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
The Canva Interface
All right, So we're going to keep going with our canvas interface. We've created our first blank design on. We see that the page is broken up into a couple sections. Let's go through an unpack. What? They are Header bar. Most people are familiar with it. It has a couple of menu items and we'll go through them one by one. In addition to the Blue Header Bar, we'll see this dark gray, What I call the drawer. This is where all our goodies are. This is where we're gonna find everything every piece that we're going to include in our designs and then in the light gray area. Over here, we have the stage. This is where our layout is going to be with the wig again. What you see is what you get. Everything that goes into this white frame is going to be part of our final graphic. Um, let's take a look at the header bar and go through. The Campbell logo always takes you back to your initial can va page, which looks like this. So your dashboard, In addition to that, we have filed underneath, of whic...
h we have some interesting options. We can save on. Make a copy of the existing design that we're in, uh, special note. Most cloud based tools Canada included, automatically save your changes. Uh, this is because the files air living online, they're not living on your desktop. We'll get into version control a little bit later, but just a note. It'll clue you in on what's going on with the changes right here next to the file menu. Um, if there are unsaved changes, it'll let you know. Please don't close your browser. You will lose a little bit of work on. It will give you the thumbs up if it's okay to go on to something else. Enclosure designed will say all changes saved. Next to the file menu, we have the title of our design. It was a little tricky for me when I first got into this to figure out what this thing is called. Like this particular piece. How do I name this stuff? Um, if we just click on it gives us a little prompt design title will call it my first design array, and then that is going to show up on your dashboard once we make some changes and actually create something worth looking at share, which is, which is a great button for taking your designs directly online. You can save them to your desktop and cart them around in the U. S. Beer or whatever or email them. As you can hear directly from Canada, you can post them to Facebook or Twitter. You can link your accounts to canvas so that anything that you do doesn't even have to touch your desktop. You don't have to save files out anymore. You can post right to these thes social media sites, and then you can also share as an edit herbal design. We'll get into that later. That's gonna be working with other people in Can va. It's an interesting and great function where you can send something to someone and say, Hey, take a look at this thing I just did. Not only can they look at it, but they can edit it. They can make changes to it if you want them to. In addition to share we have download. This is a very important button, so it's telling me that I have not designed anything yet, which is very kind of it. Otherwise, I'd be saving a lot of blank white squares on my desktop, but this will be populated once we make some changes, and we'll go through exactly what kinds of files weaken save out from Canada that end up actually living on her desktop. A good way to think about it is share doesn't touch. Your desktop always stays out in the ether and the Internet and download does come to your desktop. It is thumb something that you can save for later. In addition to those guys, the last one in the Header bar is a little toggle that says, Make public again. I click on this, and it's saying You cannot publish a blank White square. I'm a minimalist. I love white squares. Clearly they don't they don't agree with this eso, they're telling me No fool, you have to design something first. Fine, we'll do it later. This toggle allows you to publish your design on what's called the canvas design stream, and we'll find that Find out where that is a little bit later. That's where anyone who's using Can Va can put up their great designs, and it's this great stream where you can get inspiration from what other people are doing. If you don't want to make your design public, that's fine. I work with a lot of clients where they would not appreciate me putting their designs up online without checking with them First. Eso it's by default turned off your designs or not public when you first create them. And then we have a question from the chat rooms, which is great from arto Um, thankless. Who wants to know are those designs and templates are those searchable? Once you make them public, they are. You can assign keywords to them. In fact, if we want, we could hop over to the to the to the design stream right now. Show you guys how to do that, so to get to the canvas design stream. Oh, by the way, look, it's already put my lovely White Square and is my first design. Clearly, the dashboard thinks it's worthy. I don't know why Twitter doesn't so there are a couple of menu items down here that that we can get into one of them is notifications that if someone shares a design with you will go through that later of workflow. Then we got these two guys learn to design and get design inspiration, uh, can VA employees and has collected some of the greatest designers that I've seen in a long time, which is really cool. I mean, these guys are putting out a lot of good stuff, and we'll see that when we go into the pre made layouts. So Campbell wants to show off their design prowess and by doing so, show you how to be great designers. The this link here learn to design will take you to what's called the can of a design school. The link for that is designed school dot can va dot com, which is pretty easy. We'll go through what's in the design school later, but this is amazing amazing stuff. I read every article that's put up there, and I've been designing for years, and I still think some of the stuff that they're doing is really cool. Um, below, learn to design will see, get design inspiration. This is what you're talking about with the design stream. The question was, once you created design, can you search for something like it if we go to the design stream, which is Canada dot com pound design Dash stream We can see, and we're sort of inadvertently giving shadows to all these cool designers who have recently put work up. We can see what other people are doing with Canada, and it's pretty cool, Um, as faras searching for a design. You can see, uh, what people have wrote about it here. This person has said that they're designed is titled Business Driven. Here we have some comments on some designs here. You can see someone's tag someone else again. That's what we were talking about with your handle, starting with an at symbol very similar to Twitter. I don't know if this is searchable, but you can certainly go through and poke around and see what the latest cool creations people have been doing in here are, um, there is a feature that will get into a little bit later, where you can save your things into folders so that you can search through them, but will say that for the workflow session. Cool. All right, so let's go back to our Here's Our Dashboard and in this other tab are lonely. White Square is still sitting there completely un designed the poor guy. Um, so that was the header bar that we just went through. Now we'll take a look at the drawer. This is again. This is where all of your stuff is gonna live. All your graphics images, things that you can drag directly onto the canvas to create your designs. The drawer has a couple icons here which control it. Search layouts, text, background and uploads. Search allows you to search through all of these different kinds of things. Whether it's a line or a Nikon or an image. I'll give you a good example. If I search for lion, it's going to show me images of lions, icons of lions, drawings and illustrations Pretty much anything that has to do with the word lion you can get here. Some of them have this little free sticker next to it. Some of them don't. We'll go into why some of them don't. Some of them do a little bit later, but we're looking at the search function here. We can search through anything. Let's try. Uh uh, It's too light bulb. So here I have a graphic images, some really cool stock photography. They try to cultivate and give you the most beautiful up to date Contemporary options available again somewhere, Premium Some or not, they usually, uh, here. You can see it by the sticker, whether it's free or not. So that's the search feature. Additionally, you'll notice that when I when I first click on Search, I get thes uh, icon buckets here, and they kind of fly out when I roll over them. These are, uh, you could do a visual search. You want to type in a keyword. So let's look at photos. So here I can look at just some photos that canvas collected. There are thousands, and thousands of these guys will delete this. I can close that and go into something else. We have a total of 10 items here. Holly's That's probably gonna go away. Hopefully, or maybe in the next month or so. Um, grids and frames, shapes, lines, illustrations, icons, photos and charts. Now, to a designer, some of these kind of mean the same thing. To me, an illustration I can't is an illustration is just a small version of it. But to the to the non designing public, they're gonna look at this and say OK, great. I can choose this so I can do this. I can put any of these different things in here. This is how they're divided.
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.