Canva Gal

I finally got the Canva Pro account a week or two ago and I’m loving it!

Who knew being able to export a PNG with a transparent background could lead to the possibility of creating this little fella here?

Isn’t he a cutie?! All made with their free stock media too…

And I like the fact that you can choose which page to export too. Oh and the curved text feature.

Which allows me to create this lil lady here…

And there’s even a way to share copies of files without changing the ‘Master’ copy. That part is genius.

If you’re not great with the technical elements to design then Canva is a great place to start- they have free option too, just less flexibility with the free option.

I’ve been playing with fonts too and uploading them into Canva. I wish there was some way of categorising or sorting them once you’ve uploaded them, that would be helpful. Like, having different branding sections of the upload page, but oh well. You can’t have everything!

Not quite at the sell your font level yet…but this is a vast improvement from my first one a few posts ago, right?!

The kerning is a little off. Kerning. I love that word, it means the spacing between the letters (I think!).

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My First Font! (It’s quite bad!!)

Isn’t it funny how you start with one idea or purpose in mind and then end up with something totally different! Like, you start down one path and end up going in a completely different direction.

I’ve been looking at a lot of things to do with digital downloads and design software lately, getting to grips with design tools and elements and trying to figure out vectors for drawing and designing (I have NO graphic design experience or qualifications whatsoever by the way).

And then one day, after watching so many design videos on Youtube, I found a few videos about making your own fonts and I was hooked.

There are a few options as to how to make your own font, I should add I’m only looking at free ones or maybe pay a few pounds for an app. I’m not looking to spend thousands on professional design software!

There are apps such as ifontmaker or there’s Calligraphr. Which is what I used.

You sign up for a free account (or you can buy a paid one which gives you more characters to choose from – the free version only gives you 75 characters which isn’t very much, so if you wanted to make fonts to sell, then you would have to create a few more characters than 75).

Then you download a template, import the template into an app such as Procreate, which is what I used, write your letters or characters, export as a PNG and reupload it back to Calligraphr, mess around a bit with spacing and letter height and then create your font.

Once you download your font from Calligraphr, you can add it to your design software, I uploaded mine to my Canva account and I wrote the page below in Canva.

Now, this might sound like a lot of back and forth, it certainly looks it when I come to write all this out, but believe me it’s not. The whole process was quick and easy and a lot of fun.

But I now realise how terrible my handwriting is!! :O

Proving I had NO IDEA what to write when making this!!

And the pictures are my hand drawings from Procreate too. I can’t believe how the last month has been WHOOSH of technical stuff.

I dont know where this saying comes from but I feel it’s appropriate for me right now:

‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know!’

Want to have a go at creating your own font? Head over to Calligraphr it’s really easy.

You could create a birthday card or type a letter for someone if you wanted. Maybe even make an e-book with it. Or even sell it if it was any good.