Hello everyone and welcome back to the Canva Tutorial.
My name is Ed and today, I'll be showing you
how to create very simple yet eye-catching
thumbnails for your TikTok and IG Reels posts using Canva.
A well-designed thumbnail can be a difference
between hundreds or even thousands of extra views
and should definitely not be overlooked.
Let's drop into Canva for a short run through.
Now, you don't need to be an expert on TikTok or Instagram Reels,
but a little background knowledge comes in handy when viewing this tutorial.
We're going to start by searching TikTok in our templates up here.
And we'll probably select TikTok video for this tutorial.
While we're creating a static thumbnail, meaning it's an image,
we can use these video templates just in case
we wanted to use any of the elements or overall designs somehow
because let's face it, they have some great templates here.
Once we finish our design, we can choose to download it as
either an image or a video anyhow.
You can take some time going through these templates or
any other TikTok templates available under different searches
And that goes for Reels too.
For the purpose of this tutorial, let's start with a blank template.
So let's imagine parts of this tutorial that I'm filming right now.
We're going to be used to make a TikTok video or Reel.
I want two distinct versions which pay attention to
different nuances of each platform TikTok and Instagram.
Let's start with TikTok.
Let's build out this design starting with a nice, purple background.
I'm going to select our background.
Here's the background color and I'm going to choose a nice purple for this.
Next, I'm going to add an image of myself into the design.
So we've got this nice image of myself in.
And because I'm hosting this hypothetical video or tutorial,
it makes sense to have me in the thumbnail.
We're now going to run some background removal on this image,
which you can do by heading to Effects while your image is selected and
clicking Background Remover.
Keep in mind that this is a Canva Pro feature.
An awesome feature at that.
And once this background remover is complete,
I'm going to apply this first of all.
My image does look a little bit sharp.
So I'm going to head to Adjust and turn the blur up by one.
Just to sort of soften some of those features. There we go.
Next, we're going to add some text into our design
with the headline reading "How do I..."
So add a heading and "How do I..."
Now, I don't think Bebas is the perfect font for this kind of design.
So I might go for something a bit like Helvetica Neue.
Or I might even go for some League Spartan.
You can never go wrong with League Spartan. There we go.
So I'm going to capitalize this actually. So "HOW DO I..."
And I'm going to make this font white and I'm going to enlarge it like so.
And just resize that. Bring it back in. "HOW DO I..."
And I'm just going to make sure these are aligned to the left like that.
And we haven't even begun to position the photo of me yet.
So we're just going to keep these here for now.
And I'm going to add another piece of text down here
called "Create thumbnails for TikTok".
And I'm just going to enlarge that a little bit as well. Cool!
This might become smaller later on. I might bring this down to 100.
And bring this down to 100 also. Cool.
So far, we've got all these placeholder sort of text and photos in there
and now we can begin positioning these.
So I'm going to enlarge this photo of me and sort of place it over here
and put this on a slight angle maybe 3 degrees
and the same with this one, 3 degrees as well.
And these are looking aligned.
I bring this over just a tad more. Maybe a little bit higher as well.
So that my finger is sort of pointing to this in a certain way.
Now, when viewers are looking at this thumbnail,
I don't want them to think that that circle there is a
Canva Design Circle is part of an actual text.
I don't want them to think that's a full stop or something.
So it usually helps just to sort of wear a different t-shirt if you can help it.
But what we're going to do here is something crafty.
I've just created this like square that's gone over our t-shirt there
and just adjusting this, I might bring the brightness down by one
just to make it sort of fit in seamlessly and you can barely tell it's there.
So I'm going to put this back in over here
and now there's no, sort of, you know, logo on my t-shirt interfering with this.
So from here, we're going to add some squares behind the text
just to make it sort of pop a little more.
And you'll see what I mean once it starts to come together.
So I'm going to search for square and I might sort of make this asymmetrical in a way.
So what I'm thinking, I'm doing is like potentially having it look like that
and you know put these on slightly different angles.
I might make this just a tad larger like that
and I might make this as well just a tad bit larger.
We use the directional keys now to just fine tune the positioning a little bit.
I kind of like how that's looking right now.
And then with create thumbnails for TikTok.
We can do the same thing perhaps this time
a sort of square behind each line of text.
We might go for a different color here.
So I'm thinking what might suit this is potentially thick
and blue could be good for this.
Let's see how this looks. Yeah, I like that.
We just brought it to the back to see how it looks
and then brought it back to the front just to be able to reselect it,
in case you didn't know what I was doing there.
And I'm going to copy this, paste it, keep this down here for now.
And then, reselect this, send it backwards. I like how that's sitting right now.
And now we're going to do the same thing for this piece of "thumbnail" text.
I'm just going to readjust this slightly. Bring that down a little bit.
Let's see how that's looking and let's fine-tune that with the direction keys.
If I can select this again. Okay.
And I'm going to send that backwards and bring it forwards again.
Again, we're just going to fine tune the positioning. Send it back.
And I'm liking how that is currently looking.
How to create thumbnails for TikTok.
This is looking great.
So let's again set it back--nope, let's move this forward a few units
and then send this back again.
And that is looking great.
So we've got "how do I",
capitalize as this is kind of like the name of a series of sorts.
We've got this text over here in a sentence case just
because it could be the name of the episode within this series.
From here, we're going to perhaps add a light bulb element
so this is an educational video with educational sort of outcomes.
So what we can do is, you know, choose some colors
that are a bit similar to colors already in our sort of design.
And we're going to place this light bulb up here next to my temple.
And I like how this is looking. So TikTok does enable moving thumbnails.
So what we can do is add some blobs, which could be a nice little touch
to the top and bottom borders of our design.
So what I can do is add that up here and add that up there.
I can add this down here and this is also stopping that
sort of abrupt end or crop of my image there.
It's kind of like seamlessly covering that up.
And our simple TikTok thumbnail is now complete.
It's a matter of whether we want to download this as an image
and add it as a sort of static thumbnail separately
or if you want to download this as a video
and incorporate it directly into the video itself.
Maybe at the start for a few seconds, in that case,
we'd probably animate the text, light bulbs, and other elements
to really use video to its fullest here.
The purpose of this tutorial though we'll suppose is just an image and we'll move on.
But yeah, you can head to pretty much download, keep it as an MP4 or
you can download it as a PNG. And if you download it as a PNG,
this sort of video or animated element over here
will save as the first frame of this video element, this animated element.
So the first frame of movement of this element.
Now for Reels, it's just a simple matter of duplicating this by clicking duplicating
and we have to make a few edits based on some nuances from the Instagram platform.
We know that when Reels are viewed from somebody's profile or gallery,
they're cropped to 1080 x 1080 and they look like tiles.
And it crops out a lot of what is at the top and lower quadrants of your Reel like so.
This has some implications on the positioning
of all of the objects in our design right now.
As a simple fix, what we can do is enable rulers and guides
by heading to File, rulers and guides.
They already flicked on and we can tell by heading to the Resize menu
that our dimension 1080 x 1920.
You can also sort of see that here on the Rulers and guides.
So we know our halfway point is somewhere in the middle of 1920,
which would be about 960, I believe so.
We're just going to drag a ruler down from on the edges
and place it here at 960.
That's the halfway point. Half of 960 is 480.
So we're going to head over here and create another one at 480 or thereabouts.
I'm not too fast and we're going to do it once again,
this time 480+960 which is 1440.
We're going to place one down here too.
And basically, over here now, we have a centralized square
of where we can expect our objects to be cropped above and below.
So from the Instagram gallery view,
we can expect that everything below this line is going to be cropped out
and everything above this line is going to be cropped out.
So it's in our best interest to probably move this text higher
and move this text a bit lower and have everything sort of in this area here.
So we're going to do that quite quickly by just selecting this.
We might move the image in the process, but that's fine.
And again, here with this and you could probably even
make the image of myself a bit smaller and then send that forward.
And here's the-here's the funny thing, guys. I made an oopsie over here.
So I was supposed to actually move this forward
so my finger was pointing at HOW DO I,
So we've gone back and fixed that for our TikTok by now.
We can just move this a tad bit that way.
Again grabbing the image of myself and positioning it slightly like that.
And this light bulb can go over here now.
And this is looking like it's within our safe zones.
And before that's all done, we'll change this to say "Reels".
And that is good to go.
We're all finished.
These are the final results.
You're now able to create simple, but attention-grabbing
and descriptive thumbnails for both TikTok and IG Reels.
Did you like this tutorial?
If so, please let us know by dropping a like on this video.
If you found any of these lessons here useful,
we also love to hear in the comments below.
I'll catch you in the next tutorial.
Ed out.