Solution: Creating social media artwork

- All right, if you're watching this, hopefully that means you've completed your first challenge and you're ready to watch me walk through the solution to that challenge. So Guy was telling you earlier that he wanted you to create a new Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus header image using Canva. That's exactly what I'm going to walk you through right now. If you don't have a picture of yourself, or of your business, that's okay. I've included some mock-up logos in your exercise file so you can go ahead and use those as part of the imagery that you use in your creative covers. The first thing I need to do is create a new cover image and I'll just choose Facebook as the first one that I'm going to do.

That's going to launch up the Canva design module that you see here, and it's going to allow me to start to customize this. The first thing that I'm going to do is I want to make sure that I can control the background element of this layout. So I'll go to the "Search" tab really quick and I'll choose this thing called "Grids." This is where I can find frames that I'm allowed to put images into. So I'll take this single frame, right here, and I'll just put it out onto the design surface. Once I have that out there I have the ability to then put a photo into that. Now, I've already got in my "Uploads" folder, here, a photo of myself.

You can upload a photo of you or your business, or you can upload one of those logos that I talked about earlier. In this case though, I'm just going to take this and I'm just going to place it right there, inside of that frame. In this case I can also adjust the crop of this so I can maneuver it so that my face shows up a little bit better. There we go. And then I'll hit the check mark to make sure that that's okay. There we go, I've got my header image pretty much set the way I want it, in terms of imagery; now let's go ahead and customize the text. I'll come over here to the Text panel and there's a lot of different things that you can work with inside of this panel.

I'm just going to scroll through and find the one that I like the best, so let's keep scrolling on down through here. And most of them, again, are going to be marked as "free" or "paid" depending on whether or not it's a premium bit of text or not. And so you can just scroll through here and find exactly the one that you want for your project; in this case I'm going to back up here towards the top. Let's find one of these that looks something like this, right here. I'm just going to click this and it's going to add this in. I'm going to change the size of it, just a little bit.

And move it over here. Then what I'm going to do here, is type out my usual catch phrase, "Educating the world," and then I usually put an ellipses after that, and then at the bottom, "one pixel at a time." There we go, and then in the middle, JUSTINSEELEY.COM. And we'll change this to be white. And we'll change this up, make that white as well.

Easier to see. There we go. If you want to change the script on this, which I kind of do, little hard to read the way it is now, just do something simple like Open Sans, that looks better. And we'll change this one as well, Open Sans. There we go, so, "Educating the world "one pixel at a time," "JUSTINSEELEY.COM," I may want to move this over just a little bit because it is, of course, running into that light a little bit. Let's make this a little bigger, reposition it, and I think that is going to look pretty good.

Once I have that all done what I'm going to do is come up here, click on the "Description" and I'll just call this "Facebook cover" and hit "Done." That's going to save that for me, see, it's automatically saving up there, at the top. Once I have that all done I'll just go back out to "My designs" and you'll see that it starts to show up here in the "My design" section. I'll scroll over, and let's do a Twitter header. It's pretty much going to be the exact same process, I might customize just a little bit, for the most part, though, I'm going to start off with "Search", "Grids," drag and drop that over, go into my uploads and place that in there.

Again, we're going to need to adjust the crop, so let's go ahead and click on the "Crop." Move that down a little bit, here we go. Then let's go into the "Text" and I'll grab this exact same thing. Remember, we want everything to be very, very consistent. Once I get that out there it's going to be way too large, so let's just move that over. And again, this one right here, is going to be white and Open Sans.

once we have all this set up the first time it's very easy to customize it the second time around. So we'll do this, "Educating the world," and then the bottom one, here, "One pixel at a time." And change the color, change the font, Right here in the middle change the color and then type out, "JUSTINSEELEY.COM," and click away from it.

Now in this case it's a little bit harder to read so I may want to adjust this a little bit. So, let's do this, let's move it up just a little bit, we can also get inside of here, move that a little bit. That looks pretty good, so there we go. Then we'll jump back outside to "My designs." It's giving me a warning, here, and it gives me this warning because it's not done saving it. So I'm going to stay on the page, wait for that check mark, remember, always wait for the check mark, and then go back out to your designs.

You see now, everything's getting populated. The last one is going to be the Google Plus cover. Let's do that once more. This one is a little bit different because there's going to be some overlap over here, so I've got to get creative with this one. Let's go first to the "Search" box, let's do the grids, bring that out. See I only get this area over here, everything else is pretty much blocked off. Now I'll go into my uploads, put the picture of myself, there you see I get a little bit better of a crop this time. I can actually move that down just a tad, there we go, check mark.

Now when I go to do the text I'm not sure that this one is going to play as well as the other ones have. So in this case what I'll do is, I'll double click in here, it's Oswald is the typeface that we're using in the middle. So what I'm going to do is just remove this particular box, and I'm going to find another one that looks similar to that. In this case let's do this. Just kind of tack it onto the edge, right here. The background to this, I think we're going to make this more of a bright red, something like that, there we go.

The text, we're going to change this to Oswald. There we go. And, "JUSTINSEELEY.COM." We're going to enlarge that quite a bit and increase text size, there. Once we have that done we can click away. If you notice that it needs to be resized just resize it however big or how small you need that to go. So there we go, I think that works out pretty well, I might even move that down a little bit.

Something kind of like that. I'm using the same typeface, just don't get the same effect as I had before. I'm using the same photo though, so that all works out pretty well. Once I'm finished with that what I'm going to do now is make sure it is saved, which it is, and I can return back out to "My designs." So once I'm out on "My designs" the only thing I have to look at here is making sure that everything looks good and I'll hit "Refresh" really quick. When I hit "Refresh" everything should show up. The only thing that's not coming through is my last one, right there.

You'll notice, also, that you can copy these and you can actually create new ones based on them, you can delete them as well. But for the most part I'm just ready to go. I've got everything saved and now I'm ready to take these and then publish them to the web.