Speaker 1: Are you ready to become an amazing graphic designer all in one video? Yes, it's going to happen in this video. We are going to design our own podcast cover art by reverse engineering or dissecting these three awesome podcast covers. These are from very popular, high performing podcasts, and they're really cool covers. So I'm going to show you how we can create our versions of these covers using Canva Pro. Now, Canva Pro is the paid version of Canva, which is about $10 a month. The best $10 a month as a content creator, you will spend. You can achieve some of what we are doing in the free version of Canva, and you can also try out Canva Pro for free by going to PodSoundSchool.com slash Canva. The techniques that we're going to learn in this video are not only going to help you design a really bad ass podcast cover, but they're also going to help you to continue to design really amazing graphics in Canva Pro for all of your graphic design needs. We've got a lot to learn, so we better get started. OK, here we are in Canva. This is the home page of Canva, and to get started, what we're going to do is we're going to come up here to the right side where it says created design and we could start by typing in podcast. And when we do that, you'll see podcast or even podcast cover come up. We'll select podcast cover. And here we are with the perfect dimensions. And also, if you look along the left hand side here, what I like to think of as Canva's toolbar, it defaults at templates right here. And look at all these templates. You can just get started with one of these templates. But what we're going to do is we're actually going to pull up these podcast covers as examples. So let's start with podcast cover number one. And that is Gold Digger by Jenna Kutcher. This is a favorite podcast of ours. We love Jenna. And I think this podcast cover art is really simple and it's going to be fun for us to create. So now that it is open here as a reference underneath this, I'll click on add page. And now that we have a blank canvas or a blank page, let's see if we can find a similar sort of gradient orange, yellow color for our background color. Now you can go to the color selector here for a background color. And look how cool this is. Canva has already found colors from the photos in our designs, and we can actually see some of the colors that Jenna is using. However, if we want to get a gradient, we're going to have to get a little more creative. And what we can do is come back over to this toolbar again on the left hand side and click on elements. And from elements, let's type in gradient and see what comes up. And now we have some different gradient options. This one is really cool right here. I use this one a lot. If we click on it, it will actually bring it into the design. And notice it allows us to change the colors. So now if we want to get exactly what Jenna had, we can choose the yellow color for the first color. And for the second color, we can choose the orange color. And maybe we can even go in and make it a little darker orange or even add a little pink to it, something like that by adjusting the colors that way. And now we can make this square gradient fill up the entire canvas. And would you look at that? We have a really cool gradient. It's not exactly like Jenna's, but I think it looks really great. So now we just need to find the picture that we want to use. I'm going to come to my uploads tab here from the left hand toolbar, and I'm going to find a picture of Veronica that I think will look good for this cover. And let's do this one for this cover. Veronica is wearing a flowery dress, so it'll kind of give off the same vibe. And you'll notice if I zoom in here, when we took this picture, we made sure to have as solid color of a background as we could anticipating that we would remove the background from this. And once this picture is highlighted, now we could come up to this top dropdown menu here and click on edit image. When we do that, this brings up all of Canva's awesome effects. One of the options right at the very top here is my favorite effect in Canva, the background remover, and it's worth the ten dollars a month alone. All you have to do is click on it and watch the magic happen. And look at that. It did a beautiful, beautiful job of removing the background from Veronica. When you're happy with it, you can go ahead and say apply. And now we have the background completely removed from Veronica. Now I can zoom out so that I can see both pages by pressing command or control minus key. And that way I can kind of see both designs at the same time and get Veronica about the same size as Jenna is on her design. That looks pretty good. And I'm actually going to crop Veronica's picture just for the time being. And I'm just going to crop it down about right here. That way, it doesn't keep trying to go into the background of the design and I can have control over the picture more easily as I add more elements. So now we need to put in the word goal, but we need to put three of the letters behind Veronica and one of the letters in front of Veronica. So I think the easiest way to do this would actually be to add text. And when we add the text, we'll add one letter at a time. So now that I have a G, let's see if we can find a similar font that Jenna is using. She's using something that has a little bit of a serif or the little what do you call those things? I don't know what you call them, serifs. You know, the little things on the text. So with the G selected, we get options to edit our text along this top hand menu bar. And you'll notice this Josephine Sands is actually the font. So from the font, we can actually type in all sorts of things to search through the hundreds of fonts that we have access to. I'm actually going to type in serif and it will show a bunch of fonts that are serifs. This one looks pretty good right off the bat like that. Why don't we just go with this one? DM serif display. And now we can do is change the color to a white color. And with the G, we're going to bring the G behind Veronica's picture. Now, there is a quick key to do this, and I really recommend memorizing as many quickies as you can. And that is command or control bracket. If while the G selected, you come up here to where it says position, you'll see that it actually displays the quick key for that. So if you forget the quick key, you can find it right here. Backward command bracket. And I guess you would call this left bracket on a PC. That's control. And when you press that, the G now goes behind her. We can get the position of it just right. And now I'm just going to copy and paste the G by pressing control or command C and then control or command V. And then I'll change the G to an O and we'll get the O right where we like it. And again, command bracket will bring the O behind her. Copy and paste that. Oh, bring that down here. And this time with the A, we're going to keep the A in front of Veronica. Another little hack that you can do while you're inside of Canva, I'm going to zoom in on the design, is you can actually move around any element that's highlighted by pressing the arrow keys. What? That can be really helpful if you're just trying to move a design by really small increments instead of using your mouse. The other thing that happens in Canva quite often is you'll get your layers messed up and you're trying to get the L, but Veronica is now in front of the L. How do I access that L? Well, you can hold the control or command button and click and it will actually click on the layers behind those layers. And that will allow you to actually click on the L and then move it. And I think that's good. And now we need Digger. So I'm actually going to copy and paste the L again. So I'm going to highlight everything and move it up a little bit. And that way we can get the G and the goal more where it needs to be. Now I'm going to move Veronica back down so that we can put her name up there. And with her name, actually, you'll notice that Jenna used a sans serif font for her name. So we'll find a sans serif font that looks good as well. Make it a little bit smaller. And now we'll change the color of the font to white. My background moved up as well when I moved everything up. So pull the background back down and that looks beautiful. Now all we need to do is put in a little bar at the bottom. That's easy enough. All we have to do for that is actually come back to our elements tab. And now we'll X out of this. We can actually from the elements tab, you'll find lines and shapes right here. You can say see all or you will notice that there was a square. And this is something you'll be using a lot. And now with this little shape selected, we can find this blue color again. Campbell will remember the photo colors here so we can get the exact blue color that she uses. This looks a little brown, more brown than her blue color. Maybe it didn't do the best job. So we can come into it and actually refine the color a little bit more. Hold this slider a little bit more into a blue and make a little more of a blue color. I like that. And when we get a color we're happy with, we can now adjust the shape and the size of this object. And now maybe here we could put bipod sound school. And with podcast covers, it's important to have things be very legible. And last but not least, I think it would be nice if this digger could stick out a little bit more. For me, it's getting lost in her dress. Maybe we can adjust the size of it a little bit. Also, there's text effects that might help it to stand out from the background. So with this selected, let's come up to effects here. And from the text effects, I really like this lift one. And look how that sort of lifts it from the background. You can also adjust the intensity of it. I think that's going to help us to be able to read it. But I'd say that that looks pretty awesome. So what do you think? Are you falling in love with Canva? Are you finding value in this video? If so, please hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. Come back each week. We post awesome videos all about content creation, sometimes tutorials. We also have a whole playlist for some previous Canva tutorials that I've done that you can find right here by clicking on the little I button thingy. OK, let's get to the next podcast cover again from the home page. We say create design and we click on podcast cover this time as a reference. I'll come back to the uploads and let's challenge ourselves to do this one here. Oh, I like this one. This is product thinking with Melissa Perry. Really cool podcast and an especially cool podcast cover. So first, let's start by getting the background just right. So we're actually going to go back to the elements tab. We're going to click on the square and we're going to choose the first green color that it found for us. And that's this one right here. And I'm actually going to spin it until we get it to 45 degrees, I believe. And you'll notice as you spin, it gives you a little degree sign there. So now we have a 45 degree little angle with it. Let's copy and paste this and butt it up right next to the other one. And on this one, we'll go to the color and we'll just move the color to a darker shade to get something similar to what she had going on. Something like that. And here's a trick in Canva that you can do. You can actually select any elements altogether. If you click and drag, you get this marquee thing and that will actually highlight as many elements as you want. And then you can select group from up here on this menu bar and that will group them together. Now they move around as if they're one item. You can also select them and say ungroup when you're ready. So if I wanted to and actually switch it around, I could do one of these and make a hundred and eighty degree. Yeah, 180 degree whoop to whoop. And then we'll come here and we'll just kind of make this big, big, big, big, big. Something like that. Well, that's pretty cool. OK, so now we need to find a little speech bubble thingy that we put behind our text. So I'm guessing if we go to elements and type in speech that we're going to get some fun options. We did. I'm going to scroll through and find one that looks similar to this. Oh, and if I actually change it to speech bubble up here instead of just speech, it refines the search even in a better way, I think, for me. OK, now here's one that I really like. Now, it's not the same as hers, but it's going to be great for this illustration. So the first thing that we'll do is we can flip any object we want either horizontally or vertically. We'll select the object from our top menu bar. We have flip as an option and we'll say flip horizontal. Now, first, let's get rid of the black outline. We'll come up here. This allows us to change the outline color to anything we want. We'll make it white. And now we have something similar. We can kind of move it around. But what we can now do is we can also say control C for copy and control V for paste or command on a PC. And now we'll change the color of this to that yellow color that Canva has found from Melissa's picture here. And we'll actually make the outline yellow, too. And now I can put this actually behind the other one. Remember, by pressing command bracket to the left or coming up here to position to find that and move the position behind it, I can move it around until we have a nice little shadow of it. I think that looks good, looks something similar. And now I want to actually group these together. So remember, I'll have to press command or control to grab the bottom layer. And now with the shift button selected, if you click, it will click the top layer. And now both of those are selected together. That's another Canva hack. You're welcome. It'll save you hours of moving layers around. Make sure you press group here. And now these move around as if they're one thing. So she's got a sans serif font here. We can just find a font that's similar. And I'm going to press the caps lock key and we'll type in product. And you know what? Maybe actually let's look at a font that's a little beefier, a little thicker. I can go here and just look through canvas fonts if I want. There's a ton of them. Or I can actually type some in now. I like one called League Spartan. I think that might actually be the thick that we're looking for. You can also adjust the spacing, the letter spacing and also the line spacing. When your font is selected, you come up here to the menu bar and you'll find this tool that says spacing when you hover over it. And that allows you to adjust the letter spacing so we can give this a little bit more letter spacing. And now that looks somewhat similar to what she had going on. So we'll say product there. I'll copy and paste it. And here we'll type in thinking and we can resize thinking if we want. Or we can even adjust the spacing of thinking so that product and thinking have the same edges to them if we wanted. And then we'll change the color of thinking to this red color right from her design, which is pretty fun. And now we'll need to find a cursive to say with Veronica instead of with Melissa Perry. I really like this feeling passionate one. I think it looks like she wrote it with a marker. So we'll go ahead and use that one for this illustration. It's not the same as hers, but I think it still looks really good. So now we're going to need a picture of Veronica's face. We're going to need to cut the picture off around her neck, but allow the hair to still kind of stick under that the way that she has done here and then also make it look like the picture is illustrated. So that's a lot of stuff we got to do. So let's come back to these pictures again. I'm Veronica and we'll find one that we can use. I like this picture of Veronica here. We're going to use this one because I think it's she's looking straight on. She has a nice smile. And I'm going to show you different ways that we can actually cut her picture out by leaving some of her hair here. So what we're going to do is we're going to come back to where it says edit image and we're going to say background remover one more time. But this is where you can get creative and do more than just remove the background when you're using background remover. You can remove other things, too. OK, so now once it's done this first step, instead of saying apply, you have the option to erase or restore. So we're actually going to go to the erase option and it brings up this window. You can zoom in on this window again by pressing controller command and the plus button or the minus button to zoom out. And you can change the brush size as well. I'm going to make the brush size really small, something more like this. Make it nice. Come over here and then come down here and kind of follow her. The curves of her hair a little bit. Something like that. Now we can actually make the brush size bigger and erase the rest of Veronica's picture and make the brush size really big to make it easier and quicker to erase the whole rest of her picture. And now we have just Veronica's head that we very quickly have cut out from her picture, and now I can say done from up here at the top. And I've got Veronica's head there. Now I can crop this picture down quite a bit so that it's a little easier to control. Now we can move it around and resize and get exactly how we want. We'll put it right there. I think that looks pretty good. Now we need to give it like an illustrated sketch effect. Now, Canva doesn't actually have an effect that is going to get this exact illustrative look, but we can get something similar, maybe something black and white. If I click on Veronica's image, say edit image. There's a really cool effect or a series effects called photogenic. From here, we can say see all. And from photogenic, we can come down to these mono options and we can get something really cool. Let's go ahead and go with this classic one and say apply. And now if we wanted to, we could try to get a little more illustrative by copying and pasting this and actually add another effect to a copy of this and maybe play around with different effects. There's this bad TV, which is a pretty cool effects. These will actually allow you to get some kind of rewind sort of noise. And if you go into it, we can actually kill the thick distortion that it does. Keep this noisiness that we see with Veronica here. If we put that now on top and we say apply with this picture on top, we can now come up to from the dropdown menu where it says transparency and actually start turning the transparency down. And now we've made it look a little more illustrated, a little less like a clean photo if we want. And we can get that looking just how we want. Also, we can click, copy and paste and look at some of the filters that Canva has. Canva has some really cool filters right here where it says filters. And sometimes this creates a nice effect as well. Maybe that would be cool. I think that's actually looking a lot more. That was the afterglow. Now there's just one more thing we need in this design, and that's these little things. And I think the best way to call these would be rays. So we'll go to elements again and we'll type in ray and see what comes up. And look, we have some rays and these three right here look great. Let's change the color to the same color that Melissa used in her design. We'll shrink it down and put some little rays next to Veronica's head here. Get them just how we like it. We'll just make Veronica's head a little smaller, something like that. And would you look at that? We have a really similar, really cool looking design. Number two, complete. What did you think? Did you like this one? If so, hit that like button for me. Are you learning some really cool stuff? Let's move on to our last and final design. Again, back to the home page of Canva. Create design podcast cover. We should be getting pretty fast and good at this now. I'm going to come to the uploads and we're going to drag this one on here. This design is really cool. And I want to show you how we can use the background remover again to isolate just a color. Maybe we want to have just our shirt or something be in color, whereas the rest of our pictures in black and white. So we're going to do that if we want. Again, we have these photo colors. We can get the exact photo colors that she was using in this awesome podcast. This is well read Black Girl, by the way. Really awesome podcast to check out. We're going to get a sans serif type of text. I think something similar to what we had before was really great. I like this one. And then I think also if we play with the spacing of it a little bit, that will help if we kind of squeeze the letters together a little bit more. And that way we can make it bigger as well. Let's go ahead and all caps this and type in Pushkin here. And now we can rotate it to 90 degrees. And if we come back here, we can again X out of this. Go to handwriting. How about finger paint? Ah, there we go. That's good enough for this illustration. And now we're going to need a green sort of shape or a circle behind where we're going to put Veronica's pictures. So let's do that as well. We can come to elements and from elements, we can look at lines and shapes or we can type in circle and from circle. This will give us more just circular options and circle shapes that might be better. This one looks pretty good, and it does allow us to change the color of it so we can get it just about in that same position. And again, if we want, we can come and choose the exact green color that was used in this design. And now let's find a picture of Veronica where we can remove the background and maybe also find a creative way to isolate the color of her shirt. And we'll choose this picture here. Now, this is a much different pose, but I want to choose this because she's wearing this orange shirt. And I think this would be fun to isolate the orange shirt. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to copy and paste this image. So I have two of these images on this first image back here. I'm actually going to remove the background as per usual. And that looks really good. That background has been removed. It looks great. And now this one, I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to remove the background. But after it's removed the background, before I say apply, I'm going to come back to the erase again. And just like we did with the previous picture, I'm going to erase everything except for Veronica's shirt. So I'll come here. I can zoom in by pressing command or control and the plus sign. And that will zoom in so I can get right in on just the shirt and make the brush size really nice and small. If you didn't like your stroke, you can command Z to undo your previous stroke. And now that I have the shirt isolated again, I can increase the brush size and sort of start removing the rest of the picture from it as well. And now by zooming out and making the brush bigger, I can also delete the rest of the picture. So now I just have her shirt isolated and now I can say done. So now I have her shirt that will snap right on top of her picture. And I also have a picture of her. So now I'm going to make this picture black and white. And from edit image, I can either just turn the saturation all the way down or I can go to the photogenic. You can also adjust the contrast and any of these adjustments here to get a really nice black and white photo, sometimes adding a little contrast or taking some contrast away. We'll get the black and white photo to look just how you want it. And then I can drag her shirt like that. Now you may be saying, hey, she was wearing a blue shirt there. Well, could we change the color of this orange shirt? And yes, you can do this in Canva. But if you're going to change the color of a shirt, something that you want to maintain texture of, it needs to be in a similar color range, meaning it needs to be either a darker color or a mid tone or a light tone. And since this is a mid orange tone, it will probably work. What I'm going to do, though, is I'm actually going to copy this top layer and paste it over here. And now from the edit image option, I'm going to come to the duo tone effect, which is this right here. And I'll say I'll just pick any one of these. And once you pick it, you can actually click on these three little slider looking things here. And this brings up this. And from the highlight color, I can actually choose a new color. And there's an eyedropper right here. You can pick a color from any of your designs. So I'm going to choose the lightest color I can find. And I want this square to go over like the lightest color of blue that I can find. So right about here. And I've got a nice light color of blue. I might even make it a little bit lighter so that it's the light version of this color. And then from the shadows, I'll use the eyedropper again and I'll find a dark color of blue here and we'll do something like that. And you can play with these until you get maybe we even need to go even darker so that we get a nice blue shirt. And now I've actually changed the color of Veronica's shirt. Now, I really want to group these together to make them work, right? But sometimes in Canva, you have to move things around to get it to group, right? So I'm actually going to move the circle out of the way. And then I'm going to use my marquee to highlight just these two pictures and group them together. Now these move around as if they're one thing. I can move the circle back where I want it and I can position Veronica where I want her. So we'll go ahead and do. I think that looks really good. What do you think? Comment below, which is your favorite design? Which is the favorite trick that you learned? What other Canva videos would you like me to make? Make sure that you subscribe to our channel and keep coming back every week. We post really fun content creation videos. And until next time, good luck with all of your graphic designing. And we will catch you on the next video.