In this Canva tutorial, I’m going to show you super easy and speedy ways for how to create an animated GIF or video in minutes so you can have beautiful, eye-catching social media posts for Instagram, Facebook or any platform that you like. Even if you have zero design skills whatsoever. Stay tuned.
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Canva tutorial – How to create an animated GIF – Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Sara Nguyen, and on this channel, I make tech and social media easier for awesome entrepreneurs like yourself. If you’re new to this channel, consider subscribing for all of the latest product reviews, social media marketing tips and training.
And at any time during this video, check out the description for links to all of the resources mentioned in this video. If you’ve never heard of Canva before, check out the link in the description.
I have several Canva tutorials that show you how to use canvas step by step. It’s a fantastic design tool to help you design without any complicated software.
Let’s get straight into how to make a GIF or animated video in Canva. If we have a look at my Instagram, you’ll see that I’ve got a couple of animated GIFs and they’re really just nice, cute little elegant animations that help emphasise, I guess the message and they create a bit of a pop.
As much as I hate to use that word. And it was really easy to create these, and it took me no time at all. I’m going to show you exactly how to create animated GIFs just like this, so you can use them on Instagram, Facebook, and whatever other social media platform you so choose.
Now I’m going to walk you through three, yes, you heard that right, three different, very easy ways to create animated GIFs using Canva. The first way to create animated GIFs using Canva is to, after you’ve logged into Canva, select the animated social media template here.
At the moment, at the time of this recording, they’ve moved it to the first one that you see here. So go ahead and select that. You’ll see it as soon as you log in. Click on that, and this will open up the preexisting animated templates that Canva has already created for you.
And if you have a look on the left-hand side here, all of these are animated GIFs. So if you just hover over each one just subtly, you can see the animations that they have created for each one.
So I’m going to go ahead and select one. All of the ones under here, in this section, are animated. So there’s subtle animations in each one of these.
So you choose whichever one you like. I’m going to go ahead and choose this one. Once you’ve selected one of the templates, you can see it on your canvas here, and then you can go in, and you can change the text, and you can change the colour of some of the elements to suit your brand and your personal preferences.
And that’s really cool because the beauty of Canva is that you’re not designing from scratch, you have a beautiful template that is already designed for you, so all you have to do is tailor it to your message and tailor it to your brand.
And it’s really customizable, and it’s really easy and quick to get a design out this way. So I’m going to go ahead and make a couple of changes. So I’m going to select the text.
So I’ve just changed the text there. I’m going to select a couple of elements, and I’m going to just swap out the colours so that they match my brand colours and my personal preferences because Canva is cool like that.
You get to create it the way you like to create it if you don’t like a particular element. So let’s say I’m not feeling any of these features, I can simply delete it, and that’s pretty cool.
So it’s very, very flexible. Now once you’ve changed the text, changed the style, please check out the Canva tutorial if you don’t know how to do this, but you can then go ahead and save this as an animated GIF.
The way that you do that is you go to the right-hand corner here, and then what you want to look for is animation. And then you’ll see here, you get to preview a couple of different styles, and you get to select the style of how you want the animation to appear.
Now you can’t customise the animation, they are pre-created for you, but that’s okay like this is really all that you need to quickly create a GIF. And so just pick one that suits you.
My favourite one is the simple one. And then to choose a speed so it’s just straight forward and it has the elements, the animated elements moving. And then you can choose the animated file to be either an animated GIF or an MP4 file.
I’m going to go ahead and select animated GIF, and then I’m going to go download. And this will, Canva will go ahead and create this file for me, and we’re just going to let it download now.
The file is now downloaded, and when I open the file, I can see my beautiful animated GIF. And that took what? A couple of seconds, maybe more than a couple of seconds. That took a couple of minutes.
Selecting a template, changing out the text, and bam, I’ve got a beautiful animated GIF that’s ready for me to upload to Instagram, upload to Facebook and start using straight away. I’m going to show you the second way to create animations from Canva.
And once again, assuming that you’ve just logged into Canva, I’m going to go start something from blank. So I’m going to go 1920 by 1920. So I’m going to create a square design, and this is a blank design.
Once I’ve opened up, or once my canvas has opened up, then I am going to start creating animations by going to elements. What I’m going to search for is you can either search for it or you can scroll, but you’re searching for stickers.
So let’s go ahead and search for stickers so that we can make this a little interactive. So search for stickers and then look animation. So there are lots of little premade animations that you can use.
So just by selecting them, you can resize them. With animations, they’re premade for you, and you can’t really change them. So they’re already made. And unfortunately, you’re not able to change the colour. You’re not able to change, I guess, the text to be what you want.
But there’s so many here that it’s really easy to just grab something that’s relevant to the animation that you’re trying to create. So let’s say that I want to go ahead and–wow, they’re really, the last time I looked at this, I didn’t see any of these.
These are really new. They’re constantly adding animations, and they’re really easy to use. So it’s about searching for stickers and picking something that you like and adding it to your canvas.
So let’s say this is my animation that I want to use. Once I’ve chosen the stickers, I once again go to the right-hand corner here, and I’m going to search for animation, and I’m going to choose how I want the style to appear.
I think I’m going to go simple because I like simple. And then I’m going to download it. Once again, I have the choice of choosing animated GIF or GIF whatever you prefer or MP4. I’m going to go animated GIF, and I’m going to download that.
And that’s the second way that you can create animations using Canva really, really quick, using their stickers, their premade stickers. You can add like this pop to your social media posts, and it’s really quick and really easy, and there are so many to choose from.
I have no doubt that you’ll be able to choose something that suits your designs. My animation has downloaded, and I’m going to open it up so we can have a look at it. And there it is.
There’s the animation that I just created once again, ready for me to upload to Instagram or to Facebook or whichever other social media platform that I can use animations with. So I’ve shown you two ways to create animations.
One was using Canva’s animated social media design template. The second way was using stickers. And the third way, cause there’s more, always more than one way to do things, is I’m going to show you how to use any standard design.
It could be a design that you’ve created, or it can be just one of Canva’s static designs to create an animation from. So I’m going to go and select Facebook post as the template.
You can create any of the templates that you choose or it can be one that you’ve designed from scratch. And then I’m going to, let’s go ahead and pick this one. So we’re going to pretend that this is exactly how I want it to be.
And after I’ve finished making all of the changes to the design, what I want to do is, once again, as well, as always with Canva to finalise your design, you go to the top-right hand corner. I’m going to choose once again, animation.
Do you see a trend here? Hopefully, you can see a trend here. And then I can choose a style. So that’s as you saw, the fade style, the pan style, pans for one of the better word.
So you can go through and choose which style of animation that you like. I think I’m going to go with pan and then I’m going to choose animated GIF. So you can use any design and then Canva will automatically animate it for you using these animation styles that they have.
And you go ahead and pick one. And this works for any design. So I’m going to download this now. So whether it’s one that is a Facebook post, or whether it’s a presentation, all of their designs have the ability to be animated, which is pretty cool if you ask me.
So it doesn’t have to be using the social media templates. It can be from any of the designs. And then you just use their premade animations.
Now a lot of people have said, why can’t we animate it how we want it to be animated? And I hear you, I definitely hear you. But this is about creating animations quickly and easily. And once you get into trying to customise animation, it really is a headache.
Now let’s have a look at this design. Now that it is completed. I’m going to open it up so we can have a look. There you go. So just by using a standard design that was static, I was able to use the animation, I guess, publishing feature and then I have a beautiful animated GIF that I can use. So it’s really easy.
I’ve shown you three ways to create animations using Canva. Super simple, super quick, and as always, beautiful. Now in order to create animations in any of the ways that I’ve shown you in this tutorial, you do need to have the paid version of Canva.
So Canva Pro or Canva for Work as it used to be called. If you check out the link in my description, there is a link to sign up to Canva, and you get the free trial for a little bit of time.
So maybe go ahead and go use that to create a couple of free ones and then see how you like it. I really, really love Canva, and I use the Pro version of Canva because it’s such an easy way to get designs out quickly.
And I use a combination of Canva to create my own stuff and a graphic designer who does external stuff. So I don’t think it has to be a sack-your-graphic designer, do everything yourself, although that is an option, I think you can use it in conjunction with a graphic designer.
So there you have it there. There’s my walkthrough of how to create an animated GIFs or GIFs using Canva. And please check out the link in the description to get your free trial of Canva Pro so you can create your own animated GIFs as well.
If you found this tutorial useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. And if you’re looking for more ways to grow your business, creating GIFs and content is just one part of the equation.
You also need to figure out what social media accounts to set up, what to post, and how to make it all work for you. So I’ve put together a Social Media Checklist.
I outlined all of the things you need to do to get up and running on social media so you can start leveraging the power of social to make more sales with ease.
To get your hands on it, simply click on the link in the description box below and thanks for watching.
