How to Create Stunning Graphics Easily With No Design Skills

We have something a little bit different planned for you today? Well, a lot of what today is is perfectly normal. We're going to be taking a look at Canva, a terrific graphics creation tool that makes it easy for you to create and design graphics. But what's unusual is I'm not going to be taking you through much of the tutorial today. Instead, I'm going to rely on Liz as Yan, who is our content manager here at Datto tech. She recently did a terrific tutorial for our webinar Wednesday group on using canvas and it went over so well. I thought we should do a video on using Canva for the main channel. And so I started to do the research and then I realized I can't do half as good a job of showing you Canva as Liz can. So today we're going to be taking a look at using Canva hosted by Liz as yet, and that's today on Datto tech.[inaudible]let's do Donald here. How the heck are you doing this fine day? And as I mentioned off the top, it's a little bit of a different video today on daughter tech. Plus, it's quite a long video today on Datto tech. So if you want to skip the preamble and jump right to the tutorial, we will have timestamps in the description below so you can leap ahead or rewatch some of the more compelling bits. But now let me tell you about why we did this video this week. Every week at Datto tech, we host a webinar called webinar Wednesday, which is a tutorial webinar on either productivity or content publishing or content creation. And last week the video or the webinar that we hosted was on using Canva to create graphics, even if you aren't graphically gifted. And it was hosted by our content manager here at Datto tech by Liz AZA.And she put together all of the, uh, she put together the, the, the tutorial and it went over so well with the community. I thought we have to do a video on Canva here for the channel. So I started to do the research and started to put together a video and then I realized, what the heck am I doing? Liz is the expert. Liz really knows that and she did a great job of teaching our webinar Wednesday community. So why don't I just share that video with you, our YouTube audience. So that's how we got about, that's how this video came about today was the fact it is a story that I think needs to be told. Canva is a great graphics creation tool that has come a long ways since its early days of creating simple little social posts that you could resize. Now we use it for almost all of our graphic needs here at Datto tech and I think you will appreciate how it can fit in your life as well. So let's take a look at how to design brilliant graphics even if you aren't a gifted graphics person using Canva hosted by our very own Liz as yet.In this video, I'll show you how to create a design using Canva in three simple steps. First I'll show you how to choose your design types. Next I'll show you how to choose and customize the template. And lastly, I'll show you how to publish and download your designs. If you stick around to the end. I'll show you how to share and manage your designs as well. So let's jump into my screen and get down to business. So the first step is to choose your design type. There are two types of designs that you can generally choose from in Canva. The first one is using one of the Canva templates, which you can find in the template library or by conducting a search. Another option is to create a design from scratch. For this tutorial, let's go ahead and choose the template. That's usually where I start.I'm going to choose a blog thumbnail template, so there are three ways I can go about finding a template for my blog thumbnail. I could browse the template page and look for the category blog banner, or I can just type in blog banner in the search bar on the top of the page, or if you want to create from scratch, you can go to the top left sidebar and do a search there for blog and see what suggestions come up. As you can see, there are two options here for blog block, banner and blog graphic. I'm going to create a blog thumbnail so I will go ahead and select the blog banner. Next I'm going to show you how to choose and customize a template. For this tutorial. I'm going to choose this templates customize. I'm going to change the colors and add an image to match my brand. When you first use Canva, you will be guided through the process of customizing your template. The first step is to click on an element to edit it. You will see the editing tool bar appear above as you're editing the template. You can also upload your own photos by either clicking the upload button or dragging and dropping your files onto the canvas from the desktop. Lastly, the guide shows you where you can publish your designs. Once you're finished.To make this blog banner match my brand, I'm going to change the colors of this blog banner to my brand colors. As I've added my brand colors earlier in my brand kit, I should be able to easily select it from the editing tool bar. In this case, I want to change the pink background to my bronze brand color. So I'll just cut the background. And as I'm doing that, the editing tool bar will appear on the top and I can just click the pink color in the editing tool bar and select the bronze brand color from my primary palette. So easy, right? No need to go through the hassle and find my brand haitch Tema color code. Now I'd like to change the text on this blog banner. So what what I'll do is I'll just double click in the area of texts that I want to change. And then if I want to just delete everything, I just highlight the whole andthen delete and then just enter the text that you want to add. So in this case I'm adding my name, but as you can see, this actually covers the text below here. So we could do a few things here. We can either move this down so it doesn't overlap or I think in this case, because of how does that and why is quite long at the bottom. I'm going to put the word bliss and ASEAN on the sameline like that. That's you can see whenever I try to create a space, it goes down. So you could do two things here. Either you make the space bigger and then try and add the space again like that. Or you can select it all and then change the font size. So in this case I'll go to 48 make it a little bit smaller so it can fit the size that it wants to fit into. And then I see that I need to probably pivot a bit. So there's this rotation tool here. You could turn it around slightly. I might even move it slightly to the left by just clicking on it and then pressing down and then moving it wherever I want. As you can see there as well, there's an alignment tool. So you could say, you could tell whether or not your texts or your elements. It could be an image or text, whether it's centered or not. So that's pretty cool thing. So now that that is moved up, I can move this back up again. And if I want to change this as well, I could just double click deleted and then add my own text.All right, so that's all done. So you could also change the fonts in, in itself. You could change the colors, you could see all the options here to change the colors. I could change it to pink or gray, or I think I'll stick to the whites. Um, I could change the actual text, I could change the actual font family, see what fits. And you can see here that the ones with the crowns on the side, those are premium fonts. So you'll have to use the pro account to access those.And so you can see when you try to do that, this popup comes up. So if you want to continue to use the free version, just choose this, uh, fonts that are, that don't have the crown on the side. So I'm going to go with the original. I think that was quite nice. Okay, so now what I want to do is change this image. So as you remember earlier, I had uploaded an image of myself here and now I'm just gonna swap the image that is currently there in the template with my image. So sometimes that happens, you just have to make sure that yousee, you just hover over it until you get it to the right spot. And now too, as I can see her, there's a lot of Headspace here. So I'm just going, when you double click it, this is what will happen. You can move the image within the frame there and then you could even, if you want it to be clear, you could make the image bigger and resize as you see fit. Once you've done, you just click outside the box and it's done pretty good day. So another option is if you want to use filters, you can also do that here. You just click on the image and then click filter here. And you can choose the different filtersthat you want to use on your image. So sometimes it's nice to use it on Instagram where you use the same filter over all your images. So it could see is you've got a theme going on. Uh, it's like this. You could use this Epic filter and then you could just go up and down and adjust the intensity and you can just take note of what you use. Like say Epic 29, just take note of that if that's the kind of filter you like. And then when there's a different image, you apply the same setting. So you get the same kind of look and feel every time for your images. You could also adjust the image here in terms of brightness as say if your photos a little bit dark, you could adjust the brightness of it could ingest the contrast of it. You can add some tint, you can blur it out if you want to.If you just want it to blow out slightly. Um, that's possible. You could add process X process here. Uh, you could just really play around really with the setting Sarah and see how you like it. If you made a mistake, don't worry, just click reset and you're back to normal. You can also crop the photo, which in this case we won't do because it's kind of already in a frame and you could flip the photo, you could flip horizontally or vertically. You could do all that here and say if you've made a mistake, don't worry, just click and do up here until you find the image that you want again the way that you wanted it.I also wanted to show you another function that you could use on the elements. So when I say elements, it could be videos or photos or texts or images, anything. You could basically adjust the transparency as well. So see in this case I've just led to the picture and I'm adjusting the transparency. You can also do it here. Say for instance maybe, um, this background to the text there, I could change the transparency of that as well. And I could change the text transparency as well. So sometimes you want some images to be less prominent than others. You could change the brightness of it with the transparency. And you can also duplicate items. So say if you want it, more hearts on it, you duplicate it and then there's the copy and then you could move it here or wherever you would like.Yeah,so that's an option. Another option is to duplicate this whole slide. So this whole banner, you could duplicate the whole thing. And this, in this case, the blob banner, you probably wouldn't do that. But probably if this was a slide for a presentation, you might want to use the same uh, layout. You just click duplicate and then you get another copy. And if you're working with a team member, you could add notes here. Say, how does this look to you? Prove. And then you can click save. And so there's so many things that you can do in terms of editing your, customizing your template and these are just a few options for you.The other great thing about Canva is the ability to access stock photos so you don't have to go rummaging around. Um, and you know, subscribing to photo stocks, websites just to get access to images that you'd like to use for your business or you know, for whatever purpose that you want to use it for in Canva, you could access a photo library that is immediately accessible. As you can see here, I just clicked on photos and all I have to do is search what I'm looking for. So say I'm looking for a bicycle for instance. So I just type in bicycle and then as you can see here, if you see the crown, that means that is something that you need to pay for and it's not free. So in order to use images, you don't necessarily have to have a pro account. You could choose to just use one image and pay per image.So you could stay on the free account but pay per image. But, um, if you up upgrade to pro you, if you use a lot of stock images, you might be saving a lot of money because then you'll just be paying for a bulk of the images instead of just an image at a time. And that this might suit people who use a lot of images or if they're an agency that uses a lot of images for their clients and so on. So in this case, I'm going to try and use this free image by just dragging it and putting it there. So as you can see just now, it was possible to also add this image in the background so I could just hover over and that could be the background. And sometimes if you notice, if you use, um, a photo background, sometimes it's a little bit too, um, too bright.And then for in order for the text to show like this white text here, um, you need to make it a little bit darker. So you can either use the facts. Mmm. These are just a lot of different apps that you could use to create a fax. Or you could use a filter, you could change the color or you could change his transparency. See how'd that just changed the whole background? And then in may, the white text kind of pop up a bit. You could also use, um, elements to add a layer over the image. Like say for instance, if I wanted it to have an sort of like a dark black overlay so I could just make the attacks become more visible. So as you can see here, now when I selected that shape, it went over the image. And so you don't want that, you want the image to go above the picture, but below all the other elements on this design.So I'm going to do is I'm going to click the position button and I'm going to click backwards. So as it clicked backwards, you can see that is, it's kind of like moving down in terms of where the layer is and you can see when you should stop. So I think there, if you kind of make it a little bit bigger, you can see, okay, so now it's gone where you want it to be. So I'm just going to pull it so it covers the whole area. And then what I wanted to do, I was gonna add a layer of darkness. So a layer of black color, a transparent black color over it. So the image itself isn't, um, too bright. And so I'll be able read all the texts on, on the image. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to turn down the transparency on that. Do you see what happened there? So what I did was I put a layer of black and then I turned it down all over the image. And while, as you can see here is much more readable. All these texts, all these kinds of white elements are much more readable. In this case, I might want to change up the black. So it's now a color that is more visible. I might change it to yellow. So all the blacks here, I'll just change it to yellow.So see in a few seconds, I would say, I would say, okay, a minute at most, I have just changed this whole image from that to that. And it has changed completely how it looks and it's changed. Um, the whole theming of this is all about bicycles now. So I could change this and say bicycle mania, I could change the text. Um, maybe I'll change the font to that and then I'll make it a little bit smaller. Yeah. Well too small. Big again. But I'll you see, remember what we did before when it kind of gets a little bit too big. You just make the area bigger and then we could change this to a different font. Let's choose a free one. Nah, that doesn't fit. Nah, that doesn't fit.Hm. Maybe I like the original. Maybe change this one to something else. Yeah, kind of like that too big. Change it. Change it to be a bit smaller. Scale it back so it's centered. All right, that looks better. What do you think? So do you think you can do this too? I mean you could even go crazy. And I'm at a few clip parts of bicycles. So over here just now, I was searching for bicycle photos. Now I could add bicycle clip art. So see you have the pro and free versions. I'm going to add a pro version just so you see how it looks like. So when you add a pro image or pro element, it's going to have this kind of grid like image to it. So that means that's a paid for element. And when you try to download this whole design with, uh, an image that has a paid element to it, it will show you here that you need to pay that pay and download and then the, um, watermark will be removed.So if you want to see it without the, with the watermark, you could just download a free watermark draft, but it will still see the watermark. Um, but if not, you pay first and then you can download it and you won't see the watermark anymore. So that's how you use the premium images, uh, while not needing to upgrade to pro sort of pay as you go. When it comes to text, you can also change the emphasis of certain texts, you know, with, you can either make it bold, you can make it like Tallac, you can underline it, you could change the, uh, transformant to be capitalized, um, with upper case. And you could also change the spacing between all the letters. So you could create more space between the letters or you could reduce it. Even you could adjust the line height. So this is say if, um, it's like this and you want the line height change you want, maybe you want to make it closer, further away and you can make it change where the anchor is. So there's many things you could do in terms of changing how the text appears.So another thing you can do, well in this case we probably wouldn't do it, but you could create bullet points as well. So say if that's one bullet point, that's another bullet point, it's totally possible to do that. And of course you could change, the color, can change all of it. You could change half of it. So you can have two colors on one line. And that's really cool thing to do because you might want to emphasize just one word and have that standout and you might even go as far as bolding it. So it stands out even more than that one. So the next thing you want to do is publish it. Once you're done with the design, you want to publish it, you want to download it, you want to share it, and you really want to manage it. So the first thing I would say before publishing is to click on here, file and click save. Make sure that the latest version and the version that you're happy with is always saved. Another option is you could save it to a folder. So currently we haven't set up any folders in this account, so try to set one up. So let's say blog bannersand then it's saved to that folder. So if you create any other block banners, you could say that to the file and you could easily review it in a folder, which makes it a lot more organized for you to find in the future. So once you've saved it and organized it, you just either click here to download or you could care to publish. So depending on what you want to do, I would say first, usually what people would do is they would just download it. In this case, remember I created, I duplicated this design. So now we have three pages in this whole design. So, but I just want to use this one. I just want to download the first one. So what I can do here, I click the down button and just click on page one and click done and then click download. And that prepares the design. It's only takes a few seconds and then you, um, you choose to download it onto your machine.That's one way to do it. Another way to do it to publish is you could publish as a link. So maybe you want to show it to someone and then they could just grab the link. You grab the link and you share it with somebody just like that. And that's what they'll see. And they could open their own Canva time account and then they can edit it or they could, they could share it, um, or they could see it in a thumbnail view. So once you share it, remember you're sharing the whole thing. You're not just sharing that one page. So you could also publish it directly to your social media. So you could publish is Facebook, Twitter, email, Facebook group. You could download it as an animation. Now this is cool, but it's only a pro version. Um, so I won't show it today, but you can also upload it, uh, send it to Google drive Dropbox.Um, because depending on what your system is, you might want to send it straight to your cloud storage so your team member could access it and then share it on social media or you could even share it to your MailChimp. So say if you're creating an email header, then that will be awesome to just send it straight to MailChimp. Uh, you could also send it Slack and you could print it if you wanted to. So there are so many options for you to publish it. But the easiest one and the one that people are going to use the most is obviously just download it and you have all these options on how you can download it. Um, for social media, PNG, JPEG is totally fine, whichever you prefer. I prefer PNG because it seems to work better on most platforms and that's how you publish your design.Next I want to show you how to share your design. Now this is very cool as well because you want might want to share it with your teams, invite somebody to edit it. So this is where you go to share it. So you could have, you could have accessed this here just now with shared like it's basically the same thing. But over here you could also have the option to add in somebody's email address or share it with your team member if you've already added them to your account. So before you go, I really wanted to show you this very powerful feature that they have in Canva on the pro accounts. If you were to decide to upgrade. So this has started a text pro Canva account. And what we have here is right now is our webinar Wednesday thumbnail. What you can do in this instance is, uh, say if you want it to post this to Instagram with the pro account, you can auto magically, I would say resize the graphic into a size that's appropriate for Instagram.All you do is click here and then you could Instagram posts or you could basically change it to any custom size you want, but they do have these quick selections for you to choose from. So I'm just going to copy and resize this to an Instagram sizing so they see automatically it has changed that to a square format which is suitable for um, for Instagram. So sometimes you might want to change things a little bit. You might want to resize that there might be some alterations needed, but it's definitely not as much as you would have if you were to do it all over again from scratch. This helps to save a lot of time and a lot of energy if you were to create a lot of different graphics for different social media platforms. Another thing I wanted to show you that's very cool is the folder options.So we've, I've created folder for Datto tech wear, which is sits right here on the left hand side when you are on your dashboard. So we have so many different types of products. We have webinar Wednesday, we have a newsletter, we have our gray zone group, we have our Evernote main easy course. So you could basically put all these elements into different folders. Let's just look into one of them. So this is the webinar Wednesday files, and this is all our, what I would call templates. So all I need to do if I want to use them is say make a copy and then I'll create a new thumbnail or I could just reuse it. And then every time update the same one. What's cool about this is with the folder system, you could also add your, uh, assets quite easily to any graphic that you're currently working on in this area and this editing area.So say for instance, I'm like, we're, I'm always looking for Steve's photos because we've got to have these photos in all of our assets. So as you can see there, the folders are easily accessible here. So if I want these photos, I'll just look, Oh, which one do I want the transparent one? Do I want the ones with background? And this is where all his photo lives. So you don't have to like go back to this window here to grab, say, or even go to your computer to grab an image. You could put them, put them in a folder system that was for you and right here within your editing window you can have access to all your assets, your logo, you know, anything that you might need even from a different project, different products you can access that right here. Say, I'm just going to take an example here. I want to change this to a different photo. Oh, sometimes it's a little bit tricky and there you go. So I could if say I want to change to transparent one or even one of these Bitmoji lists. There you go. So it says easy as that. You can save so much time. And I mean for me it's been, it's probably saved me more than half the time I take to create Steve's image.How awesome was that? We are so lucky to have Liz Asien on our team here at Datto tech and this process that she has put in place for us to use Canva for publishing. All of our graphics has streamlined the entire production process at Datto tech. It's well worth investing your time and energy to learn this product and master it and bring it into your publishing system. Now, if you found today's video useful, a couple of suggestions. First of all, why don't you join us for one of our webinar Wednesdays every week here at Datto tech, we host a tutorial webinar based on productivity or content creation. This was an example of the sort of content we share. So I invite you to join us. They're free, and every week we'd love to have you as well. If you found this video useful, I've got a few favors to ask. First of all, give us a like and a share and a comment. Let us know what you like, what you want to know more about. I read each and every comment even if I don't have time to reply to them all. And finally, if you've not yet subscribed to this channel, what the heck are you waiting for? Click that subscribe button. Ring the notification bell, and we will see you next time. Right here. For more Donald tech. Tell them I'm Steve Dotto a fun storm in the castle.