21 Canva Tips & Tricks You'll Wish You Knew Sooner

In this video, I'm sharing 21 Canva tips, tricks, and hacks that will instantly make your designs cleaner, your workflow smoother, and your personal brand look way more professional. These are things that I've learned over years of building my online business and in using Canva. And if I knew these earlier, they would have saved me so much time and helped me look way more professional from day one. Some of these you might already know, but others will genuinely change the way that you use Canva. So watch this entire video to make sure that you don't miss a single one. Now, the first one most people do know about, and this is stock photos and videos. Canva has thousands of stock photos and videos that you can directly download b-roll like this to make your edits feel a lot more polished. To access the Canva stock photo and videos, you will click on any design that you want, and then off to the left, you're going to see all these different icons. And if you go down, you will see videos or photos. If you cannot find them because you have not used this, then you can click on apps, and then you can type in photos, click there, and you will see the photos app. When you click that, it will reveal itself down here on the icon list. Once it's there, we'll click on photos and then you can type in whatever you want, like literally anything you can imagine. There's probably a photo for you here. So if I type in something like a creator workspace, then you can get this awesome looking colored workspace. There's a ton of different options to choose from. And if you drag it to the edge, it'll fill up the whole space rather than just clicking on it, then it doesn't fill in the space. You have to manually add that in and resize it versus just dragging. Boom, double-click it and you can kind of move it around but keep it inside the frame. And then we can do the same thing down with videos. Put in our same prompt, create a workspace, and then right here you'll see right here we can download the file. We'll click share, download MP4 video file. Make sure your page is selected, page number 2. And then yeah, you can download your video right there. Now if you are doing a photo and you have some videos in the same design, just make sure that when you go to share and you hit download, that the file type right here is on either JPEG or PNG, which most people will use. And then make sure that your current page is selected, and then you can download it as a still image. Now if you can't find a stock photo that you want, or you're taking forever to try and find it, that's where you can use Canva's AI image generator. In the last year or so, Canva has released a ton of different AI tools to up their software, and the Canva AI image generator is pretty rad. To access it, you can go over here to Magic Media when you're inside of one of your designs. If you're on the home page, you can go over here to Canva AI as well and then click on Image and then type in whatever you want. As you can see, I played around with it. You can get some weird stuff, but inside of a design, you will click on Magic Media and then you will put in a prompt. So I put in a prompt: create an image of an online coach working on a laptop while automated sales notifications appear in the background, clean modern style, neutral colors. And then we're going to hit Generate Images. The more specific you can be about what you want from the image, the better the outcome is going to be, like any kind of AI. So we got a handful of images and we can generate it again if we don't like this, but this is pretty awesome. I mean, look at that. That's like— it's so scary how good AI is getting, and like it's going to get better. The text doesn't really make sense here, but you can kind of get the idea and it's something worth playing around with. You can delete the ones that don't make sense or that are not very good. But yeah, this one has like actual numbers, 5-star review or 6-star review. Yeah, worth checking out, worth playing with. Now, if that wasn't cool enough, you can also make AI-generated videos using the Canva AI video generator. So in the same exact spot, Magic Media right here, we're just going to click over to videos. And then we can put in any kind of prompt that we want. So I put in the prompt, show a content creator on a laptop with social media icons popping off, and we're gonna generate a video. As you can see, a brand new video is being generated, but it should take 1 to 2 minutes. It's a little more complex than an image. Okay, so right here we will click on the video and you can see we have our AI generated video. That's just a really quick prompt. It's a little weird, but it's still pretty impressive. The fact that you can just click this all inside of Canva and not some other designated tool. Now, one quick thing to note is that you might need to be on the Canva Pro account. It's like $15 a month, but quite frankly, Canva Pro is 100% worth it, especially if you're trying to build a personal brand or an online business of any kind, and design is a big piece of what you're doing. So I'd highly recommend signing up for Canva. I'll put a link to it right below this video, but I do not have any affiliation with Canva. I just think it's a great tool and it's worth paying for the extra subscription. Now, another awesome AI tool you can use in Canva is the Canva AI music generator. So this is great if you're doing video editing for your business and making any kind of reels or long-form edits, and you just want to add a little bit of ambient music underneath. Maybe you're creating a promotional video to sell some kind of product, and the video's just feeling a little flat or unfinished. Adding a little bit of music underneath is awesome. But instead of paying for subscriptions, you can create AI-generated music inside of Canva, and it's all just part of your Canva subscription. To access this, we'll go over to AI Music down here at the bottom. Again, if you cannot find it, go to Apps and then type in AI Music. So we'll click AI Music, and then from here you can have the basic or advanced setting as well. Even just the basic one is totally fine. What you can do is choose the kind of ambiance or vibe that you want to have with your music. So let's pick a couple of these. We'll go like inspiring chill music, and we'll make this 30 seconds, see what that sounds like. All right, here we go. Pretty crazy, right? So you can create any kind of music you want, add it to your videos, just add a little bit more life to the videos that you're creating. Now next up, we have icons and graphics. Icons and graphics are awesome for giving your website pages just a lot more of a professional look, or if you want to use icons in your videos to better explain concepts that you're teaching. So something I like to do with icons is on landing pages in my business, I'll have a section like this, like how it works, and I'll have these little icons. And these are directly pulled from Canva. And this just helps in simplifying and having a professional look to your website on landing pages, on a sales page or your main website page, anything that you want. By the way, if you're trying to build an online business or a personal brand and you want to coach people or coach groups and communities or sell online courses and digital products, you're trying to find a good platform to do it on, then I would recommend Kajabi. I've tried so many different tools and Kajabi has been the best one that I have found. This entire page was built inside of Kajabi and it's the backbone of my six-figure online business. If you want the best platform to help you build a personal brand online, Kajabi is the one, and I can get you a free 30-day trial with the link right below this video. This is actually the page that you're going to land on. And with this, you'll sign up for your 30-day trial. You're going to get access to a free course that I made that's going to show you everything that I've done to build a 6-figure business inside of Kajabi. It's going to save you a ton of time. You'll have my private coaching system, how I enroll high-ticket clients from $5,000 to $10,000. You're going to get my evergreen sales system and how I turn digital products into passive income. And I give you Canva templates and all that kind of stuff to make your life way easier. And you get a private one-on-one session with me where I'll sit down with you live and answer any questions you have about Kajabi or your online business strategy as a whole. People have been using just the course alone and been getting really awesome results just from this. So if you want to get 30 days of Kajabi free plus my 6-figure business system and an hour with me, click the first link down in the description and you can get started today. So to access these icons, what you can do is go to any kind of design that you want. And on the left, you'll go up here to Elements, click on that, and we can type in whatever you want. So like these ones right here, for example, This is really simple. I just said computer icon. It's pretty much say whatever you want and then icon. Over here on graphics, we can click see all, and then you can go through and pick whichever one makes sense for you. There's a lot to choose from, and any one of these can work really. You can also change the colors to fit kind of the brand colors that you have. Something cool is that you can, if you have a button or a specific color, You can add that in here and then Canva will automatically color match for you based on the image in here. So now it's going to make the image or the icon look exactly like the color or whatever color you have for your website page. And then here I did a calendar icon. So again, we just kind of go through, pick one that we like, and then of course you can change up that color. What you'll do is I would size this up to whatever size you need. Go over here to share, we'll hit download. And then when you do an icon like this and you want it to look clean and professional, you can either keep the background white because then it would blend in with this background. But what I like to do is click on transparent background. Now, in order to do this, you do need to be on the Canva Pro plan, which again is totally worth it. Transparent background, download, and then you will just have this image and you won't see anything else, which is pretty rad. Now, another awesome tip is you can use smart mockups inside of Canva. So these are really good when you're trying to promote a course, a program, a lead magnet, anything out there for your business or personal brand. What we'll do is go on to the main dashboard for Canva and click on templates right here. And then we're going to type in smart mockups and hit enter. These are what smart mockups look like. So you can pick pretty much whatever you want. Keep in mind this little crown icon. Is limited to pro members, but like this one's free, part of the free plan, and it looks awesome. These designs are fully customizable. You can get rid of this photo, add in whatever it is that you want. If you like those AI-generated ones that we used before, you can plug those in. You could change up this background color to, to anything like a dark blue, black. You can make it white. Whatever it is that you want to do. So fully customizable, but it just gives you a more professional look. And then when you download this, you can plug it into a landing page like we have here and be looking like a pro right off the bat. Next up, we have frames. Frames are awesome when you want to have a consistent layout for headshots or testimonials. So for example, this is one of my opt-in pages for my own business. And down here we have this little design that I had built inside of Canva. So if you see this right here, this is something called a frame. So if we, we can duplicate this page so I can mess with it. What we're going to do is you'll see this little frame. And just to show you what it can do is you'll get like a headshot, little Alex Mosey headshot right there, and it plugs it straight in. And you can see that we didn't have to do anything. That's the frame. And if it wasn't there, we would have to crop it and all that kind of stuff. So it just plugs it directly in. You can double-click and move the image or the person around. We want to make sure that's nice and centered. Looks super clean, super professional right out of the gate. So what we'll do is go over to Elements again, and you are going to type in frames. We can click See All, and they have all these different designs and shapes like page torn and all that kind of stuff. Typically what I do is I just use a circle, or I'll use the square, or kind of that rounded square look. Yeah, we'll click this, and then we're gonna resize it. Like, boom, and that looks nice and clean. So if you want to do some kind of testimonial thing like this, this is just 5 frames stacked over each other and then a star right here. You can see that's the design. These are each individual frames. So really cool for adding that clean professional look, especially when you're having credibility markers like this to help you with selling more products or getting more opt-ins for your email list. The next step, we have the brand kit inside of Canva. Now this is really cool just for keeping your fonts and your brand colors consistent so you don't have to start from scratch over and over again. So what we'll do is go over here in the front dashboard to the brand button. You'll click on that and then you're going to immediately be inside of your brand kit. So this is where you can upload your logos, you can change up the colors, which are your brand colors, add in your fonts. So something I like to do is just use Poppins for pretty much everything, and you can choose if you want it to be like regular or if you want it to be bold right there. So if it's going to be like a heading or a title, I want it to be bold. And then the body, we can keep normal font. But yeah, you can add your brand voice, you can add photos, graphics, icons, charts, anything you want inside of here. And it's just going to better optimize for speed when you want to create something down the road. It also really helps with just keeping your brand consistent across the board. Next up, we have gradient backgrounds. So gradient backgrounds are really cool when you want to add a nice background to a thumbnail for YouTube or anything else like that. For example, this is the thumbnail for this video, and in the back I have a gradient background. So I'm going to duplicate this just so I don't mess anything up. And when you make any kind of design, you can click on the background. You'll see it's highlighted in purple right there. Click on the background color. When you click add new color, you'll have a solid color, or you can click right here and go gradient, and then you can pick whatever colors you want to have. So if you want to do more of that Canva kind of look you can see I can play around with it and you can also have it look more in the middle kind of gradient or off to the side, up and down, kind of whatever you want. I like this one though. I think that looks clean, nice and professional. Could be a little bit softer. That's why I kept that because I didn't want to mess it up. Next up, we have image blur. So this is really helpful when it comes to creating things like YouTube thumbnails. For example, I have this thumbnail right here and you can see that the background is really blurred. Now, if I click on the background, if I can go over here to position, I'll go to layers and we will click on this background photo. I'm going to go over to edit and I can edit the background photo. And from here we can scroll down to effects and you will see blur and you can either blur the whole image or you can just do a certain piece of the image. I usually just do the whole image, but see how blurred I made it. If I made this zero, then we can go back and you will see that it doesn't really add that depth of field to it versus when I fix it. Now we have that blur there. So it just makes the thumbnail look way more polished in the background. But you can blur anything. I could blur this image of me if I wanted to. Click on blur. I can blur myself up if I wanted, but obviously that does not make sense. So you can kind of artificially create that depth of field. In your thumbnails, which is really cool. Next up, we have the background remover. Now, this is a tip that most people do know, but the background remover is really helpful when you want to have a more clean and professional look, especially when it comes to creating thumbnails. What we'll do is we're going to scroll down through here and we will click on an image. So I'll use this one for now. And then when you click on the image, you can see this is just me like in my little office studio thing. But this is a good picture that I can use for a thumbnail. So we're going to go up here to background remover. Now, where there is the crown, So in order to access this, you have to be on the paid Canva subscription or Canva Pro plan. Again, totally worth it. Highly recommend. I'll link it right below this. If you click Background Remover, now you can see that it kept us here, but it got rid of the background, which gives us more flexibility and kind of a transparent background that we can do whatever we want with. We can turn this into a thumbnail. Now my next tip are the image adjustment settings. So you notice how this picture looks a little bit dull, like it's an okay picture. And if you can take an HD photo when you plug it in, that's great. But it still looks just a little dark, a little off right here. So we click on the image, we can go up here to edit this little button, and then from here we will go to adjust. And now we can change the temperature. We can make it look colder, warmer, add a bit of a tint, which I never really use personally, but I think we can add a little bit of warmth to this and then we can turn up the brightness. Now already it's looking a lot better. We want bright, crisp, clean thumbnails. You can add a little bit of contrast or kind of play with it. And you don't want to heavily edit because then it starts looking like weird and grainy. You just want to play around with it to where it looks brighter and, you know, easier to see. But it's not— it's not looking weird or grainy. So you can play with highlights. I don't like to go too hard on all these different effects. I might play with the shadows or the whites or the blacks, turn up the blacks a little bit. See how my shirt's kind of changing up a little bit. But then down here we have texture, so you can turn up the sharpness. which is something I really like to do. And you can see like this is a really nice photo. If you click on it, it was a good picture when I took it. But then if we go over to edit right here and adjust, you can see I just turned up a little bit of brightness. I turned up the blacks a little bit, and then I turned up the sharpness just a hair. So it doesn't really need to take a whole lot to get a really crisp and clean image like this. Now, another awesome thing you can do in Canva is that you can change your shirt color. This is something that took me a really long time to figure out, but I got a little bit lazy and I noticed that I always wear a black shirt, so I wanted to change it up a little bit. And I found out that you can do this. So we click on our image, we go to edit, and then you go to this Magic Studio section, click on the arrows, and then you will get Magic Edit right here. So what we can do is you see there's a circle here and we can do our brush or click. But if you click, it's going to do the whole image of my entire body. So we're going to do brush and we can change up our brush size. You can see there in the middle how big you want this to be. So I like to go a little bit smaller. And then what we're going to do is we're just going to lightly brush around the shirt. And then pretty much once I get around the neck, then what I'll do is I'll turn the brush size up so I can just get more volume here. It's just a little bit faster. Bam. Okay, cool. And then what we'll say is change this, change this shirt color to blue, and then I'll hit generate. Now sometimes this can be a little finicky. You might have to play around with it or a different color, but you can pretty much change it to any color you want. And then here we'll have a couple different options on which one looks the best for you. I kind of think this one looks good. We'll hit done, and then boom, now I have a blue shirt. It's still a little, you know, we can play around with it, but you get the idea. Now next up, you can add text really So this is a really simple tip, but it does save you time. And all you have to do is on your keyboard, click on your design and just press T as in Tom. From here you can type in whatever you want. We can say something like stop undercharging, whatever it is that you want. You can play around with the— this font can make it a bit more bold, anything like that. And now we're kind of playing around with some stuff. This is a really simple tip, but it does save you time just by understanding that you can click T instead of having to go here and then click it. It's one button instead of like 3 or 4. Now my next tip is that we can animate the text and different elements inside of our designs. So with this text right here, if we click on it, we can go over to this little button, animate. And from here you can see the different animations just by hovering over these to decide which one you like the most. So I kind of like this one, let's say, and you can change up the intensity how fast it is on enter, on exit, characters, or per word. Per word is kind of cool, honestly. And now we have that animation there. We can also do it even with this image of me. We can click animate and then you can see a crazy zoom or swipe, old TV. You know, there's a lot of different options you can have, but you can play around with this. Now, one thing is that if you do animations, you should go to share. And when you download whatever you create, make sure it's on an MP4 setting rather than a PNG, which is a still image, or JPEG. These are all still images, so it would have to be on MP4 to be able to see that visual effect when you export it. And next up, we can do drop shadows and glow effects. So to do this, we'll click on our text and we'll go over here to effects, and then we can choose to have some lift, but we can increase the intensity. As you can see, the text is starting to disappear a little bit more. Or we can do a shadow and we can change up the color to whatever it is we want. Usually black is pretty good. You can add the blur to it, do an offset, play around with the direction of the shadow if you want. You can play around with it. Okay. Just to kind of make sure that if text is looking a little bland, that even like this with the black background, if you add some lift, sometimes that even helps just making it pop a little bit more right here. But we can also do other effects. If you click here on effects, we can go back to none and then you can choose like neon, for example. If it's not, it's not really showing anything here. But if you add a text color on this button and we do anything you want, I mean, we could do like blue or red and now we can see this. So we'll go back over to effects and we can play with the intensity of how you want this to look. More red, less red, more white in the middle, somewhere in the middle, whatever it is you want. But the effects can be kind of cool, especially when you want to do up your thumbnails or anything like that. Now, another great tip is the one-click resize button or magic resize. So we click on this to this design right here, we can go over to this little resize button. Again, we have the crown, so you want to make sure that you're on the Canva Pro plan. If you click on resize, you can turn it into an Instagram post, more of a landscape kind of post with video. So if we click on Instagram post, we can copy and resize, which makes a new design, or we can resize this design. So if we do video for landscape, because this is already pretty much like that Instagram post, we'll resize this design and you'll see now it stretched it out. This template wasn't really made for a landscape design, but it can be helpful if you want to quickly resize any one of your designs to some other kind of size. Now, another really cool tip in Canva that took me a while to figure out, but it's been awesome, is that you can share Canva templates. So this was a game changer for me because I am obsessed with making my students' lives way easier when they take my courses or they're inside of my coaching programs. So what I did was I templatized inside of my Kajabi course this exact page because it was built in Kajabi. It took me a while to design it and I did it all from scratch. Even this Canva design down here. So when I gave it to people, I made sure that they had a nice template inside of Kajabi. And then if you go down here, you can click here to access my pre-made Canva templates, which is this page. So I'm giving you the exact templates that I've already built in my own business. So you can just add in your client name, client website and business, and the 5-star review and get these exact designs. So if you're in business and like you're doing website design and that kind of stuff with people, you can build out your designs, put them into one place, and, you know, these different pieces like the phone right here, it's this exact phone piece, and then they have to plug in whatever their image is underneath that. So anytime you make any kind of design and you want to share it with other people, you just go up here to share and then you will hit template link and it will generate you a link that you can then share with your people inside of a course or a program or whatever it is that you want to do. So they don't have to build everything from scratch. They just join in and get a copy of of the exact template link and it doesn't mess with anything on your end. This is a really awesome feature inside of Canva, especially if you're a business owner like me. Now my next Canva tip is recording slides in presentation mode inside of Canva. So this is great if you have an online course or you're creating some kind of trainings and you don't want to use like Keynote or something like that. You want more options inside of Canva and more design. Then you can build out your presentations, record them directly in there, and then export the video, and you can use that for online course lessons, sharing it with clients, or whatever it is that you want to do. So what we'll do is on the main page, you can type in presentations, or you can just click here and go to presentation. And from here, we'll have a bunch of different templates and designs that we can choose from to create our presentation. So I'll click here, add this one, and then we can go down here, add another. Slide. We'll go over to design. We'll add this one. So if we're doing like some kind of product feature or whatever, and you can customize everything, get it done up the way that you want your slides to look like. And once your slides are all built out for your presentation, you're going to click on this present button and then click present and record. Hit next. Get to recording. I'm already set up with my camera and microphone right now, but here you would click start recording and then you can begin recording your slides directly inside of Canva. it'll make the video and then you can go to share and export or download it as an MP4 video and then you can share it wherever it is you want to share it. Another Canva tip that took me a while to figure out was that you can have auto captions for your videos that you can use on social media posts like TikTok or YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels. So if you go in here and you add in a video, this is a super old video by me, but you can right-click and show view-only captions and then press play. And then we'll add in those captions for you. And then from here, you can download and download to have your captions. Next up, we have infographics. So infographics are awesome when you are simplifying complex ideas. If you're telling people how to run an online business or how your process works when you're working with them, and it's kind of high level, having an infographic really helps solidify the idea. And Canva gives you a ton of options on infographics that you can create. So to create an infographic, I would go to the main dashboard. And then you can go to templates and type in infographic. So a lot of these can be a little too busy or complex. This is a pretty good one that you can see the journey of AI adaptation. So it's kind of mapping out a journey. Really, really helpful for doing that. This is a pretty good one. You can see people come in, they define their idea, ideate, prototype, and then test. Oh, I like this one. Simple claim process. So it's start here, do this one, this one, this one, this one. And just kind of mapping out your process into some simple, easy-to-follow steps. Yeah, here's another good one. So pick a design that you like. You can change up all the colors and the text and everything like that, reduce the amount of steps, whatever it is that you want to do. But it's just helpful to know that these are in here and there's a ton of different designs to choose from that can fit your brand. Now, if you're thinking about building an online business and selling digital products yourself, ebooks are one of the fastest type of digital products that you can create and start selling really fast. Watch this video next and I'll show you how to build your own ebook inside of Canva in 30 minutes or less. Hey, this video was helpful. Please give it a thumbs up and share it with someone that you think would benefit from it. If you have any questions, leave a comment right below this video and I will get to you as soon as I can. And as always, take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen. I'll see you in the next one.