Easy Infographics using CANVA - Houghton Consulting - June 2020

So I mean, that's the original post. And, you know, as of what, 4 or 5 days after I posted it, 6,000 views now.

Wow.

On that post. And, you know, loads and loads of comments and stuff. Completely unexpected. 137 reactions, 14 comments. So yeah, it's obviously resonated, hasn't it? I was amazed. So I'll show you my secret tool, which isn't really very secret. My secret tool for this stuff is Canva.

Okay.

I don't know whether you've come across Canva or not.

No, come across a pictochart.

Yeah. Right, well, canva.com, and you can open up Canva and start using it and it costs nothing. Now, I've actually, after doing that for about a year or so, I actually now bought a Canva license. It's like €12 a month or like €100 a year, something like that. But it's really, really easy to create this stuff. So I'll just take you through it. So once you kind of start doing stuff, there's an All Your Designs tab here. So you can see these are all my Canva things that I've produced over the last while for photography and for, you know, college and all the rest of it, consulting work. But, you know, it does make your stuff look fairly professional. Yeah, I'll show you this one quickly. This one is, is an assignment brief that I gave to the management consulting students that I finished teaching 2 weeks ago. So, you know, normally it'd just be a boring Word document. But what I set them— what I set them the task of doing, and I'll just make it a little bit bigger for you. There we are, so 125%. Okay, create a corporate learning course for student impact and learning. So these guys are going to be in Deloitte and EY in 3 weeks, you know, or 3— a couple of months' time or whatever. So I thought, well, who better to And when they reach their new clients, one of the things most of their clients are going to say is, oh, you're a consultant, teach us how to do this online stuff better. So I switched their group assignment around to this. And, you know, you're just about to enter a changed business environment, companies are trying to motivate staff and reorient them and stuff, and you've just finished years of education and you've just gone through Smurfit and you've pivoted online and everything. So use this to use all that experience to create a learning, a business course. And I told them it can be whatever you like. And there's 13 groups and they've come up with all kinds of different stuff. Some are doing resilience, some are doing online learning, some are doing, you know, how do we recreate strategy for a small business, you know, when we can only interact in an online space and all the rest of it. But just the presentation Really got them interested, you know, when I gave them the assignment and stuff. Just the whole— so many of them were saying, this is really interesting the way it's been presented, and it's sparking a discussion, and it's making us think, and all the rest of it. So, so I use Zoom all the time now to, to do this stuff because, you know, that's just a 3-page, very quick document that took me like 15 minutes. to put together, but it resonates with people. Okay, so if we go back to home, so this is kind of where you would start, you know, the Canva home thing, and this is where I kind of started when I did that infographic. So let's walk you through the whole process of creating an infographic like that. Okay, so I thought, okay, well, I think I want to do an infographic, but if you scroll down a little bit, you see Create a Design. Okay, so what kind of a design do you want to create? So you've got newsletters, programs, animated, social media, all the rest of it, presentations, logos. Oh, infographics. Okay, so let's click on infographic.

Okay, and sorry, Joe, you don't need a license for that infographic then, do you?

No, no, all these are, you know, the standard template. As far as I know, the standard templates are free.

Okay.

Now there's some limitations in terms of being able to change sizes and things like that. Once you've got the Pro license, you can, you know, if you've got something that's A4 and you want it switched to landscape or whatever, you can change it and it'll flow everything for you and give you options like that and stuff. So now we're in the infographics thing and we can search in templates. Okay, for, you know, a theme, for instance, or if you don't want to search, you can go down and see we've got education infographics, process infographics, and you can open these up so that you can, you know, see more and more different templates to start with. Okay, so I mean, you know, let's pick a template. There we are. There's one. Yeah, that's all right. It's not quite what I'm looking for. Let's try another one. So these are kind of starters for 10, if you like. Okay, and the thing is that everything on every one of these infographics is editable and is changeable. So if we come back to the one that I started with, it was that one. Okay, so that was my starting point, and if I make that a bit bigger so we can see The whole thing. Okay, there we are. So educate kids, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Okay, and I thought, yeah, I can probably work with that. I can probably, you know, and as you can see, the one that I did isn't so different to that. So, so now you've got all these different boxes, and as you see, as you go over with the mouse, they just highlight. So you just double-click into the box and you just replace. Okay, so this was, you know, the term that was— I think I said, didn't I? Oh, now I'm too big. I've gone too big. So I can highlight that text and go up here and say, okay, well, I only want, say, a 72-point. Okay, so I've changed the font size here. Yeah, the fonts— it's got— they've got loads of different fonts. So if you want to change the font to something different, you know, you just change the font. To that. Okay, and then you just click, click off it, and that one's done. And now, okay, so the term that was, you know, what was it, Jan to April 2020. Yeah, and I don't want that there. I want that further here. I want that down here, say. Okay, so that, so then I can move it, and I can, I can open this up, and I can make it bigger, or I can you know, extend this, the box here, and now give myself a bit more space to play with this kind of stuff. Okay, so it's very, very easy to move this stuff around and redesign where things are going to go and all the rest of it. You know, that's okay. So I want a bit of white space on the, on the right-hand side. So, so maybe I'm going to do that, and I'm going to move this over here and leave myself a little bit of room to put something else in here. So let's say I want to put something else in here. So I think on my original one I had a COVID infographic. Okay, so over on the left you've got various things. So photos— now with the free version you get a certain number of photos. Okay, with the, with the paid version you get millions more. So Here's all the stuff. So you can actually, you can do a search in there. So you can see I'd done searches previously for these different things. So if we search for COVID-19, yeah. Now what I wanted was, I wanted that little ball with the sticky things that were sticking out. Yeah, that was in my head. But actually they didn't have that. You know, I scrolled down and even with the Pro submission, they didn't have that. So what I did was I went off to Google Images and I found a COVID-19 image and then I imported that. So one of the things you can do as well is you've got this uploads option here, so if you go off and find another image and you save it onto your hard drive, then you can just upload an image or video. So if you click on upload the image or video there, then it will go to, you know, your folders and you can just upload a JPEG or a PNG or whatever, whatever you've got. Yeah, so there's, you know, so let's say I wanted to upload this Smurfit Frontage image. So then that's just gonna, that's gonna now upload onto— and so all these are my, if you like, uploaded images that I've pulled into Canva from other places. Okay, so there's my, there's my Smurfit frontage coming up now. Okay, so if I want to use that, I just click on it. Okay, and it puts that into the middle of whatever it is I'm designing. So because I'm at the top and the infographic is very long, if you, if you click on that, you don't realise what's actually happened until you get to know Canva. Okay, so, so I know that once I've clicked on it, that, that image is up here, and I can now just drag that image up. You know, the easiest way of doing it is just to just bring this down to 25% or whatever, and, you know, I could, I could pop that image up there. So there's a little bit of toing and froing, but that should— yeah, and there's, there's my, there's my image. Sitting in there, for instance. Okay, so, you know, and then you can just change this stuff. So coming further down, I think that— let me just have a look at LinkedIn. What was that? What was the first bit of that image? So the first— so it was— oh, it was 88 postgrad students. Yeah, okay, so let's go back into here. So, so I just changed that to 88 And then Postgrad Students, make that a bit wider, see whether I can get it in. Now I'm going to need to drop the font size just a tad, so pull the font size down to 28. Okay, there we are. Okay, now I need a bit more space, so I kind of— I can just pull this across a little bit further. I'm going to change that text in a minute. So look, but you see, as I pull it across, you see it's lining everything up.

Mm-hmm.

So it makes it really easy to make sure that you've got, you know, decent alignment and stuff like that. So that the H8 postgrad students, maybe I'm going to do there. And then you see these, I've got, I've got 10s here. Yeah, so if I highlight that one and do Ctrl+C or Command+C, Okay, and then Command+V. I've now got another, another instance of that graphic, so I can now just line that up with the, with the other graphic there. And, and now I can just— I can, if I just want to move it a couple of pixels, I'm now using the arrow keys on the keyboard just to move it a pixel at a time. Okay, and then I can Shift and click So now I've got a grouped graphic and I can move that across. So there's my first one, and then I might do the same thing for the other ones to get my 88. Yeah, so if I click on that one and I click on Shift and click on that, that one, Command+C, Command+V. Okay, there we are. So there's my little men. And, and Command+C, Command+V. There's my little ladies. And, you know, line them all up. And then I want, I want another copy of— what have I got? Men, lady, men, lady. So I want another copy of ladies. So Command+C and then Command+V and drag them up here. So that's my 80. And then I just want 4 and 4. So Command+C, Command+V, copy that, and then just delete— click and delete the ones I don't want. So I'm just clicking and hitting the Delete key there, and then Command+C, Command+V, so copy and paste. There's my 4 guys: 1, 2, 3, 4, and then just delete the rest. So now I've actually got 88 students sitting there, and if I drag across like this, then it's selecting, you know, different elements, and then I can drag them all, and you can group them as well. So that would— that would— that was our first one, wasn't it? And then I can't remember what was in— what was in the— oh, drawn from all over the world. Yeah, so So again, just, just click and drag across the text, you know. You can move that around and, you know, center it or whatever. And it's just a matter of going down and playing with that. So, so, so what was the next thing? The next thing was, was 12 assignments. Okay, so assignments. 12. Okay, now these don't apply to assignments, so I'm just going to click on each of those and I'm going to delete them. And I'm going to go up to Elements now on the, on the left-hand side. Okay, and one of the things you can look for in Elements is icons. Okay, so now I'm into icons. But I might want to kind of, you know, just, just have particular color icons. So you can, you can ask for that, or static ones, or animated ones, because the Pro version will also allow you to share not only static, you know, PDFs and PNG files and stuff, but it'll also export kind of videos for you as well. So you can animate your, your stuff as well. You can just choose from the free stuff, or if you've got the Pro account, you can say, well, just give me the Pro icons, because then that's going to differentiate your stuff from everybody who's just using the free Canva and stuff like that. So now I can have a look here, and, you know, maybe I'm going to look at assignment icons, see what comes up. Okay, cool. Okay, so it's, you know, it's got Various icons. So, so maybe I'm going to pick that one, and then that appears here, and then I can just drag and resize that down to a reasonable size, and then just, you know, pop that one there for a minute. And I'll go down and find, you know, maybe, maybe that one. We'll do the same thing, we'll just drag and drag and resize it. Let it just draw. Zoom's obviously slowing things down a little bit. There we are. We put that one there. Now maybe I want that one at the back, so if I right-click, I can send that backwards. So now it's behind this first one. Okay, so this first one is overlaying it slightly and stuff like that. So you've got you've got that ability to choose kind of group and layer, layer stuff as well. And then let's pick out just, just one last one. Oh yeah, maybe, maybe a nice tick. And bring that down and pop that up into something like that. Okay, and then, you know, I can't remember what the text was on this one. Oh yeah, the different types of assignment, so etc., etc., etc. And you know, and again. I need to move these, so Shift to select both of them, and then I can drag those both up a bit further and just, just organize them a bit better. One, hold the Shift key down, click the 2 other ones there, and now I can move those as a group and just make sure that everything looks good. And you just move your way down doing that, and it's as simple as that. Now, if If you want to add a text element in, there's a tab here called Text. Okay, so I think on the one that I did, let's have a look. Yeah, and a few more grey hairs at the bottom I put in, didn't I? That's right. So that was, I think that was a subheading maybe. So again, I've clicked on that, it's gone up into the middle. So let me just go up and find where it normally puts it. There it is. Okay, yeah, so add a subheading. So now I can change that text in there. So is it E-Y or A-Y? Colour.

E-Y.

Yeah, okay, so that's that. And then you see now, now obviously that's too big, so what I'm gonna do is select it all and go up to the— and, you know, bring it down to, I don't know, 12-point or 16-point, something like that. And you can see how it's centering it on the page for me. And then I can just move it down a little bit by clicking on that and just using the arrow keys or whatever just to move it around. And I can also change the color of the font because I don't want black You know, I want it to be, say, grey or something like that. So I can go up here and the colour of the font— so it picks up the main colours in the document, so you can get a colour palette going. Okay, so maybe I'm just gonna pick, you know, that blue, or I'm gonna pick that green or whatever, and it'll apply that to the thing.

There we are.

It just didn't seem to change the size, did it? And then, you know, make those 16 points or whatever. There we are. So we can drag that around and put it where we want it, and it's as simple as that. And then once you've done that, you then use this little down arrow here, okay, and that downloads. And then you can choose how you want to download it. So It'll default to PDF, but if you click on the little down arrow, you can choose small size JPEG or a PNG file to give you, you know, maximum quality of image or whatever. And then, as I say, if you've included things like movement in your stuff, you can select video or GIF or whatever it is. So in this case, because I knew that I was going to upload this onto LinkedIn, I just downloaded this as a JPEG. So you download as a JPEG. You can change the size if you want. It's defaulting to a standard size and a standard quality. Okay, so if you want to just pull the quality down a little bit because, you know, it's going on a web page or something, download it. And then, you know, just as normal, it's going to ask— it's going to just give you a second to prepare. And then if you just wait a second, up will come Finder. And I can, you know, go to my summer term folder and there we are. So the term that was infographic— I have a habit of naming stuff quite, quite long so that I can always search for it again. So, you know, I can't remember what I called that infographic, but infographic's in the name, so I'll be able to find it by just using infographic. Okay, save that, and then I can just, you know, close the design has been published thing there, and I'm back in. And that's now on my hard drive, and I can just upload it to LinkedIn or whatever. So if I come back out to homepage now, you know, so I've finished for the day on Canva or whatever, but All My Designs. There it is. It's sitting there in All My Designs. And if I want to do another graphic that's similar to that one, I don't open this again. I just go up to the 3 dots and I make a copy. Okay, so now that— then that makes me a completely new copy. And now I can click into this one. Yeah, which is now, as you can see, it's titled Copy Of. The term that was, and you can just rename that and, you know, change it another way. So up here, that's the title of the file, just there. So, you know, I might call this one, you know, September 2019 or whatever, and then edit this one as a different one. So, I mean, it's as simple as that. Yeah, you're really just taking templates and then tweaking them and using either your own uploads or using, you know, photos or different types of element. And there's loads of different types of elements. You know, there's grids, so you can create grids or shapes or frames. Frames are really good. So if we go to Home and We go to just general templates. Okay, so let's say you're gonna go for a— where we are— lesson plan, something like that. Okay, you know what I mean? This is fantastic for educators, this stuff. Look, so here's all our lesson plans, reading plans, and you can just kind of, you know, change this stuff to whatever you need. Create one. Do you like it? Right, use it. Okay, and now it's created you a copy of that as a document that now you can edit, and then you can change the colors and you can change the backgrounds and you can, you know, add new stuff. So if I want to now put a different element that isn't in there, let's say I want to put a round frame. Here. Okay, so I'm going to replace the other stuff behind it and get rid of that, that other stuff. Okay, so I'm going to delete that, and I'm going to delete that, and I'm going to delete that. Let's just get rid of those. 1, 2, 3. Okay, and now I want to pop a frame in here. So I'm popping the frame in there. Yeah, and what a frame does is then allows you to take photo. Okay, so let's pick a photo. Let's pick, let's pick the coronavirus photo. Yeah, and I can drop that into the frame, and the frame is now masking the photo. Yeah, so now I can, I can move, you know, move that. Or if I double-click, that allows me to now move the photo within the frame. Let's say I want to center the coronavirus thing there. I mean, how cool is that? Yeah, it's really, really easy to kind of make stuff look really, really good really, really fast. And once you've got a look, you know, once you've done it once, then you can just tweak it, you know, to different, different things.

Could you get a job for Canva?

Yes. But that's it. Any questions, guys? Have I gone through stuff too fast there, or did it, did it make sense? Did it—

Oh, it was really helpful. I think you're probably like anything, just to spend time kind of playing.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, you know, I wouldn't have known like what a frame was and how you'd be able to put a photograph in it, like, and it would make a difference. And also, I think just how you said about presenting the assignment to your students. just stick it up on a PowerPoint or, you know, stick it on Blackboard or whatever, but something like this could be, you know, in terms of the starting point for myself for next semester. Okay, I'm going to use this now to present my final assignments or something. So yeah.

Yeah, and I mean, you know, I produced a series of these one-pagers when COVID started, you know, working from home and stuff like that. And again, it was just a template, and then I just changed it and brought in my own, you know, graphics and text and all the rest of it. And I've put those up on the website. I've had a fair bit of work out of those.

Great.

You know, people come and said, bloody hell, you know, this guy's putting a series of these out and he knows kind of what he's doing. Will you come and train us in? So I've had a bit of consultancy work come out of this stuff. If you pop those up on LinkedIn— I pop one of those up on LinkedIn every 3 or 4 days— At the start of COVID and it really got noticed.

That's great. That's brilliant. It really is good, Joe. Thanks a million. We'll be all doing infographics now.

But why not? I mean, you know, it's a quick and easy tool, whether you use the free one or whether you use the, you know, the paid one, which isn't really very expensive given what it's giving you and the speed that you can put this stuff together with. And because it's all online, you know, you can, you can do it. I mean, I can sit in bed in the evening, kind of, you know, when I've got 15 minutes before I'm going to sleep, and I can be editing something that I started earlier on in the day on the laptop. You just log on with your iPad and you can be editing just as easily as you are on a PC or whatever. So it's really cool.

Yeah, that's great. Joe, thanks a million for that. That's been very informative.

No problem, no problem. I'm glad to help. I think that was a— that was probably a fairly productive half hour, wasn't it?

Very.

So yeah, okay. All right, all right, we'll call that a day, shall we? I think we'll call that a wrap.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Thanks very much.

Cheers, see you soon.