In this Canva tutorial, I share some Canva tips and tricks to reveal some of the best Canva keywords to help you find and discover canva elements that you can use for your designs.
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🕒Timestamps 🕒
00:00 Start
2:18 Brush stroke
3:18 Brush stroke+gold+metallic
4:14 Right click to see more
4:43 Glitter
5:27 Suggested searches
6:03 Gradients
6:57 Gradient overlay
7:15 Gradient frame
7:39 Character
9:18 Watercolor
10:50 Handdrawn
11:49 Abstract scribble
13:02 Leaf frame
13:58 Monoline Elements
14:45 Positive quotes
16:00 Sacred Geometry
16:57 Abstract
17:39 Abstract pattern / pattern
18:00 Abstract shape/ organic shape
18:23 Sparkle
18:44 Scandinavian background
19:18 Photo frame
19:51 Neon
20:15 Retro
20:49 Brand:BAD2BbIfm6k
22:15 Questions
📙Keywords mentioned📙
Brush stroke
Brush stroke+gold+metallic
Glitter
Gradients
Gradient overlay
Gradient frame
Character
Watercolor
Watercolour
Handdrawn
Abstract scribble
Leaf frame
Monoline Elements
Positive quotes
Sacred Geometry
Abstract
Abstract pattern / pattern
Abstract shape/ organic shape
Sparkle
Scandinavian background
Photo frame
Neon
Retro
Brand:BAD2BbIfm6k
▶️All my Canva videos in a Canva playlist ▶️: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiqAD0OPX91ZyH2HVSYrfkwKbInXEuj32
Canva elements tutorial – Video Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the live stream, whether you are joining live with me now, or if you’re catching us on the replay. I’m super excited to present today’s live stream. Today, I’m walking you through another Canva tutorial and specifically I’m looking at Canva element keywords, so specific keywords that you can use in Canva to find some really beautiful standout, stunning elements so you can use across all of your different designs.
One of the biggest things that people tell me all the time about Canva is that they love using it, but they don’t know what to find because there’s so much stuff in it. In this tutorial, I’m walking you through my top 20 favourites or special element keywords so that you can figure out, so you can use them for yourself.
It’s going to be a great one. All right. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help you build your business using video on social media with ease. Now, whether you are joining live with me now, or if you’re catching the replay, if you have any questions, please either drop them in the chat or in the comment, and I’ll answer them at the end of the live stream or afterwards.
Let’s get cracking. As usual, everything that I talk about I’ll put the links to them in the description and I’m really excited. I love Canva. If you check out the link in the description, I have a special link where you can get Canva Pro or the paid version of Canva free for 45 days. The usual trial is 30 days, but through my link, you get 45 days.
So an extra 15 days to use all of the paid elements for free. Make sure that you check that out. That’s a cool little thing. So I’m really, really excited, big fan of Canva, confetti party. Love what they offer. Now let’s get right into it.
I’m going to go straight into over to my computer now. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to walk you through all of my favourite keywords. Now, the first keyword that I really love, and you’ll be able to access all of these keywords and use them within Canva on the left-hand side here in the elements tab, right?
This one that you see that I’m hovering over here. The first keyword that I really love to use to bring up some really stunning designs is brush stroke, right? And when you bring up brush stroke, you can see what we get here.
We get lots of really beautiful brushes. And this helps you add stunning, you know, elements to your design, and it helps you fill the page. One of the biggest problems people have with Canva and with designing and not necessarily with Canva is that, you know, the page looks empty.
How can you fill it? You can fill it with abstract elements. You can fill it with a brush stroke like this. And, you know, you get some really nice, you know, effects as you can see there. Brush stroke is one, and when, you know, look up brush stroke, you can see all these beautiful, beautiful brush strokes.
Like you’ve got this one that I added here and you’ve got like these ones here. And they actually are more than just vectored. They’re kind of like these, you know, real life, 3d-ish, top brush strokes.
The other keyword that I like that’s kind of within this brush stroke realm is brush stroke gold and metallic. This is one of my favourite ones, right? As you can see here, you get this beautiful gold look because gold’s always in, I don’t care what people say, gold doesn’t go out of fashion.
Gold is always there. It’s always one of those colours that’s neutral. That looks beautiful, you know, regardless of which, whatever it’s on. And then you’ll be able to come up, use all of these beautiful ones. Plus you also get these beautiful Rose Gold ones too.
Like how stunning is that? Right. You can just play around with it, add them to your designs. Really gorgeous. Right? The first keyword that I really love is brush stroke. And then you can add to that using a brush stroke, gold metallic.
Alright, so in the next, oh yeah, so another little tip that I have here. Let’s just say that you’ve found, you know, a bunch of gold metallic ones or whatever designs that you love when you hover over them. You’ll see, they’ve got these three dots, right?
They’ve got this three dots here. And if you click on that, you can go to see more like this. Let’s just say, I really love this gold brush stroke. If I click on, see more like this, it will bring up more that I specifically like that design for you, right?
It kind of helps you with that search process because they’ve got so many elements within their actual design. That’s a little hint for you there. Now, the second keyword that I love and recommend is glitter. What comes up when I search glitter?
I love this keyword because once again, it’s about giving you beautiful things that help fill your page. And as you saw from my confetti thing before, I’m a big fan of glitter, you know, it’s nice to add to, you know, a bit of a background. I love the, I love the look of it.
I love, once again, it’s quite neutral and you’ve got all different types of glitter styles that can really help you feel the page. So beautiful and so easy, right? And it’s simple and it makes you look like you’ve spent all this time putting all the elements on the page, but really it’s just a really great keyword to find elements for.
Now, once again, with this, one of the things that you can do when you are searching for a keyword is see, as I typed glitter, what you see here is suggested. This gives you an idea of even more keywords for you to search for. There’s glitter, there’s pink glitter, gold glitter, silver glitter so use the suggested searches and that will help you build out finding all your favourite keywords as well. Right?
You don’t have to have all the answers Canva’s constantly helping you find more and more of this, of the designs within the Canva design systems for want of a better word. Let’s go to keyword number three. Keyword number three is gradients.
Now I love gradients. See, I don’t even have to type a little bit. It comes up for me. I’m going to put gradients. And I like gradients for a couple of reasons, right? They take out the effort of trying to make colours come together, and they make it really easy.
I’m going to choose this gradient here. And the thing that you can see here is yes, this is this beautiful pink and purple combination. But if I click on the elements, I can change them to suit my own colour palette. I can make it be, you know, whatever colours that I need.
You can always adjust the gradient to be what you want. And it’s just a quick way of doing it. If you were to figure this out in Photoshop, it’s a lot more clicks, right? But gradient here is a great keyword because once again, it gives you this element that, you know, can help you fill the page, create a beautiful background really, really easily.
Now with that said, another one of my favourite gradient keywords is gradient overlay. And with gradient overlay, once again, it just gives you a bit more of, you know, you get these gradients but these are just different elements that have more of this gradient feel to them, and they compose in different ways, right? Once again, another idea. And another gradient keyword is gradient frame.
And this one I really like as well. Once again, it’s just giving you just ideas of things that you can do. And this one, let’s click this one. As you can see here, it’s just this, you know, this cute little style of elements that you can use.
Use gradients, gradient overlay, gradient frame, and you’ve got stunning, you know, things that you can start working with. Keyword number five is character. Let me walk you through this one a little bit. One of the things that people may not realise about Canva is that it not only has beautiful, you know, squares and circles and stuff like that.
But if you type character, what you actually get is people, right? You have people, you have completely built people, but you’ve also got these, you know, like faces, right? And so you can add these faces of a character and then you can search for their eyes. Right?
At the moment, let’s just say that I want to create an actual character, female character. I’ll scroll through, there’s lots of ones without faces, and I’ve chosen this one and you’re like, that’s great, but she has no eyes. Then you can just search eyes, right?
And then you can find the appropriate eyes and then add them to the design. This is going to look a little bit creepy, but, you know, you can start to kind of see that how you can use Canva to actually not just create, you can actually build illustration.
You can actually build characters and people. So you go ahead and add the eyes. It’s starting to come together there. She’s starting to look a little creepy. Then you can add the nose and the mouth, as you can see here.
All of these things are possible within Canva, so you can actually build out, she’s still looking a little bit creepy, but she’s getting there, right? You can build out characters in Canva. People may not be aware, but you can search for characters.
You can add eyes, you can build like a whole person or personality using canvas. I really, really love that. Now, the sixth key word is watercolour. I love watercolour. And you can spell it in the English spelling of watercolour, or the American spelling.
I’m going to spell it in the UK English, because that’s the system that I use. So watercolour. When you type up watercolour, you can see all of these beautiful painted elements. Right. And they come in all sorts of things. They come in like abstract type of watercolour blobs.
These are great for, you know, filling the page once again, or just adding to your design. But you’ve also got watercolour painted things. Just look at this one, this is a watercolour painted forest, so to speak.
You look at that. Immediately you’ve got these beautiful elements that you can use, and the watercolour element to it means it’s not just a vector, right? It gives you that other light texture, it gives you that other dimension to your design.
This is one of my favourite elements to use because it’s so stunning. I may look at watercolour, let’s say coffee, right? That wasn’t a great one. But you can, you can find like, look, look at this watercolour fruit, right? All sorts of things in the watercolour treatment.
Oh there’s a croissant here, there’s a water colour croissant here. There’s just so many stunning things and it just makes your design a little bit different, right. Options. You know, there’s just so many options. I haven’t found my coffee yet.
I know there’s a coffee in there somewhere, but as you can see, there’s heaps and heaps of elements that you can use within this watercolour keyword. And you just keep building it out.
Keyword number seven, I think it’s like an extension of watercolour. I love the fact that, you know, it’s painted, it’s hand done, and now the keyword number seven is hand drawn. Let’s go hand drawn.
I love hand drawn. Some of the watercolour things are here, but you get, in theory, like hand drawn elements, like beautiful designs like this. Look how nice that is to fill the page. Then you get like scribbly type of things like these abstracty hand drawn elements here.
Once again, it adds that extra dimension to your actual designs and it kind of makes them stand out. It’s not all just vectors. It’s not all just, you know, circles and squares. Hand-drawn is another one of my favourite ones. And I just think they’re really cute.
You know, there’s something about hand drawn, there’s something about having elements that are not necessarily straight out vectors that I really, really love. Keyword number– oh, I duplicated that one. Keyword number nine, in the wrong order, is abstract scribble.
I think this is another extension and look at what we get when we type in ab– can’t spell this. I’m just going to copy and paste this. You don’t have to watch me spell.
Okay. Abstract scribble. I liked abstract scribble. Once again, like the hand drawn element, these are really nice things that can help you fill up the page. Right? I’ll look at this. Look how cute that is? Like just throwing that on the page.
And as you know, not with all of them, but with some of them you can go in and then you can change the colours of the actual elements. Some of them, you kind of just stuck with the colours that they have, but a lot of them, you can actually change them.
As you can see, there’s some more magic recommendations here. You just get really gorgeous elements that help you fill up the page, and then you can scroll here and you can see there’s just these like nice little things and that you can just add to fill the page that you can add to the background that you can add to kind of, you know, create that extra depth to the page.
As I love using magic recommendations, I just think it’s a great way of finding more and more things, that allows you to help Canva find more actual designs. Keyword– I’m all over the place with my keywords today. I’ve duplicated that one as well.
The next one that we’re going to go through is leaf frame. Leave frame. No, that’s not it. Leaf frame. Okay. Leaf Frame is another one of my favourite keywords, because look at this, look how gorgeous these little leafy things are.
Once again, once you like start to add them here, they can easily fill the page. Let’s do this one. Yeah. Look at that. Like that starts to fill the page immediately. You’ve got like this elegant element that already fills the page and you can just add, you know, text around it.
And it’s an easy way to fill the page and create a design. It’s a really great element to use and look at all the beautiful leaf designs you’ve got, like this square components here. You’ve got these circular ones here.
So, so, so gorgeous. Now let’s look at the next one. I’m all over the place. Monoline elements. Let’s look at monoline elements. Now this one was one that I really liked because it was kind of an extension of the frames. Monoline elements was one that I found and I liked it because it was elegant. Right.
And you got these beautiful lines, right? You got these beautiful lines. And there’s, I think some beauty in simplicity. You’ve got these triangles here. We’ve got this Hexagony thing here. All of these stunning, stunning
lines that can help you fill the page. Right.
And monoline elements was just one that I was searching for things for. And then I saw all of these components and I was just like, stunning. I have to share them with you guys now. Let’s look at the next one, positive quotes.
People think that within Canva, it’s all just, you know, shapes. It’s all just graphics but you actually get words as well. Beautiful combination words. Let’s look up positive quotes.
When we type in positive quotes, we get these pre-made, really stunning, you know, quotes and these are really great for your Instagram stories or Instagram posts or Facebook posts. And I just think, how cool is that?
They’re kind of like these really well done stickers and look at them, look at, look at how much variety you get. Now for most of these, you can change the colour. You unfortunately can’t change the text because they’re already pre-composed, but really, really love it.
Positive quotes is another one and there are so many of them and so many gorgeous ones that you can use. Once again, look at that, you know, people may think, Oh, wow she put in all that effort to find all of these characters when it’s like, no, boom, I just search positive quotes and put it on the page and created a social media graphic.
That’s another one of my really easy ones to use and one of my favourite keywords, positive quotes. Now, next one is sacred geometry. This is for all of my spiritual friends, sacred geometry.
I was really excited to find this one because if you use creative market, if you use any of these other paid graphic
services, sacred geometry costs money for each one, but within Canva, you’ve got such beautiful geometry pieces. Here’s recommendations.
But you can just use, and then look at that. Look how stunning they all are. Once again, filling the page, really intricate designs making you look like you are way better of a designer than you actually are, and just sophisticated, beautiful, sacred geometries.
Like the possibilities with sacred geometry is just endless, whether you use it to, you know, solely as a single piece of design or whether you use it in the background components of it, love it. One of my favourite ones, sacred geometry. The next one that I have is abstract, right?
I talked about using different components of a design to feel the background, or to just feel the page. And when we type abstract, you can see there’s all types of different abstract elements here. And these help you once again, bulk out the page.
These help you have not just so much white space, if you’re looking to, you know, fill it out. And I love abstract because it’s just got these blobby things and they kind of just go with everything, right?
Regardless of what you actually are looking to do, they kind of just work with so many things. The other combination is abstract pattern. This also comes, you know, brings up beautiful, beautiful things that help you fill the page.
Abstract shape was another one that I really liked as well. All these abstract things. We like abstract. Comes up with all of these stuff. And a variation of abstract shape that I liked was organic shape, right? We’ve got this abstract shape, let’s look up organic shape.
See? And now we’ve got all these nice little organic shapes that are slightly different. They’re not say jagged they’re a little bit, you know, a bit more flowy for one of a better word. Let’s look at the next design element and that’s
Sparkle.
I like sparkle. It’s kind of a variation on glitter, but you just get really cute little elements that you can start to use. And how cool is that? I just liked the simplicity of it. I just like how cute they are. That’s why I added it in there.
And then we have, okay, so this is one of an interesting one. I’m always looking for things that are, you know, a little bit on trend, you know, things that are really popular right now.
And Scandinavian background was an interesting one because you got all of these really cool little, you know, forest, wood forest type of elements, and there’s the reindeer, the Christmas type of theme. But I liked how, like just really, you know, like that scandy type of Ikea-ish type of feel is what you got from Scandinavian backgrounds.
How cool is that? How cool of an element is that? And now photo frame. Photo frame is another one. Let’s look up photo frame because you got like this Polaroid type of components that you can use and you can put pictures underneath them.
There’s magic recommendations. If you click magic recommendations, you’ll be able to see all that, you know, Canva recommend for you. Photo frame, so many different things that you can use, and then you can add your images on top or underneath them, depending on which elements that they actually are.
It’s another really great keyword to use, and that’s wrapping us up shortly. Another popular thing that seems to constantly come in and out is neon. When you type neon, you get all sorts of neon elements, so you can drill deeper and go neon word, or whatever it is.
Neon’s a great one to use and it’s very on trend right now. You can see all of the neon elements that you can use to add into your actual design. And then retro. Retro is a kind of, kind of an extension on that as well. Retro, we’ve got the old cassette tapes for people who are even old enough to, to know what a cassette tape is.
And you’ve got like the cassette tape player and all different types of things. It’s one of my favourite ones because it makes me a little bit nostalgic. And, yeah, I’m really excited about sharing this one and just, man, just this brings back a couple of good memories you know? The past, like the old style TV.
I remember having one of those back in the day. Now, this then brings us to the last key word before we get to questions and this isn’t really a keyword, but this, when you go within Canva, you’ll be able to see that a lot of the designs have brands associated with them.
What does that mean? I’ve typed this particular brand here and I’m going to paste it in search, right? And this is a particular designer. These are all of these designer’s brand, this designer’s elements.
And when I click on it, you’ll see, you’ll see here it says, it names the element wave organic abstract shape vector. View more designs by masala digital, right? This brand number here is actually all of the designs from this actual designer.
If you liked the particular, you know, style or feel of it, and you click on the actual element, you can click on view more by this designer and this will bring up their brand. It will bring up all of the elements that they’ve created and released in Canva and typically they’ll have the same look, they’ll have the same feel.
Then you can use them to build out your design. That’s a nice little hack that’s, you know, you’ll be able to use as well. That wraps up my keywords. I think there was more or less, more than 20, but we’re going to go with twenty for now.
I clearly can’t count. But these were my favourite ones. I’m going to jump back over to the questions. Let’s just see what we’ve got. Okay. All right. We’ve got a question from, ‘can these be used commercially?’ so I’m going to put a link in the description to Canva’s use of these elements.
Everytime I ask Canva about clarifying whether or not we can use these commercially, it’s very grey. When I did a tutorial on Canva prints, t-shirt prints, I had the same question and I asked them, can we use these designs that we create on Canva and all of these elements, and then use them on t-shirt and then sell these t-shirts.
And they said that the onus is on you as the user to make sure that you can use these elements commercially. From my interpretation and my understanding is yes, you can, but I’ll put a link in the actual description their very unclear terms and conditions when it comes to commercial use, but from my understanding, yes.
When it comes to like logos, so one of the things that you can do within Canva is you can create logos and a question that I get asked all the time, particularly on that Canva tutorial is, can I use this logo commercially? And the answer is yes. But can you trademark it?
Well no, you won’t be able to trademark it because you’re using elements that are not unique. They’re part of these type of, you know, commonly used things. You won’t be able to trademark it, but you can use it.
Just, you know, it’s this really gray type of area in terms of whether or not you can use it commercially, but from my interpretation, yes, I feel that you can use them commercially. Let’s check out some of the other questions and comments, ‘I’m glad that I tuned in. I’ve been searching Canva today’.
I’m really glad that, you know, hopefully this has been able to help you. There are so many elements in Canva. I think they’ve got, I’m making up a number now, hundreds of thousands of elements. I tried to bring out the ones that I use.
I tried to bring up the ones that I think help you make designs beautifully really quickly. Hopefully, that you guys have found this to be really helpful. Jacqueline, ‘Thanks that’s been great tonight’. I’m really glad to have you guys here.
TechManiac, hey, Bradley! Good to see you on the live stream. Bradley’s a up and coming YouTuber from Tasmania. Go check out his channel. He’s got a great, a great little channel there. I’m super excited, really grateful to, you know, present this to you guys today.
Hopefully, we had a lot of fun. As you can see, I had a couple of issues with my counting of all of the elements, but you’ve got so many different elements. I’m going to go back and put the timestamps in. You have all of these different ones to use within your designs.
With that said, if you found this video useful, please give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. If you haven’t already, where I do lots more Canva tutorials, social media tutorials, live streaming tutorials, all sorts of training to help you grow your business on social media with ease.
And if you haven’t already got a copy of it, make sure you grab a copy of my Social Media Checklist. I’ll show you how to get up and running on all of the major social media platforms, even if you’ve never like, you know, gone on social before.
So it gets you up and running on them, so you can start leveraging the power of social to start building your business, to start growing your audience with ease.
That basically wraps up today’s live stream, had a blast as usual. Thanks everyone for joining me. Always great to be here. Enjoy the rest of your day, and I will see you on the next live stream. Bye for now.
