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# Using Canva for Video Essays: Tips and Tricks Guide

Canva is an extremely versatile tool that can be used to make presentations, posts, flyers, and even video essays. In this HackMD, I've compiled some helpful tips and tricks to help you utilize Canva's features as you make video essays.

## Style
As you create your video essay, it's important to keep a style in mind. If your theme is horror-related, fonts, colors, and design should all be used to contribute to a theme.


Alongside creating a central theme, it can also be helpful to have slides created with an idea or skeleton in mind. For example, if the goal of one slide is to emphasize a quote, it could be helpful to have a background that emphasizes the quote, making it legible and stand out.


You can create a general skeleton for your video essay to follow and fill in each skeleton of a slide with the information you need as you go. Canva offers some tools that allow you to create this as you go:

* **Color Palette:** Allows you to pick out the central colors used for your presentation
* **Brand Kit:** Allows you to pick out the central fonts used for your presentation.
* **Presets and Designs:** Allows you to pick out pre-made slides for you to edit and add to your color palette / brand kit.
* **Magic Recommendations:** An algorithm that picks out similar fonts, pgotos, or images related to something that you're currently using. Helps create a cohesive theme.

### Font Combinations

### Filling Up Space!


### Using Videos & Gifs

## Tools
Canva has plenty of tools that can make your presentation easy to create and look nice when you present.

* **Frames:** Allows you to drag in photos to a greenscreen-like frame. This can help you arrange elements on a page before you decide to add in photos or text.
* **Opacity:** Changing the opacity on photos or backgrounds allows you to make certain text stand out, or blend in a photo with a background to overlay something on top of it.
* **Photo Edit:** The Photo Edit tool allows you to edit images to your heart's content! Here, you can apply filters to your photo, remove a background from an image, blur, apply AI filters, etc. This 'Edit' feature can really change up a photo to fit into your theme.
* **Transitions:** As you present, you can add transitions to a page or elements on a page. A lot of video essays tend to have dynamic photos or backgrounds, even if they are not moving too much. Taking advantage of transitions can help make a static page look a little more interesting!
* **App Add-Ons:** Can't find what you're looking for in Canva? There is an Add-Ons store that lets you add in helpful features into your base Canva. There are plenty of features available so it's up to you to look through them all and find what you're looking for!

## Keyboard Shortcuts

Sometimes clicking and dragging and typing can become too tiring. Here are some helpful shortcuts to use while you're desigining to speed things up!
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* **Shift + Click**: Pressing and holding shift while clicking elements on a page allows you to select more than one element at a time. This is useful if you need to apply the same change to multiple things, instead of just doing it one at a time.
* **Command / Control + A:** Pressing Command (Or Conrol on Windows) and pressing A together is the shortcut for 'Select All.' If you need to select every element on a page or select every text in a box, this shortcut helps you select it all without having to click or drag.

## Video Essay Tips

In this section, you'll find some general advice on making video essays look good!

### Catchy First Slide

Whenever you see a video essay on YouTube, you've probably seen the thumbnail and been captivated by it. WHen you create your video essay, it is critical that your first slide (or thumbnail) contains the essence of your essay. Perhaps include a photo of the topic, or an edited photo / collage. Include some text on your topic like your call to action or the question you're asking.