Curious how everyone is making animated GIFs?
It's a lot easier than you think.
I'm SueB Zimmerman and today, I'm
going to show you how to make a GIF using
one of my favorite graphic tools, Canva.
Instagram videos are dominating social media
with millions created and shared every single day.
One type of video content that has become increasingly popular
are GIFs--
graphic interchange formats.
It's basically file images that move.
Now full disclosure, Christina, on my team,
is a graphic designer.
And she makes these amazing GIFs and graphics for my business.
But sometimes graphic designers aren't always
in the budget or available.
No worries because there are a ton of free or low cost
apps out there to help you create engaging, fun GIFs.
And today, I'm going to show you one of those design
platforms, Canva, and how, in just a few minutes,
you can easily create high quality GIFs just like this.
For those of you who don't know, Canva
is an online design platform that
allows you to quickly and easily create
a variety of social media graphics,
just like all these awesome ones that you're looking
at on their Instagram feed.
With over 10 million active users,
it is quickly becoming the go-to platform for brands
and businesses on Instagram.
While Canva does offer a free subscription,
you will need to have a Canva for work account, which
is a reasonable monthly subscription.
Right now Canva GIFs are in the testing phase
but should be rolling out to a wider audience very soon.
All right, after you log into your Canva account,
you're going to want to click on the social media post
that you want to make.
And we're going to click right here on the Instagram post
and then you're going to want to upload your image
to create the GIF.
So I'm tapping on "upload" and I'm
going to grab an image that's right on my computer.
I'm going to open this up.
Once the image is uploaded, you can just
drag it right in to the space and drag the corners so
that it fits in to the square.
And then move it to however you want it cropped.
So since you're creating a GIF, your graphic
needs to be multi-layered and you need
to add text and a color block.
So we're going to tap on "elements," right here.
And we're going to tap on "shapes"
and here are all the different shapes.
I am going to click on this one, that's free.
I'm going to resize it so it fits right
in the middle of my dress.
Notice the two colors that popped up on the left up here.
I'm going to change the colors so they're more on point
with my branding.
I'm going to have the green in the middle and the outline
be purple.
So ninja-tip here, all these colors that are in the primary
are our brand colors that we have our hexed colors for.
And we know what numbers they are so we have them
here stored so that we can easily access them.
So you can add your color palette at any time
and put in your code.
And that's exactly what we did.
All right, so now we have the shape, we have the colors,
and we want to add text.
And as you can see, there's a lot of different options here.
I'm just going to tap on the one that you can read really well
and I want this to be white not black.
So I'm going to tap on the color wheel, tap on the plus sign
and get to white.
Let's see if that's the white.
Yes, here we are.
OK, so I'm going to write, "I have a surprise
for you dot, dot, dot."
OK, so we need to just position this and resize it
a little bit.
And I'm just selecting all the text.
And if you go up here, you can see the font size.
I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller.
I think 40 will work.
Select all the text and maybe we'll go to 36.
There we go.
OK.
And you can position that so it's centered.
All right, so after you do that you want to click on "download"
and select the file type.
And then choose "animated GIF movie."
So here's the download button and we're
going to select the file type by pulling down right here.
And here is the animated GIF movie
and then we're going to download it.
OK, so now that we have this up, we
have options, the animation style.
So you can play around here and figure out
which one is your favorite.
That one made me a little dizzy.
I like this block one.
And there's the 3-D and then there's the fade.
So I'm going to choose the block one
and then I'm just going to download it as a GIF.
And it's that easy.
Once it's downloaded, I can upload it to Instagram
and share it as a GIF.
So with Canva, you can easily create fun and engaging GIFs.
The best part is that it doesn't have to take too much time
and it's a smart way to incorporate
more video into your feed.
OK, now I'm taking it to my phone
because the last step you need to do before you
can share your GIF on Instagram is
to convert it to a video file.
Now there's a ton of apps out there to convert GIF files,
but right now I'm going to use GifLab.
It does cost $2.99 but it's recommended by Mashable
and looks like the most professional app.
And I did look at a lot of different ones.
OK, so now you want to tap on "GIF to Instagram,"
right here on the bottom.
And when you do you want to select the GIF from your camera
roll.
A little pro-tip for you is that I
do save all of my GIFs and videos
in Dropbox so that they're easy to find and organized.
Once you do this, you want to adjust the playback speed.
And you want to make sure that it
is at least three seconds long or Instagram
won't allow it to load.
Once you've done that, just tap to save and share on Instagram.
Instagram's going to open up, the GIFs going to upload,
and you're all set.
Did you like this video?
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Go ahead and hit thumbs up.
Be sure to subscribe and let me know in the comments
below what you think of using Canva to create your custom
GIF.
And be sure to grab my free Instagram strategy guide,
that link is waiting for you right below this video.
And I'll see you next time.