 Okay, so that was amazing view of Trinidad and Tobago, and may I ask my co-hosts Shirley and Sandra to check the waiting room as people join us. And let's get the show on the road. First of all, as I mentioned, happy Independence Day and the place looks amazing. So today we are going to talk about creating Toastmaster brand compliant communication, though even the posters says creating posters. But really I want to talk today about creating brand compliant communication when as a club or as an area or as a district, we communicate to non-toastmasters how we should do this. And the tool that we are going to use today is Canva because it's free. As mentioned, I am a photographer. I am a scuba diver, so I'm looking forward to coming to this beautiful place. Today I am there virtually, but certainly when things get back to normal, I love to come there and meet up with you in person. A year ago, I converted all of my photography gear and converted it into a YouTube studio and that's where I started my channel Tech for Toastmasters. This has helped me to reach out to so many Toastmasters around the world. I've gone to give workshops on Canva, on PR, on branding, or even for that matter on hybrid meeting, which is the new buzzword. This is what I've been doing. And do check it out. To get the most out of today's meeting, do keep your microphones muted. Use the speaker view. If you have any queries, please put them in the chat. I will address them. So today we are going to focus on how to create or how to use the brand manual to advantage, how to access the brand portal, the Canva design elements, how to do some basic editing. We don't have enough time to do deep dive, but I will make sure that we go slowly and we do our best today. And how to share your work, how to collaborate. When I asked you all during the registration process, you have asked so many questions. And some of these things, all of these things mentioned here, we are going to cover today, how to remove background from your pictures, how to use curved text, how to decide if the picture in the poster is brand compliant or not. Please explain gradients, radial gradients, explain transparencies. Give us tips on creating posters, how to create posters. In fact, the whole session is how to create posters and tips on how to create posters. And some of you all asked me how to add colors. This was the question that you all posted in your form when you were registering. Some observations that I found is that, will this training be recorded? Yes, it is being recorded. I will share it with the division. It can be watched later on at your own pace. If you have missed something, you can go through the training and see, aha, this is what I missed and continue and complete your work. I will try to keep it as interactive as possible. Somebody asked, is it better to use a phone or a laptop for Canva? Use whatever it is. Phone is, the laptop is easier because you have more space to work with. And also, you don't have to download Canva. It's a website. You just go to the website and that's it. That's all there is for Canva. You don't have to download anything on your PC or on your phone. Of course, there is an app, but for your computer, just go to the website and do your designs. We have a Photoshop user. I hope he is here with us. Tips on how to use. I use Photoshop for my photography. I find Photoshop very difficult to do branding design because it's too hard. And I believe as PRs, we shouldn't be wasting so much of our time on obsessing over design because there are so many ready-made templates that you can use in Canva. Quickly make it. Get on with our life, get on with our family, get on with our Toastmaster meetings. This is my way of looking at branding. But anyway, if you are a good in Photoshop, yes, but for most of us who are new in PR role, Canva is what I recommend because it's easy to use. Some of you will ask me about features, whether we could show it today. But today, I want to focus on the free version of Canva. But if you are willing to pay a little money every month, some of you might, but it's $9 or $10 a month. And if you pay them, then you get these extra features. You get to create something called templates that you can create one time and use them all the time. You can share it with your team so that you can collaborate on the work. So these are some of the things, especially what we call the brand kit. You can keep all the color codes so you don't have to remember them. And all the logos in one place, you can create kit. But this is a pro feature and I will not be covering them today. But you can always make a note of it and see whether you want to do something like that. And due to time constraints, I think I might not be able to cover videos or to have YouTube music and newsletters. I'll try to touch up during the Q&A session. But these are some of the things I might have a challenge covering in the 60 minutes. I'll try my best. Everyone is looking forward to the session. Please give me a thumbs up. So let me open Canva and explain what Canva is all about. Let's get on with the show and I am now sharing my screen for you. And I hope everyone can see the Canva. Yes, my wife is here, so I will make her a co-host. So in case I face any problem, she'll come running to me and tell me or she will unmute herself and tell me that I'm doing something wrong. And that's one good thing of having your wife in the same training session. She acts as my quality control. So first of all, let's talk about Canva. Canva is a simple, easy to use tool. And I was looking at the registrations and I found, I ask you, are you a beginner? Are you an expert or are you an intermediate? And a majority of you responded by saying you are a beginner. Maybe you have just tried Canva. Maybe you have done some designs, but you are not feeling comfortable. So what we are going to do today is we are going to use the next 50 minutes to slowly go through a simple design, create it ourselves. So as much as possible, what I want you to do is you have your Zoom window open in one place and keep Canva open in the other place. How do you do? You go to your website and you just type WWW. Canva.com. OK, in my reminder email, I had told you I'll try as much as possible to create your account. So you should be able to log into your account if you have not already done so. And I hope all of you have an account on Canva and you are able to create a design by clicking on this button over here on top, which says create a design. And let's start creating a very simple design. Now, when you click on this button, create a design, you get different options. And so depending on how you want to present your design, is it for Instagram? Is it for Facebook? So you can create different dimensions or is it a poster that you want to print as a A4 size, for example? So there are so many options available here in Canva for us to choose from. So in our example today, we are going to create a Facebook post, something that we can post on our Facebook channel. So what I'm going to do is in the search box over here, we can say Facebook and you can get different kinds of Facebook designs that we can create. So I'm going to create a Facebook post. So I want you all to go to Canva.com. I'll give you a minute. Make sure that you have logged into the account. If not, quickly create one account and then click on this button here, which says create a design and type the word Facebook and click on Facebook post. And I want all of you all to have something like this on your screen. And then you can come back to Zoom and so observe what I am doing in this session. I like to hear or see some kind of a thumbs up saying that so far it looks OK to you all. If not, please put a chat message and I will ask to unmute. I want all of you all to benefit from today's session. We are going to create a poster, something like this. And if you notice, this poster has a couple of things. They are all brand compliant, by the way. It has a new color, which was not available for us before. What we call a gradient. I will show you how to create a gradient like this. We have our logo. We have a picture from the brand portal. We have some elements here. We have some curved text. You all wanted to learn how to do something like that. And we have something called a transparency. So using all of these elements, let us try to create a poster, something like this. So let me go back to my blank design. And the first thing let us talk about is the colors. I hope most of you all know what are the different types of colors that are in the chat. If you can tell me what are the Toastmaster brand colors that you can use when you are making a poster? True Maroon. Yes. True Maroon is one of the colors. What's the other color that we can use? Loyal blue, say Sandra, cool gray, happy yellow. So let's look at what are the colors that we can use in a Toastmaster content. So if I go to our Toastmaster brand manual and I will show you where you can find this manual. So as we can see, colors are basically three. We have three colors and you have just mentioned it in the chat. We have something called a true Maroon. We have a loyal blue and we have a cool gray. These are the three primary colors of Toastmasters. We also have a happy yellow, but this is called, as you can see, clearly it's called an accent color. It is something that you should use to highlight something, not the primary color. So we have the difference between primary color and accent color. And what it means is the primary colors you can use as much as you want. Accent colors use them judiciously. What do I mean by this? If I was to go back to my Canva design and let me try to change the background color of this. So to change the color, I can click anywhere on this design of the white area and I will see a color box on the top here. And if I click on it, I can choose the color. But I cannot choose any color like this because in Toastmasters we have to be very precise. We have to use this color codes. And you may all the time you might be struggling to find or remember this color codes. I have a very simple trick that I use. I print this colors on a piece of paper like this and I keep it next to my desk. Even though I am considered a brand expert, I also keep forgetting this color codes, by the way. But it is good to have a reference like this next to you. And I have a design, I will share this design to you. We can print this and staple it and keep it somewhere next to your screen so that you don't forget this color codes. So having this color codes that are here 7-7-2-4-3-2, which is the true maroon or 0-0-4-1-6-5, which is so these are the precise color codes we must use. So if I am going back to my Canva and I try to say change the color code to click here and then I type the color code 0-0-4-1-6-5, which is the color for loyal blue. That's called the loyal blue color. And if I click on it, now this is the background of your image. Now this is good if you use this color. Also, if I was to use the maroon, the true maroon as you all mentioned, which is 7-7-2-4-3-2, you can use this or you can use the cool gray A9, B2, B1. So these are the three primary colors that we can use when creating our design. In addition to that, there is one more color that we can use as part of our design, which is white. White is also a brand color, even though it is not mentioned in the brand manual. White is something that you can use. Black, can I use black color? Sorry, black is, by the way, 0-0-0-0-0, all zeros, not advisable. It doesn't have the Toastmaster. Even though black is a color in the brand palette, it shouldn't be used as a full primary color for background. And also, by the way, if you were to print this on a paper or on a poster, your ink will get over. So these are the three colors. Happy Yellow, use it only for certain things, as we will see later on. As I mentioned to you, it is good to have something like this as a reference. This is what I'm using with me. So what I do is I print this and I keep it in front of me and I can share the link to you so you can print your own and later on use it for. So all the color codes are mentioned here. A9, B2, B1, 7, 7, 2, 4, 3, 2, 0-0-0-4, 1-6-5. This is an accent only, used only for accents. And black is all zeros, FF all white. So I hope you got that idea now. What are the color codes that we should be using when we go to our design here? And a blank design. Because members and VPPRs were complaining, this is too limited. Only three colors to use and only one accent color. Recently, Toastmasters came up with a solution for us, which said, okay, let's make you happy. Let's give you gradients. So using gradients, we can now make more interesting color codes. So again, to understand what is gradients, gradients is nothing but a combination of two colors to make your design look more interesting. So if I was to show you my my gradient setup, so as you can see, when you want to create gradient, you can use a blue gradient made up of this color, which is 0-0-4-1-6-5, which we know is loyal blue and this color, which is 6-0-9-4. So if you combine them together, you can make a gradient. Similarly, for Maroon, we have these two colors, which allow you to make a gradient and for cool gray, these are the two colors. So because our example is a gradient background, we are going to create a background here in our, here instead of this, we are going to create a gradient background. I'll show you in Canva how to create the cool gray gradient. It's one of my favorites. On the left hand side, you can see something called elements. If you click on the elements, you have lots of elements that we can use in Canva. And the element that we are looking for is called graphics. And under graphics, we have something called gradient. And the gradient that we are interested in is this one, this color. If you all can find this gradient, it looks bluish like this. And if you click on this three dots, it shows that it's a square gradient. I want you all to click on that gradient and bring it into your design like this. And as we know that the gradient is a combination of two colors. And we are going to create a gradient for cool gray. So click on the first color on the top here. And we will change that to the cool gray color, which is nothing but A9, B2, B1. Please make a note of that A9, B2, B1, that's your first color. And then we will click on the second color, which is currently published. And for that, we will change it to a color code called F5, F5, F5, which is like a lighter version of gray. And this is how your gradient looks. I can move this gradient around and I can make it bigger like this as much as I want. And if you can achieve this one, congratulations to you. So what I want you to do is I want you to take one minute to create a design to make this gradient by going to elements and then go to graphics, gradients and find this gradient and change this to colors. This is your exercise for you for the next two minutes. And once you finish it, I want you to click on the share button here. And I want you to take this option copy link and I want you to post it in the chat. Let's see who can do a gradient background the first. Of course, gradients are optional. You could use a normal color, one of those three primary colors that I mentioned, but gradients look cool, so why not use them? Now that we have seen how to set the background, if you some of you couldn't make the gradient background, no problem. You will later on check the video and you will follow it and try to make a gradient background like this. Let's move to the next element of our design, which is we wanted to have a logo on top here. So let's see how we can have a logo in our design here. Now, the easiest way to get logo is, of course, from the Toastmasters website. And as VPPR, we must be familiar with the Toastmaster website, Toastmasters.org, where we can go to the resources section here and go to the brand portal. All the things that we need to create good brand compliant content is available for us here in this section, especially, for example, the design and the logo elements here, you will have all the logos and try to use logos only from this because there were some logos and some brand elements that have been retired. You may still find them on your PC or some way, but if you don't find it on the brand portal, it means it's a retired element. Let's forget about it. Whatever is available in the brand portal is what we need to use because we want to create a consistent message for all clubs. So when you click on logo and design elements on the Toastmasters website, you will find all the logos, the wordmarks, the lockups. You can check which one you like. I generally like the logo, which is the color logo here. And you have different options, JPG and PNG. When you're working with Canva, PNG is best. It has a higher quality. It has transparent background, so it looks cool. So the fastest way to get a logo from Toastmasters website to Canva is to click on the PNG option here and you'll open this logo. Then click anywhere on the logo and click right click on it and say copy image. Go to your Canva design, wherever it was, like here and press control V. It will bring the logo directly into your design. And once it is in your design, you can resize it by moving the corner like this handles and place it wherever you want. So the next thing, of course, is to put text. So whenever we are putting text in Canva, all we have to do is click on the text button on the left hand side. And choose any of it doesn't matter. You can choose this line, any one of this text. You can just drag and drop it. It doesn't matter. And you can put your text. Just drag and drop whatever you want and then just change the text here. I want to say, for example, division F. The only important thing about text is the fonts. And you look at here on top, it says open science extra. That's the name of the font. And if I change it to some other font, let's say something like this. All these are fonts that we shouldn't be using on a Toastmaster brand communication. OK, so let's talk about fonts. We have only two fonts, by the way. These are the only two fonts we can use in a Toastmaster brand content. So if I go back to the brand manual and by the way, the brand manual is in the Toastmaster same place where I brought the logo. You'll find the brand manual also there. So we have only two fonts. The first font is called Gotham, which is the primary font of Toastmasters. And we have a font called Myriad Pro. So these are the two approved fonts of Toastmasters. Gotham for your headings for your main text. And then Myriad Pro for the body of your design. So if you have the on top, the name of the club or something like that, you will use Gotham. And when you want to type some text underneath the design, you will use Myriad Pro. Unfortunately, if you go to Canva and try to find Gotham, you will not find it. And if you find Myriad Pro, also you will not find it because these two fonts, though they are beautiful fonts and they look really good. They also paid fonts and expensive paid fonts, by the way, something like $1,000 you have to pay to the company that owns these fonts. But as clubs, we can't afford that. So they understood that. And what they did is they said, OK, guys, when you want to use Gotham, instead of Gotham, your alternate font is Montserrat. So wherever you are supposed to use Gotham, use Montserrat, which means Montserrat is your main font for headings. And wherever we were supposed to use Myriad Pro, go ahead and use this font called Source Sans Pro. That's it. These are the only things you have to remember. So in Canva, because we don't have the main fonts, in Canva, our choices are Montserrat for headings and Source Sans Pro for the body of the design. Somebody mentioned Ariel and it is mentioned here, by the way, Ariel is a font that you could use as a backup. Ideally, don't use it. But if you have no other choice, then you can use it. Which means if I was to put this division J by now, you must have figured out that the font that I should be using is Montserrat. So click on this text and change it to Montserrat. You can type it. You can say Montserrat. So it will show you all the Montserrat options. There are multiple of them. Some Montserrat have like extra bold, semi bold. You can choose anyone. It doesn't matter, actually. So if I want the heading to be extra bold, fine. Let me go and say division F, right? So that's the font that is brand compliant. And for body, whenever I want to do this, I will use Source Sans Pro. So stick to only these two fonts, friends, whenever you're doing anything Canva, when you want to highlight something, use Montserrat, when you want to type some additional text, then use the Source Sans Pro. And one more thing we will do before we share your content is images, OK, what kind of images we can use in a poster. And my friends, the main reason I find brand in compliance is because whenever a VPPR is trying to create a content, they start by looking at the theme. Oh, we have Independence Day, for example. And you'll try to create a picture that represents the theme. And that's where generally the problem with branding comes. If we go back to your brand manual and you look at the images, it very clearly says what kind of images we should be using. And we should be using images only of people. And those people are looking engaged, empowered, supported. If you have photos from your club meetings, those are the photos to be used primarily. If not, there are two options. Of course, the primary option is to go and bring the images from Toastmaster website, which is here, as you know, in the resources. As I mentioned to you, go to the brand portal and find the images that you want from this professional images. There are around 100 or so images that we can use. So this is your first choice. You can go to the website. You can find all these images that are available free to use. They are professional images. The other option that you have is go to Canva and look for images here itself. So we have photos. There are a lot of photos here, but of course, we can't use all of them. You have to search for, let's say, meeting. And if you find a meeting photo that looks similar theme as a Toastmaster meeting where people are connected, engaged, something like this, I have no problem using this image. And it's free, by the way, to use. So you could use an image like this, or you can go to the Toastmaster website and bring the image and put it here. Or if you have your own member photos, those, as I said, are the best photos to use. So try to use that. For example, I'll give you an idea. I have here with me in this upload option, some images that I had uploaded before. If you see here, for example, this is one of our club meeting photo before COVID, of course, and I love to use four images like this because it shows the reality. It shows our club what we are. And so people are attracted to come and join this team, not some professional images. So if you have club images, use them as your first priority. For this example, we will bring one image from the Toastmaster website. As I mentioned to you, these are all the images that you'll find on the brand portal. Click on any one of them, find the image that you like. And how do we download the image? It is not the same as logo in the logo. I had shown you that you can right click in here. You don't have the right click for some reason. Toastmasters has protected the images not to directly copy it from the using right click. But if you click at the bottom here at here, you have an option called download. And if you click on that, it will show you, OK, you have different sizes that you can download. Medium is more than enough for designs. And you can click on the download button. So that downloads the image on your computer. And now what I can do is I can go back to Canva after I have downloaded the image. I go to Canva and then click on uploads. I want to bring the image into Canva. Click on this button, which says upload media, and then click on this button, which says device and bring the image from the. This is the same image that I downloaded. I brought it into Canva and I can just drag and drop it here. So try and download any image from the Toastmaster website and place it here. Since we have only 10 minutes more, I won't be able to complete the whole design. But I hope you have got a good sense of colors, fonts, images, logo. That is actually the essence of a Toastmaster brand communication. Sticking to this fonts, sticking to these colors. This is what we want. So whenever you want to start with a design, don't start thinking about the theme or what you want to convey. Start by looking at the assets that are available to you. And how we can creatively use them. Many people say, oh, but this kills all creativity. It looks all the same. My answer to that is very simple. You are not promoting your club. And this is something that I would like all of you all to take as my message today. You're not promoting your club. You are promoting Toastmasters. So if all the clubs provide similar messages, similar themes, similar colors, similar photos, what happens to non Toastmasters is they start sort of linking. Oh, this is all connected. This is a single organization. At the end of the day, they might not join your club. They might join another Toastmaster club, but they have joined Toastmasters. And I believe that overrides trying to sort of build only your club. It's more about the message that you're creating, a unified message. That, for me, is the more important message today to deliver when I talk about branding to create this consistent messages. One thing we can do is I will show you how to use text. Right. So let's use a text here and let's make sure that the font of this text is Source Sans Pro because remember the font for the body is Source Sans Pro. And if you have a text like this, let's say, let's make it Canva Workshop. There are a lot of interesting effects that we can apply. For example, if I click on this button here, which says effects. For example, I could say curved. Very easy. Right. And then if I go down at the bottom, I can define the angle of the curve to make it different like this, make it really curved or something like that. So you can play with the curve angle by this way. The other thing that we should be observing when let's say I have this division F and I know that I can change the color of this font to loyal blue or I could make it, for example, happy yellow. If you make happy yellow, the problem you will notice the other thing that we should be keeping always attention is the contrast between your text and your background. So whenever you put some text, it should contrast, which means if your background is light, make the color of your text dark. If your background is dark, make the font light. In this case, because my background is light, I could make the text maroon blue or black. Any three will work. What will not work is having it in this color. Unless you want it, let's say artistic effect or this color where there is not enough contrast. And also if you use white, for example, can't read it. So unless there is an artistic idea behind it, avoid having text that is difficult to read. When you're creating a gradient, the second color cannot be anything. It has to be this only. So if you're creating a blue gradient, your first color is 004165. Your second color is 006094. That's it. Don't use white. Don't use black. The second color has to be this. If you are creating maroon gradient, these are the two colors. By the way, this is some exception. I don't know why they did that, but the true maroon is not here. This is a dark maroon and a light maroon. It's not the normal true maroon. And for gray, these are the only two colors you can use. The second color has to be this F5, F5, F5. So these are your gradient options. I have seen a lot of designs where they make a gradient like this. They make it as, let's say, 004165 as the first color. And the second color is white, something like this. No, this is not a approved gradient. The color to be used in this case is the other blue color. OK, so keep that in mind. Brand manual to show the gradients which are acceptable or compliant. Yes, it's the same thing, which is the design that I was just showing you. So when you look at the gradient, it shows like this. When you're creating, you can do a blue gradient with this combination. You can do a maroon gradient with this combination and you can do a cool gray with this gradient. So both the colors are mentioned very clearly that you can use for creating gradients. OK, so we have reached actually the end of the time that was allotted to me. I would be more than happy if some of you all want to ask certain questions. For example, there is a question that was asked about hyperlinks, how to create hyperlinks. Very simple. If you have, let's say, a Facebook page, let me check if you all have, as you do have. So let's say this is your Facebook page and I want people to click on my link on the poster and come to this page. So what you do, you copy this link here using Control C, go to your design. So here I want to put a text box, which says click here to go to a Facebook page. This is the text that I want. I can resize it to be big or small. Always make sure that the font is so sans pro so that we are brand compliant, even though the other font looked almost the same. But let's stick to 100% brand compliance. And all I have to do is I have to select this text and here there is an option called link. Click on that and type that Facebook link here that we had copied from the Facebook page, paste it here and click apply. So what happens is it creates a clickable link. But do keep in mind that this link will work only if you download this design as a PDF as a PDF file, not as a JPG or PNG. But if you download it as a PDF file, then this link becomes clickable. You click on it, it will take you to your Facebook page. Though we have not done a very complex design, some of you have managed to do the gradient, the fonts, the colors, the photos. This is just the building block. And I hope it has given you some kind of look into not just to create the design. You can keep adding a lot of things that you will find here. As long as the colors are the same, you can keep adding things, make it as interesting as possible, but keep this idea of following the brand guidelines in terms of colors, photos, assets, fonts and the logo.