Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am feeling somewhat graphically inspired.
Why is that, you may ask.
Because today’s demo is all about Canva, which is the graphics creation tool for all
of your different social channels.
It’s the tool I recommend the most for creating graphics for social channels, things like
Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and of course YouTube cover art, that sort of stuff.
Now the reason that we’re looking at Canva today is they now have something called Canva
for business, which steps up the game.
Canva has always worked great for an individual creating social media graphics.
But now, they’re creating an environment that supports teams and your business as well.
So I thought we should take a look at Canva for Business today on DottoTech.
Now Canva is the tool that I recommend most often when people need to create graphics
to support their social media communications.
For creating Facebook posts, Pinterest posts, Instagram posts or cover art for YouTube,
Canva, other than Photoshop, is the tool, that I would recommend most.
It’s far easier to use than Photoshop and it’s free for the most part.
Everything that we’re going to show you until we get a little bit on to this demo
is all done for free.
Now it uses templates to design all of the graphical elements that you might decide to
create and they base those templates on different social media delivery platforms.
Basically, it’s how they format and the size that they create the graphics in.
So if you want to create a Pinterest graphic, they’ve got the size.
So these are all optimized for these different formats.
We’ll just start out with a social media post because I want to create something square,
800 x 800, because I’m playing with a whole new social media platform a little bit later
today.
I’m going to go and I’m going to do my first Blab broadcast.
Have you heard of Blab?
Blab is kind of like Periscope on steroids or kind of almost like a Google hangout.
You basically do video.
You stream video and you bring people on and you could have up to four people talking at
a time.
Here our friend, Vincent Ng, actually in good Vancouver and he lives not too far from me,
he is now teaching and 22 people are watching him talking about Pinterest.
Let’s pop in and have a quick look.
I know this isn’t about—just pop in.
Shh, don’t tell him that we’re here.
“—different and I’m going to go kind of a little bit on on-topic and a little bit
off-topic in terms of design.
So something that I actually discovered, which was really interesting because we talk about
driving traffic back to your site, Tina’s talking about using the right fonts and just—“
Isn’t that cool?
We’ll pop out.
But that is a new social media delivery platform.
But you notice it’s a square format.
So I’m going to create some supporting graphics for my first foray into that space later today.
So I’ve chosen the square graphic layouts and as you scroll through, you see there are
literally hundreds, I’m sure there are hundreds, I’m not positive but there are hundreds
of design ideas that you can kind of riff off of.
You can take a look and you can choose one and then you can work with this.
So I do all kind of tech stuff so let’s choose this Monthly Hackathon graphic.
When we click on it, it’s brought up with the proper background art, some suggested
fonts in the foreground and all of that kind of stuff.
So we can actually go into and I can just change this if I want to say “Dotto Tech.”
Do you see how it automatically formats into the font and color that they’ve chosen for
us?
I can highlight it all.
I can change the size.
It’s a really big font right now.
I can make it a little bit smaller.
Let’s make it say 100 and that might fit better.
Yup, DottoTech and we’ll call it a Blab, DottoTech Blab.
I can put in the date.
I can put in the time.
I can incorporate and then add some graphics.
Now they’ve got additional features here in this browser which allows us to find not
just other full templates but graphics to support.
If I click in the Search, we have grids, we have frames, we have shapes and we have icons,
illustrations and photos, other things that we can incorporate into this graphic as we
create it.
Now the revenue model for Canva has been up to now buying premium graphics to support
this sort of thing so paying a dollar for a photo or for a graphic that we might want
to include in our design and that’s worked pretty well for them, I believe.
We’ll be talking a little bit more.
They’ve got more of a membership model coming online now but even having said all of that,
you’ll still find tons of free graphics available to you.
You can search for graphics based on theme.
I wanted this to be kind of video-y so I’m going to type in YouTube and look what comes
up.
I’ve got of these different graphics and they’re branded as free so I wouldn’t
have to pay for any of these.
To incorporate it, I just pull it out and see how easy it is because I might want to
just kind of use this as a pointer pointing at the time or the date.
We’ll point it right there.
No, it doesn’t look as good as there.
We’ll put it up there and I’m going to say 10:00 PM.
No, actually the time is 4:00 PM PDT so people know what time this event is.
And of course, I’d go through and I would edit the rest of the video or the rest of
the graphic to make it all work for me.
But that is how easy it is to create the basic graphic.
That alone is awesome but what you’re about to see is almost mind-blowing.
This is a new feature that they’ve incorporated because let’s say that I’m going to be
using this graphic and I might be using this on Instagram or I might be using this as a
slate or as cover art for the actual event.
But I might want to use this same graphical element and post it into Pinterest or post
it onto Facebook.
Watch what they’ve added here.
If we go into the file menu, we have something called Magic Resize.
If I choose that, what they’re going to do is they’re going to go and they’re
going to reformat this graphic for all of these—I’ll add Facebook post there—different
social channels.
I click, abracadabra and look what happens.
New tabs open up all the way across the top of my browser and each of those tabs has this
graphic reformatted for that social channel and they label them.
So there is our Twitter post.
There is our Instagram post.
I’m going to give it a second for it to all resolve.
Let’s talk a second.
Square for Instagram, oblong for Twitter.
How is it going to look for Pinterest?
There’s the same one for Pinterest.
Now you might want to go in and you might want to tweak it.
We can still adjust the graphic slightly because things might not resolve perfectly.
There it is for Facebook and there it is in the square format which is the one that we
used to start things off as well.
Isn’t that spectacular?
What a great way to maximize the user graphics and minimize the amount of time you spend
creating something.
You’ll get a handle on using this very quickly and it really ups the game as far as Canva
is concerned.
I really like that feature.
Now the other feature that they’ve added to Canva is more of a revenue side feature
and that is Canva for Business, Your Brand section.
If I click here on Your Brand, that brings me into a new section that we haven’t had
previously in Canva.
It allows us to create our own templates that we save for our team.
This is the heart of it though.
It’s called the Kit.
This is where we can import all of the different graphics and styles that are [germain phonetic
00:07:52] to our business.
So I can import my graphics, the colors that I use for my logos and other things.
I can choose the fonts that I want to use in all of my social posts and then anybody
on my team when they go about and they start creating posts, they can be working within
the parameters that the designers want for my graphics.
So this is awesome.
I mean we’ve all gone through or anybody that’s been on a team has gone through the
point of, “Can you send me the logo?” and then you get sent the logo and it’s
the old logo and it’s the wrong one.
“No, I needed the black and white logo.”
So you’re going back and forth and you waste a lot of cycles just getting all of the different
assets in place.
And then you probably aren’t following standards for fonts and other things if you’re creating
graphics yourself for your team environment for whatever venture you’re on.
This way one person or your graphics design department can standardize the look and the
appearance of all graphics coming out and still give the people who are posting and
engaging in the community the flexibility and freedom to be able to create those graphics.
And that’s the magic.
It’s not about controlling and stopping people from doing things but it’s designed
to give people who should be doing things the tools they need to do them properly without
messing up.
That is what the branding section is all about.
Of course, your graphics department can create templates for all of your different graphical
elements as well that people can work within.
This is a really nice way for that distributed team to gain access to all of the different
assets that they might need in order to do their job better.
It does not come free, oh no.
They’ve set it up, at the initial launch if you pay annually it’s $10 a month and
if you pay monthly it’s $13 a month per individual team member.
So it’s not cheap but if you do belong to a social media team and you’re posting a
lot, this gives you the ability to create standardization for all of the different graphical
elements going out.
For more information, you can drop by Canva.com and have a look.
This is rolling out as we speak so it’s something that you can gain access to right
away.
I hope you found today’s video to be enlightening and useful.
Now remember, there are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please subscribe to this channel.
Second, subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll learn about our upcoming live webinars like
my upcoming blab today.
I emailed that out to our whole list so maybe some of you have already participated in the
blab by the time you see this video.
And finally, DottoTech is a community-funded channel.
We’re supported by you, our viewers through the crowdfunding site, Patreon.
I encourage you to drop by, take a look and learn about the perks that are included in
supporting DottoTech.
They are awesome as are you.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!