Welcome

To Canva Confident!

I’m excited to support you to take your Canva skills to the next level so you can more confidently market your business (and prepare for starting the Aligned & Embodied program!)

about page soul stirring branding 06

Here’s what I’ll be covering:

(click on any of the below to jump straight to the video) 

Video 1: The Basics of Canva

In this video, I cover:

  • What is Canva
  • Why should I use it?
  • Do you have to pay for it?
  • How much does it cost (Pro version)
  • What do you get in the Pro account?
  • The two main areas inside Canva (The home screen + document screen)
  • And a quick overview of what I’ll be covering in the subsequent videos 

Video 2: Overview of The Home Screen

In this video, I cover:

  • What is the first screen you see when you log in
  • The various ways you can create a new design 
  • How do you access your existing designs. 
  • The Canva folders/projects area 
  • The “Brand Kit” area

Video 3: Overview of the “Document” Screen + Working With Text

In this video, I cover:

  • The document/design screen: black left sidebar and top tool bar
  • Creating a text box
  • Adjusting your text box
  • Aligning your text to the page 
  • Canva fonts – pro vs free fonts 
  • How to install a custom font in Canva 
  • Changing text colour
  • Adjusting letter spacing and line spacing 
  • How to do curved text
  • Using multiple fonts in one text box – what you can and can’t do
  • Adding hyperlinks (and what file format supports it when you download it).

 In this video, I cover:

  • My pro tip for having way more control over your spacing in your text box, that I assume most people wouldn’t know about.
  • This is especially handy for bullet pointed lists, but helpful for regular text too. 

Video 4: Canva Elements

In this video, I cover:

  • Using basic shapes (circle, rectangle, lines etc)
  • Rotating shapes 
  • Changing background colour 
  • Creating gradients and also a colour fading into transparency for a colour block which fades into a photo behind it. 
  • Canva’s stock graphics (and ideas for what to search for to match your brand style). 
  • Canva stock photos and how to search via your brand colour!
  • Adjusting photos via Canva (brightness etc)
  • Cropping your photo and dragging an uploaded photo into a pre-set photo proportion.  
  • Working with transparency (i.e. semi-transparent colour over your photo
  • Canva’s table functionality 
  • Organising your uploaded assets (photos, graphics etc) into folders. 
  • Canva’s stock videos 
  • Canva’s “Frames” (which allow you to pop your photos into specific shapes like circles or inside an iphone mockup etc)

Video 5: Document Sizing, Downloading and Sharing

In this video, I cover:

  • The amazing “Magic Switch” feature which allows you to easily resize your documents into different formats to repurpose them.
  • How to save a document (you don’t need to, it’s automatically saved to the cloud)
  • How to download a document and what file format to choose (PDF, PNG, JPEG, Mp4 etc)
  • Sharing a document with a team member 
  • How to present and record slides with Canva 
  • Organising your documents into folders 

Video 6: Canva’s Ai Tools

In this video, I cover:

  • The Background Remove Tool (My most used Canva Ai Tool and the one I find most reliable. Usually does a great job and if it misses any spots you can go through with a little pen and manually remove them!)
  • Magic Eraser Tool (Deletes an element in your photo and AI will replace it with something that matches the elements around it – mixed results, especially if the background elements are not easy for the Ai to replicate seamlessly).
  • Magic Expand (if you need more height or width on your photo, Canva will do this with its Ai tool. Once again, it gets mixed results and usually isn’t perfect). 
  • Magic Edit (change an element in your photo. I.e. instead of holding a daisy you’re holding a rose. I don’t usually find the imagery they change it to looks great, but you can have a play and see if it works for you).
  • Magic Grab (if you have a photo which has text on it, Canva will convert this into proper copy and pasteable text). 
  • Magic Write (Canva’s Ai writing tool, a bit like Chat GPT)
  • Grammarly (A browser extension which will check your spelling in Canva as well as Google Docs and other websites. I use this everyday!) 

Video 7: Canva’s Animation Features (Reels, Videos) 

In this video, I cover:

  • Text and image animation features (sliding/popping elements, typewriter)
  • The timeline feature which helps you create reels and videos, adding different slides and graphics to the screen for different lengths of time.
  • Adding an audio track and whether you should do this in Canva or Instagram. 

Video 8: How We Use Canva In Aligned & Embodied

In this video, I cover:

  • How we’ll be creating our Heart and Soul guidebooks in Canva based on the Canva template I’ll supply. All you need to know is how to edit text boxes, so it’s super easy! Many students take it a step further and customise photos, graphics and colours, which is also super easy once you’ve watched the Canva Confident videos! It’s so much fun and a good playground to explore what shape you want your visual branding to take. 
  • The next phase is to create your visual branding. As part of Aligned & Embodied you can either do this yourself in Canva(I detail how to do this in the modules), or you can outsource it. I’m available if you wish to upgrade to get my support in this area. 
  • In the third phase, we size all our images for our WordPress template via Canva! I have set up all the correct image sizes that correlate with the Sacred & Soulful website template to make this easy. 
Emma sitting in the park next to a lake writing in a journal

I hope these videos helped you develop your Canva confidence! 

Aligned & Embodied will open for enrollment on February 19th 2024!

We’ll be getting together 2 x a week across 6 months to bring your branding and website to life in ways you can only imagine right now!

Within a small group container, we will work together live on the process so you have have lots of accountability and camaraderie.

Each week, we’ll do 2 x co-working/coaching calls focused on getting things done and giving feedback in real time on your creations.

Timing for these calls will be decided once I get a sense of the groups availability. They are usually done in the US afternoon/evening, Australian morning.

Have a question about Aligned & Embodied?
Email me at: emma@soulstirringbranding.com.au!