How to Create Amazing Pinterest Images Using Canva (Your New BFF)

LADIES! If you are blogging for your business and don’t have a Pinterest business account, YOU ARE MISSING OUT. Pinterest is the second largest driver of traffic to websites, after Facebook. And hold onto your seat, ’cause if you’re like me, this is going to make you fall clean out of it—Pinterest is ALSO the second largest search engine, after Google. WHAT!??

Yep, that’s right. People go onto Pinterest specifically to SEARCH for things. And with millions of people using it every single day, if you aren’t pinning your blog posts, you’re missing a huge opportunity for driving traffic to your site!

In order to do that successfully, though, you have to create EYE-CATCHING pins that people can’t resist clicking on! Now, you may be “design-challenged” like me, but the great news is you don’t have to hire someone to create your pins for you, or spend a ton of money buying fancy design software like Photoshop.

Have you heard of a little thing called CANVA? If you haven’t yet checked it out, you need to! For those of us who aren’t professional designers but still want to have beautiful, professional-looking graphics and images for our social media, website, and marketing materials, a subscription to this website is a MUST-HAVE. Let me show you why I freakin’ love this site!

It has all these pre-made designs that you can customize—FOR FREE—to look just the way you like, with your brand colors and fonts, and it’s EASY. Like, soooo easy…

So today I’m going to show you how you can use Canva to craft a new pin for your blog content!

Step One: Set up your Canva Account, and Add your Branding

After you get yourself set up with a FREE account in Canva, and before we get started creating our Pinterest image, we’re going to set up your brand colors and fonts so that you can easily customize the templates. You’ll notice several buttons along the left side of the screen, and you’ll want to click on “Your brand.”

Here, you’ll see there are areas for you to set your brand colors and fonts and upload a logo. The first thing you want to do is save your unique branding in this area, so that you can easily access this once you start creating your images.

Step Two: Create Your Design

After you have set up your branding, click on the “Create a design” button. Canva has it set up where you can simply choose what kind of image you’re wanting to make, and they already have all these templates with the correct sizing and dimensions set for you! It shows you some of the popular image types, one of which is “Pinterest Graphic.” Click on this item.

This will open up a template for you that is already sized correctly for a pin.

You’ll notice some buttons at the left side of your screen:

• Search
• Layouts
• Elements
• Text
• Background
• Uploads

When you click to start creating using any of the predetermined sizes (in this case Pinterest Graphic), it will automatically default to showing you some layouts. You can either customize one of these or start from scratch. Scrolling through these layout templates, you’ll notice in the bottom right corner of each that it will either say “Free” or will show a price. Just be aware of that some of these may cost you if you want to use them. But I’m willing to bet you’ll find something you love in the free items! You’ll want to take some time to think about how you want your branding to look on Pinterest. Will you use photos in your pins? Will you create more graphic pins with bright colors and no photos?

For this example, I knew I wanted to create a pin with two areas for text and a photo, so I just chose a premade template to customize:

I’m now going to insert my own photo and branding to customize this template and make it my own. First, I’ll insert my photo in place of the one with the tie. Click on the template photo and delete. You’ll notice the frame remains. Then click on “uploads” over on the left and you’ll be able to upload and use your own photos. Alternatively, you can use free photos that Canva has made available under the “Elements” tab.

Drag your image into the frame. You can resize or move your image by double-clicking on it. When you get it sized and placed to your liking within the frame, click on the check mark.

After playing around with this for a bit, I have decided to stretch the photo out to the edges of the top and sides of the pin.

Next, I’m going to update the text and background colors to make them match my brand font and colors. Click on the different colored shapes to change them. When you click on a shape, you’ll notice a bar across the top that gives you the options to change the color, copy the shape, arrange it (bring it forward or backward with relation to other items in your image), change the transparency, create a hyperlink, or delete the item. When you click on the color box, your brand colors that you set up earlier will automatically appear here. Here, I have copied the shape in both corners, rotated it slightly using the rotate tool, and changed each to my lighter brand colors.

When you click on an area of font, it allows you a few basic formatting options (sizing, spacing, etc) as well as some of the same options you found when you clicked on a colored shape. Here I changed the text to say what I wanted, changed the font, size, and colors. In addition, sometimes it is helpful to group several items together so you can move them together easily. In this case I have three text boxes (“How to create,” “Awesome Pins,” and “Using Canva”) that I want to stay together as I am designing. You can select them all together by holding down the “Shift” key and clicking on the various items you want to group.

You’ll notice I have also added in my logo at the bottom of the image. I did this by first including a square shape, which you will find under the “elements” tab. This is my favorite area to use because it includes a ton of free shapes, lines, frames, photos, icons, and other goodies you can use in your designs. To create the purple background for my logo, I simply clicked on “shapes,” inserted a square, and pulled the corners to size it into a rectangle. I then went back and clicked on the “Uploads” tab and found my logo, which I had already loaded in earlier.

The last thing I’ll do is add one more shape, an empty rectangle, to frame the whole thing and tie everything together. Click on the “Elements” tab and then “Shapes” and scroll to find the desired shape.

So now let’s look at the side by side comparison of the original template and the modified image I created. You can see how easy this was to achieve, and it only took me about ten minutes to accomplish! When I first started using Canva, obviously it took me longer, but the more you use it, the faster you’ll get.

   

Step 3: Play Around with It, and Have Fun!

For all your blog posts, it’s a great idea to have more than one pin to go with each post. The more you pin, the more likely you’ll be to get re-pinned! So for this post I created a bold graphic with large text, using simple shapes, the Canva logo, and my brand colors.

So you can see that Canva is totally going to become your new BFF. You’ll be wanting to use it not only for pins, but for social media posts, presentations, business cards, and everything in between!

How did your first Canva experience go? Let me know in the comments!