To follow along with this chapter – and the rest of the book – you will just need Canva.

Saying that, it’s important to note that Canva has some features that require a paid subscription. But fear not, design grasshopper; we’ll be exploring both the free and paid sides – so whether you’re rocking a budget tighter than a drumhead or have pockets overflowing with digital doubloons, we’ve got you covered.

Though Canva is extremely user-friendly, it might seem like a magical land of visual delights, and you may need some help navigating around the different interfaces.

Figure 1.1: Canva’s dashboard

So, let’s demystify the Canva interface together and explore some of its different features.

Canva search bar

Feeling the blank page panic? Fear not, design friend! Ditch the template hunt, tell the search bar what you want, and POOF! Canva’s magic AI whips up a unique design just for you!

Figure 1.2: Canva’s search bar

The search bar isn’t just your keyword buddy anymore – it’s a creative partner, understanding your ideas and generating designs based on your prompts. Think of it like ChatGPT for design.

But remember, our AI baby is still learning, so keep your prompts simple and concise. If you want to make an event about sushi, search for sushi Wednesday or flyer sushi. Adding a color to your prompt will also help you to find a template that suits your business, such as green flyer sushi.

Also, currently, the search bar only works in English (for now; more languages are coming soon!).

And another thing – even if you do not remember the name of a project, you can search for the style you gave it, the color codes used, or words featured in the design. Essentially, you can search for nearly anything you remember about the project and Canva should be able to find it for you!

Visual Suite

Since March 2023, Canva has transformed into a Visual Suite, serving up an array of eye-catching layouts right under your search bar. Need a social media post or a Pinterest pin? Easy peasy! Craving a video edit or a document template? You’ve got it! Invoices, estimates, mind maps, shopping lists, even CVs and presentations – Canva’s your one-stop shop for all things visual.

Figure 1.3: Canva’s Visual Suite

All the design types have been grouped into macro-categories, so just click on the category you need and look for a specific premade template or a blank one.

Templates

Feeling uninspired and stuck staring at a blank canvas? Don’t worry, you’re not alone! That’s where Canva templates come in. Instead of starting from scratch, you can use a template as a springboard, customizing it with your own colors, fonts, and images to make it unique.

And the best part? Even if you end up with something completely different from the template, it doesn’t matter! The template just sparked your imagination and helped you get started.

Figure 1.4: Templates page

Let’s suppose we are looking for inspiration to design social content about interior design. Click the Template option on the left-hand toolbar and, from the search bar, enter the keyword you are looking for. We’ll enter Interior design. Then, based on your color palette, let’s assume you want to find a template for Instagram that is predominantly white. You can just open the template’s filters, tick the Instagram post category, and select the color White. This way, you can find results that are closest to your needs without wasting time on uninteresting results.

Figure 1.5: Search results for “interior design” templates, plus filters

Brand Hub

Brand element management can be cumbersome; however, if you have a Pro subscription, consider utilizing Canva’s Brand Hub – this is your centralized storage space for all the logos, colors, fonts, and other assets of the brand (or brands) you may be managing. The Brand Hub eliminates the need for scattered folder structures and provides easy access in a single in-cloud location.

Even free users can leverage limited functionality by storing up to three essential brand colors. For extended functionality, consider creating a custom project (794x1,890 pixels) to serve as a DIY Brand Hub, housing logos, color codes, fonts, and relevant branding imagery, all saved in one handy document.

Figure 1.6: Brand Templates page

Alternatively, you can access a pre-made Brand Hub template (created by me!) here: https://partner.canva.com/eK5vY1. You can customize the template to suit your specific needs and populate it with relevant branding elements to establish a consistent and organized brand identity.

Figure 1.7: My pre-made Brand Hub template

Remember, effective organization enhances efficiency and streamlines design processes. Implement these suggestions to optimize your brand element management within Canva.

Plus, are you stuck with your brand voice? Canva Pro’s got your back! Since October 2023, you can store your brand tone right in the Hub with its AI writing tool. Canva’s AI brand voice feature is not just a text generator, though; it’s a powerful tool for harnessing the magic of consistency and injecting personality into your brand communication.

Think of it as a whisper coach: you define your brand voice guidelines, including vocabulary, tone, and personality traits. The AI then analyzes these guidelines and learns your brand’s “language.” When you want to generate content, the AI will suggest text tailored to your specific voice. The AI doesn’t simply parrot your existing content either – it uses its understanding of your brand to generate fresh, original text that aligns with your desired tone and message.

To find this feature, make sure that you’re in the Brand Hub and scroll down until you find Brand voice. Then you can tell Canva how to generate text using the same tone your brand is using, such as confident, casual, and friendly.

Figure 1.8: Canva’s brand voice

To have a taste of how it sounds, click on Try your brand voice in a design and a new document will open up where you can write a prompt that will be used to generate a response in your set brand’s voice:

Figure 1.9: Canva’s brand voice result

With this prompt, Canva’s AI can help you with generating customized texts for your documents, posts, and presentations.

Note

Speaking of AI, Canva is packed with a whole host of AI features. In fact, we’ve dedicated Chapter 11 to discussing them!

Single project interface

The single project page interface is our chameleon of Canva, changing and growing constantly, and is packed with features that we’ll explore throughout the book!

Accessing design elements within Canva’s project interface proves straightforward. Once you have a project option, as shown in Figure 1.22, navigate to the left toolbar menu. There are a few categories here, but the three main ones are Elements, Text, and Uploads:

• Need text? The Text section is here to help you add text boxes to your design.
• Got your own photos, videos, or audio? Upload them straight from your device using the Uploads section.
• Looking for something extra? The Elements section offers a wider range of design elements for you to choose from.

Figure 1.10: Single project interface

Looking at the Elements category specifically, it houses various design components, such as illustrations, icons, images, videos, shapes, grids, graphs, and layouts. These elements boast diverse origins, including contributions from creators like myself, enriching the available selection for Canva subscribers.

Furthermore, clicking the three dots (…) beside any element reveals the creator’s name, additional information, and suggestions for similar elements. You can even follow creators directly within Canva, allowing convenient access to their future content.

Additionally, if you click on Info, you can also do the following:

• Mark the element as favorite: this will add the element to the favorite folder
• Add it to a specific folder of your choice
• Be redirected to similar elements
• See all the other related elements (if the element is part of a wider collection)

Figure 1.11: Magic recommendations and element creator details

However, be careful when using these elements. You cannot download an illustration and simply use it as a logo or icon just as it is; you will have to customize it with your own colors or use the illustration as part of a larger graphic. This way, Canva enforces copyright by protecting the work of its creators.

Note

You can find more information about Canva copyright here: https://www.canva.com /help/licenses-copyright-legal-commercial-use/.

Create a design button

Does your project canvas feel barren? Simply utilize the Create a Design button to initiate project creation.

Figure 1.12: Create a design button

While the search bar aims to lead you through templates or projects by searching for keywords, the Create a design button allows you to directly find the type of design you want to create (for example, an Instagram story). This lets you bypass pre-defined templates and set custom dimensions, allowing you to unleash your design potential without restraint!

Figure 1.13: Create a design button options

On top of that, have you ever been stuck in a situation where you have a PDF and you can’t copy the text? The Create a design button also lets you upload PDFs and make them completely editable. Some designers use this option to upload brand identities that were made in Adobe Illustrator but exported as PDFs.

Plus, the Create a design button lets you adjust images without opening a project too. This way, you do not need to download other photo editing apps to quickly adjust the colors or add a filter to your picture. It’s your design pit stop for quick fixes and instant satisfaction.

After that overview of the main interfaces of Canva, one thing you may be wondering is

what you can upload in Canva. If so, stay with me. In the next section, I will give you some more details about the storage you can use in Canva and the upload limits.

In Canva, the Uploads section allows you to upload external resources and save them in the Canva cloud space – for free users, this is 5 GB (on average, over 3,000 images); for Pro users, it is 1 TB (on average, over 600,000 images); and for education and non-profit accounts, it is 100 GB (on average, over 60,000 images).

Figure 1.14: Canva’s upload section

Even though I have hardly seen the storage space on Canva run out, I still advise you to upload images that are never larger than the design you are creating. For example, if you are creating an Instagram story measuring 1,080x1,920 pixels and you want to use a full-screen photo of yourself, make sure that the image is no larger than 1,920 pixels. If you instead were to create a 1x2 meter roll-up, you would need a larger image, at least 2 meters in size (i.e., 7,559 pixels), otherwise the previous 1,920px image would be grainy.

Figure 1.15: Low- and high-resolution images

Saying that, there are some upload limitations. In terms of the files, there is the following:

• The image file (.jpeg, .png, .svg) limit is 25 MB
• The audio file (.m4a, .mp3, etc.) limit is 250 MB
• The video file (.mov, .mp4, etc.) is 1 GB

And in terms of users, there is the following:

• The limit for free users is up to 1 GB
• There is no specific limit for Canva Pro/Teams users (it is likely just very big)

Let’s also take a look at some of the supported file types. The supported image formats are as follows:

• .png and .jpg/jpeg: These are the most common image formats
• .heic: Most iPhone and iPad pictures are automatically saved in this format
• .svg: A vectorial format, mostly used for logos

While the supported video formats are as follows:

• .mov: This is Apple’s video format
• .gif: Used for animated web images for the web, such as icons and short loops (memes!), but not for photos or long videos.
• .mp4: The widest multimedia container format
• .mpeg: A format that uses compression to make the file smaller
• .mkv: Good for high-quality videos with multiple language options
• .webm: A free, web-friendly video format designed for streaming

If you are wondering how you can find out the format, size, extent, or weight of the image from your PC, simply right-click the image and view the image properties:

Figure 1.16: Image information on Mac (top) and Windows (bottom)

If you’re using your phone, just find your image and open the image’s information panel:

Figure 1.17: Image information on a phone (iPhone)

After that, if you need to change properties, you can use this powerful and free converter: https://www.iloveimg.com/.

Also, to quickly convert pixels into centimeters or other units of measurement, you can simply use the Google Converter: https://cloudconvert.com/.

Note

Before starting a project, it’s worth remembering that the minimum size for your project is 40x40 pixels (1,058 x 1,058 cm), while the maximum is 8,000 x 3,125 pixels (211,664 x 82,681 cm).

After quickly reviewing the Upload section and some Canva limits, let’s now quickly review some helpful shortcuts you should remember.

To speed up your work in Canva you can use a series of shortcuts from your desktop. Here are some of the Canva shortcuts that I use daily to speed up my work:

Figure 1.30: Shortcuts

Besides these, you can find other shortcuts here: https://www.canva.com/help/keyboard-shortcuts/.

Level up, designer – you have now finished the first chapter and unlocked some of Canva’s essential features!

Throughout this chapter, we have navigated through Canva’s interface, discovering the search bar (powered by AI!), its streamlined single project interface, and the multi-purpose Create a design button. Just for Pro users, we also met the Brand Hub; however, we looked at how Free users can still use this feature too.

As well as the main interfaces, we also reviewed incorporating resources in the Uploads section, some of our tool’s limitations, and some handy shortcuts.

Remember, Canva evolves, but your potential soars. Use this knowledge to explore and unleash your inner design genius!

In the next chapter, let’s dive into brand archetypes and discover your creative personality!