Transcription
You know what time it is? It's Canva tutorial time! In this video, you'll learn how to create a vision board with Canva to crush your goals in 2023 and get better at graphic design at the same time. Ready? Let's do this!
Hi, my lovely people! It's Natalia, and welcome back to my channel where I help you create better content and grow on social media. Today I'm bringing you a fun little Canva tutorial to practice your design skills and get more intentional in 2023. At the same time, we're going to create a Canva vision board so that you have a constant reminder of your goals right in front of your eyes.
Before we jump into the tutorial, however, I want to explain why creating a vision board can be so good for what you're working on this year, how to plan it before you design so you can have a clear image of your goals, and once we created it, how to print it and where you can display it to work best for you. As always, I'm including the timestamps down in the description box and right here too, so feel free to skip around to the parts that interest you the most.
Alright, let's talk about why you should even bother creating a vision board. So, a little bit of a forward: why create a vision board? Well, the most important benefit is that you have a strong, tangible representation of your goals. It serves as a constant reminder of what you're working towards in life. When you display your board in a visible place (more on that later), you can develop tunnel vision because what you see around you all the time shifts to the forefront of your mind and becomes your focus.
For me, a vision board is also an accountability check for those shaky days when I feel like giving up. Of course, all I've mentioned is purely anecdotal, and there aren't many studies done that tell us visualizing our goals actually helps us achieve them. That being said, I still want to include some scientific data here to potentially improve our vision board's effects, starting with the act of writing down your goals.
The study conducted by psychology professor Dr. Gail Matthews at the Dominican University in California looked at goal setting with 149 participants. It turns out if you write your goals down, you're 42% more likely to actually achieve them. That's why including my key goals on the board in actual words (you'll see what it looks like in a moment).
The second study I want to mention is one done by Shelly Taylor and Lean Pham at the University of California Los Angeles. They divided a large group of college students into two. The first group was asked to visualize themselves excitedly walking up to a board and seeing their final result list with an A grade by their name and then to repeat the process a few times in the week before their actual exam. The second group was asked to imagine the process of studying for the exam in detail, for example, by sitting at their desk or bed studying the chapters and revising the lecture notes, again repeating the process in the days leading up to the exam.
The results were quite interesting. It turns out that the second group visualizing the process performed better at the exam as opposed to the group imagining the outcome. Apart from that, in a separate study from the same researchers, the process of visualizing groups found that working towards their exam was easier.
For this reason, I'm going to include more images showing the performance of tasks rather than the happy outcomes. Another quick note here: we also have very specific clusters of neurons called the reticular activating system in our brain, specifically in the brain stem. It's a bunch of areas alerting us to external cues and mediating how aware, how conscious, or focused we are on them.
Well, given the sheer amount of data that our brains process every second, we can't really take in everything that happens. So, the reticular activating system serves as a filter. When you set a clear intention and decide to pay attention to or focus on something, it's driving you towards it, stimulating you, and almost kind of guiding you on a particular path. This is the main reason why I want to have my vision board in front of me for most of my day.
Okay, enough on the why—I'm definitely geeking out here—so let's move on to our first action step: planning our board. To create a vision board, you have to know what your goals are. You can identify them by dividing your life into areas like personal development, relationships, health, money, or professional life. Then find one to three core goals for each of these areas, and that's the key here: describe why you want to achieve these goals.
Since you won't be able to put all of your goals on the vision board, you need to choose the ones that are the most significant to you. Take your time here and really think about what your most transformational objectives would be if you could only achieve a few of them this year. When you have them, think of the best way to represent them visually. What would stimulate or inspire you to take action the most?
Coming back to the point of focusing on the process rather than the outcome, what would be the activity that you have to do in order to get there? Now, spend a bit of time gathering the images. I like to create a Pinterest board here, but you can also save them on your device if you prefer. To find the best imagery, browse through Pinterest, the Canva library, or use free stock libraries like Unsplash, Pexels, or Burst.
What I love doing is including some of my personal photos in the mix because it helps me imagine myself in this new identity I'm trying to adopt or in the state of flow while working towards these goals.
Alright, we have our plan ready, so it's time to jump into Canva for step number two: designing your vision board. We're on the home page. What you can do to start is to create a design from scratch using the top right corner, but I want to show you a wide variety of different templates that you can start with so that you get inspired and you know what to work with instead of just trying to reinvent the wheel and start with something that's completely blank.
So, what you want to do is go to the templates in the left tab in here, and from here at the top, you can search for something like a vision board or a mood board. I'm just going to go for vision board in here and let's see what Canva shows us.
So, right from the get-go, you can see that we have so many different types of designs. You have vertical ones, you have horizontal ones, so depending on what you're using your vision board for, you can choose the different dimensions. I would highly recommend you use something like an A4 or something more horizontal because this is going to be used for the majority of different devices or it's kind of nicer to maybe display it above your desk that way. But of course, it's up to you which one you prefer to choose.
The reason I prefer to start with the templates from this panel rather than after you've chosen the dimensions for your actual design is because it shows you all the different varieties in here. If you were to create a design that's A4, what your templates tab is going to show is only the A4 designs. If I want to start my design from scratch, I can again just go to the top right corner in here to hit the button create a design, and from here, I can choose the preferred dimensions. I know I want an A4 design, so I can just choose A4.
All of those documents will be horizontal, so just remember these dimensions from here: so it's 210 millimeters by 297 millimeters. I'm just going to go to custom size in here, and I'm going to reverse set. So I'm choosing the millimeters from here, and I have 297 by 210. I can hit create new design like this, and that's going to open up my new design in here.
I'm renaming my design straight away from the top panel in here because I want to make sure that my whole Canva account is, first of all, easily searchable and, second of all, it doesn't create too much of a mess. So I like to do it straight away from the get-go so that I can keep that habit going.
Let's say I want to go for this modern chic vision board in here. I can just click on it, click customize this template. I actually have it open in a separate tab in here, so I can just click on it, and as you can see, it is completely different in terms of the sizing to what I wanted to go for in the A4 format.
If you have a Canva Pro account, you can go to resize here in the top left corner, and you can actually choose the A4 dimensions. That's the one that I've got in here; it's from my recent, so I can just click copy and resize or just resize. Of course, if you want to try Canva Pro for 30 days for free, you can check out my link in the description box. No strings attached—you can always cancel afterward, but I highly recommend it.
Now, in terms of all of you guys who have a free account and don't want to pay for Canva Pro, you can always copy all of those things from here and actually just transfer it—so paste it into your new vision board like this. This is going to have a bit of a different dimension, so make sure you're not clicking away and keeping all of your layers selected.
Now I can just drag it from the corner to make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to adjust it so that it's right in the center, and then I can click away. Now, if I went for any of those elements, I would have to select them again, but this is what I'm happy with, and I can just go and change the color of the background to something at the moment so I can see all of those elements clearly.
Now if you're starting from scratch, you can always go to elements in here. I'm going to just add a page that you can see, and from the elements, you can choose all the different kinds of photos as standalones. You can also go to the frames and the grid section. From the frames, you have all the different beautiful options like this one, for example. I think this actual template uses a lot of those kinds of frames.
But I want to put you up to something a little bit different, and that's the grids panel. So if you go to the grids, you actually see all the different kinds of pre-planned different frames put together by Canva, so you can have a wide variety of kind of closed composition themes in here that you can choose from. All of them are presented as squares, but if I were to choose, let's say this one for example, that's going to kind of attach to your actual design and that's not going to just stay that square, it's going to adjust itself around your dimensions to create the best framing possible.
Now from here, you can also go and include the photos that you want just like that by dragging and dropping it. If you click on those grids in here as well, you can kind of adjust them to maybe include another version as well. A little tip for me, as well, because I know that's what a lot of people are struggling with: if you actually go to elements and choose just the classic square frame from here, a lot of people don't know that this only stays square, but there is an option to actually have that rectangular, and that's from the grids in here again.
So if you want the adjustable frame in a square or rectangular format, go to grids and choose the first one. From here, you'll have the freehand one that you can adjust all you want. So again, I've just copied it from here, and I can just paste it again and maybe adjust it to fit the frame and make something unique to your vision board, and you can just kind of keep adjusting them to fit what vision you've got for your own vision board.
Okay, I'm quickly popping on some of the different photos from the Canva library just like that to demonstrate what you can do with this particular vision board. Of course, if you want to use your own uploads, you can go to this panel in here. Spoiler alert: I have everything included in here from my actual vision board, but I'm going to get to that in a moment.
If you want to search for something specific, of course, you can just search for those photos in here, but I'm just going to add them randomly in here. So we have that kind of finished, and yeah, let's say this is the vision board that I initially want to use. From here, I'm going to just change the background color maybe to something a bit more neutral, a bit more muted.
This is the kind of photo color suggestion from Canva. I highly recommend you use it to keep that more cohesive style. You can click on see all and see all the different kinds of suggested photos. As you can see as well from this photo specifically, you can see that this kind of doesn't match the style of the photos as well too much. So you can just go to the edit image in here, and from the adjust panel right here, I can just adjust slightly kind of the warmth of this photo to make it a little bit warmer, to take off that blue from behind, and maybe make it a little bit lighter so that it matches the rest of the design.
Okay, let's say this is my vision board created from scratch. What if I want to use the template? As you can see, I already have my Pinterest board opened in here, but I also have all of the uploads already right in my uploads tab. If you want to upload your photos, whether it's from your laptop or you're using them on the device, this is where you do it from.
So you can just again go to uploads, hit upload files from here, and you'll be able to pull them up from your laptop. If you want to go to your phone and actually do it on your phone, go ahead and open the Canva app, and from here again, you can just select stuff from your camera roll, and that's going to kind of pull up all the images that you have saved on your phone.
I highly recommend you have them saved to a specific album, so you don't browse for ages trying to find the correct images. Also, what I want to make sure you know is that if you are in, let's say, pages like Pinterest, you can just drag that image straight into Canva, and that's also going to kind of upload it in here.
At this stage, I know I have way more photos that I want to use for my vision board, but you always want to have that variety to be able to adjust the whole design and make it your own. So I'm going to start with the ones that I definitely want to have included on my vision board that I know are representing the key goals I've mentioned in the previous portion of the video.
So I'm just going to start with my photo that I want to get back to. Let's say for this image, I'm just going to add that drag and drop it onto the frame. Start there! By the way, all of the Canva designs, even if they only contain photos and not necessarily frames like this one (because I can just click on here and actually delete that photo), and you can see that it's a frame, but actually if you have any other photo from a specific design (let's say that was the one), you can always drag another photo on top of it, and that's going to replace it.
So don't worry if it's not a frame-based design but rather an image-heavy design; you can always adjust everything from within Canva. So let's keep adding the stuff that I really want to include. So that's definitely this one that I wanted. I also am going to drag this one in here, so give me a moment. I'm just going to grab the most important ones for me and maybe rearrange some things a little bit.
Alright, I have the core of my images added into my frames. Of course, I'm going to adjust all of them in a moment. I want to show you how to also change the color of the background. From here, again I go to the background color, and I actually have a specific color that I have in mind to match kind of my aesthetic inside of my house.
So I can just go to the document colors from here and I can paste my hex code so that it matches what I wanted to represent. Now, at this stage, what you can do as well is to go ahead and zoom in to create some of those goals—those written down goals that we want to include on the vision board. Again, it's completely up to you what you want to choose. You can go ahead and choose something like an affirmation to add onto your vision board just like in this example right here.
It completely depends on what your goals are specifically, but I'm going to try and include a specific wording for my goals, so I'm just going to select that one and go ahead and say launch Canva course and digital products. Luckily, my Canva course is actually in production at the moment, so if you want to sign up for the waitlist, make sure to check out the link in the description box to become a master of Canva in 2023.
I'm going to move on to the next goal just in here, and I'm going to say produce 25 new videos for YouTube. Now, if you don't like the specific font that your template has given you, you can always select the text, go ahead in here, and find something that you like. My tip in here would be to go for a specific style if you're looking for handwriting or something a bit more minimalistic. Canva has all the different suggestions from here, so you can just type in what you want, and that's going to kind of provide it for you.
So I'll go for handwriting in here, and you have all the different options. You can go for something like apricots; I really like this font. You can go for other types of fonts in here; I'm just going to stick to this one. Now, at this stage, of course, I want to add a few more of those photos because I have a lot more of the empty space to the sides in here.
So what I want to do is to actually duplicate that particular frame. From here, you can go to Ctrl C and Ctrl V to insert them, but you can also hold Alt and actually just drag that frame to the other side, and that's going to produce a copy which you can then use to superimpose your new photo on top of it.
Now, if I want to adjust that photo from within the frame—because it's kind of cutting the stuff that I'm more interested in—I can just double-click on the frame and drag the image slightly more above. Maybe I don't want to include that much of the face or I'm cutting off some of the important elements, so you can just drag it slightly from here. I'm happy with this result.
Same goes for your options in here—just to move things around, I think it's easier to group your elements. So I'm going to select one of those little kind of cards, I'm going to hold shift and select another of those text layers, and I'm going to go to the top in here and go group. This way, I can kind of move things around from here or I can actually just copy the whole group by again holding Alt and dragging it, so I have another copy of this one. I can move it around for my next goal, or I can just delete it from here if I don't like it.
Give me a moment to play around with all the different images, try to find something that I like in terms of the composition, and I'll get back to you in a second.
Okay, I'm happy with what I've got in here. So I have all the different various images that represent my specific goals. I've included my four key goals in here that I want to kind of see and visualize every time. As you can see, I have my kind of action-based images—something that reminds me of what I actually want to do and not just the state that I want to end up with or the results that I want to end up with. Hence all of the different images in here, for example, this person one reminds me of my recording process—the fact that I want to produce the 25 videos in the New Year at minimum, of course.
So this is something that I definitely made sure I included on my vision board. Of course, from this design right here, you can always go to elements and start including your text as well. So if I were to actually choose this element right here—that's just a shape—Canva now has the option to actually add that text inside. So I can say produce 25 new YouTube videos just like that.
I can kind of stretch it out, maybe make it a little bit smaller, and then I can make the text slightly bigger again. I can change the font to something a little bit different; I'll change that to apricots I think for this one. And I can change the color in here as well, so let's say I want something maybe a bit brownish, just like that. I can change the color of the text from here as well; maybe something kind of whitish from that side. Let's say this is what I want.
So I could kind of move that around in here, make it again bigger or smaller from the sides just like that, and I can kind of include them on top of that second vision board. At this stage, you may also want to add some elements to make your vision board even more kind of aesthetic. So you can go to elements in here and search for specific keywords. I would recommend starting with things like collage, for example, just like here.
And from the graphics tab in here, you see all those different elements that can make your design even nicer. As you can see, this particular element and all the other elements that you add on top of your vision board are going to want to stick into your frame. So my tip for this would be to just put it somewhere that it doesn't stick or just not add it first to your design or not try to move it.
What you want to do is to go to your individual frames and lock all of them. The first time you click on it, that's going to lock the position, so you won't be able to move that image, but you still would be able to drag stuff on top of it. What you want to do is to go and hit that lock sign again; that's going to say lock now instead of lock position. So that's going to make sure that you're not adding anything on top of it.
So I'm going to do that for all of my different images in here, double-click on the lock, and that's going to lock them in place. Now, of course, I'm free to just add my different elements just like this to all of my different positions. You can kind of keep adding all those different elements to make it nicer.
I'll go for something like a scrapbook just like this. Again, you see something very similar in here. You have kind of paper notes, you have paper clips, for example, just kind of add that more natural view. I could use something like this maybe for my previous design where I actually have the photos like this, so I can kind of drag it in here and position it correctly. As you can see, I don't see it clearly, so I can always kind of zoom in here and just by selecting the different arrows, I can just nudge it into position slightly. I think that's exactly what I would want.
So again, you can play around with all the different elements like this to make your vision board even more kind of tailored to your needs, and I really highly recommend adding those different elements to your vision board to make it your own and kind of make it even nicer looking and matching your style. Check out those different keywords like collage and scrapbook, but move on search for things like watercolor elements.
So we can type in watercolor. You can also search for things like botanicals. I really love the brands Band Bloom or Basari Studio for those, so search for things that you really like. From here, you can see the inspirations; you can see the brush strokes from here, like this one. So you can search for a paintbrush or brush strokes. You can search for things like washi tape to maybe stick your images onto your vision board. Really, the world is your oyster in here!
The Canva library is so broad in terms of all those different beautiful elements, so make sure you are including them on your vision board if this is something that matches your style.
Okay, so I'm happy with my finished vision board. Now I want to make sure that I have it in different dimensions for all of my different devices, or all the different styles that I want to present it in. In case I want to maybe pop it on my mirror, I want it in a square format. I want to kind of resize it at this stage.
So again, as I've mentioned before, if you have Canva Pro, you can simply go to resize here at the top and choose the dimensions that you want. I've recently used one that fits my iOS wallpaper, so I can just select it from here. You can also use the custom size if you're using pixels; you can change it in here as well. But I'm just going to use that one.
I can click copy and resize from here, and of course, you need to kind of rearrange everything on your design individually to match your specific style. I have done it already so you can see that I've got my vision board arranged in here, and I also left the space for the clock on my phone so everything displays correctly and nothing is hidden behind the text over the top.
Okay, we finished designing, but for the vision board to work, you actually have to put it to good use. So let's move on to step number three: print and display your vision board. First, we need to download our design, and this time we're going to need two different copies—one for digital use and one for printing. Starting with the simpler one, let's grab our PNG for digital copy. You have to go to share in the top right corner, go to download right here, and then you have the PNG as the suggested format.
Again, if you would want to go for the JPEG, you can just choose it from here. I can choose the current page as the page that I want to download and just hit download. Of course, that's pretty straightforward, but I normally choose a PNG over a JPEG. Although JPEGs are smaller in size, PNGs use a lossless compression process which means they will most likely be sharper and better quality overall, and that's definitely what we want on this occasion.
For the printing copy, let's go to the top right corner again, go to download, and we want to select the file type as PDF print since it's the best option for printing. Now you have the RGB color in here, which is what most of the home printers use, but if you're going the extra mile and having your vision board printed professionally, you want to make sure to select CMYK for professional printing. Then go to flattened PDF, include crop marks and bleed, and you want to go to the top left corner in here to file, then go to view settings and go to show print bleed.
What that's going to do is to show that bleed that is included when you download it and actually adds a couple of millimeters around your design, so that means you may need to adjust it slightly.
Okay, you've got the file, so where do you actually put them? Right, the answer is anywhere you'll be looking at daily. So identify the places you're spending the most time on. You can display your printed vision board right above your desk, where you spend so many hours working. You can hang it somewhere by the bed to fill your morning and evening routines or put it on a mirror where you'll be looking at yourself and the board simultaneously, which helps with merging the two images in your mind.
For the digital board, you can use it as a wallpaper on your desktop or a tablet so that you can see it every time you use your device. I love to add it to my Notion dashboards that I use a lot, like my general planning one or the goal-setting one, so I'm constantly reminded of what's important to me. You can also take it to the next level with your phone and add widgets across the different home screens containing images you've used for your board or even a whole caught-up design if it works for what you've created.
There are so many possibilities here, but the most important thing is to make your vision board visible everywhere and be intentional about using it to reflect—to get inspired, to get re-energized about your plans, and align your daily life with everything you're dreaming of for that year and beyond.
I'd love to know what your biggest, most important goal is this year. What's the first step you're taking to actually achieve it? Let me know in the comments down below, and if you want to improve your graphic design skills, check out this playlist to master Canva and design stunning graphics for your life and business.
I'm not going to lie, it was a really, really fun video to work on, so I hope you've enjoyed it. If you'd like to see more Canva tutorials like this, give me a thumbs up so I know you'd like to see them. Have a beautiful day! Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.