DIY Design Academy | Canva for Business Owners | Branding

Learn everything about Canva including navigation and powerful, premium design features. You’ll leave this course feeling confident to use Canva for your very own business's designs. We’ll practise using Canva through our jam-packed exercises and Master Projects. Even if you've been using Canva for years you’ll leave with AWESOME hacks and tricks you didn’t know before.

By the end of this Module, you'll be able to:

• Navigate Canva’s dashboard

• Navigate Canva’s settings

• Use basic in-design features to make things in a design bigger or smaller, change fonts and colours, add elements, layer elements and lock elements and pages.

• Use basic keyboard shortcuts to make designing in Canva and filling out your workbook simpler.

Discover how colour affects your viewer and your customer. Make more engaging creations that urge your clients to shop and spend with on-message colours that make a deliberate impact.

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Explain why colour is so important in design

• Identify your brand’s or design’s purpose

• Determine your business’s principal colour

• Identify the meanings of various colours

• Use colour picking tools

• Optimise your designs for print or digital use

• Create your brand’s supporting colour palette

• Use the colour wheel to create effective colour combinations

• Differentiate between hues, tints and tones

• Save your brand’s unique, deliberate colour palette to your Canva brand kit

Unlock the power of not just what you say but how what you say looks. Learn proper typography terminology and explore font combinations and styles before building out your brand's font palette!

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Differentiate between typography, typefaces and fonts

• Identify the five different types of fonts, as well as glyphs

• Change your Canva design’s kerning and tracking

• Understand the different feelings that various font types evoke

• Choose your own brand’s Heading, Subheading and Body Copy

• Navigate Google Fonts

• Understand font licensing and how to access open source fonts

• Use contrasting tools to vary your design’s text even further

You'll learn how to create a visual structure that guides the viewer's eye through your design and communicates information in a clear and concise manner. We'll cover various techniques to establish a visual hierarchy, such as size, colour, contrast, and typography.

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Understand how size affects hierarchy

• Understand how spacing affects hierarchy

• Be able to manipulate F and Z patterns

• Understand how colour affects hierarchy

• Understand how alignment affects hierarchy

• Use grids

• Be able to break the grid

• Develop your brand’s own hierarchical template

Learn how using contrasting sizes and scales of design elements can create a sense of depth, guide the viewer's eye and emphasise important information to your audience. We’ll provide practical examples and exercises to help you develop your skills and apply this principle effectively to your own designs.

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Differentiate between the importance of sizing and scaling elements in a design

• Understand the importance of sizing and scaling your holistic design correctly

• Practically use size and scale to create depth and focus in a design

• Practically use size and scale to tell a story in a design about how different elements are related

• Create a design to the proper scale according to where it will be used

This principle is all about arranging design elements in a visually pleasing and effective way. We'll explore how to use negative space, balance, and symmetry to create a cohesive design that captures the viewer's attention and communicates your message effectively.

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Space out elements in a design deliberately

• Use negative space to design eye-catching logos and effects

• Align elements and text properly

• Repeat effects and styles throughout your design, a series of designs or a collection of branded designs

Now that we’ve learnt and practised all of the theoretical components that make up good design, we’re going to delve into actually designing on Canva. We’re going to start by going over the in-Canva features that you can use, followed by teaching you how to re-create popular professional design techniques that you may have seen before!

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Make use of Canva’s interface

• Understand and use Canva’s in-design features

• Be able to design using sixteen different styles and techniques including flat design, infographic style, gradients, backgroundless pictures, and videos, cutout effect, carousels, layers and mockups, text-fitted-to-image, photo editing, frosted style, collage style, animation and quote style and finally video editing

Now that we’ve learnt and practised all of the theoretical components that make up good design, we’re going to delve into actually designing on Canva. We’re going to start by going over the in-Canva features that you can use, followed by teaching you how to re-create popular professional design techniques that you may have seen before!

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Make use of Canva’s interface

• Understand and use Canva’s in-design features

• Be able to design using sixteen different styles and techniques including flat design, infographic style, gradients, backgroundless pictures, and videos, cutout effect, carousels, layers and mockups, text-fitted-to-image, photo editing, frosted style, collage style, animation and quote style and finally video editing

How do you tell the difference between design, and premium design? Well, that’s what this module is all about. We’ll show you examples of different designs within different design style categories so you can know “what looks premium” across different themes.

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Describe a brand or design’s look and feel

• Describe your own business’s look and feel.

• Understand what makes a design look professional or high-end

• Avoid making the mistakes that make a design look amateur

• Recap and recall all of the theory and practice we have learned throughout this course (Don’t worry, we’ll still be here to help!)

Create three incredible designs that your business needs right now - from email signatures and PDFs, to social media posts and animated sequences. Work with Mon and Dom and receive feedback about design eye-catching must-haves!

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Have completed at least three Master Projects. The options available include creating social media banners, social media profile pictures, social media posts, an email signature and social icons and/or a pricing guide PDF.

• Be ready to post or use these branded assets to market your business, nurture leads and inform customers.