Hello, friend, and welcome to learning about Canva. We are going to have a lot of fun designing together and you are going to be a pro before you know it. So let's get started. We're just going to get the lay of the land before we dive in. And the first thing you want to do is create an account if you haven't created one. So as you can see on the screen here, you can either sign up with email, you could sign up with Facebook or Google Plus, I already have one.

So I'm just going to log in with my email. And then this is the desktop. This shows you all the different designs which we'll go through. And it also shows you what you've already made. And it keeps your design saved in a cloud. So you can always go back and you can adjust them.

And that's one of the advantages of Canva over PicMonkey I know a lot of people use PicMonkey but when you make it Design in PicMonkey, you can't edit it. So let's start with just going through the settings here. So over here you can see this is your profile, and brings you to account settings. And this is just the personal information you use to log in. And if you want to ever delete your account, you just do it right there. There's also account info This is for if you sign up for Canva for work, and it's a paid part of Canva.

And they keep track of different things track of like the style you use the colors you use, but I'll show you how to do that without having to sign up for Canva for work. Going back to the main screen, go back to all your designs, that's how you get back to the main screen. This is generally where all the designs lie. Okay, so they give you the popular design types to begin with. So this is social media and you'll see underneath it gives you the actual size. So when you're looking to create a certain size picture, you can kind of scroll All over.

All I'm doing is taking the mouse and scrolling over and it's giving me the sizes. So blog graphic. Then they go into the more detailed ones. These are all the social media posts, Twitter, Pinterest, the popular one, Facebook posts, Instagram, and then they go into documents. So this is a US letter eight and a half by 11 normal sheet paper. This is also eight and a half by 11.

The only difference between these two is this is letterhead and when you click on it, it'll give you samples of different letters. This is just a letter size that you can make like a flyer if you wanted to make out of it. This is a magazine size. This is a little bit more they give you more magazine layout. Here's a certificate resume letterhead that's a larger size letterhead. Then you go into blogging and ebooks if you wanted to create a desktop wallpaper if you want to create a blog graphic that's 800 by 1200 Little larger.

Here's a looks like a CD album cover and an infographic This is a popular item on Pinterest. And then marketing materials. There's some flyers you can create a poster. Here's a menu, business card, gift certificate. And then they go into social media and email headers, YouTube channel art. If you have an Etsy shop, here's something you could use Google Plus photo, and then they go into some events postcard, you can make a card.

I actually made my postcards in Canva. They came out beautiful. An ads, these are for blogs. If you do ads on the side of your blog, you can create like little skyscraper ads or Facebook ad. And that is generally the overview of the different kind of designs you can make. So what I'm going to do is just go through a basic Design right now and show you the components.

I do move a little fast in this module just to give you an overview of the entire program. But don't worry, the rest of the modules will walk you through all of these steps again and again. So you get it. I just wanted to touch on everything first to give you a bird's eye view. So we're just going to click on social media. And what it does is it opens a whole new window.

For that one specific design, it starts with a blank item. So this is where you design on the right. And on the left are all of your tools CLC elements, text background, any uploads that you may have. So right here will always be the free and paid type of layouts that they offer, just to give you kind of a start. So the only way that you can tell if you pay is if you scroll over and you see the dollar sign in the corner. The free ones will actually say free right there.

So we'll just click on that one to start with. Now, all of these different components You can change, you can change the color. When you click on it, you can see all the different colors that come up for. If you wanted to change the cup, you know, a darker color blue, you could do that. You could change the line color around it, you can get rid of the line color around it, you can edit any part of any type of layout to your heart's desire. So just keep that in mind as you're designing.

And you can always search to so if you wanted to search for something like dogs, they will come up with all these different pictures of dogs. They're not all free, you could see the $1 that you'd have to pay for the design element. But if you did want to use a free dog, here's a free dog and you can change the colors in it. Get rid of the teacup behind there and just use your dog. So there's a lot of different ways that You can use the library. So we'll go back to layouts.

These are all the different layouts for this specific social media post. With each design comes a whole different assortment of layouts. So going down the line here, here's elements that you can use in your design. They have a whole host of free photos. So say you didn't want to use the dog. Let's get rid of the dog.

Here's the trashcan over here, you just click on the dog. And when it's highlighted like that with this circles in the corners, you just press Delete, and you get rid of it. Say you wanted to use this picture. serene photo, just resize it, and you could pop it right in right there. So these are all free photos. You can use a grid, say you wanted to use two pictures in your social media posts.

You can size it by squeezing it different ways to pull it down. You just click on a circle, hold it down and pull it down with your mouse. And you click on the picture, whatever picture you want and just pop it in. Now this one is in a great picture because it kind of cuts it off. If you want to pick a picture that has the right size, we'll just move it over. So then say you wanted another free photo of a guy, we'll try to pick a taller one.

There's a skyscraper. And we could pop it right in there. So that is what is part of the elements of grids. Now frames are a little different in the fact that they offer different shapes so you could see they have, you know, frames within. If you wanted to do a phone frame, you could do a frame with a border around it. Let's get another picture and I'll show you how that works out.

You go back to photos. So say we wanted to drag a dog into this frame. We'll take this pug. So then you just arrange the pug in it. Click OK. And there it is. Now if you see the grid right here with Canva under it, that means it's a paid picture.

So you're gonna end up paying $1 for this picture to put it in your design. So I always try to use free pictures or upload my own, which I will show you how to do later. So I'm just gonna delete that. Going through more of the elements, different shapes you can use. So you can insert a heart in there, make it any color you want, make it any size you want. And you can duplicate it.

If you want to copy it. You can make that a different color, which I will show you how to do all of this stuff. But you can make it look like a little shadow. So you can do things like that. All different kinds of shapes and then lines again, all different colors, different styles. You can see the lines as you go through the arrows.

And again, you can do a search at any time for anything and see what it comes up with. And then they also have illustrations, which are kind of like quirky little things that you can use to put in your designs. Again, using the search tool is very helpful to weed through a lot of these things. You go to icons, these are a little bit more sort of like illustrations, but they're outlines so they give you a little bit more of almost like what you'd see on a web page or use as a button, that kind of thing. And then if you wanted to make a chart if you're making a graph, here's some samples. And then the last thing is the I love Canva which they just put in so that if you want to put it in your design, they Get a little free publicity.

So that is the extent of it as far as the elements, then we go down to text. And this gives you all different kinds of text setups. As you can see, just scroll through. How you use these is you just literally click on it and it will insert it into your design. Then you can go into it and change the type of font right here, the size font right here, the color if you want it bold or not, and then how you want it to line up. So there's a lot of different things you can do with the font.

The next section I want to show you is background. So you just click right on background here. There are some cool patterns that you can use that they offer for free but let me just show you the first option which is to just make a bold color the background. If you also want to change the transparency to make it it looks like this is a little faded. You can make it bolder, make it at 100%. Or you can always bring it down to a lighter color.

So that is the default palette, you can also pick any color if you have a specific color you use by clicking on the plus sign, and then entering in the hex code down here. But you can also play around with it and just see what interests you. So then they give you the monochrome colors right here you could use and then below are all these different wonderful patterns. So these are all free patterns you can use for your backgrounds, click any of them right there, and it will insert it right into your design. And then if you click on it, you can actually change the color of the pattern as well. options for backgrounds are endless.

You can do a lot of different things. As you can see, they offer quite a few and then eventually you get into the paid ones. So there are some pages elements, they're only good for 24 hours to tweak. If you opt for a paid element, you can pay for the dollar for it. And then you have 24 hours to adjust it in your design, otherwise, you'll have to repay the dollar. So the last part, our uploads, right here.

And what you do is you just upload your own image by clicking on the upload your own image, and it will pull up whatever files you have on your computer. So I usually use background. So if I wanted to upload this background, I would just double click on it. And you can see it's pulling it in right here and this shows you the status bar right here. So once it's done, that'll go away, and then you can just pull it into your design. So you can either put it into the picture right there, that's where it's pulling it or If you wanted to bring it to the background, you just make it as big as the design.

And then it'll pull it into the back. Whenever you want to save anything, go right up here, this is the actual design name. So you can click on it, and you can change the file name to whatever you want to name it. So this is my intro design. And you just click Done. And then that's what it is named.

I found that you keep it shorter, it's better for your file. Sometimes it'll stall saving if you have a file name that's too long. And then you just go over here to File and Save. But it will always tell you right here where all changes are saved. And also, when was the last save last saved a few seconds ago. So that basically gets you started on designing Canva.

We're going to be touching on all these things again, as we make the individual designs that I detailed were going to be making an Instagram post, a Pinterest graphic, there's a lot of different things and you'll learn as you go. As we create things, it's a lot easier to learn quicker so that you can see how to apply them. So we're just gonna go back to the desktop real quick, I wanted to mention one other thing is the custom dimensions. If you want to create something that you haven't seen an outline for already one layout that they have, you can create your own. So you have the different dimensions here, and they offer in pixels, millimeters and inches, so that's always an option as well. So we're just gonna wrap this up and get designing.

I'll see you in the next module.