If you’re thinking about getting Canva for Work and want to know if it’s worth it or if you’ve got it and you want to know how to use its features, you’re in the right place, my friend. In this Canva tutorial, I’m going to step you through how to use Canva for Work so you can make the most out of Canva’s paid version to quickly and easily create beautiful designs with ease. Stay tuned.
Timestamps to Canva for Work sections:
1:20 – Setting up your Brand Kit
5:37 – Team Roles
7:24 – Upload your own fonts
8:13 – Magic resize
10:41 – Element locking
13:35 – Create animations
15:49 – Canva schedule
19:07 – Other goodies
All my Canva videos in a Canva playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiqAD0OPX91ZyH2HVSYrfkwKbInXEuj32
How to use Canva 2.0 (2018 update): https://youtu.be/V2zZVPbMiVI
Get your free social media checklist: https://saranguyenonline.com/special/social-media-checklist
Canva Tutorial: How to use Canva for work (2019 update) – Video Transcript
Hey, I’m Sara Nguyen, 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, tips, and tutorials. You can also check out the description for links to everything mentioned in this video.
I love Canva. They’re a fantastic Australian company who provides an easy to use design tool. If you’re new to Canva, I have a step by step tutorials to help you get started. Check out the links in the description for all of my Canva videos and Canva playlist.
Here’s the list of the Canva for work features I’ll cover in this video. You can jump directly to these sections if you’d like from the links in the description. Let’s get right into it and go over to my computer now.
Oh, hi. I’m so glad that you can make it. Thanks for joining me here. So let’s get right into it. Let’s look at the first feature of Canva for Work, which is a Brand Kit. Now with Canva for Work, one of the things that you can do is that you have a space where you can set up your brand’s colours, so your business’s colours, fonts, and logos.
And you can also share this across other Canva members of your team so that they can use the same assets, so you have consistency, you have the exact colour that you want being used across your design. Let’s look at how this actually works.
If you go to your Canva homepage on the left-hand side, select the Brand Kit. And here is where you can create your Brand Kit. The first section here is your Colour palette. And I’ve set up Colour palettes here to match the colours of my brand and the colours that I prefer to use across my design components.
You can create a palette by selecting this plus button. This gives you the colour wheel to choose the colours from, or you can use the hex code of the colour that you want as well. So you can get very precise with the colours that you want to use.
So you just go ahead, keep selecting the plus button and adding all the colours that you want to be your brand colours that you want to use across all of your designs. And then you can also have multiple brand colours, so maybe you have a colour suite that you use for a particular event, or you have a colour suite that you use for a particular theme, and you just want that to be the set. You can just rename it.
So let’s just say this is the Party Theme Colours and then I have my brand colours so that you can set these here. And then once you’re actually doing a design, you’ll see that when it comes to the Colour palette when I select it here. Then I have my party theme colour palette that I created and my brand colours.
So these colours are available, the palettes are available when I design anything or when someone in my team designed something, these are here to help me be more consistent and to help my team members select the right colours.
In the Brand Kit, I also have a Logo Section. So these are logos of mine that I’ve uploaded in the past. I can select the plus button and upload logos images that I want to use across my designs for both myself and for my team members as well. And it really is as simple as selecting that plus button and then selecting the logo that I want to be saved across my designs.
So once I’ve saved this logo here when I go into my designs and if we’ll go to folders there will be a logos folder which has those logos that I uploaded so that they will always be once again consistent when I’m using them or when members of my team are using them.
And the second last feature of the Brand Kit is the ability to upload your own fonts. So you know what I’m talking about when you have a very specific brand font or a very specific font that you want to use across your designs.
In the Free Canva version, you are unable to upload your own fonts. In the Canva for Work version, you are able to upload your own fonts, fonts that you have the right to use, so fonts that you have purchased or fonts that you have created. And it’s as simple as selecting the Upload new font, selecting the font file, once you’ve done that, Canva will ask you to confirm that you own this font or have the right to use it, and then you can upload the font.
And when you go into your design and select the text box, you’ll be able to select the font sections here, and you’ll see all of the uploaded fonts that you have uploaded from your Brand Kit here.
Another feature in Canva for Work is the ability to have Team Roles. So you’re able to have multiple users in Canva and give them different permissions. So let’s have a look at what that looks like.
If you go to your Canva homepage and select Create a Team, here’s where you can invite your team members, you simply enter their email address. And with different team members, you are charged per user per month.
But with the member levels, you’re able to have an administrator, and administrators are able to remove and add team members. They’re able to create templates and edit your Brand Kit.
There’s also a template designer. And template designers are able to, they’re able to design templates and edit the Brand Kit and invite people, but they don’t have the ability to remove people as the administrators do.
And then there is the member level. So with member levels, they’re able to create their own designs, but they can’t edit the template, and they can’t invite other people. So members is for that junior in your team who is a bit click happy and may accidentally delete a whole asset. It’s the lowest permission level.
Template designer is the next level up. And administrator is the holy grail of permissions, who is able to add people, remove people, control the designs and et cetera.
So this is pretty cool with the Canva for Work feature. You’re able to give people different permissions based on the roles that they have within your team.
Now, I talked about the ability to upload your own fonts in the Brand Kit, but what I didn’t talk about was the fact that you can upload up to a hundred custom fonts, which is pretty freaking cool if you ask me.
So you can have your own brand fonts, but then if you’re designing and you want to use lots of different style fonts, you can do that up to a hundred fonts. And if you have more than a hundred, you’ll just need to delete some of them from the Brand Kit. And with the fonts that you upload, you upload them just from the Brand Kit as I showed you earlier.
When you go to select the fonts, you’ll see brand fonts, if you selected them there and the rest of them will all be under uploaded fonts.
With Canva for Work, you also have access to their Magic Resize feature. And what that allows you to do is that it allows you to take one design that you’ve done and then have it resized into multiple image sizes in one go.
Now I’m going to show you how this works. It doesn’t magically resize it perfectly into the design layout, but it does save you time because it puts it into the Canva size. And I’ll show you exactly what I mean as opposed to doing a special interpretive dance trying to explain what I’m actually talking about.
So here’s a design that I prepared earlier and this, as you may recognise, for those of you who follow my videos, is a YouTube thumbnail. And what I want to do now is select the resize section here, and then I can choose either custom dimensions or I can choose Canva’s pre-populated sizes.
So I’ve got a YouTube thumbnail. I’m going to resize it for Facebook. I’m going to resize it for Instagram and where’s Pinterest? That’s another nice one. So you can either scroll to find other sizes or you can type in the search here and resize it for Pinterest.
So it’s going to copy and resize into those three social media platforms that I selected. There are other ones as well that you could resize it for and you can just search for what you want.
So here we have, this one is the Pinterest one. And yes, it’s not perfect, but it’s got all the elements there. So then I can just go ahead and drag it and start saving some time as opposed to having to recreate the image from scratch. So this is the Pinterest one, which I’m doing really badly because I’m trying to demo at the same time.
This is the Instagram one, so let’s put it into the Instagram square. Once again, I can go ahead and work on resizing that and all the elements pretty quickly. And this is the Facebook post one, that’s not too bad.
That doesn’t need too much work compared to the other ones, but it saves you a bit of time. You don’t have to design completely from scratch. All the elements are already there and you can just manipulate it to get it to look how you want it to look.
Now Element Locking is a feature of Canva for Work, and it’s a relatively new one as well. So what element locking allows you to do is, I’m going to copy this element, is if you have an element on your design, so whether that’s an image or text and you wanted to stay locked in a position.
So let’s say this is a presentation and I want this image to stay locked in the bottom left, I put it to where I want it to be. In the top right-hand corner where I see this padlock, I select Lock. And now as you can see, I’m selecting it, and it’s not going to move. So it’s locked into position.
Pretty handy if you have lots of elements on the page and you want a certain element to not move. So you can do other things around the design element locking, especially for Canva for Work, only a new one as well that I’m finding really handy to use in my design work.
The ability to save your design as a transparent image is another Canva for Work feature that is really, really handy if you have a design. And let’s have a look at this. This image does not have a transparent background. I can see the white when I add it to the design and I kind of really want it to be transparent because it kind of doesn’t look so great with the colour white background there.
So with the transparent background, it looks much better, and I can integrate the design or the element better into my design.
So with Canva for Work, if you’ve created a beautiful design like the one that you see here and you want to save this beautiful, stunning image so that it’s transparent, you can do that. All you have to do is go to download it.
In the file types, you select PNG, high-quality image, transparent background. I’m going to choose this particular page only. I’m not going to download all of it. And select Done.
And then download this one and you’ll see that once it’s done that this will be a transparent image. And I’ll upload it just so that you can see how it looks like. So you can’t see it too clearly here, but I’m going to upload the image.
And now you’ll see once I place it into the design after it has finished uploading that it is indeed a transparent image. So beautiful. Such a stunning design that I’ve done there.
So a really cool feature. I use this a lot. So when I’m creating designs and I need to put it into a PowerPoint presentation, or I need to overlay the image, having the ability to save it as a transparent image is really, really useful.
One of my favourite new features of Canva for Work is the ability to create your own animations. Now, this is not creating your own animations like you would in video editing software. This is, in my opinion, much better than that. You’re able to create gifs and videos that you can download as gif format or .mov format.
And let’s have a look at how it actually works. So you could see just how time-saving, just how beautiful and elegant it actually is. This is a design that I had for a social media graphic for one of my videos. I’ve got all these different elements on it. It’s just a static image that I designed in Canva.
Now what I can do when I go to download, and I select the animation option here, you can see that it’s populating the design. There’s only a couple of animation styles, and if you hover over each one of them, you can see how the animation will appear.
I’ve seen feedback where people want to be able to edit the timeline and edit how the elements appear on the video but to be honest, I think that this is pretty cool given that you don’t have to do anything and it kind of animates it for you, saving you a lot of time.
You’re able to select from their animation styles here. And a few of them so simple, allows you to change the timing of it to be medium, slow or fast. Otherwise the other ones, depending on what they are, they’ll just be the particular, I guess animation style that Canva has created for you.
Then you can choose whether you want it to be a movie file or an animated Gif, and then you download. It will output the video for you. And here is the video file. Like that. And you can upload this now to your social media, whether you want to post it to Facebook or post it to Instagram. You’ve got a little video file here that you created in a matter of seconds off the back of an existing design.
Anyway, one of the newer features that I’m also in love with in Canva for Work is Canva Schedules. So now in Canva for Work, you’re able to create your graphic, and then you can schedule it to go straight to Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Twitter directly from Canva.
So you don’t have to download it and re-upload it into a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer. You can do it directly from Canva, which is really, really cool. So if you have a look at the design here to schedule a post, you would go to download as you would, and then you would look for the Schedule feature.
Go to Schedule, and this will open up the Scheduler. You need to connect your social media accounts. So from here, I’ve already added my Facebook and Twitter account. If you wanted to add another account, you would select this plus button to connect account, a social media account.
So this one is Pinterest, and I’ll need to log in to Pinterest using my credentials which I won’t do right now, but once you’ve logged in, it will automatically add it to your social media accounts that you can schedule too. So I’m going to do some text here, demo text for demo.
I’m going to select Facebook, that’s the one I want to add it to the queue for. Then I’m going to select this button here. And I’d like to schedule so I have the ability to send it right away to Facebook from Canva, or I can schedule it. I’m going to schedule it. I’m going to choose a date and a time and then I select done.
And then I select Schedule, and it’s preparing my post to be scheduled. I can see it here, the little notification. Woohoo! Party! I can change it.
If I select edit post schedule, I can edit the time that it will appear. So I can see it also in their calendar, which is really, really neat. So I kind of like how they’ve done this. It’s still a little bit buggy if you ask me, but I can see my post.
And if I wanted to change the time, I just go edit post and then I can just change the time here to be either another day or whatever suits me. So it’s as easy as that. I like that from the Canva Scheduler; you can see your schedule. So this will have all of the posts that I’ve scheduled to go in the future.
It also has a History tab, so I can see the posts that I’ve scheduled in the past that you can see that I’ve done here in this record and drafts. So if I have put a post in to go, but I haven’t set a date for it, it will live in drafts until I go in and edit it and actually schedule it.
A lot of questions I get about Canva for Work and whether or not it’s actually worth paying for the premium version of Canva. And I really think that that’s a yes.
So I’ve been using Canva for Work for a couple of years now, and I love the fact that they have more templates, more icons and more images and photos that you can use compared to the free version. You get a ton with their free version, but you get even more with Canva for Work.
Like if you are on the free version and you get a bit tired of seeing the same images, icons, wait until you get into Canva for Work, you get even more access to images that you can use. So with images and icons, you always have access to the free ones.
There are the paid ones that you can use, but with the Canva for Work package, you get access to like another suite of images that you can use that you don’t have to pay each time for. So that’s really, really cool. Love that about Canva for Work, definitely think it’s worth it based on the fact that you get all of these elements extra as part of the package.
I also like the fact that you can create folders. So when you’re uploading lots of images, you can organise them in folders. So I organise my images in product shots, elements, backgrounds, logos, purchased images, sloth images, I’ve got a whole stack of them there, and I can organise them.
So it’s not just all random in the upload section, I can actually go, “Okay, I want to just find the folder that has just my images of sloths that I uploaded and just use these ones as I want”.
The other thing that I love about Canva and Canva for Work is that the team there are constantly working on adding more features. I’m a Canva Certified Creative, and I get the inside scoop on what’s coming. So I can’t talk about everything, but the things that I’m telling you now are things that are publicly available.
There’s a bunch of other features that they’re working on, which I can’t wait for them to release and I’ll definitely upload another video when they do. But I think for the price that you pay for Canva for Work and what you can do with it on top of the functionality of Canva in general, it’s definitely worth it.
I love it. I continue to use it. I continue to endorse it. I hope that you found this video useful, and I’m going to wrap it up here.
So there you have it, my step by step walk-through of Canva for Work to help you get more out of this amazing design tool. If you found this video 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, download my Social Media Checklist. In it, I outlined all 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 below and thanks for watching.
- [Thriving Creator Podcast] Episode 40: Want Better YouTube Videos? Use This Tool. (Yep, it’s his simple)
- [Thriving Creator Podcast] Episode 41: Someone Needs Your Rescue from Fyre II – Will You Answer the Call?
- [Thriving Creator Podcast] Episode 39: YouTube Success: Revealing the Not-So-Secret Formula
