In another tutorial, we talked about the video background remover. But there's another way for you to add movement to your content, and that's by creating your own GIFs, you can now save a GIF with a transparent background. So I'm going to show you how to make that happen so you can spice up your email marketing today. Without further ado, let's hop it.

If you've received an email where there's any aspect of the graphics moving, more than likely, that image was dropped in as a GIF. So you have the ability to save any Canva design as a GIF, but there are a few things for you to take into consideration. So while you can use the GIF maker within Canva absolutely free, there are some Pro abilities that you may want to leverage. So if you don't have Canva Pro and you would like access to a free 30-day trial, just go to lashondabrown.com/canva.

This may seem really random, but I absolutely love the SoundCloud banner template within Canva. And the reason why is it allows you to create a graphic that's very narrow and very wide. So when you're creating a GIF and you want to maybe draw attention to an upcoming workshop or webinar or challenge, this is a very easy way for you to add a little spice to your emails without taking up a ton of space. I'm just going to use this one here that says Christmas tunes, Holiday songbook, and it's just a very simple graphic. I’m going to click on customize this template, and show you how easy it is for me to drop this into a Flodesk email. In order to make this graphic more compelling in a static email, we need to add some movement. We'll accomplish this by utilizing Magic Animate.

To do that, we're going to click on the Design, locate animate at the top and on the left-hand side, instead of leaving element selected, we want to animate the entire page. When you do that, you'll have the ability to click on Magic Animate. It's going to scan your graphic and give you some style options, so you can choose the recommended style, or you can choose one of the alternatives by hovering at the bottom. So you may want to kind of preview all of them to see which one kind of addresses the look and feel that you want. And actually, I like the Homemade animation for what this is. Now that we've applied the animation, we want to preview it by clicking in the top right-hand corner. And if everything looks good, now we need to go ahead and save the design. So we're going to close this out and click on share in the top right-hand corner. Then we're going to click on download. The default will be an MP4 video, but if we import that into Flodesk, it's not going to move. So instead, we want to locate GIF underneath it with no sound.

Here's a big thing I want you to pay attention to the size of the actual design. It may happen based on the number of elements that you have in your design, that you will need to actually drag your design to the left to make the size smaller in order for the design to import into Flodesk. So just keep that in mind. What we're going to do is just do it at 0.6, and then we're going to download it. If I wanted to use a transparent background, I could do that simply by selecting it. So once it creates the GIF, we're going to go into Flodesk, and we're going to drop it into place.

Really quick before I hop into the email builder, I don't want to assume that you even know what Flodesk is. Flodesk is the email marketing software that I use in my business. So if you are a member of the Bootstrap Biz Club, which is my free email community, then this is a platform that I'm using to make those emails. If you are looking for a solution and you want to get a free trial of Flodesk, you can go to lashondabrown.com/flodesk, you'll get access to a free 30-day trial and 50% off your first year. So just want to make sure you know that is an option if you need it.

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One of the reasons why I love this platform so much is because of how the graphics look. So we're just going to take one of these sales emails, maybe this countdown timer sale. We're going to click on a view details and just customize it. With any email marketing software, you should have the ability to upload a GIF. Within Flodesk, this is how you would do it. You just simply click on the plus sign where you want to drop in the element, and you want to select image. From there, you'll click on the image block, and you can see on the right-hand side what the parameters are. It cannot be over 2000 pixels in each dimension. So if we go back to Canva, we can bump it up technically, to 0.8, but if it's at full size, it is too large in this dimension. So we're going to go back to 0.8, which will increase the quality of the design.

While we're here. I want to show you that you can also add a GIF directly from Giphy. So if you're not creating your own from scratch, and you want to drop in a meme. Here's a way that you can do that without having to go to another site. Once it gets uploaded to Flodesk, you're actually going to see the GIF move in real-time. So what I could do, in this case is, instead of having this as a header to my email, maybe the Christmas sale that's animated appears at the top. So this is how it would actually look in an email, which I think is so much fun. You can see, if we click on mobile preview, this is how it would look on a phone. This could be a strategy that you implement to market your upcoming events and just draw a little bit more attention to what you're marketing in your emails. If you want to utilize the same ability to animate your logo, that's something you could do as well.

You may find yourself in a situation where you actually want to create a GIF with a transparent background. So in this case, we're going to add another page, delete the background, and bring in an asset that I know already has a transparent background. So what we'll do is scroll down here and choose the Bootstrap Creators logo, and then we want to position it in the center. We will select it at the top and we're going to remove the animation from the previous design, click again, and just animate it as a photo. So when you do this, it’s going to animate just this element and nothing else.

We can play around with some of the options that are available. There is ink or digital, it's kind of a nice effect. Let's do digital. Once we apply the animation you can see, we have the ability to customize it just a bit. Then we're going to click on download in the top right-hand corner and we want to make sure that only the current page is selected. Again, we want a transparent background. So we're going to click on Download, and it will create the animated logo for us to overlay on any other design.

Say, for instance, you were in a situation where you were creating a presentation and you wanted your logo to be animated on top of your presentation slides. That would be a great application. So we're going to go to upload and we're actually going to upload the file that we just created. It's going to show up under videos because there is some movement. When it finishes uploading, we're going to drop it directly into the presentation. Now you can see because it has a transparent background, I can put it on top of a background that is already there, and it will animate on its own.

I hope you found this tutorial valuable, and I encourage you to play around with this, to creatively add movement, not just to your emails, but other documents as well, to add more visual interest and keep your audience engaged. Thanks so much for watching this video. 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 lashondabrown.com/canva. Until next time tata, for now.

How to Create Your Own GIFs using Canva

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