Using Canva for Your TpT Store

Grow with Angie and April: A Podcast for Teacherpreneurs

In this episode, Angie and April are talking about how they use Canva to save time while working with the design aspect of their TpT stores. Join in on the conversation in our mastermind group at www.growwithusmastermind.com. In the last podcast episode, we talked all about hiring for your TpT store. It was a pretty serious topic and covered a lot of information. This time, we’re jumping into a fun topic—playing around in Canva! We’re going to share with you the ways that we use Canva for our TpT stores, but we’d love for you to get in the Mastermind group and share how you’re using it. We’re always looking for new ideas. All about Canva If you’ve never heard of Canva, it’s a graphic design platform you can use to create pretty much any type of image you need. In the past, we used Photoshop or PowerPoint to create all our images, but it could be complicated and took a lot of work to make it look just right. Canva makes it simple and easy. I tried Canva when it first came out and didn’t like it. They had some templates but it was very limited and you had to pay to use their images. I quit using it, but they made updates to it over time and people started talking about it a lot. The platform had advanced a lot and when I came back to it, it was so easy to figure out. Is the paid Canva plan worth the investment? This is a question we get asked a lot from TpTers. There is a lot that comes with the free plan. You have access to some of the templates and images on the platform. There are also some options for collaborating with teams. But the paid account is so awesome and we think everyone should be using it. There are a lot of things we pay for and this is one of the things that we use almost every single day. It’s so cheap. The current pricing is around $120/year and that allows you to include five people on your account. April has her whole team in Canva which makes it really easy to work together on projects. What we love about Canva Folders We love the way the Canva paid account allows us to store images and graphics in folders. You can create folders for product launches that include all your templates for social media, slide decks for webinars and mini-trainings. Then, when you launch again next year, you have everything you need in one place. It’s all there and organized. Templates Templates help make the entire graphic design fast and easy. I love that you can make a template, put a placeholder in it and then easily drop an image in it when you’re ready. It saves a lot of time not having to recreate the template over and over again. All you need to do is switch the images. I can switch whole product lines in less than an hour with templates for social images, previews, thumbnails, pins, and the teacher manuals in my resources. You can create your own templates to save and share with the paid plan, but there are also tons of pre-designed templates you can use. Canva also has templates that make it easy to create mockups of your resources. They have templates with tablets and computer screens you can drop your resource photos into. You can even search “mockups” in the templates to see the templates they already have created. You can also search templates by your brand color codes. This makes it really easy to find pre-created templates that are already using your colors. You’ll probably still need to do some tweaking, but it can speed the process up. To search by color, you just use hit the filter image by the search box. Branding With the paid Canva account, you can store all of your brand