Using Canva to Create Killer Graphics
Canva
Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Smooth Sailing Online Support, I’m your host and captain Lyndsay Phillips steering you through the choppy waters of fast-paced business growth. Canva.
A lot of people know of course that you need to use graphics for your social media posts, the same with the pictures for your blogs, pictures for your websites in general, and there are some really great tools out there. One of my favorites is Canva, it’s got so many great features and it makes your life so much easier. I thought I would dive in and show you guys some great features that it has and how to use it in case you’re not using it already. I’m going to share my screen and show you what it’s all about.
All righty. I’m going to go over to Canva here, so you should be able to see my screen now. When you log into Canva, actually let me see if I can go back to the beginning where it kind of shows you the main screen here. It will show you all of the past, as you can see I’ve done tons, graphics that you’ve done, and here it kind of shows you the different designs that it has available. There are, you know, popular design types, I’m going to see if I can make my screen a little bit bigger, social media posts, Twitter, and they’re really good sizes. Now one thing I do want to point out is that this is good for Facebook posts, just don’t use it for blogs if you’re doing Facebook open graph inside your blog posts. If you’re using Facebook open graph and you want to optimize the pictures in your blog for Facebook, they have to be twelve hundred by six-fifteen, six-thirty-ish. I usually use the Facebook ad size for that, that’s a whole another video.
There are Twitter posts, there are documents, there is even your Facebook event cover, Twitter header, Facebook ad down here, I mean there’s tons of choice. For now let’s just go to a regular Joe Facebook post, the square size. Now, this size is actually good if you want to do kind of a collage. Once you go in, I don’t know if you knew this or not, but it actually shows you tons of pictures, once this thing finally loads up. Some are free but do be wary, some are paid, but I mean they’re like a buck each for the picture, so that’s kind of no biggie. You can even search for, I love cats, so you can, you know, I don’t know if there are any free ones here, but you can bring over a picture of a cat, but and, you know, I love cats all over it. Whatever you want. Now if you go in elements you’ll see here there are, you know, different squiggly lines you can add to jazz things up, shapes, frames.
I want to quickly point out the grids here. Once you put that in you can actually just change this to white. This one can be blue and then this one can be at the bottom, it’s not showing me the features, get that out of the way. I guess it doesn’t want to change the color, oh, there it is right down there. There we go. You can actually go to text and you can start typing whatever the word is, I’m not being overly creative on the fly here. Superimposed, change the color, you can put in a little blurb here, maybe a website, something else there, and then you can actually pull a picture. Well, let’s pull a picture of a cute little kitty cat in there. “I love cats.” This one is a paid one, you can tell by all the little X’s that go through it. Now if you want to get funkier with text, if you see down here, I like to go past these [inaudible [00:04:10], so that one’s there.
I mean you can put that in, you know, pretend the cat is talking. You can change the colors and all that kind of thing, if you don’t like it, just delete it. I mean some of them are really cool, so you could put that up there, you know, change the colors, you can even make it, that one doesn’t, there we go. Let’s see if that does it. Make it the upper case, centered, right, italics, sometimes you can make it bold, so you can really make some funky graphics. I personally like to use these grid ones for testimonials, so you can have the testimonial blurb in this main part, you can have the person’s headshot up here, the name of who they are in the middle and maybe your own website and your logo down here. Now you can import your own pictures. As you can see I’ve imported a bunch here. Here is my logo, so you’ll see before it actually had this was suited for gra-, sorry, an image, so this just pulled that image right into there.
You can also import, sorry, add some text over top of any images. It’s not working for me right now, but every now and then Canva does stall and it takes a while to load something, I give you full warning of that. Every now and then there’s a little glitch. Going into Twitter here, and I guess my video is going over two minutes, isn’t it? Yeah, you can change the background, colors. Doesn’t that look pretty? You can add a picture, this is what I wanted to show you. You can actually make that smaller and kind of make your own graphic from scratch. You know, if I wanted to put this down here and then put my logo, I would just go to, and then just put my business website down there. There we go, now it’s working for me.
Yeah, you can do all sorts of things, and, you know, pull in pictures, find graphics, put in different text. As you can see there is … That one’s not showing up, there we go. You can add all sorts of things to make things really beautiful, and then you just download and you can download it to a JPEG or a PNG. If there is a purchased image, then it’ll just make you pay for it at that point. Super easy, super optimized for whatever you’re using it for, Twitter, Facebook and so forth. Yeah, so I highly recommend signing up for Canva and giving it a whirl.
That’s this episode of Smooth Sailing Online Support. Have a productive and profitable week, guys. Take care.
