Hi there. This videos going to show you around Canva. I'm gonna show you
how to create a course banner for Canvas and you'll pick up some design tips along the way.
To get started, log into your own free Canva account by going to Canva.com.
At the top search for Canvas banner. You're gonna see a whole bunch of templates that are sized just
right for a banner in Canvas. To get started, you can just click on one of them. Or if you
want to start from scratch, you can do that too by selecting the empty canvas with the plus icon
in the top left corner. I'm gonna choose this one right here. So I just clicked on it. I'm gonna
close out of this little box here and close out of that one too. Now this is going to open the banner
in the canvas, which is basically like a little creative space where you can design your banner.
Now what you see here is a template and that means you can keep it the way it is or you can
change absolutely anything in it. Something that I like to do when I'm working with a template is
to create a duplicate of it by selecting duplicate page in the upper right corner. If I click there,
you'll see that it just makes a copy. And then I can edit the copy and then I always have that
original I can go back to if I do something I don't like. So don't be afraid. Get creative! So a
few things you can do that are simple is click on the text and in the upper left corner, right here,
we can click on the font name, which is Anton, and we can change it over to any other font
just by clicking. And you can see how it responds to these different selections. I actually like
that first one so I'm going to stick with that. If we want, we can also select a different text color
by choosing that option in the toolbar at the top. If I click there, I can pick a different color.
When you're picking colors, it's really important that you remember to design
an image that has a strong contrast between the background and the foreground color. So if you're
choosing something like like yellow, be sure that your background has something dark like dark blue
or something even darker than that. Now you can also remove things from the design. I'm gonna take
out this doo dad over on the left just by clicking on it and deleting everything that I click on.
So I just removed four different layers of elements from the design. I also don't think
I want these little guys down here so I'm gonna get rid of those. And I'm gonna take my text now
and click on it and drag it over to the center. You can also drag those right and left edges
over to the end and that ensures it's perfectly centered. If you don't want it centered, you can
click on the text and go up to the top and change the alignment by clicking the alignment option.
I'm going to leave mine centered. And I'm going to do the same thing with this
text below. And I'm gonna click shift on my keyboard and now I can select both of those
at the same time by clicking shift and then clicking on the elements.
And then I can pull those down a little bit. I'm gonna retitle this
just by deleting the text and adding in intro to so there's the title of my course.
And down here I can change this to anything I want, like [typing] my name. I
can give a little bit more space between the two. Now I'm gonna go over to the left side and
do something, add something to this design. In the far left column, I'm gonna click on Elements. And
then search for a different kind of banner. Let's just type in banner and see what comes up here.
So from scrolling through, I see this yellow banner here so let me click there.
And it adds it to my design which doesn't look so great, does it? But check this out.
I can grab the corner. And make that much smaller [no sound],
center it above my text, and now over on the left again, I'm gonna go down and select Text. Choose
one of these sizes of text. I'll say Add a Subheading. And I can drag that text up
to that banner and with it highlighted, I can type something different in there.
I can type Welcome to. Now that white on yellow is a very low contrast so that's not
going to work for accessibility purposes. That's really hard to see, that's what we
mean by accessibility. The more contrast we have, the more people will be able to see it.
So I'm going to highlight that text again and go up to my text color in the toolbar at the top.
Click there and then toggle that text over to black. I'm also going to make it bigger [no sound]
ok? And move it up a little bit. Check this out, this is pretty cool. I have that text highlighted,
right? If I click on Effects at the top above the banner, there's all these different
font effects. I recommend that you keep your fonts simple, ok? But this one's pretty helpful when you
have a curved element like that banner. If I click on Curve, it curves it and you might think, "Well,
that doesn't look very good." But you can adjust that curve down below here so it's not quite so
curved. So if I just keep going I can curve it to align with the banner's curve and center it just
right. And you know what? That's a pretty cool banner. I do, however, want to show you one little
design tip that Canva has built in here because it's something you can use in your future classes.
In the background, there's a black and white picture of the city, of a city with a blue
square over it that is not fully opaque – so it's somewhat transparent. And if I click on the blue,
you can see what I mean, right? Pretty tricky. So what I want you to remember is if you have an
image, you can add it to the background and, let me click on that image, go to Edit Image and
usually what you'll want to do is up the contrast. If you're going to use it like this in a
background because it gets more visible underneath a color. And you just, let me take the blue off,
so I'll show you how to do that. I'm going to delete that. And go over to Elements under Lines
and Shapes I'm going to click on the square and I'm going to just drag that over the whole image.
It doesn't look so great now, right? And now we want to go to Position
and move it to the back so it's behind that banner I added. And how we want to change the
color. So here is my color swatch, I'm going to click there int he toolbar at the top.
Change it over to a dark blue, I'll pick this color. If I want to make that a little darker,
I can click on Add a New Color and make it darker. Ok, so now I've got my blue background.
Here's the trick. At the top, on the right side, select Transparency and then just make it
a big transparent. Now you see my blue is a little bit of a different color
than it started with but it still looks pretty good, right?
Pretty professional. So I'm going to just go ahead and delete this one at the top because I don't
need it anymore. So I'll click on that garbage can icon above the banner I want to delete.
And my last step is to download my banner to my computer. In the upper right corner,
I'll click on Download. You want to be sure that under File Type it says PNG.
That means image file. That's what you need for Canvas. Be sure it says PNG, if it says
something different, just click on it and toggle to PNG. And then choose Download. And the image
will download to your computer and that's what you're going to load to your page in Canvas.