Designing your First Image with Canva: Step by Step

You’ve probably heard of Canva, but if you haven’t we’ll be happy to give you a quick introduction.

An Australian startup Canva is valued at $40 billion is a free graphic design tool developed for the simple creation of infographics, imagery, and other visual content for your website or blog. If you’ve fairly new to Canva, you’re probably wondering what’s a good place to get started with Canva itself.

I’ll start by recommending you play around with the preinstalled Canva templates. These can give you a good idea of what the program is capable of and help you dip your feet into the design process.

However, today we’ll be covering a brief step to step guide on designing your first image using Canva. We’ll go over everything you need to know to make a great logo for your brand or headline image for your blog. Let’s get to it, shall we?

• Choose the Dimensions of your Design

Starting, you’ll choose the design type for your image from the Canva site. Typically when you do this, the design type will set the optimal (best) dimensions for your graphic. This is typically fine, as it will fit for specific parts of a website like a social media post or flyer.

Additionally, you can customize the dimensions of your graphic by searching for the ‘custom size‘ option. From there, you can decide how large your image will be based on pixels, millimeters, or inches.

• Choosing your Background

When choosing your background for a graphic, you typically have two options. For one, you can make it a solid color. Remember that different colors fit different businesses and needs.

For example, you wouldn’t give a website about ocean protection a red background, when a baby blue or silvery-white would be more fitting.

Additionally, you can use a color palette tool on the Canva site for assistance with choosing your overall color scheme. Next comes background photos, which is an image you upload that will serve as your graphics background. These photos can be resized, cropped, flipped, and layered with effects to edit them to your preference. Be sure to use a background image that supports the primary message of your website or blog content.

Don’t make your background image too busy, and try to make sure the quality is high and the image pixel rate is at least 1200 X 800. And remember, make sure the image is either public domain or under your ownership to prevent issues with copyright.

• Adding in your Elements

Of course, your graphic is more than just a picture and a background color. You need text, icons, and other illustrations to make your graphic even more appealing to your users. Consider elements a balancing act. You don’t want too much color and dead space from your background, but you also don’t want to crowd your images in large walls of text.

You’ll also want to make sure your elements are not crowded together but instead properly centered and divided about your image. But the best thing you can do when trying to create a great visual hierarchy is to keep your design simple.

• Choose a Great, Legible Font

Choosing the right font can sometimes feel like a science, and that’s because it’s the one element that has the biggest impact on your graphic aside from the image itself. You need a font that pairs properly not just with your brand and graphic but with your written content and overall website aesthetic as well.

Try to avoid fonts that make your graphics appear messy, or that take up too much space which spoils the visual element of your graphic. You can also experiment with font combinations, which is the process of combining fonts to make your graphics more unique.

Whatever you choose for your font, try to follow the golden rules: 

• Make it readable.
• Don’t block out your graphics.
• Keep it centered from other elements.

Interested in creating your graphic design tools, or simply looking for a free consultation about programs and software you can use?

Let’s Nurture offers a free consultation for any business looking to create technical solutions to real-world problems, especially for social media marketing and graphic designing. We’ve been in business for over two decades, making our clients satisfied has always been our primary goal. Do you use your graphic design software? Let us know in the comments below.

Please check out this blog, to know more about Creating Visuals with Canva: An 8-step Guide.