The ability to create custom animations has continued to improve inside the Canva Design Editor, so this post will be a deep dive into Canva Animations. Without further ado, let's hop in.

Not only does Canva make it incredibly easy for you to create graphics that stand out from the crowd, they also make it so much easier for you to animate your designs. There's a new feature called Canva Magic Animate that I will demo in this tutorial but there are also some other incredible ways that you can add movement to your Canva designs. Using AI, Magic Animate is going to analyze your design, and it will choose motion that matches your content, your font choices, images and colors. You don't need to have any special skills in order for you to animate designs in Canva and I want to show you multiple applications so that you can utilize this technique, not just in social media graphics, but also in your presentations.

This is a great example of how I use the animation features within Canva to help me make my Instagram account more engaging. So I did a challenge this year called Start a YouTube channel in a week. As part of the marketing strategy for the challenge, I would constantly update people on Instagram to let them know who has signed up for it and how many spots were left for them to be able to join. Some people do like the post-it note thing on the wall, I decided I'll just make an Instagram story graphic and then post that to my Instagram stories. So if you look at the top, this is a 15-second animation. Not only does it animate the elements, it also animates the text. Now I added that little green box in the top right-hand corner for me to put a clickable link sticker in my Instagram Stories so that people could click from a story and go and sign up on my Flodesk checkout page. Any Canva design can technically be animated, so think of animations within Canva more as a feature than a specific type of template.

To animate your design, either click on the entire page or click on an element on the page. I am going to select the text box with all of the names because I'd like to animate that versus it just appearing as a block of text. So I'll click on that element, and at the very top, you're going to see that animate button. From there, you will see that because this is a text box, and it recognizes it, it's going to give me options specific to what text can do. So it'll provide me with some suggestions, typewriter, ascend, shift, and as I hover over the animations, it's going to preview it on the right-hand side. If you continue to scroll, there are some other general animations that you can do to move the entire thing as one block. You can do some add on effects like flicker, pulse, rotate, and even wiggle. So if you find yourself in a situation where you want a custom animation and you don't like the effects that are available, you can click on create an animation. So all you need to do for that is to simply select the element and drag it around on the canvas, on the path that you would like for that text element to go.

Instead of it wiggling or fading in, maybe you want to see this go up and down, and then maybe off the screen. So whatever path that you want, you would start to drag it, and you can see the dotted lines will show the path. And then we're going to drag it off to the side. So when you finish, you will see the text follow the path that I created. You can smooth it out. You can steady it. You can even decide on the speed. So maybe you want it to move faster, or maybe you want it to also flicker and wiggle. I mean, there's so much that you can do now.

Here is actually a little animation that I forgot to mention when we talked about Canva Presentations. Within a presentation, you can now select an element and have it appear on the click. So imagine like in PowerPoint, where you could time out when certain elements appeared on your slide. In the past, if you wanted to create that effect where text boxes would be revealed over time. You had to duplicate the entire slide and then add the text on the new slide. Here, all you need to do is toggle this on, and that will cause your text element to now appear on click. So that's something new, super minor, but also super useful so I wanted to call attention to that. Regardless of what you do, when you finish, if you like it, you can go ahead and download it, and you'll need to download it either as an MP4 or as a GIF for it to actually move. If you save it as a photo, none of your animations are going to appear in your file.

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Now that I've shown you how to use Canva Animations for a social media graphic. Let's open up one of my slide decks and I'll show you how to apply animations to your presentation. Each month, I host a workshop with a subject matter expert, and in December, I hosted a workshop with Christy Price. So one of the things that I like to do at the beginning of the call is a little bit of housekeeping because sometimes people are new to my community because they're popping in with the speaker link. So in this case, I gave Christy a link to share specifically with her community, to try to bring in some new faces and share what we're doing. And so they don't quite know how I structure my calls, and it's a little bit different than what most people do. So we have a simple slide deck here where I give some basic announcements, I introduce who I am, I talk about our paid members. I reminded them that the holiday party was coming up, so just to make sure that they were ready and save the date. And then I told them more information about upcoming workshops in January and other virtual events that they could attend if they became a member.

Now, when I present this in the Streamyard, I typically just save it as a PDF and I don't add any special animations, but if I was going to share my screen and share it from Canva, animations would be a great fit. So to add some animations here, I'm going to click in the gap between my two slides, and that's going to reveal the option to add a transition. I would consider the transitions to be animations. You can dissolve, you can slide but one of my favorite options is the Color Wipe. I just think it has such a nice effect. So we're going to add that Color Wipe feature, and then we're going to apply it to all pages. Another feature that's really nice is match and move. And that's a really good one if you essentially want to create the look of keyframe animation. That's next level. Feel free to use that if you like, but you don't have to.

I applied the Color Wipe animation in between all my slides, and now you can see that notated here. However, the slides themselves are not animated. So to do that, we're going to click on our slide, and then we're going to click on the top and select Page. From there, we're going to click on Magic Animate, which is going to scan this particular design and give me suggestions for animations. The recommended style will be at the top, but I can also select one of the alternative styles if I prefer so I like to hover and preview them to see what best fits my brand. And I think I'm a fan of the digital format, so I'm going to apply that animation to that slide. If I wanted to use Magic Animate for each specific slide, I could do the same thing, select the slide, hit Magic Animate, and it would create an animation specifically for that particular slide.

When you're ready to see how your animations are going to appear, just click on present at the top. It'll start with whatever slide was last seen in the Design Editor. But you can easily go to the beginning by clicking on the arrows here. So you can see that Color Wipe effect is going to progress between the slides and each specific slide is animated. I just think it creates a really nice effect that makes your presentations more engaging. You could simply fade between the slides, but I think it's another way to help people to just stay alert and to stay on top of it. Because, you know, listening to someone talk, especially if you're not seeing their face, can drag on and on, so if you can leverage Canva to create engaging graphics and engaging slide decks, you can actually improve outcomes for your students, because your instructional design is next level. So whether you are a teacher in person or you're a teacher online, I think Canva Animations is a fantastic thing for you to master so that you can take your education to the next level.

Thanks so much for reading this post. If you don't already have Canva Pro and you would like to get access to a free 30-day trial while supporting the channel, go to the lashondabrown.com/canva. Until next time tata for now.

CANVA ANIMATIONS Made Easy

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