Custom LinkedIn Banner Image Tutorial and Free Canva Template

Okay, we're going to learn how to use Canva. So you're going to open up the Canva template, which is linked somewhere below this, and you're going to want to use the free Canva. Trust me, Canva is going to try and get you to pay for it, but you do not have to. So the first thing it's going to do is say, like, have a free trial of the, the Pro version. Just ignore all of that and use the free version. Unless you want the Pro version. I mean, I have pro because I love it and I use it a lot, but it is not necessarily necessary. Then you're going to have a template and the template looks like this. I'm going to change a few things. This is from my template, but you can actually change all of these things. Now what is important is to respect the spacing. The reason I have these things spaced out in this way is the way that it's going to appear on your desktop versus your phone. And so your profile picture on LinkedIn is going to be right here in the bottom left corner and it's going to come up and onto your, your banner. Okay, so you don't want to have anything here on the left side of your banner. And on a phone version, everything kind of gets shrunk in and your picture moves over here and your picture is going to be closer in to over here. So that's why I've put these text boxes where they are. You can put your name here, you can put a headline here, you can put something. But just make sure that you keep it kind of from this line right where I have it over. So if you need more room, you can always take this and drag it outward. Just don't drag the whole thing around. Same thing with this box here. You can make this box bigger if you want, but don't move it over to the left any more than it is. Otherwise it's going to be underneath your picture on the phone, on the mobile. And so my suggestion, just a nice way to do it, is your name nice and big. You can also put, you know, you can put your value proposition. You can put, you know, biochemist, like, whatever you want to put here is fine, but just make it nice and big. So that's eye catching, your value proposition, what you do well or what you care about. You can make these bullet points, you can make a list, whatever. Mine's a little list. And then I have a quote here. You don't have to have anything else. You can delete anything you want. So to delete it, you're just going to highlight the thing and hit the delete key. And then you can change the color of your fonts as well. So you hit text color, and you will have. You'll be able to change it to any color you want. If you click here, you can, you know, use this sort of color wheel and you can find a new color for it. There's all kinds of ways that you can do it. You can do a gradient. There's all kinds of things you can do. You know, you would definitely want, if you have a darker background to go with a lighter color. There's also some effects that you can do. So if you click on effects, you can actually put kind of a background. So if you did that, you can change the color of the background, but that way, I don't know, that way you can. Things kind of pop out. I'm doing a terrible job. This looks really ugly, but you can play around with it until it looks really good. I'm going to give you a template that does look pretty good, but you will have to change it if you want to change the background color. So anyway, that is how you do that. If you had a cool picture over here and you didn't want to quote, just get rid of it and let the picture speak for itself. There's a lot that you can do here. The last trick I will teach you is if you wanted to change the transparency of the background again, I'm going to double click into it and then I'm going to go into. Is it effects? I don't remember now, background? Well, there are some effects you can do. You can actually, like, basically put filters on it to make it, like different colors. That's kind of fun. If you wanted more of, like, this retro look, those are things that you could do. Oh, look at that color pop. Wow. Okay, I'm going to leave it that retro one. But then if you go to here, the transparency, you can make it more transparent so that your stuff is more visible. So those are little tricks that you can use. I'm going to take that off of there. I don't want to have a blob in the back, and I'm gonna change this to a darker color. All right. So that is how you can work on, on your thing. Um, you may or may not get a template looks just like this, but hopefully that helps. Um, and if I've missed anything, let me know. But this should be fairly straightforward. The last thing is to export it. To do that, you're gonna hit share and then you're gonna want to go to download. Okay. And then the you want. So it has like a normal size. This is the size of the LinkedIn banner. I like to blow it up just so it's nice and crisp on my LinkedIn profile. Okay, so I'm going to put a three in here. So that's going to make it three times as big, which is quite a large file size. And then you can hit download and it's going to download right to your computer. And then you can go over to your LinkedIn, which I'll pull up. So here's my little LinkedIn banner. I'm going to save it and then to edit your LinkedIn, just get a LinkedIn window going over here. Bear with me. Okay, so I've got my LinkedIn profile right here. You're going to go onto your profile and you're going to hit this little background photo. And now you would be able to change the photo. You're also able to change how it looks, but I recommend just doing it right on canvas so that it looks correct. And then you'll be able to just upload it with no problems. And you can hit change photo, upload your new one and hit apply and then you will have a new background photo. I hope that was really helpful to everybody. Let me know if you have any questions at all.