Mastering Canva: A Guide for Beginners and Pros for November 2023!

 

laptop background by Kaitlyn Baker

What is Canva?

Canva is a beginner-friendly graphic design platform that can be used online or downloaded. It can be used for a wide range of content including Youtube Thumbnails, Logos, Backgrounds and basically anything you can think of!

Why Canva?

Canva has the most user friendly interface for basic to moderate graphic design needs. Within a matter of minutes, you can create amazing projects even if you're a beginner!

In fact, the picture above was also created with Canva in about 5 minutes!

Canva can be downloaded or be used in your default browser so this means you can work on your projects whenever and wherever you want with just your email and password.

It's completely free without any watermarks and you can always upgrade to Canva Pro for some extra features.

85% of the Fortune 500 use Canva! There must be a reason behind this, so lets dive in deeper.


made with Canva

Canva offers a lot of stuff on their website/software for free. Everything from millions of free-to-use pictures to over 250,000 Free templates. Yes, you heard that right.

You can make anything such as a Resume, Youtube Thumbnail, Logo, Desktop Wallpaper and over 100 more other design types.

Canva's free plan even offers a generous 5TB of cloud storage, allowing you to save your work without consuming valuable space on your computer.

You can add your friends, or other businesses for a collaboration to make better designs together, all for free.


made with Canva

Upgrading to Canva Pro can help you enhance your project to new heights as it provides a whole lot of extra features.

Canva Pro gives you access to premium templates and over 100,000,000+ stock photos, videos and other graphics.

Upgrading gives you a great 200 times more cloud storage compared to the free plan, offering a total of 1000GB or 1TB of cloud storage 

Canva Pro also gives you access to over 20 AI powered tools which can improve your projects within a few clicks.

Some examples are MagicEraser, Background Remover, Text to Image, Text to Video



Canada - Monthly: $18.99 CAD
Yearly: $149.99 CAD ($12.49 CAD/month)

United States - Monthly: $14.99 USD
Yearly: $119.99 USD ($9.99 USD/month)

United Kingdom - Monthly: €11.99 Euro
Yearly: €109.99 Euro (€9.16 Euro/month)


made with Canva

You likely already know that Canva provides a broad range of design possibilities for your projects, whether you're working on a YouTube thumbnail or creating an Instagram story.

What's even more exciting is that these design types can serve as a fantastic income source!

Here's a proven strategy, along with its comprehensive guide, for making money using Canva.

Freelancing

Canva is like a magic canvas for freelancers. You can do anything from creating logos to making Youtube thumbnails for others. Canva can be used to design stuff for others to make some good money. 

Freelancing is one of the most talked about side hustles now, which means, you can always seek help online if you encounter any issues.


Canva offers various templates to make your freelancing work even easier, the wonderland logo above was made with a Canva template in under 2 minutes.

This is an example of how you can make logos with Canva, but that's not all...

You can also assist other youtubers by designing their Youtube Banners which can be done in a few hours and eventually can make you hundreds of dollars per day.

Marketing: Once you are ready to assist others with their tasks, how do you reach out to the possible clients who need help?

Well, here's what you can do, start off with creating a portfolio with your information, and showcase your best designs.

You can then add this portfolio to your website or Freelancing platforms to promote your service and get some clients. Some of the Freelancing platforms include:




These platforms allow you to promote your service for absolutely no cost so that you can help others while earning some bread through freelancing.



Canva lets you enhance your social media posts for many platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube etc. 

Canva's free version empowers you to enhance your business and social media presence without incurring costs. You can easily create impressive visuals, this includes Business cards, Portfolios, Resumes etc...

In the realm of social media, Canva's free version offers a range of templates for Youtube Thumbnails, Instagram Posts, Instagram Reels, Instagram Stories, Tiktok Stories, Youtube Banners,

As mentioned earlier, Canva is used by 85% of Fortune 500 companies. They rely on it for creating social media posts, promotional banners, and advertisements. It simplifies the design process and enhances their online presence.

Lets learn how its done

Head on over to Canva.com and sign up


Click on "create a design" at the top right to select what project you want to be working on. Lets make an Instagram post for example

Once you have the canvas ready, you will be presented by a bunch of tools on the left side of your screen which includes options for text, uploads and elements.

If you want to upload a picture from your device, simply click on "Uploads" and then select "Upload files", but if you want to use the Canva library, just click on "Elements" and search for whatever you would like.


In this example, lets start off by adding my social media logo and effortlessly positioning it in the middle. Canva makes positioning your images so straightforward that it hardly requires any explanation.

To enhance the visual appeal, lets add some text. You can easily do this by selecting "Text" at the left side and then clicking on "Add a text box".

After you've entered your text, you can click on it and easily change its size, color, font and lots of other features!


That's much improved, but there's still one more thing were missing... Lets consider adding a background to this so that we get rid of the negative space and make a balanced picture.

When it comes to adding backgrounds to your images, you have a lot of options. You can explore the millions of pictures that Canva offers or you can upload images directly from your device and you can even drag & drop pictures you like from Google!

(be aware of copyright)

To use Canva's Photo Gallery, all you need to do is one click. Click on "Elements" on the left side of your interface and you'll have access to the million of pictures Canva offers.


That looks pretty good for a quick 10 minute project!

To download the file you've just completed, simply head over to the 'File' tab located at the top of the interface, and from there, click on the 'Download' option. You will then be asked to select your preferred file format for downloading.

And there you go!

As I write this, I have just shared the post made above on My Instagram, which happens to be my first post.

Comments

Post a Comment