How to Use Canva in 2024 - Complete Beginner's Tutorial

If you want to create any kind of design, Canva is probably the best platform

the easiest to use platform out there. You could use it completely for free at Canva.com

and they also have mobile apps for Android and iPhone too. With Canva, you could create all kinds of social media designs for Instagram

for YouTube, you could create entire videos inside of Canva, you could create presentations

And in this video, I'll walk you through everything you need to know for creating a design

from beginning to the end on Canva. Go to Canva.com and just go ahead and press sign up over here

This way you could save all your designs that you create. And then go ahead and create yourself a free account

Now, Canva does have a paid option in this video. I'm just going to show you the free option

but I'll show you a couple of different things that Canva Pro gives you. This is a subscription that you could try out for free as well

And I'll put both of these, including this free trial link in the description below

Once you create yourself a free account, you're going to land on this page where you could start creating a design

And the first thing you want to do is you want to go ahead and search for the type of content that you want to make

They also have some examples over here of different categories. So a lot of people use Canva, for example, to create Instagram posts or to create entire presentations or even videos

Or you could go to these different tabs here. So if you're trying to create something for social media, you could click on it

And it's going to give you a bunch of different recommendations here for getting started, a bunch of different categories

A lot of times I use Canva, for example, to make YouTube content. thumbnail, so I'll go ahead and click this one. And this will help me create a blank canvas over

here on Canva. And with Canva, it decides what the size should be. You don't have to worry about it

You don't have to know anything technical about dimensions. It's all ready to go and you're ready to

design over here on the design page. What I recommend for step two, once you choose what you want to

create, is actually try to find one of these templates here as a starting point. These are fully

customizable. You could even delete everything you see on them. But as long as you start with a template, someone else, a professional designer

created these templates with all the best practices of design. So this makes it a lot easier than me just trying to create something here on a blank canvas from scratch

And as you scroll through these templates over here, some of them are going to have this little crown icon

Those will require that paid pro subscription. The ones that don't have it, though, do not require any type of payment

They're going to be completely free to use. And you could also go ahead and search here. So if you were making something related to food, here's a suggestion. So food related thumbnails, those are going to pop up right here. So go ahead and do a quick search on top first. Let's do one for business, for example. And here's all the different thumbnails I could use for business. Again, some of them are going to have the pro. Some of them are not. Let's say I like this one. This one's very simple. I'll click on it. And it's going to go ahead and put it over here. And as I mentioned, every piece of this thumbnail

is fully editable. So let me walk you through the next part of this. So if I go back here

we started here on the template page and we're on the design tab over here. But if you look on the

left side there a bunch of different tabs available There an elements tab text tab and I kind of walk you through the most important tabs over here So the design tab was the best place to get started for picking a template The next tab that you most likely want to go to is the text tab here under the text tab

Even if you're creating something from scratch, you could go ahead and drag any one of the text that you see

in these templates over here or choose just a plain text. And to add it to your canvas, all you have to do is click on it and it's going to add it over here

And then you could just go ahead and type in your own text over here. So this would be your text

And then you could go ahead and click away. And then this becomes movable

So then I could just go ahead and grab it and put it up here. Now, to change the font and the color

if you double-click into this box, you're going to have all these options on top

So if you wanted to increase the size, that's over here. If you wanted to change the font, that's over here

I'll change the font like this. If you wanted to change the color, which would make sense in this case

That's this box right over here. And it's going to give you a ton of colors to choose from

I'll choose white here. Change all. And it's going to change my text over here

And you could also click on effects. That's going to give you different text effects like drop shadow

to kind of make it pop a little bit more from the background, bunch of different options available here that you could explore on your own

If you use the template, I'm just going to click on this one and press the garbage can to delete it

You could always double-click any existing text inside of templates and do the same exact thing

exact thing. So you could type in your own text over here and again, all the options that I just

mentioned on top are also available to you. If you ever make a mistake, you could always undo it as

well. That's this little arrow on top and that's going to take you back to the previous step

And this is to redo if you want to move forward to keep that change. Okay, so that's working with text

over here. So adding text here from the text panel or editing any existing text. Next, if I go to

elements, sometimes you could add little things that are in the elements section like graphics

or for example, YouTube subscribe icon might be something I could just search up for, and it's

going to give me the subscribe icon. Again, some of them are going to have the crown option. But let me go ahead and see all of them here. And here's a free one, so I could click on it

And these elements are completely resizeable. So I could go ahead and resize this one. And this

one has some animation to it. That's really designed for video. Obviously a thumbnail is not going to have

any animation. When you have things that are animated, you'll see this animate button right here

You could do this with pretty much anything, but you'll see different types of animation too

that you could add on top of the existing animation that things have. But that is again related

to videos which I cover in a different tutorial. This is really more for creating graphic design

using Canva, but Canva is capable of creating videos for YouTube. I'll go ahead and delete this one

You could also do this with photos so you'll see a ton of different photos. Again, you're

search stays on top. So I'll show you photos next. Let me go ahead and press delete on this picture

I'm going to delete this image here. And this has a nice placeholder for us. But if I go to the

photos tab, I could go ahead and add a photo. So to do that, just go ahead and search. I'm going to

search business person Let do a quick search on that It going to give me the search bar I go to the photos tab and I see all these options that are available to me Now a lot of these again are going to require you to upgrade And we got ourselves one that free over here So I could grab it and I could just bring it right over

this area. So it would drop it into our placeholder. Another thing you could do is I'm going to go

ahead and select this one and delete it. You could also add an image of yourself. So if you come to

the left side, there's this upload tab over here. And here you could upload different files from your

computer. So I got a picture on myself right over here that I just uploaded from my computer

So I could drag this one and put this into my thumbnail like this. And this looks a lot better

Typically you'll see thumbnails with people's faces. Or I could just go ahead and delete this whole

thing and I'll delete the placeholder too. So I'll delete all these different pieces. So now I have

no placeholder here. So what I could do is I could grab an image and add it like this as well

So I'll go ahead and shrink this down for example. Just grabbing the corner

You could go ahead and shrink it down like this. The only thing is a lot of times you'll see in YouTube thumbnails

someone removes the background. That also requires you to have the paid version on Canva

if you want to remove your background. So if you select this and you go up here to edit photo

with photos, you'll have this option called BG remover. So this will remove the background

But again, that requires us to upgrade. And you also have Magic Studio AI tools

a lot more than just a background remover. But you do have some free options like different filters

you could apply to it too. If you do have the paid version and you do remove the background

this is what it ends up looking like. So I've already done that. And I could go ahead and resize this here to fit

So this looks a lot better for a YouTube thumb-mail. I obviously have to work with this text a little bit to kind of make it work around this picture

So I might have to move it up here. I might have to resize it a little bit

Move this over here. Okay, so that's looking a lot more like what you might see on YouTube

as a thumbnail. Now, you also have this tab here for background

So a lot of times when you're designing something, you may want to change the background

And this is going to give you a ton of options for different backgrounds that you could choose

So if I wanted to choose this background, for example, I could click on it

And just like that, it replaces the background in one click. So all the other elements stay

And let me choose this one just to click on it. There we go. So it's really, really easy to change your background

And every time you change the background right now, as you could see, the background is

selected, I could go to Edit Photo and I could make alterations like changing the color

slightly to the background. And if I just show you all the different filters, you're going

to have a ton of different filters here to choose from to really change and dial in how this

image looks. Now, if you were to make a presentation and not just one single image, you'll

see this option. It says add a page. So if you click this, it adds page two. So if you

were doing something like a 10 page presentation, you would go ahead and create your

your cover here and continue down the line and create new presentations one at a time

So let's say with this one I want to just start with photos. Well this time let's go to the

photos tab right here. This is the same place I told you under the elements tab when we searched

but you could go directly here to the photos tab I could just select the photo like this and I could go ahead and resize this kind of fit the canvas I just go ahead and make this bigger There we go So now I fit the canvas and I could go back to my text here and if I wanted to add any type of

text from our text panel, I'll go ahead and grab one, put it over here and same as always

I'm going to resize it. I'll put it where I want. I'll double click it. I could go ahead and

change the text and the fonts and everything else and I got myself a second page and I

I could always go ahead and save both of them out of Canva. Now before I show you how to save this out of Canva

we also have this option right here that requires the pro option, but it could be a huge time saver if you make a lot of designs

Resize and magic switch. What this lets you do is it lets you resize whatever design you have

for a different size. So I started with a YouTube thumbnail, which is this size right here

but I could turn it into an Instagram post or Instagram story or any custom shape and size that I want

and it will move things around based on that setting automatically. I don't have to redesign this for different types of platforms

But again, another paid option that I'll save for Canva Pro video

Finally, let's go ahead and save our design out of Canva. To do that, go up here and press share right on top

And you have multiple options. You could actually invite other people if you want to share the design with them that way

And you could also share a link directly by copying the link. But typically we want to download this so we could post this on our website

on social media, in this case, YouTube. I'll go ahead and press download right here

And these are the options that you're going to get. So PNG is the recommended file format

And you also could do JPEG. But typically I like to save these type of images as a PNG

really good quality. So I'll leave it there. Again, the size is fine too

But if I wanted to change the size, again, those are Canva Pro options that you need to do

And then if you have multiple pages and you just want to save one of them, I'm going to unselect both

And I'll just export the first one. If you only have one page, you don't have this option. It's just going to export that one

And I'm going to go ahead and download right here. Now, this goes directly to your download folder over here

So if I go ahead and open this folder, and here's the image here that I have now downloaded on my computer

And these automatically gets saved on your Canva account. So if you press the three lines over here, all your previous projects here are going to show up

And you could jump into any previous project directly from here. You just have to click on it and it brings you to the project that you will

you were working on before. So here's another project that I have that I'm making for

LinkedIn ads, for example, and this is a format. Same thing that I'm showing you before

Adding images, text, changing the background, and I've created multiple different versions of that

Next, I recommend watching the tutorial I have on Canva Magic Studio. This actually gives you

20 different AI tools with a paid subscription that really take Canva to the next level

So the resize and magic switch option could take any type of design and turn it into a

a completely different size and shape design. You could also type in text and turn it into complete videos

You could type in text and create images from text prompts. And they have ton of AI magic tools here like magic grab magic edit

That is all covered in that other video, which I'll link here

I hope you found this video useful. All the links are in the description and I will see you next time