Canva
Canva is a very popular online graphic design tool that many people use for different purposes, and we can use it to create appealing visuals for a digital humanities project. It is especially useful when we want to tell a story or create an attractive poster for any project. Students and researchers in the field of Digital humanities can use it to help communicate research findings, illustrate timelines, or create aesthetically appealing digital publications and portfolios that make their work more accessible to broader audiences. It is easy to use and contains numerous templates for different topics with various art styles, which is why I believe it can be useful for Digital Arts & Humanities work.
Here is a tutorial for how to use Canva to create a simple visual aid for something like a final project presentation. My final project is about Haldore Hanson’s journey to China during WWII, and how it reflects the history of China at that time.
Step 1: Sign up and log in
Go to the Canva website, and you will see the following page. Click on the Sign up button in the top right corner, and choose one way you want to continue. For example, you can select “Continue with Google,” and it will prompt you to enter your Gmail account address and password to sign up and log in automatically.
Step 2: Choose a template
After you log in, you will see the exploration page, where you can browse the template provided by Canva. If you already have something in your mind, you can look it up in the search bar.
For example, an important element in our project is the history of China, so I put “history” as the keyword to see if I can find any template that I want.
There is a template with World War II on its cover, so we can click on it to see more details, and if we want to use it, just click on Custom edit this template button.
Step 3: Edit plots and texts
After we open the template, we can edit the text and graphs in it. For example, I can delete the original image, copy the image from Hanson’s photography archive on the Carleton website, and paste it. We can also change the title so it better suits what we need.
Step 4: Add extra media to the presentation
In the presentation visual, we can not only use slides, but also other media by clicking on the left bottom + button and selecting from many options Canva provides, like whiteboard, sheets, or videos.
For example, I can choose Whiteboard, click on Design on the left menu bar and select one from many different styles of visualization.
I can choose a Mind map, and edit the texts to China WWII, so it may be further edited into an additional visualization for our project presentation.
Step 5: Share the Canva project
To share your Canva project, click the Share button on the top right corner, and choose the way you want to share it. For example, you can download it as a PDF.
Additional resources
If you want to learn more about Canva, you can check out these resources:
3 thoughts on “Blog 9: Tutorial on Canva”
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I had never thought of Canva as a digital humanities tool but, thanks to this tutorial, I now have a more expansive understanding of its capacities! I thought your descriptions of the mind map creation process was especially effective and a feature that I did not know Canva had! I was wondering if you could include more information about the joint editing capacity of Canva? I know you can share a project with others but does it let you edit together? How does this work in the context of your final project?
Nice tutorial. I have known about Canva for a good while, but I wasn’t aware it has so many offerings! All the data visualization options and presentation templates available were cool to see. I very much agree that it is a useful tool for digital humanities. A big part of digital humanities is presentation and communication of ideas and Canva is great for that. Also, I liked how you connected it with your final project.
The addition of the extra media options is what really cements Canva as a valuable tool for the digital humanities. It is cool that there are so many options for visualizations, such as your mind map demonstration. This makes me wonder how many other tools I am using without truly understanding and maximizing their digital humanities components. This class has made me realize that aspects of digital humanities are everywhere. We just need the understanding to uncover and use them.