Introduction to the Canva Design Editor
Transcript
In this video, I’ll give you a quick overview of the Canva design editor interface.
Please note that Canva makes updates to the platform from time to time, so the layout or tools you see on your screen might differ slightly from what you see here—that’s just the nature of the beast with Canva as they’re always improving the platform!
General Overview of the Layout
Let’s start with a quick overview of the interface, and you’ll see that Canva’s design editor has four distinct areas that serve specific functions.
The Design Pages area serves as your primary workspace. Here, you interact directly with your design, making changes, arranging elements, and navigating between different pages or slides. It’s the area where you’ll spend the most time, actively creating your design.
Supporting this is the Object Panel, located on the left-hand side of the screen. This panel gives you easy access to all the tools and elements needed to enhance your design.
As you work, the Floating Toolbar will appear whenever you select an element within your design. This toolbar provides quick, contextual editing options that keeps your essential design features within easy reach.
And then at the top of the interface is the Menu Bar, which offers overarching controls for navigating your project and accessing key features. This area lets you manage project settings, such as resizing designs, switching modes, or sharing your work with others.
Working with Pages
Every design will open up with a single design page and then you can easily add pages by clicking on the add page button at the bottom and it will then automatically add another page to the end of the design. Or you can add a page in between existing pages by using this icon here at the top of the page.
You can duplicate a page design by clicking on this icon and you can move pages up or down in the design file by using these two arrow icons.
And then if I want to delete a page, I will simply click on this trash icon to get rid of the page all together.
If I want to change the background colour of a page, I’ll select the design page and then you’ll see that floating toolbar appear that I mentioned in the overview. The toolbar will only provide editing options that are available for the specific component that I’ve selected, so to change the background colour, I’ll select the colour picker and choose a different page colour.
I can choose from one of the default colour options, including solid colours or gradients. Or I can choose a custom colour, and again, I can specify a solid colour or I can create a custom gradient.
You can also give each page a title that describes the page, and then when you download a design that has multiple pages, rather than labelling the pages with numbers, for example, 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, etc., it will instead label the pages with the description that you have set for the title.
You can also add comments to a page in your design by clicking on this comment icon here. This can be very helpful if you are collaborating on a design with somebody else and you want to be able to leave comments or questions for each other about the progress of a design.
You can add notes by clicking on the notes option here and any notes you add in this area will be displayed in presenter view if you present a design in Canva.
And then down at the bottom section here, you can access the zoom settings, so if you wanted to zoom in closer to a design, you can zoom in… and you can zoom back out.
You also have different ways to view and navigate through your pages or slides, including Thumbnail View, Scroll View, and Grid View. Each of these views offers a unique way to interact with your design, particularly when working with multi-page documents or presentations.
The Thumbnail View displays small previews or thumbnails of each page or slide along the bottom of the design editor. It allows you to quickly navigate between pages and see a condensed version of your design. This is helpful for reviewing the overall flow of your document or your presentation.
In Scroll View mode, which tends to be the default display for many design types, all pages are shown in a continuous vertical scroll, one after the other. It’s what I’ve been showing you so far in this video, and it makes it easy to work on multiple pages without switching between them, so you can seamlessly move up and down through your design. It’s especially useful when working on projects that require consistent design elements across multiple pages.
Then there’s the Grid view option, which arranges all pages into a grid format, displaying all pages as thumbnails in one overview. It’s an efficient way to get a bird’s-eye view of your entire design at once, which helps in reviewing the structure and overall consistency of your project. And it also enables you to easily move pages around, placing them exactly where you want them.
Each view offers flexibility depending on how you want to navigate and interact with your multi-page designs.
So let’s move on to the object panel and the various options that are available for creating content in the design editor.
The Object Panel
Design: Templates
At the top here, you’ll see your most recently used templates, so this can be very handy if you have a particular template that you like to re-use regularly as a starting point.
You can also search for templates here in the search bar.
Design: Styles
And then you have Canva’s “styles” tool, which you can use to have Canva automatically change the colours and fonts used in a design.
You can shuffle through your brand colours and change the look of a design without clicking on each element and changing the colours manually.
However, I find that the way Canva applies your colour palette or fonts often won’t necessarily be in line with your consistent brand guidelines, so while this is a neat tool, I do prefer to teach business owners how to customize a template and make design decisions for their colours and fonts that will ensure their designs are consistent and cohesive.
Elements
Next in the list is elements, and it includes a variety of elements that are essentially the building blocks of creating designs inside of Canva, includin Shapes, which also includes line options; Graphics; Canva’s AI image generator; Tables; Photos; Video; Audio; Charts; Stickers; Frames; Grids; Mockups; and Collections.
Then when you are working with a design that contains combinations of these various elements, anytime you select a component of your design, your floating toolbar will appear with various ways to interact with and edit your chosen element.
Text
Next up is text and your brand fonts will appear at the top and then there are a bunch of font combinations that you can also select from. These are just kind of like text templates. They’ve already taken text and organized it into a predesigned template that you can modify from.
As with elements, anytime you select a text component in your design, the floating toolbar will appear with text specific editing options.
Brand
If you have a Canva Pro or Teams account, you’ll be able to use this Brand area, which enables you to access the contents of your brand kits, including your logos, colours, fonts, photos, graphics and any brand icons.
So this makes it extremely easy to access all of your brand elements so that you create consistently on brand marketing materials for your business.
Uploads
Next is Uploads. You can upload images here and you can also upload your videos here.
However, I would suggest that you only use Uploads as a temporary holding location for images, as you’ll be better off creating a custom folder system for your designs and images… and I’ll show you where to access that in the editor in a minute.
Draw
The “Draw” tool enables you to create freehand drawings and sketches directly within the Canva design editor, so this is a great option if you want to create custom illustrations or icons or other graphical elements to incorporate into your designs.
Projects
In the Projects area, you’ll be able to access from the design editor any custom folders you’ve created, including any of the images and designs contained within those folders.
Apps
And then we’ve got the Apps tab and this is where you’ll find access to a variety of Canva’s other apps and tools.
The Menu Bar
To wrap up, let’s look at a few other features to be aware of in your design layout.
Anytime you want to go back to the Canva homepage, you can click here on this little hamburger menu — that will give you an option to return home or to one of the other primary areas of your Canva dashboard.
Clicking on “File” will tell you more information about your design.
As I mentioned at the outset of this video, Canva tends to update its platform fairly often, so the exact options you see under File may change, but as of this recording, the options include:
The file’s name, document type, owner and size.
You can create a new design or import files.
You can also access the document’s settings, including rulers and guides, margins, print bleed and more.
Canva’s Design Accessibility Tool is a feature that helps ensure your designs are accessible to a broader audience, particularly those with visual impairments or disabilities. These tools help creators design with inclusivity in mind, making your content more accessible to all users.
You can save your design here, although it does tend to save pretty frequently on its own.
You can also move the design to a folder or make a copy, or download the file.
Version History is a feature that is available on Canva Pro accounts. With Version History, you can view and restore older versions of your design, so that can definitely come in handy if you’ve made a variety of changes in a design and want to go back to a previous version of it.
You can move the design directly to the trash if you decide you no longer need it.
And you can also access the Find and replace text feature from the File menu, or open the design in Canva’s desktop app version.
Finally, you can suggest an improvement to Canva.
Resize gives you access to Canva’s Resize and Magic Switch features, which are Canva Pro features. If you have Canva Pro, you’ll have the ability here to resize an existing design into other dimensions.
Next to that is the sharing permission settings, which indicates what level of access you have to a design.
The arrows here enable you to undo or redo changes.
This just gives you the status of whether your updates have been saved.
Over here is the name of the design file. You can rename it anytime by clicking on it here and just retyping it in.
You’re able to control who has access to the design here.
The Insights feature provides performance metrics and data about your designs, giving you an overview of how your content is being received or interacted with. It is a Canva Pro feature and is particularly useful for tracking engagement on shared or published designs.
Next to that you can see the comments on a design.
The option next to comments will vary. On this design you can see that you have an option to publish the design as a brand template, which is a Canva Pro feature.
But on presentation sized designs, you will instead see a Present option.
When you click on “Present,” you can choose from different presentation modes, including Present full screen, Presenter view, and Present and record.
You will find all options for downloading and sharing the design under this Share button.
If you simply want to download your design, you can skip all the rest of of these options and click directly on the “Download” option here, and that will open up the download settings.
How to Download
You will have different download options available to you, depending on the file type that you select.
If you choose a PNG file, you will see these options, though most of these are only features that you can take advantage of if you are on a Canva Pro account, which is indicated by this crown icon.
Pro features for downloading include:
The ability to download your design at a different size, for example, if you wanted to download your design at 2 times the design size, you can do that automatically here, you don’t have to actually resize your design to be twice as big, you can use this feature. And that will come in handy, for example with cover images on social media if you’re finding that the version you’re uploading is a bit pixelated and if you want a larger version of it to try to improve the clarity of the image.
Canva Pro accounts can also download images with a transparent background.
And Pro accounts can also compress files by using this option here – that results in a lower quality version but will also be a smaller file size as well.
Also, Canva has introduced an option to limit the downloaded file size when you’re downloading a single page of a design as an image.
And regardless of file type, if you have multiple pages in your design, you’ll be given an option here to select the pages you want to download, and you can choose specific pages to download, or you can stay with the default of “All pages”.
The download option for JPGs include size and quality, again both Pro options.
And again it offers the limit file size option.
If you are saving your design as an image, you will want to download either a JPG or a PNG. JPG files will usually be significantly smaller than PNG files.
PDF Standard and PDF print won’t offer size or quality options, but you will find an option to include crop marks and bleed on PDF print.
Additionally, if you choose either PDF standard or print, you will have an option to flatten the PDF so that all of the components in the PDF are flattened into a single image. This can be desirable if your printer asks for a flattened file, or if you want to ensure that recipients cannot extract any of the images or elements contained in your PDF design.
You will typically save a document as a PDF standard if you are sharing a slide deck, or a workbook or checklist, or any sort of document that you want your audience to be able to view on screen as a PDF. PDF files will also preserve any hyperlinks you’ve added to your design, whereas image files will NOT preserve linked text or elements.
SVG is a Canva Pro option only, and you’d use this option if you were trying to export a design to a vector format.
If the design you’re working with is a presentation, you will also see this Powerpoint format appear as a download option.
And then Video and GIF are the options you’ll be looking at if you plan on saving a design as a video or an animated design.
How to Share
If you’re looking to share the design, not download it, you have a variety of options available to you.
You can choose to share the design with individuals or teams here.
And you can adjust the link sharing permissions here to only you, or your team, or to anyone who has the link.
If I change the settings to anyone who has the link, I can then adjust whether the link will allow people to be able to edit the design or just view the design.
Alternately, if I simply want to provide a “view only” link to this design, I could just click on this “Public view link” option in the row below the button.
If you want to print your design through Canva, you would choose this option and then continue on through the steps it provides you.
If you’re on a Pro account, you can publish the design as a brand template here.
And then you’ll see all options here, including all the various ways you can share your design, including as a template link, a website, or to share it to a variety of your social media accounts.