In this video, I’m going to be looking at how to use The Canva App On Your Mobile Device. I created a tutorial on how to use Canva app particularly a couple of years ago and it’s very popular tutorial, but I feel like it’s a little bit out of date because Canva have updated the app since and I just thought it’s about time that we had to look at the most recent app.
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🕒Timestamps🕒
2:12 Access the app
2:52 Navigating the Canva App homepage (what is where?)
4:26 Accessing your own designs on the Canva app
5:29 Using the search bar to find designs
6:47 Create a new design from the categories
7:15 Using custom dimensions
10:26 Creating an Instagram post
11:56 Changing text, fonts and text colours
15:27 Adding extra text or elements to your design
16:26 Changing an image
19:39 Adding other features (including stickers)
21:11 Saving a design
22:53 Adding pages and duplicating a design
24:33 How to animate in the canva app
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How to use the Canva App (Canva on mobile) – Video Transcription
Hello, and welcome! In this video, hi, if you’re joining me live today and if you are watching the replay. I’m going to be looking at how to use The Canva App On Your Mobile Device. I created a tutorial on how to use Canva, the Canva app particularly a couple of years ago and it’s very popular tutorial, but I feel like it’s a little bit out of date because Canva have updated the app since they’ve updated it over the last few years. I just thought it’s about time that we had to look at the most recent app.
Let’s get started with the tutorial. Now, everything is happening the way it should be. All systems are going, yes, and I’m pretty good with that. Okay, so let’s get started right now.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help businesses build and grow their businesses using video on social media and make sure that you check out the links in the description because I’m going to, after the broadcast, put the links to all the timestamps so you can go back and watch the tutorial, and the sections of the tutorial. As well as any resources and extra, extra stuff that I mentioned within this tutorial.
Let’s go over now to the Canva app. This once again, I don’t get any cranky people going, “That’s not what it looks like on desktop”. This is for using Canva on your mobile device, whether that is your iPhone, your Android, your tablet. I’m going to demonstrate on my iPad Pro, but it definitely works on your iPhone or a smart tablet, smart tablet. I think you’re going to find this really, really fun. Yay! Look at that, once you have, let’s go back a step.
You firstly you need to go and you need to download the Canva app from the app store or from the Google play store. Look for Canva, download the app and then once you’ve downloaded it, you’ll need to log in using your username and password. You have to do that in order to access the app and then you’ll see the app looks, let me zoom in like, that’s Canva see there? That’s what the app looks like. Go ahead and click on that. This will open up the app.
It’s going to zoom back out now with things pending. What I’m going to do now is I think with this tutorial, this is will be less of a how to design with the Canva app, but it will be more of a how do we navigate this, right? If you really want to learn how to design with the design with Canva, I’ve got a bunch of tutorials. The links to all of them will be in the description.
But the question that I’ve been getting a lot with the Canva app is, how do I use it? Like how do I navigate? I don’t quite understand. A little bit of feedback that it’s not as intuitive and I get it. Things are changing constantly, but I’m going to give you the foundations so that you always know how to navigate the app.
All right, so now that we are in the app, we are in the app. I’m gonna make myself a little bit smaller. This is what you typically see when you log into Canva on your mobile device. Now you may see a little bit less in terms of like, this is just from a big screen.
This is using the iPad pro, the bigger one, the bigger size, I forgot what size it is, it’s just gone from my mind but from the mobile device, obviously you won’t see as many things ’cause it’s a smaller screen. But I wanted to do it on a bigger screen because I thought it would be easier to show the features as opposed to battling it on a smaller screen. But more or less, it’s pretty much the same.
Navigating the homepage I think is an important thing. In order to design with Canva, you need to be able to access the designs. If you already have designs, then you’ll be able to find them. Let me see here.
If you scroll to the bottom of your, well I’ll scroll to the bottom, but you’ll see in the bottom there’s a plus icon and there is this little square icon with like rectangle things on it. That is where all your designs are. If you click on that, we’ll press that then this will open up all of the designs that you have already saved within Canva.
If you want to get back to the home screen, you click on that plus again. That’s pretty important to know because not everyone knows that all of their designs are already within the app if you’ve logged in. That’s how you can firstly access your existing designs on Canva within the mobile app.
The other way that you can start creating designs is in the top section. Let’s zoom in again. I’m going to do this. Do you like this zooming feature? I think it’s really cool if everything is working and you’re seeing everything that you should be seeing.
In the top of the app, you’ll see search over 60,000 templates. I’m hoping that this number grows and that this becomes out, this line becomes redundant soon because they’re constantly adding templates and what you can do there is it’s a search bar, so you can search for whatever designs you’re looking to create.
Let’s just say you’re looking to create an Instagram story. You can start typing Instagram and then you’ll see all these options drop with a suggested search options for Instagram posts, Instagram story, Instagram ad. With Canva that if you do choose it, they’ve already sized it for you. You will know that the Instagram posts will be square and the Instagram story will be like a brick long vertical rectangle. That’s how you can access designs.
You can use the search bar and start typing in something and then they will have suggestions,so that’s one way. The second way that you can start accessing designs is, let me zoom a little bit more, underneath the search bar you’ll see it says, what do you want to design today? Create a new design.
Now, you can see at the moment there’s Instagram, Instagram story logo on my screen at the moment. If I scroll across, you’ll see that there’s more designs. These are categories for different designs that Canva have created for you. You can access a design by just choosing one of these categories here but some people don’t know that you can actually scroll there, so that’s another way of accessing designs.
If you want to create your own design and you have like a specific custom size that you want it to be. Where it says custom dimensions, you can tap that and then you’ll see it says, enter the size and pixel. You can go ahead and enter the width and the height of the image that you want it to be. Let’s just say I want an image to be 700 wide by 700 high and then you select create and then Canva will open up the canvas in that size. That’s how you create your own image in your own size. I’m going to cancel that.
Then the third way to access designs, let me zoom out a little bit. Now I showed you the top of the search bar. I showed you just the categories that you can scroll horizontally. If you scroll up, you’ll see that they’ve also got categories of their designs already on the app, so right now you can see animated social media.
I’m going to scroll and you can see Instagram posts, Instagram stories, logos, and there’s just a whole range of categories that allow you to choose a category. These change in terms of the ordering of them. I’m seeing them change all the time. Animated social media is at the top right now if you wanted to create that, it’s very popular. Maybe that’s why it’s at the top and all you have to do is select an image from that section. That’s how you navigate this home page.
You can either search for a design by looking at the toolbar, the search bar at the top. You can scroll across and pick a category. You can scroll up and down and you can choose another category that way or you can access your own designs. That is navigating the homepage and you can get back to the home page by clicking on the bottom, the little plus in a circle at the bottom. I’m going to make it big so you can see it. That plus icon in the bottom there takes you back to the home page. That is navigating the home page.
I feel it’s quite important because a lot of people don’t know that this is how you can access different designs and there are different ways to do it. I also want to emphasize that there’s no like, right or wrong way to do it. This is different options and you will find that Canva constantly test and change things. For the most part you’ll see that, you know, this is how you’ll be able to access it but the ordering of things may change.
This is at the Bay at the very fundamental sense how you navigate the homepage. Let’s just say now that you understand how to navigate the homepage, let’s go into actually managing a design. Let’s say that you want to create a Instagram post on your mobile device, ’cause that’s something that I do and you know, lots of people do because you may be out and about, or you may have an idea to create a post for Instagram and you may not, you may just want to do it quickly on your mobile device.
I’m going to go and choose it. I have lots of options as you know, but I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to click Instagram post. The option here. Once I select Instagram post, I’ve got all of the different designs here, and I can just scroll to choose one that I like and I’m going to choose one and then once again, this is more about navigating how to design in Canva as opposed to like designing and moving things two pixels to the left or two pixels to the right because I find that people can typically figure out the design part, but using the tool is a little bit harder.
A lot of people aren’t quite familiar with how things are kind of laid out. I’m going to go and choose this design. Just pick one that has images and graphics. All right, I’m going to select the Sunday mood design. I’m going to tap on that and then Canva will open up the design in a canvas.
You’ll notice now that everything that you want to do will change just like it does on desktop. For example, if I wanted to change the text, I tap on the text and then at the bottom you’ll see that all the options for changing the text font, changing the alignment, changing the colour, changing the size appears after I’ve selected it.
I’ve tapped on it. I can change the font. I’m going to scroll and see here, you can see that it says Playfair display, which is the current font and if I want to change the font it will be, it wouldn’t automatically have the default font that it is selected but if you want to change it, you can select the name of the font and then trying to navigate like zooming in and out on an app is very interesting, very interesting while you’re live streaming, then you can see that you can scroll and there’s all different fonts that you can choose there.
You can either scroll and that’s a little bit hard to see because you’re going to see a few at a time, but that’s the nature of mobile or you can search for a font. Maybe I want to look for a brush, a photo with brush, then that will come up here. You can either scroll or you can try to search for them.
Now, you may also notice, let’s highlight, and zoom up on this, that with the font, there’s some that will have this little crown option on them and if it has a crown option on it, it means that it’s part of Canva Pro, so Canva’s paid version and you can access it if you are a canvas pro member.
If you are using the free version of Canva, you won’t be able to access it but check out, make sure you check out the link in the description, which I’ll add at the end of this broadcast because I’ll give you a link which will enable you to get Canva Pro for free for 30 days. You can go in, you can use all their Pro stuff and create what you need to create. I’ll put that link in the description if it isn’t already there.
Back to fonts, either search for it using the toolbar or you can just keep scrolling. That’s how you choose the fonts. And once you choose one, I’m going to go ahead and choose a font and zoom back out. You can see, Once I choose a font, it would change it immediately and I can just keep changing the font.
As I choose different ones, the design will change in front of my eyes, which is good because you want to be able to do that. Once you’re happy with it, you can go and tap the little done icon in the bottom right. I’m going to go and do that now. That is playing around with fonts so you can change the font, change the text by tapping on it. I changed the font if I wanted to change it in terms of the text, all I would do is double tap on it and then I can just start, the keyboard were up here and then I can write whatever I want there and that’s how you do it.
You can also add emojis as well and click done and that’s how you would change the fonts. Now, I may hear you say, what if I want to add extra font? I don’t want to just use add extra text. I don’t want to just use the text that they’ve given me there. Good question. In the bottom right-hand corner, you can click on the plus icon and this will open up a whole menu that allows you to add lots of different things that may or may not already be on the design.
If I wanted to add extra text, I would select text and it would give me the option to either add some of my own or I can choose some of their pre-configured texts. I’m going to add some of my own and as you can see there, I’ve got some options. I’m going to go change it and then done and that’s how I add text.
I can move it around by just putting my finger on the actual text and that allows me to move it to be wherever I want it to be. That’s how you play with the font, play with the text and add extra text.
Now if you, if I select another item, let’s just say that I select the image. Once I select the image at the bottom, once again, you can see how the options for what I can do with images has opened as I had selected that section. It’s opened up my camera roll and I can either choose an image from the camera roll to replace it with. I’ve got one that I prepared earlier. I’m going to select that one and then switched it out. As you can see. If I tap on it once again, double tap then I can move like the image around within like the sizing that it has.
The other thing that you can do is if you don’t want to use images from your camera roll, if you go and select images with the little icon you’ll see here, I’m going to zoom up on that so you can see that there images in the center there, this will allow you to access Canva’s image library, they’ve got stock images that you can use and once again you can scroll. It’s a little bit hard to see on the screen, but you can either scroll and look for images that way or you can search for search to help it filter down.
Let’s just say you want some happy image, you type that in search and then relevant images would come up. I’m going to zoom into this section so you can see. Once again with Canva, you’ll be able to see that they’ve got both free options and that’s marked with free and they’ve also got the little crown on it, which means it’s a Canva Pro, a paid image or not paid image, but it’s part of the Canva Pro, the paid version of Canva.
Once again, I’ve got links in the description if you want to use Canva Pro because I get a lot of comments going, I can’t access it, but you can, you can. Make sure you check out the description and then you can access Canva for Pro for free for 30 days. That’s what you can do.
You can add your own images. You can use Canva’s image library to add stock images. All you have to do is scroll or you can use that search feature there. That’s like some fundamentals of text, images, moving things around. What else am I going to show you today? I think in terms of like the designs, in terms of like using Canva to create a post or whether that’s an Instagram post or a story or whatever graphic it is, this is all the same.
The only thing that will be different is like, obviously if it’s a Pinterest image, the size and the dimensions will be different but in terms of adding texts, in terms of changing things, it’s all the same. You tap on the element that you want to change, the menu item will change appropriately to whatever you’re trying to modify and then you can just use the menu items to make the changes that you want to change.
Now that we’ve got this beautiful image going and I showed you text, I showed you just changing out images. I’m gonna show you another thing. This bottom right hand corner plus icon, if you select that I showed you before how to add extra text, but you’ve also got options to do a couple of other things. You’ve got options to add videos, you’ve got options to add illustrations, you’ve got options to add shapes, stickers, logos change the template and add new pages.
That plus icon is really how you navigate other features of Canva that you want to add to the actual design, so make sure that you check that one out. They will all be different obviously depending on what you choose. If I go ahead and choose stickers, then it will open up the sticker library. As always you can either search for it or you can scroll and see what’s available.
Then if you want to choose it, you just tap it and you add it to your design and you can resize it by dragging your finger on the design and then moving it to where you want it to be. Make sure that you check out the plus icon because that’s how you add, you know, that’s where you’ll be able to access things to add to your actual designs.
The one to note is that if I click on templates, this will open up other templates that I can change if I want, if I didn’t really like the template that I was working with. I could go in and I could select a different template. That’s what that one does. All the options for what you need to do are there.
Now, in order to save your design, you’ve created a beautiful cohesive design, which is not what you see right here. This is a tutorial, not a design session. In order to save it on the top right-hand corner, we are going to zoom. I’m going to move you to the top. Let’s go as big as I can. Okay. In the top right-hand corner, if I was really happy with the design, if I click that down pointing arrow, it will save it directly to my camera roll. I’ve done that now and it’ll save it to my camera roll and then it’s saved to camera roll.
Now if I want to upload it to Instagram, I have it on my camera roll, I’d go into Instagram and I upload that same image. If I select the arrow pointing up, it just gives me a couple more options. It will prepare the design, what are you doing? and then it will allow me to share it and all the options that I can do are visible on the screen.
I can either copy it, save it, I can airdrop it if I’m, if you’re on a Mac, that’s just more options. You can either press the down option, what’s it doing now? Let’s go back to design. You can either click on the down option, it’ll save it directly to your camera roll, or you can click on the right-hand side arrow pointing up, and that will give you more options to save it and share it. That’s essentially what that does.
I think those are the key things that people don’t necessarily know about designing with the tools. Navigating the design elements and where everything kind of is. The other thing that I wanted to draw your attention to was in the bottom left, so we are going to zoom, remove you, you go here. In the bottom left, you see where there’s this icon with the one, a little dot thing. I’m going to press that and what it does here is that it’s opened it and made it really, really small. I can, if I click on the squares in the middle, it would duplicate the design.
You can open up the design and then have two versions of it that you can, you know, play around with. If I click plus, it will open a new page, a blank page. I can either duplicate or I can add another blank page to the design or if I select the bin, guess what it does? It trashes it. I’m going to select that and it would trash it. That’s what you can do with that element. It allows you to once again play around with the options within the app.
I’m going to go click that X icon and that will take me back to my design. That’s the core navigating the app. I showed you how tapping on stuff allows you to, I guess open up the menu items. I showed you the plus icon in the bottom right, which opens up adding extra things to the design and I showed you how to add extra pages and duplicate the page as well.
There’s one other thing I want to show you within the app and that is how to animate. I’m going to open an existing design that I have because I found this to be less buggy for the purposes of being on a live stream and trying to demo something and not have things crash.
Now, let’s zoom this. This is a design that I did for a previous tutorial that I had and with the design, what you can do, particularly if you have Canva Pro, is you can animate it from the app as well. I’ve got the design and in the top right-hand corner, let’s go up. In the top right-hand corner there is that play button, that triangle that’s next to the down arrow, right? Click on that.
I’m going to zoom back out ’cause you need to see the options and if you click on that, the options to animate appear. It’s kind of hard to see, but they’re at the bottom of the app. Let’s zoom in. It’s actually playing the actual designs right now. But if I zoom in and I go to the bottom, you’ll see, If I scroll across the bottom there that these are the different animation types, so as I select them, they will appear.
If you wanted to animate them, that’s how you access them and that’s how you change the animation style to be whatever you want it to be. It’s just a little bit hard to see because I’ve got that text and I should have thought of that before I came on the live stream, but that’s how you access it.
You go to the play button which will open up the ability for you to then choose the different animation styles and then that’s it, that’s how you do it. Then you just save it by clicking on the download button as well. So that’s really cool and not many people know that you can actually animate within the app as well.
It’s not just for desktop, so hopefully that I’ve covered everything I needed to. I think I have. I showed you in this tutorial how to navigate the home page, the Canva home page inside the app, and to actually get to your existing designs or to create a new design.
I showed you how to actually design or use the app to design things. We had that little example there where we selected an Instagram post and then I showed you if you want to change things all you have to do, if you want to change things, all you have to do is touch it, touch the element that you want to change.
In the bottom of the app you’ll see the menu items open for that allow you to change that item. If you want to add extra things, then you simply click on the plus icon and this opens up another menu which allows you to go in and add images, add texts, add videos at illustrations.
That’s essentially how you use the Canva app. let’s go back now to the screen. Okay. I hope you found that useful because I got a lot of questions and a lot of comments. The last tutorial that I did on the Canva app. It was a couple of years ago and it’s, I think they’ve changed a few things, but the core things are still the same.
I hope that you found this useful and that this gives you insight and clarity into how to actually use the app ’cause I get a lot of questions of what do I do with it? Where are things? And hopefully now that you know how to do that.
If you’ve found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and also make sure that if you haven’t got it already, check out my Social Media Checklist. I show you how to get up and running on all the social media platforms. Well not all of them, the key ones, so that you can start leveraging social to grow your business and to make more sales with ease. I really hope that you enjoyed this livestream. I had a lot of fun figuring out how to put everything together.
