I’ve talked about how you can use a free online tool or Color Hunt to get inspiration for color palettes, right? And even has hex codes available, so you can use the colors immediately. But whatever you wanna use the color scheme of a specific image or company logo you found online? You can literally just copy the image and paste it into a camera design.
The colors will be automatically detected here under photo colors. To take this a step further, after car dealership seo experts select the color, you can actually go up, click Add a new color here. Find out the hex code, copy it and add it to your next presentation in Google slides, just like this. Pretty cool, right?
Let’s Get Started
In this blog, I’m gonna share 15 game-changing tips for Canva that will help me become more efficient with this tool. I’ve repaired examples for creatives, students and working professionals. So diving right into tip number two, for backgrounds that might be clashing a little bit with the elements on top here, you wanna first go to the Transparency slider changes to 90.
Then click Edit image, go to See all under adjust and change a blur to something like five. Now, there’s more of a separation between the background and the text on top. If you want a specific element to pop out a bit more on screen, first, just drag the image into the design like so, and after it loads we can do is click Edit image here. Go to Shadows, click Glow, and then click again to go into glow settings.
Change The Color To White
Blur to something like one or two, oops, change the color to white like I said. Transparency up to 100 and change a size here to get a light outline that you like. This combination of the blurred background and the outline, just helps the main elements pop out a bit more. Speaking of cool designs, some of you asked me how I made the Thanos disintegration effect in this YouTube Thumbnail, is actually very simple.
As you can see in my design here, I just used a bunch of splatter effects. You could just literally search for splatter under the Elements tab. And some of them are just pure whitening color to make it seem like the icon is disappearing, right? And then some are colored in, to make it seem like the particles are floating away. Instead of boring you with a walkthrough, I’m just gonna link this exact design in the description below so you can make a copy and play around with it.
Next Few Tips Under Efficiency
I’ve categorized the next few tips under efficiency since they’re all designed to increase your productivity with Canva. First up, you can press Command D or Control D on windows to duplicate an element or press the option or out keys to duplicate and drag. Next up, you can double click to start cropping and create cool effects like this, move this all the way down so it’s overlaps with that. And now, since they’re two images, I can highlight both and press Command G and move them around.
I can go to File, Show ruler and drag guide from the left-hand side to the middle of here to make sure like this is a line like so. Or I can just go to like Position, press the Center to do the exact same thing. I can press R to quickly create a rectangle like this. This is way too big. Let’s get rid of the ruler by dragging off screen. And then I can resize this.
Change The Transparency
Just the address is highlighted change the transparency all the way down like so it looks much better. And now there are multiple layers. I can actually press Command or Control Windows and press again, to toggle between these two layers. Huge thanks to Aurelius Tjin for sharing this tip in his Canva tutorial blog, check out his channel for more. Once I’m happy with how like one layer looks, I always like to press lock here so I don’t move that layer by mistake.
Other keyboard shortcuts you might want to remember, a C for Circle, L for Line and T for Text. And once, like everything is basically confirmed, you wanna actually zoom out by pressing, holding down rather command or control on windows and just scrolling back. So you can see your design from afar. The next few tips are for students and working professionals alike.
Product Mockups
If you have a screenshot or like a product mockup you want to include in your next presentation, make it look more natural by going to Edit image scrolling down Smartmockups, See all and picking one of these that you like. Alternatively, if you wanna more basic look and feel, you can actually just go to the Elements tab and search for frames like so. In your final presentation, incremental small changes like this, before, after, before, after, make a larger difference than you think in the eyes of your audience.
Another hack I wish I knew much earlier in life is that you can actually drag entire PDF documents into Canva. And the file then becomes editable. If you’re a job seeker and you come across a PDF resume or a cover letter, import and make edits. If you’re putting together a deck at work or for a school import an external industry report and copy paste the data.
Change Your Credit Card Statement
If you wanna change your credit card statement after Black Friday, before your partner sees it, you shouldn’t because lying is bad and we should never do that. All right, next tip business cards. Interestingly enough, if you’re a working professional, you probably don’t need to design your own business cards. – [Man] We were all given new business cards, big enough to set us apart from the competition. – But if you are a student, I highly recommend you make one so you can stand out from your peers during the internship or job search process.
I’m the best and the sweetest, I’ve actually already created a free template for you to use, and I’ll link this down below. If you don’t think this is good enough, you can go to the Canva homepage and type in business cards and use one of these stupid ugly tablets have on being unemployed, I don’t care, whatever. Pro tip, don’t actually print these.
PNG Or JPG Image
Simply download as a PNG or JPG image and send this as part of your follow-up message or email after a networking chat or informational interview. Pro tip number two, if you have a website or online portfolio you’d like to showcase, click the QR code option here. Type in your URL generate code and include this instead. Throughout this blog, you might’ve noticed my color and font choices, look pretty good.
Also Read: 5 Easy Tips To Choose The Personal Loan Tenure With Bajaj Finserv
Free Guide On Font Pairings
That’s thanks to number one, Canvas a free guide on font pairings, where they share like 30 aesthetic, very pretty looking examples. And they’re free color wheel tool, where they walk you through what types of color combinations go well together. I am not artistic, I have never studied design so I guarantee you, these are very dummy friendly. Although this blog is not sponsored, I do wanna bring up three Canva Pro features that I currently cannot live without.
First up, background remover. So this tool works for both people and normal images. You can literally just click Background Remover this button once and just like that, the background disappears. Second, after getting rid of that white background, and let me just delete this yellow color. I wanna download this with a transparent background, so I can use it in my next presentation or in my blog for example. And download as, Transparent background is also a pro feature I use all the time.
Color Eyedropper Tool
Go to the color palette, go to add a new color, and you can use this dropper tool to pick any color that’s currently on your screen like so. Yes, you can achieve the same thing with the first hack I talked about at the beginning of this blog, but this speeds things up drastically. If you wanna try Canva Pro for free for 30 days, I’ll include a link down below. You might also wanna check out my blog on seven creative ways that use Canva as a student or working professional.
