Design – Lit World Interviews

Hi all:

I usually bring you reviews and random things, but a post by our own Jo Robinson about back covers got me thinking about images and how little skill I have at manipulating them. I’ve tried a number of programmes but find that other than the very basics, if I try to do anything a bit fancier my mind boggles and the results are less than stellar.

One day visiting a post (I think, it was a while back), I came across ‘Canva’. I wrote a post about it in my own blog and I thought that although I’m sure most people manage better than me, some might be interested in checking an option that requires very little training.

Here it goes. I’m transcribing from my original post:

I’m not an image person at all, and I decided to try and keep it simple. Thankfully, through another post I discovered something called Canva. You’ve probably already heard about it, but just in case…

Canva offers you the option of using their templates to create all kinds of things, from covers for CDs, cards, invitations, Twitter, Pinterest or Facebook posts (so you don’t need to worry about the different sizes of images required), banners, blog posts…

Like this one I prepared earlier.

You can change colours, letter sizes and types, upload and use your own images, crop, use filters, etc. They have a fair amount of free resources and quite a large amount of paying ones (it’s $1 per image or paying template or element). Then whatever you make you can download as image or PDF. And it also saves it there.

And the best thing about it is that it offers you a variety of design tutorials where you can learn how to use the different features. And those are short and practical (it gives you 5 or 6 exercises to do that take only a few minutes and you have the option of watching a very brief video if you don’t know how to do it).

Having tried a few of the programmes for manipulating images and being quite clumsy with images, I find this one easy to move around. Do give it a go. I used it to create the slides that I put together in the video (that and images Lourdes Vidal, the designer and I had considered for the cover of the book).

And talking about images, I had promised you to share a few more of the images my friend Christelle took in Florence, as both her camera and her skills are much better than mine.

So here….