Canva Tutorial for Beginners 2022

Welcome to our 2022 Canva tutorial for beginners video

So in this video, I'm going to walk you through step by step everything you need to know to create amazing designs with Canva

Canva has been a platform that we've been using as a team for a couple of years now

The first year or so we were using the free version. The last year and a half or so we've been using Canva Pro

In this tutorial, I'm going to use the Canva Pro version, but 95% of what we're going to be doing, you can do with the free version

And I'm going to point out the premium features so you know, hey, this is something that you would need to upgrade to be able to utilize

Really quickly, let's check out the differences between the free and the pro version of Canva

So you get two hundred and fifty thousand free templates with the free version over here

You get six hundred and ten thousand. You get hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics here

You get hundreds of millions of photos, videos, audio and other graphics here

You can also save a bunch of different brand kits. So with the free version, you can save up to three colors for your brand kit

With the pro version, you can have a bunch of separate different brand kits for different companies you may work with

You can save logos and fonts as well. Then the next benefit here is to be able to remove the background of images

something that we use for YouTube thumbnails and other designs basically every single day

The next thing is you can quickly resize your design. So you could go from an Instagram image

that is square to an Instagram story that's vertical. The next thing you can do is save templates and use as a team

You have more cloud storage. You can also schedule social media content across a platform

So this is similar to later buffer or some of the other scheduling softwares

If you're interested in trying Canva Pro for free for 45 days, check out our affiliate link down below in the description

If you end up upgrading to Canva Pro, we may earn a small commission, but at no extra cost to you

This is longer than Canva's normal free trial. So if you go to Canva.com, you will not get as many days free

as the link that we have down below in the description. I recommend just checking it out for free

See if it's worth it. If not, don't worry. The normal free version of Canva is really, really powerful

With that said, let's hop on the computer and get started. Once you click on our affiliate link, it's going to look something like this

where you can sign up to get your 45 day free trial. So when you sign into Canva, it's going to look something like this

Obviously, if you're signing in for the first time, you're not going to have these recent designs

Now, let's just walk through everything on screen right now. So up along the top, you have all the different templates that you could create

here, some of the different features, so photos, icons, print products, apps

explore, you can download the Canva app onto your computer or your phone

We have a tutorial on how to use Canva on your phone. I'll link to that up above right here

Then on to learning. They have a bunch of tutorials that help you learn how to create better designs

about fonts, colors, all sorts of things like that. So that's a great resource to check out

Then that's kind of all along the top right here. Then let's move along the side

So all of your designs, your recent designs, stuff that's been shared with you, all of your folders, stuff that you've added to the trash

Here's where you can add someone else to your team. And then you have the brand kit and the content planner

So the content planner is just available in Canva Pro. And then the brand kit is partly available in the free version

But you get a ton more within Canva Pro. So within Canva Pro, you can add your logos and add fonts

The colors right here. So you can see we have three different color combinations

If you're using the free version, you're only going to get three colors that you can save for your brand colors

That's most of what you're going to find here. Now let's go back to the home and create a design

So there's a lot of ways you can find what you're looking for in terms of the type of design

So you can see you have for you right here, you can create presentations

social media, videos, print products, marketing and office. So you could just go explore within one of these and scroll along to the side

Or sometimes it's just easier to type in whatever you're looking for

So if you type in YouTube, you're going to have the channel art, your thumbnails, stuff for YouTube shorts, etc.

as well as the outros and intros. If we were to create something for Instagram

you have Instagram posts, real stories, etc. So let's say we want to create a post for Instagram

Here is the size. So you could just type in 1080 by 1080

and create a design really easily or just click on Instagram posts

So when you get here, you see that there are a ton of different templates. Eighty eight thousand four hundred and fifty five, to be exact

I would imagine for the normal version of Canva, it's probably around half of that

But to tell which ones are free and premium, if it has a little crown

that's the icon for Canva Pro. So as we kind of mouse over, this is a normal free one

This one, this one, that whole row was essentially free. So we're, you know, half of that row

So you can see here there's there's tons of different options and you can go and filter along the side right here

Colorful, minimal, elegant, simple. So maybe you want something simple, something like one of these

So what you can do here is you can start with one of the templates they have

or you always have this option to create a blank Instagram post

or whatever the design is that you're creating. So why don't we just click on this first one

And really quickly, I'll show you how to edit a template and then we'll create something from scratch

And I'll basically show you all of the different things you can do within Canva. So if you pick the design like this, what you can do is go and click on anything here

so you can, you know, drag the corner, change the size. If you click on this, you can highlight and, you know, change the text

Hello. You can click on the color and change. Well, that's not going to change that

This icon right here, if it's something like this, you can change the colors of it

If it's not kind of fixed like this image doesn't give you options to change the colors

But this you see this color up here, up here. That means that you can go and change this to a different color

So now it's green. The same thing with this shape right here

So you can drag the side of it. If you drag the corner, it keeps the proportions the same

You know, you can move it like so. Again, these ones, it looks like there's three different colors in this

So anyways, if you want to change one of them. You can do something like that

If you click on something, you can go and rotate it so you can just go through and take one of the existing templates

make it to your liking. One last thing, if you click on the background, you can go and change the color

So something like that. But now let's just go back, click on home again

and then click on create, give it create blank Instagram post. So here, if we just click on the background, the first thing we could do is

let's use our blue color for the background up here. We can say test IG post

So now that it has a name, if you have the colors, your brand kit, you can just click on one

They have some default colors here. Or you always have the option to add the hex code right here

Or you can essentially use these two screens to get any color you want

So you drag here for the different kind of types of color

And then from here, you can go and choose something, you know, much more specific

And it gives you the hex code right here. And then obviously something all the way in the corner is going to be pure black

So that's the very beginning. Hey, we got the background done. The templates we looked at a second ago

And then from there, let's go to elements. So there's a ton that you have here

So it's going to show you stuff you've recently used. You have lines and shapes

So if there's anything you want to use, just click on it. It gets added again

Just go up here. Change the color if you want. If you move the corner that way, you change it this way here

And we could go back to elements. Maybe we want a line like so

And then if you want to see more of any of these, you can just click on see all

One quick thing with something like this design is that if you drag the corner, it's going to change the whole shape of everything

You see now the line is much thinner. So if you had a line that was too thick for whatever you wanted to do

what you can do is drag the corner of it to get the thickness you want. And then you can just drag one side at a time to get it back

to the dimensions that you want to use. So something like that

And now we have an outline that's much thinner. Now, one kind of quick thing I think that would make sense

Well, we have three different shapes here. This is a good thing

Good time to show you the positioning. So if I were to highlight all three of these, there's a lot that we can do now

If I click on group, that means that all these are going to stay the same proportion

If I go and move them and I move everything together, if I want to then ungroup, I can do that

Then the position what I was talking about. So let's highlight the three things again

If I go to position, if I position to the top, they're all at the top

Now, if I were to move them again, I like all three position

And then so you can see. So this is going to be middle vertically. So it's going to pull them all down like this

It could be in the center and then they're all lined up along the center. I could align them to the right

I could align all to the left. The other thing I could do is space evenly and then it's spacious

So this space and this space are the same. So there's a lot that you can do like that

The other thing is the order of the elements. So let's do something like this

And so you can tell this is on top. This is in the middle and this is behind

So what we can do again is if we have the line clicked on and go to position

we can bring it forward so we can bring forward one. And it's probably let's change the color

So it's easier to see. Let's go to this. So you can see that this is now on top of everything

It's on top. Of even the square. And so this one down here is on the complete bottom

So if I go to position here, I could move forward and then it is on top of the square

but it is beneath it's this is the middle of the three items right now

So if I wanted to push it all the way to the back, I could do that. So if you have text and something else and you want to change which one is up front

sometimes you have text and you want maybe the image to cover up the very end of the text

Let's say you would put whatever the images in front of the text in that example

So here are kind of lines and shapes, but within elements, there's all sorts of stuff

So if we go now to graphics. So there's all sorts of different designs, something really easy

So gradients are something that's kind of shaded from one color to another

So you can just go and change, you know, any of these two colors

This you can also use these for backgrounds as well. And then you have feature designs

You have stickers, designs for a cause, the foliage, zodiac symbols. Let's edit one of these

So if the design is editable in terms of the colors, you get something like this along the side

And then you can just go through and change, you know, any of those colors there

And then I get the same thing with adjusting the size, you know, rotate it if you want to, etc

And then let's see, some of the stuff will probably not. This I can change the colors

Anyways, if something isn't allowing you to edit, it's not going to give you these up top

Then you have the photo. So within within Canva, as we saw earlier, there's hundreds of thousands of photos for free

with the free version and millions within the pro version. If you're looking for other stock photos that you don't find here, we have a video walking you

through a bunch of websites that offer free stock photos. I'll link to the video above right here

But here again, you can use the search for anything. So if we go, what do we want to think about today

How about lions? So we have all these photos. Again, what we're going to see, these are free

If you see the crown, this is part of Canva Pro. Maybe we want to use this image or

So maybe this one, one of the things that that we can try, I've actually never tried this before

is to remove the background. So this works at least with people

I've never tried it with an animal before. So we can remove the background and see if we have just the lion left

There we go. So now we have just the outline of the lion, the same thing works for people

This is what we use to create all of the thumbnails for our YouTube videos. We always use a solid background

I take the picture right here. We get rid of the gray background and use our blue

So that within let's go back to elements. So we looked at images, graphics, so more photos

There's videos as well. And then from there. So if we let's just clean up some of the stuff here

So the lion's taking up a lot of space. Let's move that. Get the line back on

Move this person down here. Also within scrolling down further, you have frames

And so if we use a frame like so, what you can do here is if you drag an image into the frame

You can do that. So what's going to happen is there's a circle now

So we have essentially the circle and the lion is in that. What we may want to do within the circle, though, is put the lion at the center of it

So now we have a circle element. So you would see it better if we change the background

There's there's essentially no the element. This has no background. If this were an image with a background, you would see the circle more clearly

You have charts as well. Now, if we go down to uploads. So this is where you can add, you know, company logos, pictures, anything else that you want to have

You can even record yourself right here. So one one option is you can just drag an image on the screen like this or you can click on it and it does the same thing

We only need to have me on here once. So with this picture, we can again edit this image background remover

And then again, I wanted to show you all of the other things you can do within the the image

So this is important. So if you click on edit image, so we remove the background, but then the brightness, contrast and saturation

So this is something you may use in Photoshop or something like that. So you can change the brightness, the contrast, the saturation

So you can have make sure that the image looks good. You can make some small tweaks to the image right here

There's filters for the colors. If you want to go back, you have to go to see more and then go to none

Then we have photogenic. So. Again, it's going to add. Some type of a filter, I think these are kind of similar and then we can go back to none again, scrolling down further, so mockups is similar to what we did with the line where we put it inside a form

So if I wanted to be inside of a laptop. I can do that, like so or

If it were. Me on a photo, me and a cell phone, there's a bunch of different options if you click back or forward, you can undo or redo, so undo and then you have the different shadows are really interesting, too

So what you can do if you want to kind of have a highlight or kind of a halo effect around an image

So if you want to edit one of these things, you see the little dials right here, click on that and you see there's three options

So the size of the shadow, the transparency. So if you want to be solid, you drag it all the way across if you want some blur

So there's kind of a range of from more transparent to less transparent

You could increase the blur and you can make it bigger and

Less transparent, so you can do that to it as well. And if you wanted this to be white, you could also do that

And then let's see if there's anything else with an image. They have these duo tones that we can do

So you can essentially. Well, that's a bit too much. And again, click on the edits and then I can go through and change these colors

Change the shadow. And then cancel if I don't want to use that, and there's a few other things down here that I that I haven't really had a chance to use

One other thing with the images, so if you wanted to crop the image, if you want to cut out part of the image, you can just, you know, either drag it by the corner or so here

If I just wanted to maybe kind of cut my hand out of it, I could do that. And then if I click on done there, we got rid of the rest of the image

I can undo it if for some reason I wanted my hand on the other side. You can flip it

So in that case, you would flip horizontally or you can also flip vertically

So that's pretty much the editing for images that you can do

Now, moving on to text so you can click on text here and add something

Also, if you just hit T, it will add text on the

On your design, like I just did, there's a bunch of kind of design fonts for you, so something like this, and then you can go through and say hello

And then it should let me also. I don't know if I can change the

So I don't know if it'll let me change all three colors or just the top color with this one, some of the other ones it will, you know, let you go through and change

You know, everything there. Let's see. Fresh baked. Maybe we'll change the background to white

Let's get rid of some of this stuff. So here let's see. Yeah, so we have now this is the

The this font, and then if I were to click on this, I can adjust, you know, this font if I wanted to click this, I can change this one

That's basically how you'd go through and edit some of that text. But again, if you want just something more plain, which is what we end up doing most of the time, if you want to just delete this, click on

So you're not typing in the text and then just hit delete. And then I'll just hit T and have some paragraph text

And so I can drag this anywhere that I want. And then one of the other things that's always important is to align stuff

So it always give you these dotted lines. So now it's going to. So this is left aligned with a square

I could write a line this with the end of this line. I could be right in the middle of the design like this

I can, you know, go and bold italic. So if this design was much longer

So you can see now in the design it's centered, but I could go left align or I could go full right align or back to center

If I wanted to add a bulleted list. I could easily. Here's a number list

And then if I want to get rid of it and then there's tons of different font options right here

And if you're using camera pro, you can upload a font that you want to use as well with both images, text and things like that

You'll find effects and the ability to animate. So effects you can see kind of similar to what we did around the image

So I can add neon around it. I can add splice. There's lift

And then if I go to animate, you can just hover over some of the different types of animations

You would have to export this as a gif or as a video if you want the animations to show up

If it's just an image, you're going to have the static text there. So that's essentially the different options with the text

So the other thing too, is if you want to change the spacing. So you have the letter spacing, which is how far apart each letter is like so

And then the line spacing you can increase right here. And then moving on from text, we have style

So the nice thing here, let's actually change to a template for this one

Which one has a lot of colors that we maybe like. So let's say no, let's do something else

So the newsroom. OK, so if we want to change the style, all we have to do is if we choose our colors, automatically adjust

Maybe it's not perfect. I don't know if I like this red background, but you can go through and just change the formatting, you know, altogether

So it changes the fonts and the colors to go with whatever the design is

So you can take a template you like and adjust it to your fonts and your colors right away and then go in there and add it further

And then so let's go back to the blank design. Let's go back to our blue

And what else do we have? So we have background. So I've just been showing you solid backgrounds, but you can also use the what's it called

The gradients where you can go and change one of the colors

You can also have patterns that you can add or you could add a landscape and put, you know, text and other images on top of it

They have abstract options. Then down below with Pro, you have your logo saved within more

You can see photo videos, the different folders. You can connect pixels and pixel bay, emojis, maps, Dropbox, Instagram, also stuff right within here

Then one of the other features that's really useful. Let me go to something that we've already maybe created, though

Let's go to home. So this is a thumbnail for YouTube and to put something in the YouTube community

We upload square images. So if I already created this, that's set up for a thumbnail

If I want to create a square, all I need to do is click on resize and then say what I want to be

So as we said before, 1080 by 1080, I can just do that custom or I could just click on Instagram post and then so I could do several different sizes or just one

So it's going to copy and resize. And so what's going to happen is right here we have all of the the different designs we had

So you can have multiple pages when you're creating designs as well. So, for example, if you wanted to duplicate this page, I could just do that and have a second one

So for this, what I need to do to make this design look good is I could maybe drag this up here

I could make myself a little bit bigger, move this up a little bit, and then, you know, maybe I want to really highlight the free and make that much larger

So that takes the thumbnail to a square image in a matter of seconds using all the same text colors and everything else

So that's another like really quick pro of using camera pro. One last thing along the side here that we haven't touched on is this, which is the transparency

So this is a hundred percent solid. If we pull anything to less transparent, you can change that like so

The same thing would work for an image if I want to look like a ghost, let's say

So let's not say I'm happy with this design and want to download this or export it

If you click on the three dots right here, you can share this. You can share the link, present, add to Twitter, Facebook

You can have it printed, et cetera. But we just want to download this and say add it to the community of our YouTube channel

Then we would just click on download. And so you have a couple of options of the type of file that you want

So PNG is what we normally use. If you want a video or a GIF, if you had something animation data, you would choose that

And then from here, do you want a transparent background? So the background wouldn't show through on this

This is only something available with Canva Pro. You can see the little crowns right here

This is really useful. Let's say if you have your logo and you want to put it on top of an image or on your website

that's a different color. If you're not able to export with a transparent background unless you use Canva Pro

And then if you have multiple pages like this, what you would want to do is you can download

all four or maybe I just want page two. So I can just click on this, delete this and go to two

Now page two is what is going to download. And then what I would do now is click on download

So that's how easy it is to create designs with Canva. You basically choose the type of design you want, choose a template or start from scratch

add images, add text, add other graphics, edit each of them. When you're done with the design, hit download

There you go. If there's a specific Canva tutorial you'd like to see on the channel, let me know down below

in the comments section. If you want to see all of our other Canva tutorial videos, check out the playlist right here

Hope to see you in those and future videos. Bye bye