Friday 13 March 2015

Canva x



Oh I do so love the wonder that is Pinterest and Bloglovin. It is such an incredible joy to be able to find new and interesting places to play and to meet new people along the way. The other day whilst perusing Pinterest I came across a lovely picture and post all about a site called Canva. I wonder how many of you have also found this place?

Well if not I hope to enlighten you on a really brilliant online source for designing photograph pieces for your blog, Facebook, Twitter and a multitude of other things.

Canva is primarily a free site and anyone can use it, all you need to do is sign up. It has alot of similarities to Picmonkey however one of the key elements I love is that is has loads of free templates designed for you to make the most of your photographs and to present them in a stylish way. You can also buy access to templates at $1.00 so it's not going to break the bank balance.

To give you idea of what you can create, I'm going to give a brief run through of some of the creations I've made. Now obviously this is only a summary so I will post links to get you started and then it's up to you if you'd like to play yourself.

So when you go to the site you get a welcome page and a signup sheet, complete that and then check your emails as there will be one of those links to confirm your account. Now you can begin creating.

The first page I went to was this one........



Along the top there is a slidebar which shows all the different designs you can choose to work with, so let's choose a collage. This opens this page........



Along the lefthand side are your function bar and the clipboard for uploading your photos. The rest of the page is given over to the collage. So choose a collage you'd like to use, double click it and it will magically open up in your screen like this.

Next I tend to open up my photographs and upload them to the page too, this is pretty fast despite my slower than a tortoise broadband service. Ah village life. But the tortoise won the race so there you go. Once you have all your photos uploaded, select the frame you want your first photo to go into double clicking with your mouse and you then slide the photos with your mouse until programme sucks then into place. Clever.





The photo programme then opens up some tools so that you can add filters, do some touching up of brightness etc and then once you're happy you do the same thing again until all your photos are in place. The great thing is that the programme constantly saves your work for you too.

Once I've got my picture settled, I then play around with the background. There are a large number of free backgrounds to choose from and ones which cost a few dollars. Choose your background and it will look like this..............



Next text. Most the templates have a place for texts and all you do to alter this is double click on the words, change the text, font, colour and size and then the same for the next piece. You can move the text boxes around just like in a Word programme by hovering your mouse over the box until the cross appears then move it to the new position.



Once you're happy with your masterpiece you can download your images. The collage can be saved as a PNG. file or a pdf. If you add in additional pages these are downloaded as zip files with each page as an individual image, so you can make lots of collages at once but upload them individually.



The collage is also saved to your personal page.................



and here is my collage completed...............




I hope this post will help you to create your own collages and I'd love to see some. If you've been using Canva for a while and have any hot tips, that would be great too.


3 comments:

  1. Jo, this looks very cool. I've always been a picmonkey girl, but this seems to offer lots of possibility. Thanks for sharing it..it's a new one for me :)

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  2. What a great job! I might give this a try.
    Rinda

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  3. Beautiful collage and thank-you for the tutorial! You've put a lot of effort into this.

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Hello and thank you so much for stopping by. It is always a pleasure to read the comments I receive and to meet new friends. I try and reply to comments on friend's blogs as much as possible. I hope you have enjoyed reading my blog and look forward to seeing you here again soon. Love Jo xxx