My Top 5 Favorite Canva Features

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Today, I want to talk about my five favorite features of Canva. I love Canva! Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Canva is basically like the Photoshop for the lay person.

If you're not really wanting to get deep into photograph or graphic design and photography - you just want to be able to make a graphic real quick and put it on social media or a creative business card or a logo or a template or a PDF or banner for your website - Canva is the place to go!

I am a huge believer in Canva. They make my life so much easier and I use it for all my clients. I, Zion Brock, actually have a free course on how to use Canva! I created it for anybody that wants to learn because I'm such a believer in Canva. It's in the link below, just look underneath this video and there's a link for how to use Canva. 

It's a whole little 10  video series on how do you get started with Canva and how to get going with it really easily. So as a teaser, I want to show you my five favorite features of Canva today.

My name is Zion and I am the founder of the Get Known Service. It is a service in which I support and help you tubers and podcasters to create value, value-based content, on a weekly rhythmic basis.

So I just support people by doing everything they don't want to do. So my clients, they shoot a YouTube video or they create a podcast and I do everything else. Like I put it all together, publish it. If it's a podcast, we do all the audio production. Our team puts together, all the graphics, the thumbnails, the social media posts, the emails. We create little tidbits of aha moments from your podcast. We do all that for you so that all you have to do is focus on the content. That is our goal … is to make your life easier.

If that interests you, if you could use our service, again, the links are below to our website and you can contact us for a free 15 minute consultation and I'll talk to you in person and let you know what we offer, and if it could work for you.

Okay, let's get into this. My five favorite features of Canva.

So number one, when you create something in Canva, there are tons of templates. I think a lot of people don't realize how many templates there are, and you can search in here. Let's say you're doing a cover for an album cover for your CD. Maybe it's a podcast cover. Maybe it's a Facebook, the cover art in your Facebook. So let's say we're just going to do that. We want to just change up our Facebook cover art.

That's that banner at the very top of your Facebook profile. Now there's already hundreds, thousands of templates already made that you can choose from to give you a starting point. And if you want to use that, you can do that. So let's just choose one right here. This one's really cool. It's got a cool photo in the background. I've got some text right here and I've got some, what they call elements or graphics on the side. Very basic.

But what I love about this, and this is the first feature I want to talk to you about is the fact that there are so many templates already designed for you. If you wanted to go in and browse, you could browse for hours and hours of, of templates that were already created by other experts. And you could choose one that really works for you and say, this is my profile. And it really makes your website, your Facebook profile, your social media look stellar, highly recommend doing that. Do not underestimate the amount of creativity that's been put into these templates from incredible graphic designers.

Number two, removing the background of certain objects and photos.

This is one of the most powerful tools in Canva. Let's say I have a background like this, and I want to put a person in it. Maybe this is for a slideshow or something like that. I can go into the photos area over on the side. And let's say, I say professional woman. We're going to grab somebody that I think looks very professional here. And what I can do is if I don't like the background in this photo, but I really liked the background I've chosen. I can remove it from her photo. All I do. And you have to have the pro account of Canva, which is not expensive at all, totally worth it.

My affiliate link is below and allows you to just try out Canva. So check that out. You go over here and you just sit background remover. I'm going to click that and literally give it a few seconds and let the little robots do their work. And you're going to see that the background in this image just completely disappears and all that's left is the person. I do not know how this works. It is unbelievably incredible.

Once you've done that, make sure you hit apply because otherwise it can tend to resort back and you don't want to do that. And then you can position the woman, however you want, or the photo of whoever you want. And now, now, unfortunately this photo had cut off her arm just because of how the photo was cropped. So I'm a little bit limited with this photo, but let's say we want to add one more person.

Maybe this person isn't way out in the background. What we can do is we're going to edit and I'm going to hit background removal. Now, one of the things you want to keep in mind, if you have multiple people in a photo, sometimes the people in the background you want to have out of focus just slightly.

So I'm going to show you how to do that, which is actually my number three.

So I'm going to hit apply, and we're going to add her back here and she's going to be kind of in the background like this, and I can actually position her behind this woman. And the way I do that is a position function. Just like in Photoshop graphics work, sort of in layers. Think of it as like, if you had a bunch of panes of glass and you're looking through a pile of panes of glass, you could slide in images between those and rearrange them.

And certain images would be in front of the other images, right? It's the same thing. So I'm going to take this woman. I'm going to say, go backwards. Now this woman is in front of her and this woman is in the back and we're going to make her a little bit smaller to make it look even less like she's maybe walking up behind her. And this is where I'm going to blur her out just slightly.

We're going to go over here to edit image. We selected this woman at an image and I'm going to click on adjust and I can actually go over here to blur and just slightly blur her out. Maybe just slightly. This is 3%. So it's very, very little, and maybe I'm going to turn down the saturation. So she doesn't look quite right in the foreground so that my eye catches this woman. And not this woman in the photo.

This is just a rough example. Of course, now what's really cool is you can actually do these same concepts with graphics. So if I go into elements and I find an element, I really like, let's say I have this webcam. I really like this webcam and I want to use it, but I've got this white background. I don't want to use that white background because it doesn't match my background. Right? I can do the background removal for that as well. Same thing. It's just looking for the edges of that primary image and negating all the other colors and pixels behind it. And so all you're left with is just that webcam. In this example, you can do this with logos. You can do this with words, you can do this with anything that has a primary object in it, but what's amazing is the fact that it does it with people.

All right? So that's two things we've shown you, I've shown you how to remove the background out of a someone's photo and how to blur somebody out. Let's talk about the next one.

The next one is text. And a lot of people don't realize how powerful the text is in here. If you go to the text tab, most people just grab the one of these headings here, you grab a piece of text and say, this is text and you can immediately start typing it resorts, it defaults, I should have say to Manjari bold, Manjari bold. There might be a way to change that default. I've never found it, but normally what I do is I go in and I change the actual font. So you can go in here and change the font, however you want. And let's say, I really liked that and I can even change the color of the font.

And if I wanted to, I could change the spacing of the font. So I could go like this and widen that font out. And a lot of people don't realize you can do that as well. But, here's one of the things that's really, really cool is there are some fonts that are not necessarily in the normal font. It's in this, they call them font combinations. And the font combinations are really great because they keep adding more and more of them on. And again, it's not going to be in the normal font area, but if you grab one of them, they can look really good. They often have like, this one here has sort of a highlight around it, which can kind of look neon like it's glowing. And I really liked this one. I let's see, I really like this. And we can change the color of that using this.

And so you can do it like that. I love that. There's a lot of really cool fonts in here that are outside of your, you know, Comic Sans and Papyrus and whatever Code Pro. You can go a lot more complicated with that. So check out the fonts. It's really important.

Number three is the branding. So if you work with different clients or you have a brand a font and colors that you use for your brand, you want to go into the brand kit and actually customize it. And I've done this for my different companies. I have the Triple Threat Artists. It's just my production music production company and Get Known, which is what this channel is all about. And I've gone in here and I've created the colors I use for Get Known because I can reference those anytime I'm making graphics for Get Known. I can reference them really quickly.

If I wanted to, I could actually add the fonts for Get Known as well. I don't really, it's not as particular to me. It's just the colors, but I also have my clients. I've got a pot, I've got two podcasts that I'm producing right now. One's called Keep The Weight Off. It's by my friend, Angela, who is a doctor and one called the Side Hustle Lounge. I've got the Triple Threat. And then you can actually add more pallets at at the bottom. There's lots of great palette colors. You can add, which really freshen up your design.

Here's another thing is, if you are in a design, let's say you're creating a new - something new, let's say an Instagram story. So I'm going to create a story for Instagram. It's already got the exact dimensions and everything. And let's say, I really like this, this design, this layout, and I'm going to be replacing the, the text and everything.

But let's say I look at this and I go, I just don't like the colors. The colors don't really match my theme. You can actually go into any other template and say, I really liked the colors of that one. Click those three buttons and say, apply styles only. And it'll apply the fonts and the colors to your current template, your current layout without having to go through and do each one. This is a very powerful tool that I think a lot of people don't really realize is that you can do this really quickly; just like that. So keep that in mind. Branding your colors and also changing your colors on the fly is very powerful.

Lastly, I want to talk about video. I think a lot of people don't really realize how much video is actually in here. You can create video anytime you want for a graphic, for a game, you can create GIFs. You can create for social media posts or B-roll for a video. I did this the other day for one of my YouTube videos. I created a B-roll that just comes in and plays graphics. And you could get a license to some video B-roll site, or you could just do it here in Canva.

So let's do that real quick. I'm going to show you. I'm going to go back to create a design and let's do like a thumbnail size. So this is like a 720 and you can resize really easily in here. So 720 is the height. It's not quite 1080P but that's good enough for what we're doing. Let's say I just want some B-roll. B-Rroll just means video that's playing, that supports, whatever you're talking about. Usually it has no audio to it. We can go down here to video and I'm going to grab something and let's say, I want aerial shots.

I like the idea of that. Maybe I'm talking about a specific city. And I like this as a, this looks like is, I don't know if this is San Francisco or something. Actually, I think that's Portland. So I like this video right here. That's really nice. It's slick, it's moving. And this is going to look great on my website or my presentation. I can go in here and I can click this and I can trim it to be a little bit smaller. I don't need the entire video.

I would suggest doing that if you don't need the entire video, otherwise you're using a lot of hard drive space, or, you can go over here and add something; you can add more stuff to it, but when you download it, you can download it either as an MP4 video, which is what you'd normally do, or you can say, hey, I want to have this as a GIF. I'm going to create a GIF.

So something that's moving. Cause you can actually make, put a GIF in an email and things are moving around. In fact, I did this the other day. Let me show you something. I did. I have something called the Geek Out, which is my music production site. And I created this little GIF that I put in an email and it looks like this when it plays. So the words come in, there's some animation, this thing's pulsing up here and there's some confetti in the background. That's all made in Canva. I didn't have to use any kind of video editor to do. Again. Canva is not going to replace a video software tool like Screencast or a Final Cut or something. It's not going to do that.

It's going to do some simple little video stuff. But it is very powerful. And if you don't have to open up a really expensive and robust video software program, and you can just do this real quick on the fly to create a cool GIF, GIF or GIF, I don't know what it's called or a video for your site. It's going to save you a ton of time. And I actually use the videos in here, the stock video footage all the time for my for my courses, for my clients, for my websites, it's really, really powerful.

And it's, once you have the pro version, you're you have access to thousands and thousands of stock footage, stock photos, stock footage, stock elements. It's incredibly powerful. So that's my five things I hope that helped you. I hope you can see the power of Canva. If you want to learn a little bit more about how to use these features, click below.

Again, I have a free course on doing this. I have a free course that will take you about an hour and a half and you'll know Canva you'll know everything I know. Well, I can't promise that, but you'll know a lot.

This is Zion signing off.

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