Saving & Sharing
Transcript
Most of your focus when working in Canva will be on what you’re creating, but once you’ve finished the design process, you’ll need to get your design out of Canva and into the world so you can actually use it, whether that’s a graphic for social media, a PDF guide, a presentation slide deck, or whatever else it is.
Regardless of whether you’re on a free Canva plan or the Pro subscription, there will be a lot of similarities across all Canva accounts in terms of how you save and share your designs.
All Canva users have the ability to export their designs in a variety of formats, including as JPG, PNG and PDF files. And you can also download MP4 and GIF files on all plans.
If you’d like a detailed overview of all of the saving and sharing options available to you inside of Canva, look for a video in the Tutorials area of this mini course called “Introduction to Canva: The Design Editor.”
For the purposes of this video though, here’s what to expect in terms of the key differences between free and Pro, and you’ll notice that most of them are related to the downloading options available to you.
The downloading options will differ, depending on the type of file format you’re looking to save.
If you’re saving a design as a JPG image, then you’ll have these options, and you’ll notice that the ability to change the download size and the quality of the download are both Pro features.
If you’re saving a design as a PNG file, it’ll be a similar scenario, with both the download size and the option of compressing the file being available only on a Pro plan.
So, when might you want to download your design at a different size?
As an example, if you use Canva to create a header for your email newsletters and you often find that header image looking blurry, it is very useful to have the the ability to download your header design at 2 or 3 times the design size to get a more clear looking image.
And if you have struggled with Canva designs that look clear when you download them but fuzzy when they’re uploaded to your email marketing provider or to a social media platform, then I have another free tutorial you can check out called “How to Create a Clear, Non-Pixelated Email Header in Canva” and I’ll link to that in the resources below this video.
But perhaps more importantly than those other download features, you also won’t be able to download a design with a transparent background if you don’t have the Pro plan.
You’ll need that transparent background option anytime you want to download an image without a white or other colour square behind it.
So for example, if you’re creating an icon or illustration that you want to blend seamlessly on your website.
Or if you are using Canva to create a logo, this will be important as well.
There’s also a third image download format here, and that’s an SVG file; this format option is only going to be available on Pro.
Your PDF downloading options will be pretty much the same whether you’re on a free or Pro plan, with the one exception being that if you’re preparing a design to be print ready, you will only be able to select this CMYK colour profile option if you’re on a Canva Pro account.
And finally, you’ll be looking at downloading a design as an MP4 or GIF if the design is a video or animation. If that’s your situation, as with images, you’ll only be able to adjust the download size on a Pro plan, plus you need that paid subscription if you want to download a video design as separate files.
For example, if you had multiple animations or videos contained within a single design and you wanted to be able to download them as individual videos, rather than as multiple pages of a single design, then you’ll need to be on Canva Pro.
So those are the differences in the options for saving your designs, but there’s also a key difference if you’re looking to share your designs.
For the most part, your sharing options will be the same, whether you want to share a link to view or edit a design, or share it as a template so that folks can make a copy of the design into their own Canva account.
But if you want to save a design as a brand template within your own Canva account, you’ll need to be on Pro to do so.
Saving a design as a brand template can streamline your design workflow by giving you the option of creating a master template as a starting point for any social graphics, client materials, or other designs that you are creating repeatedly.
For example, you could have a brand template for a client proposal design, or an onboarding guide, or an Instagram carousel design, and so on.
You might have a master presentation slide deck design that you use as a starting point for all of your presentations. I do this for my presentation topics that I give repeatedly, and that template contains all the variations of the slides that I might need. Then I can just hop into the grid view mode and delete the pages I don’t need. It’s so much more efficient than piece-mealing together a presentation.
Or another example…. in the past I ran a website development company and one of the services we offered was a WordPress health checkup. Those reports were created in Canva, but to streamline my process, I didn’t create a brand new design every time. I had a template already set up and then I could simply click on the template to generate a new report layout for a client.
Plus, I didn’t have to worry about accidentally leaving in another client’s name, which could be a risk if I had copied a previous client’s report to start with. This is something that can easily happen if you’re copying a proposal design or something else that has been customized for a specific client.
In other words, there’s a lot of benefits to being able to create internal brand templates. It helps ensure brand consistency. It can save a lot of time. It can help you not miss components that require customization.
And then on the flip side, it can help you prevent inadvertent changes to your original designs that might occur if you just duplicate past files to create new designs.