Speaker 1: I love Canva for my small business. It's no secret. I share it here on my channel all the time. You might be a little intimidated if you've never designed before, or you don't want to have to learn a new software. It is so much easier than you would think. Seriously, give me 10 minutes, and I will have you creating in Canva, even if you have never designed before. This is Whiskey and Whip. My name is Whitney, and on this channel, I love to share DIYs and budget home decor. Today, I'm also pulling back the curtain to show you how I use Canva in my small business. A huge thank you to them for sponsoring today's video. I'm so excited to share my tips and tricks with you. If you're new to Canva, it's an online design platform and app focused on empowering the world to design. If you've ever wanted to try designing, or you have different ideas that you want to bring to life, you will love how easy Canva is to use. It also comes with a ton of content pre-made and time-saving features, and you can use it all for free. Today, I use Canva for everything in my business. From my logo to YouTube thumbnails, video graphics, channel art, blog graphics, cut files, printables, social media graphics, business cards, and so much more. I have an upgraded Canva Pro account, but there are so many amazing things you can do with the absolutely free version of Canva. I used that for years, and today, that's what I'm going to focus on. I will also share with you how I made a really awesome interactive business card with a QR code to leave a lasting impression on everyone I give them to. Now let's get familiar with the Canva platform. After you create your free account and log in, you'll land on Canva's home screen. Think of this as like your dashboard and your launch pad for all your designs. The colorful top bar is a great place to start as a beginner because this is where you can find pre-made templates. You can always design from scratch by clicking custom size and entering your dimensions, but as a new designer, it really lowers the pressure to get started, and it can help you get ideas flowing. Honestly, I do this all the time, and I've been designing for years. It's a really great tool. Canva has templates for everything I have needed in my small business, and just when I think I have to make my own, I'll search it, and it pops up. I recently rebranded and needed a YouTube outro, and bam, there are templates for that. I could use it as a starting point, and it saved me so much time. I've also found that many of the most popular templates have designs that span across a ton of items, so you can find social media templates that match newsletter headers, blog graphics, and business cards. Each time you come back to Canva, all your recent designs will be shown here for quick access, and you can also click this icon to change the view from grid to list. You can search Canva's entire template library from the search bar here, and you can toggle to search just your designs if you have a ton to go through like I do. One of my biggest goals this year was to get more eyeballs on both my website as well as all of my social media channels, and so to do that, I used Canva to create an interactive business card. And a great thing about Canva is you can design them all the way through to printing in the platform. Let me show you how easy it is. So let's search business cards. I'm going to select this size. And I like the look of this one. If you see a crown at the bottom of a template's tile, that just means that the template is available with a Canva Pro account, so just something to keep in mind on the free version. Now let's start with text. I can select a text element and edit the font, color, size, spacing, and the text itself. All of my options for editing will be in this top white bar when that item is selected. Now let's enter some info here for my business card. While I'm doing this, I always get a ton of questions on my favorite Canva fonts, and here are my top six free fonts I use all the time. I like Sanchez, Bebas Nui, Lovello, Moontime, Jonathan, and Playlist Script. For this particular project, I'm going to bring in Roca Too Thin because that's one of my brand fonts. I like to use similar fonts for consistency across all of my materials, and that's how you're going to get a very stylized look while also being able to do it yourself. Now let's add some elements to make this feel more like whiskey and wit. You guys know me, DIY and decor. Click elements on the left hand side and type in your search term. This will do a wide search, so I'm going to select graphics at the top to narrow it down, and I like this one, so I'm going to click and insert it. Now the great news here is this element can be further edited, and I know that because the color selector has appeared up here in the white bar. I can change the color of the handle, the metal part, and the bristles to match my brand color, and that's going to make it look like I have a designer on staff making custom elements for me. I may have just outed my secret, but we can keep it between us. You'll have to think about the products and services that you provide, and that's going to inform the search terms that you're going to put into the box. The more you use the platform, you'll also learn what search terms to use to find things that match your brand aesthetic. I like to use terms like watercolor, hand-drawn, paint stroke, and natural for my look and feel. Now as you scroll down the elements sidebar on the left, you can also browse a ton of graphics, stock photos, videos, and audio, and you can also insert things like charts, tables, frames, and grids. Also on the left, you can upload your own photos, videos, and music, so for my business cards, I'm going to add my logo and my headshot. And there's also an option to connect your YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc., so you can pull photos and videos directly from those platforms to use in your designs. Now I'm preaching to the choir when I say that small businesses have a small amount of time to dedicate to design and marketing, but it is so important. So here are my top favorite features that will give me the most bang for my buck when it comes to saving time. When you find an element that you love, to easily find something similar, you're going to hover over the element, click the three dots in the top right, and that's going to show you things like who designed that element, the keywords that it's filed under. You can star it to save it for later, add it to a folder, or you can see more like this. I like this option because it gives me a ton of other crafting themed options for this paintbrush. I also like to click find more by, that's going to pull up all the work by that designer, and it's going to help me find a set of elements that are going to work well together. Now getting creative with text is super easy with effect. So make sure your text is selected, click effects, and this side panel is going to give you a ton of options including curve, hollow, lift, which is similar to a drop shadow, and even background. I like to use that to help text stand out on my YouTube thumbnails. My new favorite feature, especially as a content creator that's always trying to get people to my website, is the ability to add a QR code directly in Canva to your designs. So I'm going to use that option on the left hand side panel, I'm clicking more, and then I'm finding QR code. Now all you need to do is grab the URL where you want to send people, put it in this box, and bam, you're done. Now anytime a phone camera is pointed at it, it's going to take folks right to that link. It's not only great for websites, but think about other possibilities for your business. Like booth signs to share your payment info at a craft show, capturing signatures at a PTA meeting, or even a realtor linking to a video of their latest listing. There are a ton of potential here, and making it easy for people is really going to help drive traffic to wherever you want them to go. Now for this business card, let's do a little bit more finessing. I'm going to add a circle frame to hold my headshot. I'm just going to drag my image over the top of it, and it's going to pop right in. And then I'm going to search and add some social media icons for the platforms I use. I'm going to update the colors with the little box at the top here to match my branding, and bam, we are done. Now when you're all done, you have a ton of different options to share your creation. You can find those by clicking share up in the top right. And then you can either share with your team, save it as traditional file types like JPEG, PNG, PDF, or you can even go down to the bottom and click more and you can see all of the different sharing options available to you. And for me to print my business cards, it was so easy. I just click print business card up in the top right next to share. I'm going to select the printing options, how many I want, review my proof, and then complete the order. So when somebody asks me what project am I working on or we start talking about what I do and I want to share my channel, I just hand them one of these cards. The QR code is on the back, and they can easily scan it, head over to my website, and I have captured that lead. And it's not just for business cards. Canva does have a wide variety of items that you can design in the platform and then print. I need to explore this because I think I'm going to be using this a lot more often. You can find that by clicking features and print products from the Canva home screen, and you can explore everything they have to offer. So what will you design today? Be sure to tag me in your creations. I would love to see what you guys are making with Canva. Have you used Canva before? If so, and you've got questions, leave me a comment. Or if you haven't tried Canva yet, what are you waiting for? Head down to my description for a link to take you over there to start designing for free. A huge thank you to Canva for sponsoring today's video. Thank you for watching, and I will catch you in the next one. Bye.