A short tutorial by Guy Kawasaki on using Canva to create presentations. He recommends selecting a professional-looking template, optimizing slides for phone viewing, and either copying content from PowerPoint into Canva or starting from scratch. He emphasizes using Canva's stock photo library and simple image edits (monochrome, increased contrast, blur) to keep focus on text, and says you can build a remarkable presentation in under an hour.
Chapters
Hi, Guy Kawasaki here. I am the chief evangelist of Canva and the creator of the Remarkable People podcast. The topic of this video is how to use Canva as your presentation creation tool. The first step is to select the design type called presentations. Then you will see over a thousand different templates. Maybe that's too many templates for you to pick from. So I'll tell you what I do. I look for templates that embody the word professionalism. I want the template to communicate Guy as a professional. Second thing is, I look for templates where it'll be very easy to read the presentation. I don't assume a laptop or desktop. I assume a phone is the delivery mechanism. Now, we have two different scenarios. Suppose you already have a PowerPoint presentation. What do you do? Well, I open up PowerPoint and I open up Canva. Take my template, I copy stuff from PowerPoint, paste it into Canva. Copy, paste, copy, paste. When you paste into Canva, the text, the graphics, all those things are still alive. You can still edit them. That's one scenario. Second scenario is starting from scratch. In this case, I just go in and I start typing what I want to say. Now, I think one of the most delightful parts of this process is using Canva's stock photography search engine. In all the presentations that I've made, I have never been disappointed by the selection of photos. So I type in the word boundaries, and I find all these great photos. I select one, then I put it in Canva to use it as the background. Now, this may be getting a little bit in the weeds, but I like dark black backgrounds. And so what I do is I change that picture to monochrome using the filter, and then I often up the contrast and blur it, because I want people to focus on the words, not look at the picture. So that's the process. If it's in PowerPoint, copy and paste. If it's starting from scratch, start typing. Looking for stock photos. I think that you could build a presentation in under an hour. You can build a remarkable presentation in Canva. I'm Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist of Canva and creator of the Remarkable People podcast. Thank you.