A Quick Guide on Canva
Some Useful Tips and Tricks to Make Graphic Design Tasks in Canva Even Easier and More Accessible
Canva is a platform for making graphic design tasks quicker and simpler, and thus is incredibly useful for beginners. However, there might be features or tools that are as yet unknown to newbies. The aim for this blog post is to point you all towards some of these and make you into more confident graphic designers!
What Is Canva?
Canva is a platform that offers businesses and organizations, as well as individual professionals, a simple and straightforward way of designing graphics that enables them to create professional quality designs. Canva is also very versatile and has a long list of powerful features available to its users, including a drag-and-drop design tool and a vast collection of photographs, graphics, and fonts.
Below is a list of some of the content you can and might want to create using Canva:
- Blog Post Banner
- Infographic Creation
- Custom Text and Premium Fonts
- Image Cropper
- Photos with Text
- Speech bubble maker
- Image Transparency Tool
- Photo Enhancer
- Photo Blur
- Photo Vignette
- Design Grids
- Logo Creation
- Photo Frames
Some Useful Tips and Tricks
As discussed before, Canva is an incredibly user friendly and intuitive platform to use compared to other editing and design software. This doesn’t mean, though, that there are no features or tools that you might not yet know about. Here is a short list of some of these features that might be useful for you.
- Hidden Element Codes
Under the ‘Elements’ tab, you will find an array of Graphics which you can use in your designs. However, many of these Graphics are visually very different in their theme and their design. So, Canva have a way for you to find Graphics that belong to the same theme, and thus will look far more complimentary together in your designs. For example, if you search for the code ‘brand:BAAAAP7rQ8M’, you should see the following list of Graphics:
Another useful method for finding themed Graphics is to scroll down on the ‘Elements’ page under the tab for Graphics. You should see different suggested themes appear which are recommended by Canva, which might include things like ‘animals’, ‘summer’ or ‘travel’. I find this especially useful under the ‘Graphics’ tab but it is also available for video and audio content.
2. Magic Resize
This tool is only available for Canva Pro users, but, is good to get to know if you do have a Pro account, as it allows you to resize your graphics in bulk to fit multiple, pre-set formats. If you run a business and need to post designs to multiple platforms, this means that you are able to permanently skip the hours of work it takes searching for up-to-date social media aspect ratios!
But how does it work? With this feature, you can resize your templates to fit any and all of your favourite platforms with just one click of the ‘Resize’ button in the top left corner of your design page. See the picture below for a visual reference:
3. Brand Kit
If you are a business owner, the brand kit is an incredibly useful feature for creating a more professional-looking brand. While templates are an amazing starting point, you definitely want to customise them to match your brand so that your designs are more consistent, distinctive and memorable. Plus, by using this feature, you can save so much time in your design process. You’ll be able to access your colour swatches, fonts & brand images almost immediately.
And it is easy to get to! You can access your brand kit from a tab in the right corner of the home page of your account.
Note that although both paid and unpaid Canva accounts can access this feature, free Canva accounts can create only one brand colour palette with up to three colours whereas Canva Pro users can create 100 colour palettes, and save up to 100 colours inside each one. Either way, though, the brand kit is a valuable tool to get to grips with and make use of!
4. Keyboard Shortcuts
There are a number of useful shortcuts available for you to use in Canva to speed up the design process. Below is a list of some that I use the most. Some of the shortcuts that I have listed state both a Command (cmd) and Control (ctrl) key option. If you are a Mac user, then you should look to use the Command key. Windows users should use the Control key.
- Bold text: cmd/ctrl + “B” key
- Transform text to Uppercase: Shift + cmd/ctrl + “K” key
- Add a line to your document: Click the “L” key
- Add a rectangle to your document: Click the “R” key
- Group Elements: cmd/ctrl + “G” key
- Ungroup Elements: shift + cmd/ctrl + “G” key
- Duplicate elements: cmd/ctrl + “D” key
- Select all items on layer: cmd/ctrl + “A” key
- Send element forward: cmd/ctrl + “]”
- Send element backward: cmd/ctrl + “[“
- Zoom in: cmd/ctrl + “+” key
- Zoom out: cmd/ctrl + “-” key
5. Aligning Texts and Images
Canva also makes aligning elements of a design very simple. Rather than having to manually position each piece of text, photo or graphic, or rely upon visual approximation, the alignment tool makes it easy to position and group them.
In order to align elements relative to the overall design, you will need to, first, select the element you want to align. Next, you should click Position from the toolbar above your design and then choose which of the listed Positions you would like to apply to the selected element.
If your texts and images are aligned perfectly respective to each other but you decide you need to move them all across the page, the Grouping feature is very handy for doing this. All you have to do is click and drag your cursor over the elements you want to group. You can also hold the Shift key on your keyboard and click on multiple elements to select them. Once the elements you want to group have all been selected, you can click Group on the toolbar above the editor. Using the shortcuts above, you can also use cmd/ctrl + G on your keyboard.
So that was a whistle-stop tour of using Canva and making the most of some of its most valuable features, which you may not have known about before. We hope you have found this blog post useful and wish you the best for your future adventures in Canva!
