PowerPoint template to use or share with others
• How to use Canva: A simple guide to the graphic design platform
• How to use Canva for professional graphic design
• 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

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.

Canva's extensive suite of features helps your photos pop

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.

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What are the paid-for Canva options?

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.

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

We're creating a standard Instagram post, so that's what we click on to see the templates available to us. Along the top of the screen, you will see trending search terms, in this instance coronavirus, food, sale, birthday, and summer. There is also a color menu you can click on to narrow down the search results to search your preferred palette.

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

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.

All the design content on the platform will be unlocked for you to use as often as you like, which means you'll have unlimited access to over 420,000 templates with new designs added daily. You can also enjoy working with more than 75 million premium stock photos, videos, audio, and graphics. When you've finalized your design, look to the top left of your screen for your sharing and downloading options.

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

(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.

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.

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.

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.

Start this process by clicking on the "Elements" menu option to the left of your screen. The next thing we're going to change are the colors on the page, as this works in a similar way. Click on your screen when there is a design element, such as a shape or patch of color, to highlight this element. You will see a blue box appear around the selected element and a small corresponding square of color at the top of your screen. They allow you to change the font type, size, and how the text is aligned, and add effects such as drop shadows and glows.

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."