Canva Tutorial: How to use Canva Tips and Tricks (2019 update)

If you’re looking for some Canva tips and tricks so you can improve your designs, you’re in the right place, my friend. In this Canva tutorial, I’m going to share my top powerful but little known Canva tips and tricks that you wish you’d known about sooner. We’re talking about keyboard shortcuts, secret features and hacks. Stay tuned.

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

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Canva Tutorial: How to use Canva Tips and Tricks – Video Transcript

Hi, 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 tutorial set to help you get started. Check out the links in the description for all of my Canva videos and Canva playlists.

Here’s the list to my top Canva tips and tricks, which 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.

The first Canva tip or trick that I would like to show you is how to group elements. When you’re designing in Canva and you’re adding your images and your texts and your elements such as these illustrations that you see here, everything is free to roam and move as you want unless you grouped them together.

And you may want to group them together if you have lots of components and you want to keep them as a block. And in order to do that, you select an element that you want to group, so select one thing, hit your Shift key, and then keep selecting the other things that you want to group together.

Then you go up here, and you select the Group button. And now the elements that I’ve selected are now grouped together, as you can see. They’re a handy little trick.

And if you want to ungroup everything, so you’re like, “Hmm? Actually, I don’t want it. I don’t want all of these things to be locked together in a block”, you simply hit the Ungroup button and then you can select other elements or add and remove whichever ones that you wanted to group and they will lock as you choose.

The next little tip that I have is a shortcut to turn all of your texts into uppercase. So you may have your texts in sentence case, and you need to make it all uppercase or all caps, and instead of retyping it, you can use this shortcut instead. So to use the shortcut, I’m going to demo it here.

The keyboard shortcuts are on the screen. It’s Control + Shift + K if you’re on Windows or Command + Shift + K and voila! Your text will go into uppercase. You do need to obviously have the cursor in the text block thing that you want all of the texts to be uppercase for, but that’s all you do.

And if you do it again, Command + Shift + K, it will return it to sentence case. So that’s a neat little trick that will save you a bit of time if you need to put everything into uppercase without having to retype it.

Did you know that you can customise background colours in Canva? Well, I’m going to show you exactly how to do this. It’s a cool little tip that I learned recently. And if you use the background on the left-hand side here from Canva, so let’s say that I choose any of these backgrounds, I’m going to do a few because I think this is really awesome.

So I’m going to choose this blue one here, this blue jellyfish. And I think I like this jellyfish, but I need it to be my brand colours. And my brand colours are, for argument’s sake, I want it to be yellow. So if I hit that yellow, look at that.

Then I can play around with other colours and adjust the background to be the colours or integrate the colours that I want. And this applies to any of the background features that you see here. So that was an image that I added, but there are also these graphic backgrounds. So let’s choose another one.

So say I like yellow watermelons and I’m like, I like the watermelons, but once again, I want it to be a different colour aligned to my brand colours. So just by selecting the Colour section here, I can choose and swap out the colours to match the colours of my brand or the colours that I want it to be.

And that’s pretty cool. That means that you now have so many options with all of these different background possibilities. You can choose different designs and choose the colours for these backgrounds that suits you.

Another little cool feature of Canva is Element locking. Now, this is only available on Canva for work, so Canva’s paid version. But I thought I’d show you anyway because it’s a cool little feature that I quite like.

So what Element locking does is, say that you add a particular image, so let’s say I want to add this mouse cursor to my design and I want it to remain in this space no matter what I do. So I want a design around it, have other things, but this must stay in this place.

So maybe you’re doing a presentation, and you want to put your logo in the bottom right-hand corner, and you want it to always be in this position. You can do that by selecting the element, putting it wherever you want it to be.

And the element doesn’t need to be an image only. It can also be text. So select the element that you want to lock and then in the top right-hand corner here, this is what the padlock does. It locks it.

So now, see? I’m putting my mouse and I’m pushing it and it won’t move because it’s locked. But if I do want to unlock it, I simply select on that padlock there again.

So it’s a cool little feature. It’s only available on Canva for work, but I think it’s pretty neat if you are using it and you have Canva for work. It’s a cool little tip there.

One of the really cool things that you can do with Canva that I only discovered recently was that you can create a gradient in Canva, so that really cool Instagram top look where you mesh two colours together like what you see here, where you can blend two colours together to create a really cool little look.

And you can do that really easily, especially compared to what you would have to do using a tool like Photoshop. You can do it in a cinch.

And in order to create a gradient like the one that you see on the screen here, you go to Elements, and then you search for Gradient and then scroll down until you see this little doobalaki mesh gradient here. It’s really sneaky because you can’t tell that this is the one that you can actually create a gradient from.

But as you can see, there are two colours at the top here. And I’m going to move this over here so you can see me do this live. And I can switch these colours just by selecting them.

So the purple-y colour, I’m going to change it to be, I think I’m going to make this orange. And then the blue, the Canva blue colour, I’m going to change that to be green. And like that right before your eyes, we have a gradient.

And it’s pretty cool because to do that, not using Canva, would take a really long time, and this was literally finding this Gradient element and then changing the colours to be pretty much whatever you wanted it to be.

I saw someone do this alignment, perfect positioning alignment tip or I think it’s a little magical trick. And when I saw it, I was like, “Oh man, I wish someone had shown me this earlier”.

So one of the things that you can do with Canva is instead of trying to move your text or your element manually into the middle and praying that this is the centre, what you can do is select the element, go to Position on the top right and I want it to be middle smack bang perfectly in the middle.

So I’m going to go middle, and I’m going to go centre. And like that, I’ve got perfect alignment. It’s in the middle, and I didn’t have to mess around with my mouse, and it was only a couple of clicks.

You can also use this position to get your element aligned left. You can get it aligned right, top, bottom, but I really like this middle and centre because I like the fact that I know because of this tool, it’s perfectly in the middle.

The other cool thing that you can do with spacing and Canva is that if you have a couple of elements and you want to space them equally in terms of the space between them, you can do it by dragging the elements and praying that they align perfectly and are distributed equally. Or let’s just do that again.

You can select them all, you can go to Position and then where it says Space evenly, I’m going to select Horizontally and that makes it equal distant horizontally between the elements. Then I’m going to align top so that everything is aligned to the top and perfect.

And then I’m going to nudge this and have it aligned vertically and then everything is perfectly distributed. The spaces between my elements are perfect, all using this positioning option here in Canva.

Now, the next tip that I’m going to share is how to duplicate a page. And I like to duplicate a page or a design, particularly if I want to play around with variations of the same design.

So instead of having to recreate all of the elements on the page, I can go to this icon here, and I’ve hovered over it, and it said Copy page, and this will give you a duplicate of the page that you were working on. So then I can play around with different backgrounds and different elements and keep the original one at the top.

And if I wanted to delete a design and I wasn’t really planning to keep all of them, I can simply just select this little bin to delete the page from the design.

And the last tip that I’m going to show you today is one that saved me a lot of time. Once again, once I discovered it, and I’d wished someone had just shown me this little tip earlier, and that is that you’re able to download your designs from the Canva home page.

You don’t have to open up your design, go to the top right-hand corner to download it every single time. If you have a design that’s complete and let’s say you’re on a rush, you’ve opened up Canva, you need to download one of your designs. You can right click on the top right-hand corner of the design, go to Download and then download it straight from there.

It’s just saving you a couple of clicks, and this is something that I really wish someone had shown me earlier. I was like, “Oh man. This was there all along?” nice little time saver.

So there you have it, my top Canva tips and tricks 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.

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