Let me walk you through how to use the Canva app on mobile. I’ll walk you through how to navigate Canva on an iPhone so you can design and create content on the move.
Timestamp
00:00 Start
01:17 Navigate Canva on iPhone
05:55 Create design on Canva
06:23 Change font on your design
07:55 Add/change images on your design
09:17 Add stickers to your design
10:54 Add video to your design
13:10 How to animate your design
13:57 How to download your design
17:03 How to resize your design
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Canva Mobile App Tutorial (for iPhone) – Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to the live stream, whether you are joining live with me now, thanks for being here. Or if you’re catching us on the replay. Today’s video, I am going to be walking you through how to use Canva, particularly Canva on a mobile device, and especially on an iPhone.
I’m going to walk you through how to use it, how to navigate it, where everything is, so that you can design beautiful graphics you can design your Instagram stories and add animation and add your own video really easily. And I’m going to walk you through specifically iPhone.
It’s going to be a great little tutorial. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help coaches, consultants and creative pros build their business using video on social media with ease.
Now, whether you are live with us now and on the chat, or if you’re catching us on the replay, if you have any questions, please drop them in the chat or in a comment. And I will answer them as soon as I can or create a new video if that’s what’s required.
I’m super stoked to present this content to you now. I am going to go over to my iPhone and I’m going to walk you through how to design using Canva on an iPhone. Let’s do this switch and look at this.
This is my iPhone, and this is what it looks like once you’ve logged into Canva on your mobile device. And once you’ve logged into Canva here, let me show you how to navigate it, right, because it’s a little bit easier in my view, when someone kind of tells you where everything is at.
In order to design in Canva on the app, there were a few ways that you can do that. Let’s start from the top to the bottom. At the top, there’s this search bar. And if I tap on that, then I can either type, you know, what design I want to create.
Either an Instagram story, you know, as I type, then things will start showing up here. Or I can see that in the search bar as well, just by putting the cursor in the search bar, there’s a bunch of suggested designs as well. You can, you know, use the search bar to get to a design.
It will have suggestions for you at the very bottom. You see there’s custom dimensions here. If you already know what size you want and you want a blank canvas, you can do it that way. That’s the first way to kind of look for designs and get to designs. Now, if we have a look just underneath the search bar under the ‘Welcome, Sara!’ banner, you’ll see it says create a design.
And if we scroll across, we’ll see that there are a bunch of design categories here as well. There’s a bunch of things, logos, animated, social media posters, you name it. There’s a bunch of categories here.
And these change, the order of these change all the time, but it’s another way to kind of scroll through and think, Hmm, what do I need to design today? That’s another way of finding them. And instead of scrolling across, if we scroll up, then you can see like there’s Instagram posts and then I can scroll again.
There’s a bunch of Instagram designs, scroll up again, there’s Instagram stories as a category. There’s, you know, there’s all these different ways to kind of get to designs and to find them from the homepage. We’ve got the search bar. We’ve got, you know, these categories as we scroll on our device.
And then we’ve also got this plus icon in the bottom right-hand corner. It’s that bluey, greeny little colour with the plus icon. And if I click on that, you can see once again, I can get to designs this way as well. I can either click on custom dimensions or I can, you know, custom dimensions brings up the box where I can put in the height and the width.
If I already know the size and start from a blank canvas. Or I can cancel that or you can see there’s a bunch of suggested categories here as well. There are a bunch of ways to get to the designs from Canva, from the homepage. You’ve got the search bar at the top. You can scroll across the categories or you can press that little plus icon, which brings it up as well.
Now, if you already have a Canva account, if you click on design, so in the bottom bar, you’ll see, it says designs, this will bring up all of your existing designs, right? You can access your designs from wherever you are from your mobile device. That’s really cool.
You’ve got access to them, you know, on your computer when you log into your account there. And you’ve also got access to the same designs in your mobile device as well. That’s all accessible from the designs tab.
Now, if we click on the one to the right, the menu one, you can see here that they’ve got all of the stuff that you would see on desktop that isn’t in the other two tabs are kind of thrown in here. Here are where all of your folders are. Here’s where, you know, if you’ve got folders of categories, you can see them here.
And also like your brand kit and everything that you see there. That’s how you kind of navigate and to get back to home, you would click on home. That is like a crash course in navigating the home page and finding, you know, your designs and pretty much that, that is kind of it.
People are a little bit like, Oh, where do I get started? And it’s kind of like get started, whatever’s fastest for you. Either from the search bar, from one of the categories. We’re going to do a design together so I can show you after you’ve kind of picked a category, how do you kind of thumb your way through a design on Canva? Right?
I’m going to pick an Instagram story. I’m going to scroll and try to find a design. I’m scrolling through, I’m finding a design that I want. Remember these are all templates. The beauty on Canva is that they have templates and you do not have to design from scratch.
This saves you time. This is fantastic for people like me who are not the best designers, but we can work with the layout. It saves us so much time. I’m going to go ahead and pick this design here and it will load it in the app. Okay.
And now you may be thinking, well, I don’t see much on the screen. How do I actually design with this thing? It’s meant to be, it’s meant to be quite intuitive in Canva, right? Any element that you want to change, so let’s just say you want to change the text that says black Friday, when you tap on it, you see at the bottom, the menu or this bottom bar will change according to the things that you can do with it.
When I edit it I, if I scroll across, you know, I can change the font, and it’s tapping on that and that will change it. If I scroll across again, I can see these numbers and that allows me to increase the font size by dragging the little bar here.
And you just go across and make the changes that you want to make. The cool thing that you can do with Canva on the mobile device is access effects as well. I’ve got the text highlight, highlighted, I’m going to click on effects and I can do things like, you know, apply these apply these different treatments.
And I can also do curve texts as well because everyone wants curve text. If I click on curve text, ta-da! I can curve the text. And then I can, you know, do all these beautiful little treatment of it all from my mobile device.
The secret to using Canva on a mobile device is when you click on the element that you want to change. Let’s go down to the sales section. You’ll see the bottom bar will activate all the things that you can do with it, changing the fonts, making it bold, central aligning it, you know, effects, groups, position, you name it.
Click on the thing that you want to change, and then use the bottom bar to navigate to what you want to do. Let’s go and change something. You can see an example of how this also works. This is a great, beautiful picture of this girl with the headphones here, but it’s not me.
I want to change this picture, right? I’m going to go ahead. I’m going to tap on it and you can see that right away, the bottom bar changed. And I’m going to click on replace. And now I’ve got the option to replace it with an image from my uploads in Canva.
But I can also, if I go across to camera roll, pick an image from my camera roll, right? This is bringing up the images on my phone. Yes, here’s a selfie and all the pictures I’ve taken of late, and you can pick it directly from your phone into Canva.
I’m going to do that now. I’m going to pick that and then it will replace it for me like that. That’s pretty cool. You know, so you can use the pictures from your mobile device to create designs on the go, which is really cool.
Plus you can access images from your uploads that you’ve done on desktop as well. Everything all in one place. Now let’s scroll across to see, uh, no, sorry. Yeah, so that was, that’s how easy it is to kind of replace the images and the elements within the template.
Now let’s just say that, okay, this is great, but I want to add something else to it. I want to add something that isn’t, you know, already, that isn’t text or not just replacing elements or the template. How would you do that? Now, there’s a plus button that’s in the bottom right-hand corner.
And if you click on that, then you can see that all these options come up and these are the same options that you’ve known and you’ve come to know and love in Canva on desktop, but you’ve got them, you’ve got access to them on your mobile device as well.
If I click on elements, right, then I’ve got access to all of the stickers, all of the shapes, all of the things that you get within Canva on desktop, you can access them now on your mobile as well. I, in the elements, I may want to add some stickers. Let’s have a look at, I’m going to search for a star.
I’m going to search for something that’s animated. Look at that. Look at all that animation. Let’s add an animation to the story. Let’s go, let’s go with this one, this free this star here. Let’s add it there. I’m going to scroll across. I’m going to position it backwards. It’s not covering my face.
Oh, that’s too much backwards. I like it smaller. Let’s do that. See, so that’s how easy it is to kind of add additional things to your actual design. You’re either tapping on an element to change it and replace it, or you are, you know, clicking on the plus icon. And then that allows you to add elements. It allows you to add a bunch of other things as well.
I want to actually show you another cool thing that you can do with it. I showed you how to kind of change out, you know, static image, but wait, there’s more! You can also create videos with the app, which is beautiful and amazing because video is, you know, the bomb.com.
Let’s just say that you wanted to create a design that had a video that you’ve recorded on your phone. You can do that so you could do it in a couple of ways. You can either click on the section that you want to replace it with and go to replace, and then choose the video in the videos tab.
If it’s already one that you’ve uploaded, or you can go to your camera roll once again and upload a video from your camera roll. Right. That’s cool.
How cool is that? You get to upload things directly from your camera roll into Canva into the design. I’m going to use this footage here and this would in theory, I haven’t test this one, so I’m hoping that it will work in theory. It will show on the actual design and bring it in for me.
That’s how we add the, you know, videos and elements to Canva. I may have broke the internet. No. I do find with videos sometimes that it can be a little bit temperamental, like it’s being right now, but that’s okay. The other thing to know that with the design, if you want to see if you are adding video and you want to see how it kind of looks like as you are designing, you can do that by clicking on the play button on the top of the actual app.
Let’s click on that and you can see that the video hasn’t come through. That’s fine. That allows us to, let’s replace that with another video. Let’s replace that with a video that is already uploaded that might not freak it out so much here.
Let’s add this one of my face. There we go. Here’s a video that’s actually working so I can see a preview there, but I want to see the whole thing. I would click on the play button at the top. And now I can see,
Oh, and press play. Hello, Canva video? That it’s not working while I’m doing the demo, but in theory, it should be playing and it’s not playing right now. But in theory, you should be able to see it play in the video animate as well when you’ve pressed that play button.
That’s how we would work in theory, unless you’re on a live stream and it’s deciding not to work for you. Those have a, that’s kind of like a quick way that you can actually do it. Let’s say now that you’ve got everything to work, you like the look of it, you know, what else can you do with it?
One of the cool things you can do is you can animate, right? We’re talking about being able to animate without having to code a line of, you know, a line of, we’re being able to animate without having to code a line of code, without having to type a line of code.
And we can do that by clicking on the actual design. And then you can see at the bottom, there’s this option here that says animate. And then as I scroll across, they’ve got like different animation treatments and I can see them as they’re actually, you know, as I switch it so I can kind of preview it live as I’m actually playing around with it.
How cool is that, that allows you to animate really, really quickly and really, really easily, you know, within the app itself. Just some cool little, you know, treatments and tricks and tips for actually using Canva. Now, let’s say that this is like the world’s greatest design, which clearly it is not, how would you then go about saving it so that you can then upload it to Instagram, upload it to your Twitter fleets, upload it to your Facebook stories.
There’s a couple of ways that we can do that. On the top right-hand corner where there’s an arrow pointing up, you can click on that and then it will allow you to, you know, use all these options. I’m going to go to download video, or you can click save as.
It will ask you, you know, which format that you want to save it as, so you can save it as an MP4 or a GIF, and then I’m going to click download, and then it will save it to your actual camera. That’s it.
And that’s how you would design and then download the actual design within Canva. We’re going to let this do its thing because it’s a video sometimes it takes a little bit of a while. While it’s doing that, I’m going to, there we go, it’s downloaded.
And then I’m going to save that video. Done. That’s it. And that’s how you would actually, you know, download the actual video. How cool is that? Let’s go back to my home page now.
Now that I’ve designed this, now that I’ve designed this actual, design, if I go back here, Okay. I can see that this design template is in all of my designs. Everything that I’ve done is saved which is pretty cool as well. Pretty happy with that.
It’s really easy to design things, whether you want to create quick little Instagram posts or little videos, or, you know, they’ve got the entire catalogue of things that you can design. And you can do it now, all, you know, using your thumbs, using the Canva app.
Let’s just go do one more example. Let’s go through Instagram posts, right? I’ve selected a design and this is, you know, a beautiful design. Let’s say that I’ve made all the changes. I want to go back now and show you something else. Within the app itself, you know, we’ve got the one design, you can also do a couple of clever things.
That’s being a bit weird. Canva, what are you doing to me on a live stream? If I wanted to create, let’s just say, a second, I like this design so much I want a second page of it, but I want to change the text. You can do that as well.
If you go to the bottom bar, so remember everything kind of happens from either the bottom bar or like the top right-hand corner. I’m going to click on the plus icon here. What are you doing to me Canva today? What are you doing to me?
All right. We’re back to Canva, right? There was a point to this, but it seems to be a bit glitchy, but that’s okay. That’s okay. We are going to keep rolling with it. I was going to show you how to duplicate a design, but duplicating doesn’t seem to be wanting to play today. That’s okay. We’re going to just keep rolling anyway.
In the top right-hand corner there, you could see, I tapped on this little plus icon thing here, and what happens here? This gives you a couple of options, particularly if you are on the Canva Paid Plan, and what you can do is you can take this and then you can resize it and you can resize it from the device.
You can resize it to custom dimensions, or you can resize it to, you know, they’ve got some pre-populated sizes that you can use there as well. Let’s say I want to change it from this square shape to a vertical shape, like the Instagram story.
I would select that and that I would click on copy and resize, and then Canva would open up the design and it’s resized it for me. Right? It saved me so much time, not having to thumb through redesigning this just like that.
I’ve been able to, you know, create this, use the same design resize, and then I can just, you know, tap on it, move, text around wherever I want it to appear. And that’s pretty much it, so that kind of like is my crash course in how to use Canva on your mobile device.
Essentially, you can access everything from the home page, from the search bar or scrolling, you know, you search or you scroll, or from the plus icon, you can bring up designs that way as well. And once you’ve actually, you know, settled on a design that you want, you would open up the template and once the template comes up, you would click on the element that you want to change.
And then the bottom bar will activate all the things that you can actually do to change it. Now, if you want to add extra things, you would simply click on the plus icon. And this brings up all of the canvas elements that you know, and love.
The ability to add elements, the ability to add extra texts, the ability to add music, you can do that all by clicking on that icon, and then it would add it onto the actual design. And once you’re ready to download it, you would simply click on the download sections on the top right-hand corner.
That is basically my crash course in Canva mobile on an iPhone. I’m just going to come back and look at all of the comments because there’s been a bit of comment, love that I can see. I’m absolutely stoked.
I’m just going to jump to the questions for a minute here Hey, Gigi, great to see you on the live stream as always. Thank you for the support. Pete Johns. Hey, good to see you on the live stream. Pete John says, ‘I need this one in a big way’. Ileane, Ileane, thank you for this super chat. Thank you for being here.
And, I appreciate you very, very much and all of your, Ileane’s got a fantastic channel where she teaches social media as well. And she does a lot of live streaming tutorials. She’s got a great channel so definitely go and check her out. Daniel, Hey, Daniel, ‘joined the party a bit late.
As a designer, I’d like to see which curved texts you’re speaking of’. All right, we’ll come back to that in a minute. But this curve text, this text that can be curved is it has been a big thing. Apparently, it’s been a big request that people have asked of Canva and they rolled it out in the last month or so, and everyone, you know, is going a bit bananas over it.
Ileane says, Curve text is great if you are creating a round logo or a bug for your brand.’ Yeah, I think it’s just an option that allows you to kind of go curve. To be honest, when I think of curve text, I think it’s a little bit 1995, but it seems to be a thing that everyone wants to use. Giga art.
GiGi says, ‘I mostly use curved text in stamps and vintage tools’. I know, right? Apparently it’s a thing. Everyone loves curves. Everyone wants the curve, curve, curves. Pete Johns, thank you for the super chat says, ‘Canva video and animation is a game-changer.
I had no idea about. Fantastic!’ Okay. Pete John says, ‘Was about to ask if background remover is available on mobile? Checked it out myself, and it is for paid users’. Yes. You can remove the background from an image in Canva on the mobile app for pro users.
Background removal is only for pro whether that’s on mobile or desktop, but yeah, one-click background remover is definitely an amazing feature that I absolutely love as well. So yes. That basically, wraps up today’s live stream.
It was meant to be this quick little one, but Canva was being a bit glitchy on me today. I’m gonna blame canva for this one. It worked really well in the rehearsal. And then it was like, Hey, this is not happening the way it’s supposed to be happening.
But I appreciate everyone for showing up so much. I’ve got another, the tutorial where I’m going to walk you through how to use Canva on an iPad, because I originally plan to do one Canva mobile video to rule them all. But then I realised the workflow is quite different because the screen size is different.
It looks completely different on an iPad with a larger screen than it does on an actual phone. Yes, that essentially wraps us up today. Now, if you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, or I do lots more tutorials on social media, live streaming and we have a lot of fun as well.
And if you haven’t already got it, make sure you grab a copy of my social media checklist. I show you how to get up and running on all of the major social media networks. You can start leveraging the power of social to grow your business with ease.
That’s a wrap my friend, thank you so much for joining me tonight. I had a blast and I will see you on the next live stream. Bye for now.
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