Canva is a superb place to start if you want to step up your design game. It is a user-friendly graphic design tool for creating professional-looking designs. Its simple drag-and-drop interface and a vast library of templates and assets make it easy to create high-quality designs for everything from social media posts to presentations.
You’re at the right place if you wish to acquire Canva expertise and learn some of its trade tricks.
These ten tips will help take your designs to the next level, whether a beginner or a seasoned pro.
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Built-In Image Library
If you’re looking for high-quality stock photos in your Canva designs, you can find what you need in Canva’s built-in image library. With millions of royalty-free stock images, illustrations, and vectors, you’re sure to find the perfect photo for your next project. Select the picture you want to use and click “Insert” to add it to your design.
Repurpose Content By Resizing
Use Canva’s resize tool to quickly adapt your designs for different social media. Creating assets separately for other social media platforms can be time-consuming. But with Canva’s resizing feature, you can easily repurpose the content for various social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram without breaking consistency. All this with just a click of a button.
Keyboard Shortcuts
If you use Canva regularly, you know how time-consuming it can be to create designs from scratch. Luckily, a few keyboard shortcuts can help speed up the process. Here are a few keystrokes you can perform for everyday actions.
- Click the “L” key on your keyboard to add a line.
- Click the “R” key on your keyboard to add a rectangle.
- Bold text: Press Control + “B” key
- Duplicate elements: Press Control + “D” key
- Group Elements: Press Control + “G” key
- Send element forward: Control + “]”
- Send element backward: cmd/ctrl + “[“
- Press Alt + drag (pointing device) to scale your selected piece proportionally.
If you wish to learn more, you can check out some of the top keyboard shortcuts for Canva.
Brand Kit
Canva brand kit is a set of tools that help you create consistent branding across all your marketing materials. With the Canva brand kit, you can easily create a cohesive look for your business, whether creating an ad campaign, a social media post, or a new website. Canva Pro users can create their brand kit within the platform, complete with their brand colours, fonts, and logo.
Canva Tip #1 – Remove Image Background
Removing background from an image is no easy task. It’s an advanced design feature. A simple click of a button would allow you to remove the background from the image and customise it to your liking. This feature is available with Canva Pro only.
Using this feature is pretty straightforward. After you’ve added the image to your design, click on it and choose the Effects option on the top left-hand of your screen. You could then see the Background Remover option. Click on it and leave the rest to Canva. You could also customise the parts you want Canva to remove or retain.
Canva Tip #2 – Lock Elements
When working with many elements on the editor, the Lock tool will come in handy. It allows you to lock the position of selected page elements, as its name suggests. This procedure ensures that you continue designing without disturbing the features you’ve already finished creating (in the background).
How to use it?
Select an element and click on the tiny Lock icon at the top of the ribbon to lock it. You can now proceed with other edits. Unlocking is pretty much the same, select the element and uncheck the lock.
Canva Tip #3 – Add A Hyperlink to Your Posts
You can use Canva for more than just JPEG, PNG, or MP4 files. You can also download templates and designs in PDF format. However, that’s not all. It is possible to link some aspects of a page (text or clip art) to external websites. To attach an object, select the object, click the Link icon in the top right corner, and type the site’s URL to add it to the page.
The only downside is that you cannot attach multiple links on the same page.
Canva Tip #4 – Create Animations in Canva
There’s more to Canva than templates and Instagram stories. You can also create animations with this tool. With a few clicks, you can make silly animations.
You can use animated frames in Instagram stories. You do this by clicking on the element you want to animate and choosing Animate from the top ribbon. Afterwards, download the files in MP4 or GIF format.
Canva Tip #5 – Add Custom Filters in Canva
Canva offers many presets for editing images. If you don’t like the ready-made filters, you can adjust the photo yourself. You can do this using Canva’s Adjust feature. Additionally, you can save the filter settings to use in future projects.
So, the next time you want to apply the same filter to a new image, simply open the Adjust panel and paste the filter code at the bottom. That will immediately transform the picture.
Canva Tip #6 – Crop Images Into Frame Shapes
Canva’s ability to crop images into shapes is perhaps one of its most valuable features. You need to ensure that the shape is available in Canva. To begin, select the frame you wish to use. Now upload the image you want to crop and drag it into the frame to crop it. That’s all there is to it.
Conclusion
Besides being a powerful design platform, Canva is also a helpful productivity tool. Whether you want to maximise your design output or elevate your brand visuals, you can use the above tips to gain Canva expertise.
If you wish to upskill yourself and learn skills that can accelerate your career, you can join the Seekho select membership today.
