Canva for Beginners

So what happens if you click that big, purple button?
You’ll be prompted to browse or search templates to choose from. Let’s start with an A4 document or US Letter.
This will take you to a blank page in the Canva editor.
You can start designing from scratch, but using a template means you can start inspired. We’ve found people who start with a template get a lot more done in a shorter time. So our team has designed and built templates for every use we could think of.
Discover everything from lost cat flyers to annual reports, in all sorts of styles.
Some templates have a single page. Others have multiple pages designed in a consistent style, like this one.
Let’s choose a template to kickstart your creativity.
But before we start designing, let’s take a look around the editor.
To add a new page to your document, click the page icon, here. Or, duplicate a page, like this. See your pages as thumbnails in grid view, handy for multi-page documents. Want to delete a page? Just click the trash icon.
To the left is our object panel. We call these our design ingredients. The templates tab is open but underneath you’ll see elements, uploads, text and the mysterious ‘more’ tab. Click each to see what’s inside.
To see our page more clearly, we can hide the expanded sidebar by clicking here.
Let’s show our rulers. Rulers display measurements on the X and Y axis. You can click and drag in a guide. This is helpful when you need to make sure everything is aligned correctly. To move it, click and drag where you need it to be. Don’t worry – these guides won’t show up when you download or print.
If guides are getting in the way, just hide them, like this. We can clear guides completely in the right click menu.
Let’s show our page margins. We recommend you keep all text and elements within the margins, especially if you’re printing.
There are other options in the file menu to explore yourself.
Resize is a Pro feature that allows you to magically resize your design to any other document size – it’s a huge time saver.
Here is our handy undo button. Undo anytime you’ve done something you’re not happy with. A quick shortcut is to press command or control Z on your keyboard. You can also redo, here.
Canva autosaves when you’re working online. Note the saving notification here. If it says ‘unable to save’ you might need to check your internet connection.
Across the top is the name of your design. This design is untitled, so let’s click to add a name.
Click here to share your design with others and allow them to view or edit it.
Download and save your design to your computer. And here are your print options. In Canva, printing and delivery is just a click away. It has a 100% happiness guarantee, so if it turns up on your doorstep and you’re not happy with it, we’ll fix it.
And finally, the publish button, with all the options for how you might choose to publish your design.
Now, let’s get back to customizing our template.
Bounding boxes appear when you hover over page elements. When an element is selected, the box stays highlighted. Rotate or resize using these handles. Or, click and drag the element to move it.
Double click text to edit. Let’s make a few changes here.
Once you’re done, click the page background to deselect everything.
Certain template elements may be grouped together and if you try to move one, others will also move. To ungroup elements, select it and click ungroup.
To group elements together, select an element, hold the shift key and click another. Then, click ‘group’.
You can move elements back or bring them forward, like this. This allows stacking items over the top of one another in layers. If something is obstructing your view, you might need to send it backward to see the elements underneath.
Certain items have additional editing options in the toolbar. We can change color, flip, crop or animate elements. We’ll dive deeper into this later on.
Now we’ve covered how to choose a template to start inspired… Are you ready to see how big Canva is?

Canva is big – really big. The options are almost limitless. That’s why ‘search’ is so important. Let’s discover all the different places you can search and how to use search to find the exact template, photo or element that you’re looking for.
The first place to start your search is the homepage. This universal search field allows you to find templates, recent designs and private content in your account. Canva even searches for keywords written within your designs! To get started, search for a keyword. Search ‘all’, ‘folders’ or ‘templates’. In templates, we can see many template types and categories. Click to see the results for a category. Note some templates have a crown or dollar icon. This means the template is made for Canva Pro or has some paid elements within it. You can always use the filters to show free templates only, and remember: You can also customize templates to remove or replace paid elements if you wish.
Now we’re in the editor. If you’ve already changed your mind and want to choose a new template, start another search in the templates tab, here. You can apply some handy filters like searching by color, like this.
Search our extensive library of design ingredients within the elements tab. Find things like Lines & Shapes, Graphics, Photos, Videos, Audio, Charts, Frames and more. You can either search an element type or search across all categories and narrow it down from there.
Let’s try searching for a ‘cat’. The search result includes photos, illustrations, animated stickers and more. Narrow it down further by clicking one of these tabs under the search field. Now the search result only includes illustrations and icons, in lots of different styles.
But what if you’re trying to find illustrations in a similar style, so that they all match? Well, here’s a little trick! Once you’ve found an element you like, click the ellipses button to see more information. Here you can see other elements from this creator. And if this element is part of a collection, you can click ‘View Collection’ to see more, like this.
The great news is you can customize the entire Object Panel with tabs to fit your workflow, making searching even easier.
If you’d prefer to have separate tabs for all your element types, personalize the object panel by clicking ‘More’ and adding each tab you use regularly. This can make it much easier to locate things quickly once you get really proficient in Canva.
And there you have it! Now you can easily find anything in Canva with deep, integrated search. Later in this series we’ll learn how to use and edit elements for your designs. Ready for the next lesson?

Canva’s photo editor couldn’t be easier to use. No complicated tools or confusing UI – just simple, straightforward tools transforming your image into something amazing. Let’s see how we can start with our own images and learn how to edit by applying photo effects and filters.
To begin, we can always start inspired with a template and add a photo to it – for example an Instagram post. But did you know we can also start with a photo itself, edit it, then decide where to use it later?

To do this, click ‘Create a design’ from the homepage. Then ‘Edit photo’, here. You’ll be prompted to choose a photo from your computer, like this. Once the image uploads, click ‘Edit photo’ to jump into the editor.
To crop an image, click here in the toolbar or double-click the photo and drag a corner, like this. Then select done. And that’s it!

Next, try flipping the photo. You can do this vertically or horizontally, like this.
Adjust the brightness, contrast or saturation of a photo. Perfect if you need to make some minor tweaks to your image. Just drag a slider up or down, like this. You’ll also notice a ‘Filter code’ at the bottom, here. You can copy and paste this code to another photo to apply the same adjustment settings to ensure your images all look consistent.

That brings us to filters. These are photo presets you can apply with just a click, giving photos a unique style. Choose a filter style, and adjust the intensity here. You can see this gives us an edgy, black and white look. Great for making image colors consistent!

Canva is jam-packed with photo effects allowing you to warp, pixelate, slice or even mock up your photos! Let’s try Duotone. This applies a unique colour treatment that makes photos pop. Some effects are only available to a Canva Pro account, like Background Remover, which easily removes the background of an image with just one click, like this.
Once you’re happy with your photos, it’s time to download and share them with the world! Download your photo, here. We recommend a PNG format for high quality images. In Canva Pro, you can also choose to download images with a transparent background.
Great work! You’re now ready to edit your photos in Canva like a pro.

By now you’re starting to find your way around the editor, but now it’s time to look a little deeper at the largest area of all, the ‘Elements’ tab.
When you open the elements tab in Canva, the first thing you’ll notice is groups like Shapes & Lines, Graphics, Photos, Videos and more. As we learned earlier, ‘search’ is often the easiest way to find what you’re looking for.
Let’s start with lines. Here are Canva’s pre-made line styles. Click one to get started, or press the ‘L’ key to add a customizable line to your page.
You can edit most elements using the toolbar. With lines, we can edit color, weight, style and end points. When it comes to moving or resizing a line, just click and drag an end point or move the entire line, like this.
Shapes work in a similar way. There are lots of predefined shapes that can be edited in different ways. Press the ‘R’ key to add a rectangle to your page or the ‘C’ key to add a circle. You can easily resize shapes using the handles, like this. And also change the colour in the toolbar, here.
Now we’ve conquered the basic elements, let’s look at some more complex ones. ‘Graphics’ is a catch-all term for things like icons, illustrations, stickers and much more. Essentially any graphic elements you can add to your design will be found here. You can find items grouped together into collections, making it super simple for you to find related illustrations. Let’s try searching for a ‘plant’ and selecting one. Most illustrations, but not all, allow us to change the colors, like this one. You can also crop or flip any graphic, like this.
Charts are a great way to show data in a visually engaging way. The key is to simplify your information and show only what matters most to your audience. Charts are found in the ‘Elements’ tab, or you can add a dedicated Charts tab by going to the ‘More’ tab. There are two fundamental types of Charts to choose from: Infographic Charts and Graphs. Let’s start with Infographic Charts. Perfect for showing really quick stats, like progress or percentages. Click one to add it to your page, and make adjustments in the sidebar. For example, switch between styles here and change percentages, line width and toggle labels and endpoints.
There’s also a handy Pictogram infographic for the ultimate visual expression of your stats, here.
Graphs are a little more advanced, and are perfect for communicating sets of data across an X-Y axis, like a bar chart, or a pie chart. First, click a graph to add to your design. The sidebar will automatically show the data fields you can edit in the table. You can also edit chart colors and style, just like any other element.
Frames are like preset shapes to drop photos into. They’re ideal as image placeholders, for cropping photos into specific shapes or adding interesting effects. Select ‘Frames’ from the Elements tab and click to add to your page. Frames can be filled with color, like this, or filled with a photo, like this. Double click to adjust the crop position of the photo within the frame.
The last element is Grids. We can use a grid layout to stretch images across your entire page, place multiple images together or crop images. In the Elements tab search for ‘grids’.
But, grids aren’t just for images. Fill them with color for a great way to section out areas of your design.
So there we have it! You’ve uncovered some of Canva’s most powerful design tools and interactive elements! Ready to keep on going?

Finding fonts and using text in Canva is easy—and fun! With thousands of fonts at your fingertips, you can really make designs your own.
To add text to your design, click on the text tab, then click one of these to add or drag and drop to your page.

You can also press the T key to quickly add a text box to your page. From here, you can style your text in the toolbar above.
To change a font, click here. Scroll through thousands of fonts in our font library, till something catches your eye. Or to search for a particular font you know and like, use keywords or refine your search using categories, like this.

Use the toolbar above to style your text. Bold, italicize or underline key words for emphasis. Change to upper or lowercase easily, like this. Format text with alignment, create a list or change the spacing between letters or lines.
Need some help choosing effects and text combinations? There’s lots of predefined options in the ‘Text’ tab. You can also find professionally paired fonts and colors in the ‘Styles’ tab, here. Click ‘Fonts’ and drag and drop the style you’d like to use. You can also apply the font styles to all pages of your design, like this.

Get creative with text effects. Experiment with shadow effects, outline effects or a Canva fave, curved text. You can adjust effect settings, like this.
So now you know how to get started with text… why not get typing!

Say goodbye to complex video editing tools! We’ve packed our library with thousands of templates, stock videos, animated graphics, and music tracks for you to quickly create professional videos. Why? Because we believe that making videos should be simple for everyone. So let’s take a look at what it’s like to work with video and audio in Canva.
Let’s start with a new video. Here’s a quick preview of the video template categories available. Let’s stick with a video document at the standard video size.
We’re back in the editor. Although it may look pretty familiar by now, you’ll notice one major difference: the video timeline. When working with video and audio, it’s more helpful to visualize your project using ‘scenes’ instead of ‘pages’. This black line and triangle is called the playhead. It shows us what will be on the screen at a particular time in the video. You can drag it like this, to fast-forward or rewind your preview.
Like all Canva designs, begin with a template or start dragging content to your design. Let’s choose a template and see how we can customize it. There’s already a video here, but what if you want to search for a new video or upload your own? Let’s duplicate this scene and find out how.
Let’s dive into Canva’s video library. Start your search from the ‘Elements’ tab, and add the Videos tab to your sidebar, here.
We’re looking for a video to better match the caption in this template, so let’s search. When you’ve found one, drag it to the background, like this. It’s quite a long video but we can trim the length of the clip by dragging the edges of the scene in the timeline, like this.
Now let’s try uploading a video. Click the uploads tab here, then ‘Upload media’, and ‘device’. Choose your video file to upload. Your video is now saved in the uploads tab. And in case you’re wondering, this works in exactly the same way for audio files too!
Ready for your moment in the spotlight? You can record yourself directly from your computer’s built-in camera and microphone. It’s easy to pause and resume at any point, like this. Your final recording is also added to your uploads tab, so you can use it for any project later on. For now, let’s use our uploaded clip and add it to ‘Scene 2’, like this. Let’s update the caption here as well.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the cool things you can do with animations and transitions. Click on any element on the page, then click ‘animate’ in the toolbar. You’ll see page animations and text animations. Page animations will apply to all elements on your page, whereas the text animations only add the effect to your selected text element, like this.
What about a transition between two scenes? You’ll find a variety to choose from here, like these. Let’s try one.
Looking good! The only thing missing now is some music. Let’s search Audio in the Elements tab. This one sounds great! Let’s drag it into the timeline to add to our video.
Lastly, let’s playback the video to preview the whole thing together. Perfect!
The final step is to download our video and share it with the world! Click the download button to download as an MP4 Video, our most common video file format.
There you have it! With Canva, you’ll have mastered video in no time!

At Canva, we love collaborating and sharing. Which is why we’ve made it easy for you to do so, too. There are some really fun ways to collaborate in Canva like brainstorming, team voting, creating greeting cards, moodboards or group work templates. The sky’s the limit!
To invite people to your design, click the ‘Share’ button, here, and decide what access permissions they’ll need. Type in their email address, give ‘View’ or ‘Edit’ access and then click ‘Send’. You can also copy and share a link to your design like this.

Now, watch as your teammates join your design. Work simultaneously and see your updates in the editor with live changes. You can always see who’s currently collaborating by checking the avatar above, and the colored bounding box lets you know what they’re working on. Also, notice their name in the corner, here.
Tag and add comments in real time. Start by selecting something in your design, then click here. You can ‘@’ mention someone to quickly tag them in a comment, like this. Then, assign a task by checking this box. If your collaborator is offline, they’ll receive a notification via email and will be able to reply or complete the assigned task later.

You can also quickly see all your notifications and anything you’ve been tagged in the ‘To Do’ list here, in the bottom right corner.
When you’re done collaborating, you can easily download your design in your preferred file format, like this. Or, access additional share and publish options, here. Like publishing directly on social media. You can even publish designs as a scrolling website and share a web link, like this.
Enjoy collaborating with ease, with Canva.

One of Canva’s superpowers is the ability to create teams and collaborate easily on designs with others. But, you might be wondering if anyone can just jump in and see all your designs, or how to keep everything organised. Well, let’s take a look!
By default all Canva designs are completely private. Only you can see your design until you invite someone or share a link to it. Same with folders. We know Canva saves designs automatically, but if your internet connection is a bit patchy and you’re worried about your work not being saved, you can always click save via the file menu.

Better still, save it to a folder, like this. Choose an existing folder or create a new one. You can also see any folders that have been shared with you, here.
Remember where to find all your folders on the homepage? Here you can organise and sort your projects, find things you’ve liked, purchased and uploaded to your Canva account. We can easily sort, change the view style or even create folders within folders. Quickly upload or share the folder with someone in your team here, too.

When you share a folder with someone, you can determine what permissions they need to have, restricting what others can access and do with your folders. You can also star folders, adding them to your sidebar for quick access.
The team page is where you can access anything related to your company or brand. The designs tab is like an inbox of all the designs that have been created and shared with members of your team. ‘Folders’ is another way to access folders that have been shared with the team. Team templates are a Canva Pro-only feature, allowing you to keep designing quickly and on-brand. And here, you can invite new team members, delete old ones and change roles of the people in your team.

Groups are handy for members to collaborate in smaller teams or on specific projects together. Create a group to name it and add members. Once your group has been created, easily share designs and folders with everyone in that group with one click!
Stay tuned for the final video in this series to find out how to boost your creative Canva skills even further.

Congratulations on completing Canva 101. You should now be familiar with finding your way around Canva. That’s why this is less of an ending and more of a beginning. The best way to build your Canva confidence is to jump on in yourself and explore everything Canva has to offer.
Don’t forget, if you get confused by how to do something, there’s the handy help button, here. Type into the search field and in no time you’ll have your answer.
To learn more about design theory and skills, visit ‘learn’. Here, you’ll find courses, tutorials and even a blog full of useful tips and techniques. Our Design School is filled with upskilling courses to help you achieve your goals.
You can also begin longer courses that lead to certification. Graphic Design, Social Media, even how to hold workshops. This is a great way to learn new skills and get the documentation to prove it.
To connect with our community of Canva users, join our Design Circle Facebook group. With over 130 thousand members, it’s a great place to see how others are using Canva or receive support from the community. You’ll find discussions, guides, events, even competitions.
Finally, if you’re interested in workshops and webinars from around the globe, check out our events. You’ll be able to sign up to live events, watch past events, register for face to face workshops or receive design mentoring.
And the final, ‘final’ thing to mention is, if you can’t find what you’re looking for, reach out to us. Clicking on the little question mark at the top right will take you through to the help centre. It has a bunch of helpful articles but you can also report an issue by contacting our support team.
And that is that. We hope you’ve enjoyed Canva 101 and can’t wait to see what you create.