Lessons
Intro to Canva: The Guy Kawasaki Interview
10:43 2The Power of Design: Canva Philosophy
05:41 3Canva Account Setup
10:35 4The Canva Interface
10:28 5Canva: Opening the Drawers
28:00 6Manipulation in Canva
18:43 7More About Your Account
12:12 8Canva for Work Account
25:59Lesson Info
Canva Account Setup
Let's dive in. So I'm gonna go from the presentation to my laptop where we have can va loaded up again? It's online. Eso it's not going to require any kind of downloading of software. Does require an Internet connection, of course, and a computer, So we're going to go to www dot can va dot com. Seem right up here and it's gonna bring this really cool start page with this great kind of fun Graphic in the background. Don't get distracted. We're going, Teoh. We're gonna create a new account. So here I'm gonna do, Let's say, Matt at right. Any old email address will do and just pick any old passwords. Now. What's great is that there's no there is a confirmation process, but you'll get that email later. Campbell wants you to jump right in. So once I click the sign up button sign a complete great Uh, yeah, we'll save that password just in case. So, yes, I had your phone in the computer. Great question. You can use it on your IPad. One of the sub segments that will talk about a little bit lat...
er is where can va lives? It's not only cloud based meaning online free laptop. But it's also for your devices. There's no IPhone application as of yet because you kind of need a bigger screen or to see your designs and be ableto manipulate things. You know, uh, on a nice big scale. But the IPad version works great. I edited stuff, actually, this morning on a knife head on the go. Um, so great question. Thank you. So once we get into the sign up page, it's gonna ask us a very interesting question. As of right now, as far as I know, this is not going to change your experience past this point. You're not going to get a different interface if you pick work or personal or education. Uh, this is I think it's info gathering for canvas for right now. As I mentioned, there is a premium tool called Can Vote for Work. But you are not purchasing that tool by clicking this button. This is just for them to get some analytics on who's using their tool. So for our purposes, for this account, we're just gonna go ahead and click the personal one here with our lovely little balloons. And we're inside. So canvas says, Wait, hang on a second. Thank you for signing up. Thank you for coming in, but we want to give you a little bit of a walk through. So they have this great little tool at its called the 23 2nd Guide to Beautiful Designing Can VA. It's gonna take us a little bit more than 23 seconds just because we're gonna run through a little bit slower. But this is the elementary entry point, uh, the on boarding process. And as you can see, it's doing it without me. I'm actually not clicking on anything. It's just showing you a really quick 2nd video of what to expect. And that's it. Don't you don't have to memorize this. You don't have to know what's going on. It's more like this is what this is the feeling that we're gonna get when we're in the tool and that's it. 23 seconds. So once it does that, it walks you through a couple a couple fun things on on what what it just did. And I encourage you guys in your own time. Go do this. We're gonna walk through it a little bit more in depth and what they're doing here. But it's great to be able to refresh your skills and go through this on your own. Um, before we go down this, I want to stop and take a look at what we're looking at because there's a lot of pieces here. Like I said, it's not his overpowering or abundant in its amount of tools as say, photo Shop is. But there's some stuff that we need to unpack. Let's start with the, um, the page that we're looking at right here. So we have a top bar up here, actually, Just use my mouth. We have a top bar here in blue. We have this sort of gray area, and then this stage, we are actually in a design session. Let's say with something that's already been created for us, can va basically gives you this piece of design in order to teach you what it is? We're gonna pause and go back one step to our account, because this segment I want I want to not design anything just yet. I want to go back to our account because we're still doing kind of a set up here So if we click on the can VA logo, this is the canvas start page that from now on, you're going to see when you log in. It kind of jumps ahead, and it says, Okay, we want to teach you how to use canvas. That's great. But I want to show you guys the account first. So here we have three sections. We have the menu over here on the left. We have the create a design section up here with lots of different options of designs that we could create and then below. Here we have what is going to be our own personal design stream. These are things that we've created. They're going to show up his thumbnails right down here. Of course, we just created account, so there's nothing there just yet. Um, let's see. Check my notes here. So we're going to go in and finish our account set up if we click on our name up here, which it suggested a name for me because it thinks my name's Matt. Because I didn't Matt at fathom creative dot com. If we click on it, we're gonna get a pop up, and we have a couple options. We're going to go into view profile here. You can also check your settings. There's not a lot in the settings, but we'll go into it in a second. You can create a new team, which will talk about later, or we could sign out. For now. We're gonna finish our profile by clicking on view profile. So here we have what our profile currently is. It's made these wonderful suggestions for me. It has suggested a user name, uh, here, which is my handle, which is used inside of Canada. And it's also suggested you know my name. Who? My I can change any of these settings by clicking on the edit info button. I can upload a photo, which I'll do right now. So I clicked on that and I'll go and navigate to my favorite photo and it puts it right in there. I can change my name and my handle. So let's do my Internet name. D. C. M. J s should be at least six characters. Thank you for the prompt. By the way, if you choose someone else's name like, for instance, my my work account, it's gonna tell me that it's taken, So it'll just let you know what names are available or not. This is, ah, tag system. It's very similar to what Twitter uses. So you'll see. We'll see in the main public design stream that you can actually tag other people and say, Hey, check this out So we'll do Matthew, let's say one for great. I can type in my website, and the reason that we're filling in this information is because people will be able to see our profile. If we make a design public, which I'll show you how to do it will show up in a design stream, and then people can see who did it, and they confined other designs that you've done if you've made them public. I am from Washington, D. C. Andorra. That's not true. United States and save changes. So now we have an account that is our own. It's ah, password protected cloud based, and you can access it from any any computer with an Internet connection or your IPad. The last thing that we're going to do in here is you know what I think that's it. So we'll go back out to Thea Main. Can Va interface here. The creation bar is where we're gonna look at next. There is another menu item done here. Um, but we're going to save that for later because no one has shared anything with this account yet. Eso that's gonna be empty. Instead, let's look at this section of here. This is where we're gonna create whatever we want, not just what's being suggested here with social media presentations or a poster. But if you click on this mawr plus arrow here, it opens up a ton of things, these air, all of the things that you can create using Canada and more because you can also enter a custom design. So if you're, ah more experienced designer and you're being asked for something that's nonstandard on, you don't see, you know, the thing here that you're looking to create, you can always create a custom designed and that allows you to enter in the with and height in either pixels millimeters or inches and create that design. But we're not gonna do that because we were inexperienced designers and we just created an account. So we really don't know what we're doing it we're gonna go with something very simple. The last part of this is we're gonna pick. Let's say this nice and easy social media post at 800 by 800 This is something say that you would put on your Facebook page or you would, you know, you could basically put it anywhere. So I'm gonna click on him, and then it takes me to a page which looks a little bit familiar. This is what we just saw. Where can Va was jumping us ahead and saying, All great, come on, designed something, Take this basic challenge and run through it. This is exactly it, but it's a blank stage. So that's the end of that little sub segment about setting up your account and getting started as quickly as possible. You guys have any questions? Yeah, if you start in for one output, but you want to have another output in different pixels. How would that happen? That was my very first question two and I started using this one of canvas. Important philosophies is consistency among all your designs. So when you create, something will go through that in the workflow section where we'll talk about taking that design and blowing it out across everything else so that you can create multiple pieces with the assets that you've already put in there.
Ratings and Reviews
Jake
Pretty good course generally...especially part 2 & 3. Frankly, Canva's early adopters, like Sue Zimmerman (who I heard about it from) & the like...& therefore probably MOST of us entrepreneurs are probably NOT graphic designers by trade. That was the whole point of Canva being created in the first place!!!! That fact was hammered home in the way Matt presented how to use Canva by pro designers in part 4. Unfortunately, Part 4 was very hard to follow at times. When was he in the pro version of Canva & what could be done in the version we all know, love & work with everyday was NOT always clear. Part 4 was waaaaay too fast & very terminology heavy for most of even the in-studio audience. (It was funny.) I wanted to hug the gal that kept trying to reel it in & get on the same page with her questions. Thank goodness. Bought the course right away because I've been using Canva for over a year and need to go to the next level. I hoped to learn tricks for all that I waste so much time figuring out on my own. There were some. Alas, one main Canva glitch with regard to applying a logo over a background (uh...kind of crucial for business owners & a real time waster to work around literally every single time you use the program) that was raised as a question & re-asked by 2 other people AND several times remained completely untouched. Although the question was on topic & appropriate at many times during parts 2, 3 & 4 and a seemingly very popular question, the moderator chose to ignore it. Almost NO questions were taken from the online audience, in fact, despite there being surprisingly few questions online!! Incredibly, incredibly frustrating & disappointing but I don't blame Matt for that. Too bad there seems to be no course materials to go along with this...like the awesome tips Matt went thru one by one. What a perfect workbook or guide that would have been to go with this, in some form. Really too bad. And really surprising. So all in all, a good course with an EXCELLENT instructor (hope he does Prezi too) but some some big disappointments for this non-professional-in-graphic-design-or-tech, which, it seems is a SIGNIFICANT chunk of your audience...right?
Lonney
This was an absolutely great course for a beginner like me. Matt explained everything very clearly and in a pleasant way. I hope he, or someone, does a class on the new Adobe Spark soon. Thanks again; Lonney
Khaled Yasser
I like this course, becuase it is very simple to the users, and canva is the future for quick design I hope everyone can you it.