 In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a Toastmasters brand compliant poster using Canva. This video is split into chapters. What I suggest you do is complete each chapter which is only a few minutes in length, pause the video and complete the same exercise in Canva. Once you are confident, come back to this video and move to the next chapter. Canva is an easy to use service that allows you to create professional designs in a few minutes and it is free. To get started, go to www.canva.com. If you have already signed up to the service, all you need to do is click login and proceed. If not, click on the sign up button to create your free account. You can sign up with your Google account or with your Facebook account or even with your email and your own password. Let me sign up with my Facebook account because I don't want to remember too many passwords. It will automatically link your Canva account with your Facebook account and you are ready to go. To create Toastmasters brand compliant posters, you need to be familiar with Toastmasters website www.toastmasters.org and all of the resources that are available to you under this section called resources and the brand portal. This video will focus on the resources that are available to us in the brand portal and how to map them correctly in Canva. A Toastmaster brand compliant design consists of these four elements colors, fonts, logos and images. Let's go through each of these one by one. The Toastmaster color palette consists of three primary colors, cool gray, loyal blue and true maroon. One accent color called happy yellow and the black and white colors along with a color called digital loyal blue which can only be used as a gradient along with the loyal blue color. Each color is defined with a precise color code. Here the color codes are represented as hex codes and the reason is because in Canva we can directly type hex codes when we are defining colors for our objects and fonts. One important note about these colors is that the color loyal blue, true maroon, black and the digital loyal blue are considered as dark colors and the color cool gray, happy yellow and white are considered as light colors. Why is this important? When you have a color and you want to write something on it, make sure that you write with a light color on the dark background or a dark color on a light background. As you can see in this example, let's get back to Canva and see how we can apply these colors to our design. Let's start by creating a new design and choose the type of design. Each design gives you different dimensions. For example, if you want to post on Instagram which has a square shape, then you would choose a Instagram post. If you want to post to Facebook, you would choose a design that is more appropriate for Facebook. You can also search for the designs by typing here. If I search for Facebook, I get the different designs that I can make for Facebook. Let's start with an Instagram post. I'll click on this and this will take me to the design page with a square design shape that is appropriate for Instagram. If I want to change the color of my design, click anywhere and then click on this color wheel. You can choose from the list of colors available to you, but since we are creating a brand compliant design, we must make sure that we enter the precise color code as shown in the previous slide. For example, if I want my background to be true Maroon, I can click here and type the color code 772432. And it will give me the precise color code to be used in my design. Click on it and your design color is now true Maroon. If you find it difficult to remember these color codes every time you create a design, there are several tools and techniques you can use to make it easy for you. To add creative elements to your design, you can go to the elements section. Be careful of the elements that you put in your design. Most of the elements available in Canva are not Terse Master Brand compliant. The elements that I would recommend that you use are the shapes. To see all the available shapes, click on the see all and choose any of the shapes that are available to you. For example, if I want to use this triangle element, just click on it. To move this element around, click anywhere on the element and hold the mouse key and move it around. You can resize the element by holding one of these corners and dragging it to make it small or to make it big. It is not necessary that the entire element is visible in your design. For example, if I only want part of this triangle, I can move the element like this and only this part will be visible in our final design. If I want to change the color of this shape, let's say to happy yellow, click on it and then click this color button and type the color code of happy yellow, which is F2DF74. Click on the color and the element changes to happy yellow. Let's add one more element. Let's say a circle, move it to your desired location, click the color button and change the color to let's say cool gray, click on the color. The color code for cool gray is A9B2B1 and your shape gets that color code. The next design element is fonts. A Toastmaster brand compliant poster can use only two fonts. The first font is the Gotham font and the second font is the Mediate Pro font. Gotham is typically used for headings while the Mediate Pro is used for the body of the text. Both of these fonts are paid fonts and they are not available in Canva. So as per the brand guidelines, we are allowed to use Montserrat wherever you were supposed to use Gotham and use the font Sosans Pro instead of Mediate Pro. Both of these fonts Montserrat and Sosans Pro are free fonts and available in Canva. Let's try them out. To add text to our design, click on this button text and choose from one of the three texts available to you, heading, subheading or body, it doesn't matter. Let's click on add a heading. This will add a text to my poster and I can move it around by holding the mouse key and placing it where I want. To resize the text, hold one of the corner circles and drag it to make it small or big. To change the font to be one of the Toastmaster brand compliant font, click on this arrow and select the font that is either Montserrat or Sosans Pro. Canva comes with hundreds of fonts so it might be difficult to find the right font by scrolling through the list. You can easily search for the font by typing the name of the font in the search box. For example, let's say I want to make it Montserrat, type the word Montserrat and all the versions of Montserrat will be shown to you. Choose anyone. Let's say Montserrat extra bold to change the color of the text. Click on this button text color and choose one of the Toastmaster brand compliant color. Since I am writing on a dark color, a light color such as white, gray, or yellow would be appropriate. Let me use white which is the letter F six times and that gives me the white color. Replace the text by selecting the text and typing your text over it. Let me type some more text to complete the poster and for the rest of the text I will use the second font that is available to me which is Sosans Pro. I have completed all the text that I wanted to put in this poster, the club name, club details, the meeting details and I am now ready for the next step. The third design element is the logo and we can get the logo from the Toastmasters website. As mentioned, go to the resources, the brand portal and the logo and design elements. You are allowed to use all of the logos that are available on this page and most logos are provided as either JPG or PNG. When it comes to Canva, I highly recommend that we use the PNG files because those have a transparent background and work better with Canva. Let's pick up a color logo by clicking on this link and here's a very easy way of transferring this logo from the Toastmasters website to the Canva poster. Right click anywhere on this image and select copy image. Next, go to your Canva design, click control V. The logo is now inserted in your design. Resize it using the corner handles, move it to a desired location. The logo is done. One very important constriction of the logo is that the logo should have clear space around it. This would not be acceptable because there is no enough space on the left side of the logo. Similarly, you cannot place the logo on anything other than a clear background that is Toastmasters branded color. This is perfect. One final note about the logo. You don't have to go to the Toastmasters website every time you need the logo. When you copy the logo using control V in Canva, the logo is automatically placed in your Canva upload folder. If you click on the uploads, you will find that the logo is now available for you for future use. The next time that you need this logo, you can simply click on it and drop it into your design. The final brand element for Toastmasters design is the images. If we click on the brand manual and download the manual, the guidelines for images is defined in the manual and the images should reflect the Toastmasters environment where people look engaged, empowered and supported, such as in a meeting, presentations, speeches and so on. The best images that you can use in your Toastmaster material is images from your own meeting. Images of your members delivering speeches or images of your club members, these are the best images to use for your PR material. To add images from your computer, simply click on the upload button and click upload media. Choose the option device. Navigate to the folder which has your images and select the image. This will load the image in Canva. You can now click on it, move it around, resize it and you are done. The second alternative is to go to the Toastmasters website and select professional images. You will find hundreds of images available on the website, browse through the collection available to you and once you find the image that you like to use in your poster, click on this download button to download the image to your PC. You have a choice of different resolutions to use. For example, if you want only a medium resolution image, select and download. The image is now on your PC. To use the downloaded image, follow the same steps. Click upload media, click device. Navigate to the download folder where your image has been downloaded and click open. The image is now available for you to use. Click on the image and the image will be now in your poster. Move it around. If you don't want one of the images, click on it and then click this button to delete. If you want this image to be placed behind, click on it and then click position and move backwards. Feel free to add other elements such as shapes, text, images, but do make sure that all of those elements are in compliance with the brand guidelines as mentioned earlier. Once you're satisfied with your design, click on the download button and you have options to download it in different formats such as PNG which has a high quality image, JPG or even as a PDF. You can directly share this design to various social media sites by clicking on these three dots and choosing one of the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. To make this training practical, I will build this poster from scratch. It's not a very complicated poster, but it has most of the elements that I want to cover in this training. One of the problems that we face when we are creating Toastmaster brand compliant content is to remember the precise color codes. Instead of remembering and typing the color code every time, we can use the feature of brand kit that is available in Canva. To access the brand kit, go to the homepage of Canva and you will find the brand kit on the left hand side. Click on it. To use the full features of the brand kit, you need to upgrade to a pro account. But with a free account also, you can store up to three colors in the brand kit and that's what we are going to do. I will store the three primary colors of the brand in the brand kit, which is the cool grey, true maroon and loyal blue. To add the color, click on the plus sign and type the color of cool grey, which is A9 B2 B1 and the color is set. Click the plus sign for the second color. Let's enter the true maroon 7 7 2 4 3 2 and the color is set. Click plus again and let's set this to loyal blue, which is 004165 and that's all we can store in the brand colors with your free account. If you try to add the fourth color, it will ask you to upgrade to the pro account. With the colors set, let's go and create a new design and to do that, click create design and choose the type of design that you want to create. I want to create a Facebook post. So let me type Facebook and it gives me a list of Facebook specific designs. I want to create a Facebook post, so I will select this. To set the background color for this design, click anywhere and click on this color button. You can see that the three colors that I have defined in the brand palette are now accessible to us with a click of a button. Our reference poster, which is here, has a white background. So let me go back to my design and set the background to white. To do that, click anywhere on the design and click the color button. The white color is available in the default colors. If it is not, you can type the color code of white, which is the letter F six times and click on it. Let's move on to the text and the fonts that we can use in this design. If I go to my reference poster, I have a text here which says capital speakers and text masters. Let's create that first. Click on the text option in Canva and choose one of the text options, heading, subheading or text. It doesn't matter. Let me click on add a heading and type the text. Resize the text by holding one of the corner circles. You can increase the width of the text by holding the side handles. The text box place your mouse anywhere till you see this cross sign and then move the text to the desired location. As we learn from the previous video, a Toastmaster branded font in Canva can be either Montserrat or it can be Soussence Pro. Let me make this Montserrat. Click on the arrow and locate the font from the font's list. You can also quickly search for the font by typing the name of the font and selecting from the list. You can increase the size of the font by clicking on the plus sign and decrease it by clicking on the minus sign. If you want the font to be of a specific size, let's say 25, you can simply type the number and the text will be changed to that size. I want to change the color of the text to loyal blue to do that. Click on this button and since the loyal blue is already defined in our brand palette, all I have to do is click on it. If I want to make the text bold, I can click on the bold button. If I want to make it italic, click on the italics button to remove the italics. Simply click on the italics again. Let's add some shapes to our design. If you look at a poster, it contains a number of shapes, a border, another shape here, a star shape and this line. To add the shapes to our design, click elements, scroll down till you find shapes and select see all. This will show you all the available shapes. Let's start with a border. I will create a border with this shape to get the right size border. We can resize the shape, move it to the corner, extend it to cover the top, the left. Add the same shape, resize it and since I want the shape to my right and at the bottom, I will rotate the shape 180 degrees, move it to the corner and extend the shape top and to the left. Change the color of the second shape to loyal blue and our border is done. Next I will drop this shape, move it to the left and resize it. This shape is made up of two colors and I can change both the colors. I want the top color to be cool gray. Click on this color which is currently loyal blue and change it to cool gray and the bottom color I want it to be loyal blue. The next shape I will add is a star shape to highlight some text, resize it and set the color to happy yellow. Since I don't have the happy yellow color in my brand palette, I'll have to type it which is F2DF74. Click on the color. The next shape I want to add is a line. Let me click on all the lines and choose the first one, move it, size it and set the color to cool gray. You can add more shapes to create interesting designs in your poster. Most of the shapes available in Canva are brand compliant because we can change their colors to one of the brand palette colors. We're not going to be using any of the colorful elements that are available in Canva because those would not be brand compliant. The next element that we can add to our design are frames. Frames allow you to add images within a specific shape. Let me add this shape to my design, resize it, move it and change the border color to true maroon. Within this frame, I want to add an image. To insert a new image, go to uploads and select upload media, choose device and select an image from your computer. Let's say I want to select this image, select open and the image will be uploaded in Canva. To use this image, click on it, hold the image with your mouse and move it to the frame. To remove the image, we can use this delete option to remove the image from the frame. One of the features available in the pro version of Canva is the ability to remove the background from an image with a click of a button. For example, if I want to remove all the background from this image, all I have to do is click on effects, select the background remover option. But since this is a free version of Canva, I use a website called remove.bg to achieve the same result. To remove the background, go to remove.bg, select on upload image and choose the image from your PC and it will automatically remove all the background from the image. Click on download, go back to Canva and select uploads and upload the image without the background. This is the image without the background. To use this image in my design, first let me remove this, click on this image, hold the mouse key and drop it inside the frame. Next, I need a logo and an image. In my previous video, I have already explained the process of getting the logo and the images from the Toastmasters website. I already have the logo uploaded in Canva, all I have to do is click on it, resize it to an appropriate size and place it where I want it. The same applies to the image. I have already uploaded the image and it's available here. Click on it, resize it, place it where you want. A poster is getting almost ready. All that is remaining in this poster is to type the rest of the text. If we look at our original poster, we have all these text boxes with different colors and font sizes. What I will now do is quickly type all the text boxes making sure that my font is either Montserrat or Source Sans Pro. I've typed all the text that I need. Now let's do some cleaning up. Canva provides all the tools to help you to align precisely. If you take any object, for example, this text box and if you move it around, colored guidelines will appear to help you to align this object in relation to other objects in your design. For example, if I want it precisely in the center, I can move it till I see this center guideline. If I move it down, I will see a horizontal guideline. This indicates that this text box is precisely in the center both horizontally and vertically. If I move this object next to other objects, the guidelines will appear when these objects are precisely aligned. Let's make both these text boxes, the club name and the club details, right align. And to do that, I can click on this button and keep clicking on this button till I get the alignment to the right. Same thing I can do for this text box. If I move this text box to the right, I know now both of these are perfectly aligned to the right. To convert text into bullet list, click on the text box and choose this option list. And we can have list as bullet list, numbered list or no list. Let me choose bullet list to rotate any text. All we have to do is click on the text, select this button and rotate it to the desired angle, can resize it, place it precisely where you want. The same thing can be done here. To move an object front or back, we can click on the object and click position and say forward. If I want to move it backwards, I can click backwards. And that completes a poster. Not very difficult, is it? When you have multiple elements in your design, we can group them together. For example, the star shape and this text. To group multiple objects together, click on one object and then hold the shift key and click on the next object. Canva will highlight both the objects and you will get a new option on top here called group. Click on it and these two objects are now grouped together. The advantage is, when I move the object, both the objects move together. If I resize it, both the objects resize together. That's amazing. I could do the same thing for the heading, which is made up of this logo, the club name and the club details. First click on the logo, hold the shift key, then click on the club name. Next click on the club details. All three objects are selected. If I click on the group button, all the three elements are grouped together and can be moved and resized as one object. To ungroup, just click on the object and the option on top changes to ungroup. Click and now the objects are ungrouped and they can now be moved and resized independently. As you continue enhancing your design, you can lock those elements that you are satisfied with so that you accidentally don't move them around or change them. To lock an object, click on the object and click this button to lock. An object that is locked cannot be moved nor can it be changed. As you can see, all the editing options for this object have disappeared. I cannot change the font, I cannot change the colors, but if I click on the other object which is not locked, I can see all the editing options. To unlock an object, click on the lock object and unlock and all the editing options become available to you. You can create clickable links in your design. The only caveat is that you should save your design as a PDF file for the links to work. If you save it as an image such as a JPG or a PNG, those links would not work. You can add links to any object in your design. For example, if you want this logo to be hyperlinked to the TOSmasters website, www.tosmasters.org, all you have to do is click on this link option and enter your link. In this case, let me type www.tosmasters.org and click apply. If I want to make this text box as a hyperlink to a section of the TOSmasters website which has information on speechcraft, let's say this page, I can just copy this link with Ctrl C, go to my design, click the link option and paste the link here and click apply. It underlines the text to indicate that this is a hyperlink. Let me save this as a PDF file and show you how this links work. Click on this arrow to download our design and in the file type, choose PDF. Click download. Next, I will open the PDF file. Now you can see when I take my mouse over the logo, it turns into a hyperlink. Let me click on it and it takes me to the TOSmasters website. Similarly, when I move my mouse to this element which has speechcraft and I click on it, it takes me to the section of the website which has the information on speechcraft. You can add any number of hyperlinks in your design and as long as you save it as a PDF, anybody who opens that PDF file will be able to access those hyperlinks by clicking on the right place within your design. Canva allows you to add transparency to any element. You do that by clicking on this option, transparency and we can change the transparency of an object from zero, which means it is completely transparent to 100, which means it is not transparent. When it comes to designing TOSmaster brand compliant content, you have to be very careful how you use the transparency. In this example, if I was to make this object transparent, it changes the color of the object and the color is no longer brand compliant color. For this reason, avoid using transparencies on objects that are brand compliant. If you must use transparencies, the only object that you can safely use it is the image, not the logo, but this image. If I make it transparent, it allows me to place other elements on top of the image. Canva allows you to create multiple pages of your design. You may want to do that if you are creating a slideshow, a presentation, movie or a newsletter. To add a new page to your design, click this button which says add page. The other way to add a page is to duplicate a page. For example, if I want a copy of the first page, click this button which says duplicate page. When you are working with multiple pages, you can quickly locate the right page by switching to the grid view and it will show you all the active pages that are available. Click on the page that you want and it will switch to that page. You can also use the zoom option to see more or less of your design. Click on the zoom. You can choose the percentage of the zoom or click on fit to fit the design within your page. To delete a page, click on the delete button and that is how you work with multiple pages. The next item I want to cover is gradients and gradients can be accessed through the elements option. If you scroll down, you will find gradients here. Click on see all. Like transparencies, we need to be careful about the gradients. As of now, Toastmasters has approved of just one gradient made up of loyal blue and a color called digital loyal blue. To use this gradient, choose one of the elements that supports two colors. Something like this. Click on the first color and choose the loyal blue. Next, click on the second color and type in the code of the digital loyal blue, which is 016094. Click on it and this is a Toastmaster approved gradient. You can move it around. You can resize it. You can even use it as a background. Just move it to the corner and resize it till it covers the entire page and you can start building on this design. In Canva, it's very easy to convert your design into an animation. To create an animation, click anywhere outside of the image. To animate your design, click on this button animate. You get several options for animation. Let's try the block animation. Some of the animations will only work if you have a pro account. If you want to remove the animation, click on none. If you enable animation for your design, by default, Canva will create a 5 second video. If you want it for a longer period, click on it and increase the time. For example, to 10 seconds. When Canva exports this video, it will be exactly 10 seconds duration. If you have multiple pages, you can set different durations for each page based on the contents in that page. And that's a great way of creating a slideshow. To preview how the animation will look, you can click on this play button. When you're done, click close. Once you convert your design into an animation, you can think of adding music or videos to make it more impactful. To add music, click on the audio button. Canva comes bundled with copyright free music, which means if you use the music that is available in Canva, you can safely use it without any issues with copyright laws. Most of the music tracks require a pro account, but you will find some free that you can use. For example, to stop the music, click here. Since we have set this slide to 10 seconds and the music track is longer, you can choose which part of the track it will play. And to do that, click on this colored area and move it to any area within the song that you want to play. You can also upload your own music. Click on the upload button and you can choose audio and upload an audio track from your computer. When it comes to audio and video, make sure you have the right to use that in your design. You should not use copyrighted music or video clips unless you have rights to use them in the design. I have purchased some music to upload it. Click on upload media. Click device. Navigate to the folder that has your music and click open. The music is now available in Canva. Click on it and it will replace the music. The same thing applies to video. You can either upload your own video or you can click on videos and choose one of the videos that is available in Canva. Since we are focused on designing brand compliant content, most of the videos available in Canva might not be suitable for us. To use one of the videos, click on it, resize it, move it to the right location and you are done. Observe that the total length here now shows 22 seconds and the reason is because our first page has a duration of 5 seconds and if you go to the second page which has the video, this video is 17 seconds in length and that's how it becomes 22 seconds. If I click on the preview button, that covers animations, audio and video. It's easy to share your Canva design with others either to view it or to edit it. To share the design, click on the share button. You can share your design by typing in the email address and Canva will send an email notification to the person with a link to your design. You can add a personal message that will go along with the link. Hey Priscilla, check out this design and suggest any edits. If you want the person to be part of your team for future sharing, you can enable this option and then click send button. The invite has been sent and it's waiting for confirmation from Priscilla. I can click on this arrow and decide whether Priscilla can edit this design, she can only view it or if I want to remove her from the team. Once the other person clicks on the link, Canva will show you Priscilla is now online looking at this design and maybe even editing it. The other way to share your design without going through the email process is to click on the share button and click copy link. Before copying the link, decide whether you want those who have the link to edit your design or to only view it. To only view it, click on the arrow and choose share a link to watch. If you want them to edit the design, choose share a link to edit. Copy the link. The link is now copied into your clipboard. You can share the link via messenger, WhatsApp, email, whatever. Can you create a great looking Toastmaster brand compliant newsletter? Absolutely. To create a newsletter, go to the homepage, select create a design and choose newsletter. Unlike a poster, it will be very hard to create a newsletter from scratch. The best approach would be to choose one of these templates available in Canva and build up on it. Choose a template that is as close to the brand guidelines as possible, for example this one. You can bring the designs page by page or choose to bring the entire template for modifications. Let's select both pages. Now we can start applying the brand guidelines to this design. This template is just a bunch of elements grouped together. For example, in this case, it's just two text boxes. Let's start with the color first. Let's change the yellow color to loyal blue to do that. Click on this object, click the color and change to loyal blue. Do the same thing for this line and this object. Since loyal blue is a dark color, all the text needs to be changed to a light color. Click on the text and change the color of text to let's say white. Do the same thing here. If I look at the fonts used in this design, I can see that they are made up of Montserrat light and Oswald. All I have to do is change the fonts now to Montserrat and Source Sans Pro. The best way to do that is to click on the object and since it's made up of two separate text boxes, the fastest way to do that would be to ungroup them first. Change this to Montserrat, resize it and change this to Source Sans Pro. Do the same to the rest of the text. Next, change the image to a brand compliant image. Let me remove this one and replace it with an image of a Toastmaster Club. Change all the text and you are done. Go to the next page and do the same thing. You can add as many pages as you want and choose different designs for each page. And that's all there is to it in creating newsletters. I hope you found this video useful. I certainly had fun creating it. Creating Toastmaster brand compliant content isn't very hard. All you need to do is assemble the resources that are already provided to you. Sometime we feel constricted because we want to create more. We want to do something that is not part of the brand guidelines. You can certainly do that if you are a designer and if you have the creativity and you believe that what you are creating is really good. Create the design. Send it to Toastmasters at brand.toastmasters.org giving you a justification why you believe this design will be helpful in your club, in your district and the team they will review it and give you the response. But for most of us, all we want to do is use the resources that have been provided to us and quickly create content whenever it is required. I wish you all the best in creating excellent Toastmaster brand compliant content.