Sixtysomething_S3_Ep2 – Meet Canva

Sixtysomething_Season 3_Episode 2_Meet Canva

[00:00:00] Hello, friends. Welcome back to 60-Something. I'm Grace, and I'm so glad you're here. Look, i- it's taken me a while to get to this episode because, again, the subject matter was going to be something that's a little hard to talk about, but I still wanna talk about it. I'm gonna leave that for episode th- three of this season.

Today, we're gonna talk about something that I dearly love. It's actually a tool. It's a free tool that has completely changed the creative landscape worldwide, I think, over the past decade, and yet I wonder if many of us 60-somethings either [00:01:00] haven't heard of it, don't understand what it is, or think it's something intended for, the other people, more tech-savvy people.

It's not. It's called Canva. C-A-N-V-A. You may have heard of it. You may not have heard of it, but by the end of this episode, I think you're going to be very glad that you have learned a little bit more about it. Now, before your eyes start glazing over and you're thinking, "Oh, great, here goes Grace geeking out about another software," just stay with me.

Stay with me. This episode really isn't about software. It's about creativity, really, about [00:02:00] new possibilities, perhaps

It's about having access to tools that simply didn't exist for ordinary people for most of our lives. Tools that now offer an affordable, approachable, creative toolkit that opens up a world of new possibilities. And w- we're talking about preserving memories, sharing stories, starting businesses, creating beautiful, professional, or just plain charming things, and learning something new at this age, which I personally think is one of the great joys of this season of life.[00:03:00]

I should mention at the end of the show notes of this episode, I've put together some introductory videos to Canva, and they also have their own design school. So if you wanted to delve deeper than just using a template to make a card or a sign, it's all there. So don't forget, it's at the end of the show notes, and I'll remind you again at the end of the episode

But for now, I wanna explain exactly what Canva is and why I love it, and why I think it might really matter to you. So let's dive in. I wanna start w- with a little personal history because I think it sets the stage for why I really have such passionate feelings about this. Way back when I [00:04:00] first got the way back when I first got the bug to design, I was in the hotel business, and I was absolutely captivated by the idea of making things look beautiful on the page.

It had almost no application to the job that I was doing at that time. I wanted to learn Photoshop. That was the big gold standard, if you will, of design software at that time. But it was so expensive that, yes, I had to use a bootleg copy just to learn, and there was no YouTube to speak of then, no online courses.

I was teaching myself out of books, physical books. Slow-going [00:05:00] doesn't even begin to describe it. My son, who is also self-taught, was a huge help to me, and believe it or not, I eventually found a way to move from hotel sales into editing and designing magazines for active adult communities like Sun City

They were full color, glossy publications, and oh my gosh, I loved it. But the software I was using to do that was always owned by the companies I worked for. Didn't belong to me. I couldn't afford it. We're talking like $3,000, I think a- about a year, at least 1,000. It wasn't until my dad died in 2004 and left me some money [00:06:00] that I was finally able to buy my own Mac and my own copy of Adobe Creative Suite.

And back then, those were essentially requirements to be taken seriously as a designer. The barrier to entry was real, financially and technically. There was an earlier exception. It, it wasn't to the level of Adobe's programs. It was called PrintShop. It was a Windows-based program that cost under $100, as I recall.

I used it for years for personal projects, cards, signs, simple things. It was a little glitchy, still cost money, and it had real limitations. The designs just weren't that professional looking. Then in [00:07:00] 2013, everything changed. A young woman named Melanie Perkins was teaching graphic design at a university in Australia, and she kept watching her students struggle, not with the design element, but with the software.

It was complicated. It was not intuitive. It was so expensive, and she thought design should be easier than this. Design should be for everyone. So she founded Canva with the explicit mission of making design accessible to every single person, not just professionals, not just people who could afford the $1,000 software subscriptions.

And that, my friends, [00:08:00] changed everything So here's how I think about what Melanie did, what Canva does. Before Canva, you had two choices if you wanted to create something that looked professional. You either hired a designer, which that cost real money, or you became one, which cost a lot of time and learning, and the money and training and software.

Design then was largely reserved for trained professionals or people with enough patience and enough resources to teach themselves. But Canva changed that equasin- equation entirely. Canva sort of did for design what smartphones have done for photography. Think about it. Before smartphones, if you wanted a really good [00:09:00] photo, you needed a good camera, decent tech knowledge, and ideally some skill.

But now with smartphones, our grandmas could take a stunning photo. I guess that means we can take a stunning photo and share it with the whole family in 30 seconds. Did smartphones replace professional photographers? No. But did they allow millions of regular people to participate in photography in a way they never could before?

Absolutely. That's Canva. More people can participate, you and me and the grade school kid and the teachers across the spectrum. More people can create. They can share their ideas, their stories, their memories in [00:10:00] ways that look genuinely beautiful, in ways that we can be proud of. And the best part is you don't need a design degree.

You don't need expensive software So What exactly is Canva? Let me give you a clean, simple explanation. I've given you some clues. Here's the 411. Canva is an online cloud-based visual design platform. It runs right in your web vi- browser, no downloads required, though there are apps for your phone and tablet if you prefer to work from those.

And it allows anyone to create professional quality visual content without needing advanced design skills or complicated [00:11:00] software. It works on a drag and drop system, and this is the beauty. You pick a template, a professionally designed template, and there are thousands and thousands, and you click on the things that you wanna change in the template.

You swap in your own photos, your own words. You can use different little design elements, clip art, photography. It's all built in

You just put in your choices and you're done. That's really it at the most basic level, and here's what makes it so powerful. As I just said, it comes loaded with millions of pre-built templates for essentially every product you can imagine. You're never starting from a blank screen if you don't want to.

[00:12:00] Every template is already beautifully designed. All you do is make it yours. Canva also has a built-in library of royalty s- free photographs, graphics, fonts, video clips, even audio tracks, all right there in your workspace. And in recent years, it's added a whole suite of AI-powered tools that honestly feel like magic.

Free account. Free... It's free. Right now, no credit card. You just go to canva.com and sign up. Now, I'm gonna say a little bit more about the free version. There is a paid version, and I'll go into that in a bit. But I want you to know upfront, the free version is genuinely impressively useful. You don't have to spend a [00:13:00] dime to get the tremendous value out of this tool.

So why does this matter? Now, I wanna stop and speak directly to my listeners, because this is where the conversation gets really interesting. Here's something nobody talks about that much. It's It's that creativity doesn't have an expiration date. Sometimes it feels like it though, don't you think? Many of us are at a point in life where we finally have something we didn't always have, time.

The kids are grown, careers are winding down, or sometimes they're already in the n- rear view mirror. Schedules are more flexible than they've been in [00:14:00] decades for us, and with that time comes a question that I find exciting and a little daunting. What have you always wanted to create? What project have you been postponing for years or decades because y- you're just too busy?

What story have you never told? What memory is just sitting in a box somewhere waiting to be honored? You know, I think about this a lot, and Canva is one of the tools that makes this particular season of life genuinely extraordinary for creative people or people who didn't even think they were creative.

You don't need to be a designer. You don't need to be an artist. You just need an idea [00:15:00] and a computer And if you have those two things, Canva will meet you the rest of the way. So I've been talking about this in fairly broad terms. Let me get specific, because I think one of the biggest misconceptions about Canva is that people think it's one thing when it's really dozens.

A lot of people, when they first hear about Canva, they think it's a tool for making social media graphics, Instagram posts, that kind of thing, and it does. It absolutely does. It's extraordinary at that. But that's like saying your phone, your iPhone, is a tool for making phone calls. Canva can create all of the social media content, Instagram posts, stories, reels, TikTok graphics, YouTube thumbnails, [00:16:00] channel banners, animated graphics, even websites, simple ones, and portfolio pages.

It does presentations, gorgeous slide decks educational materials, sales presentations, genuinely beautiful designs, not those sad default PowerPoint templates that the most of us have used. There's a documents and business capability where you can create resumes, newsletters, press releases, meeting agendas, business cards, letterheads, invoices, media kits.

If you're running any kind of small business or side project, Canva can handle virtually all of those design needs. For print, how about invitations? Greeting cards. I do not like store-bought greeting [00:17:00] cards. Some of them are, are very nice, but I just don't feel like it's very personal. I make a lot of greeting cards now Brochures, flyers, menus, posters.

And here's something people don't always-- they're not always aware of. You can actually print through Canva. So they'll ship you your business cards, even books, even posters right to your door, or you can download the file and get it printed elsewhere at a print shop, at Walgreens. It's very flexible.

For legacy and memory projects, you know, that's my gig, and I'll talk about that in more detail in a few minutes because, you know, this is where I g-get genuinely e- very excited. We're talking about here [00:18:00] photo books, family cookbooks memory tributes, family history projects, travel journals.

See what I mean? People think Canva is one thing, but it's really dozens of things in one place. That's what makes it so remarkable. Now, let's talk about the free version 'cause I wanna be really clear about this. The free version of Canva is not a stripped down, hobbled little taste of something, so they'll be able to get you to upgrade easily.

It is very full-featured, impressively so. With a free account, you get access to hundreds of thousands of templates, a massive library of photos, graphics, and fonts, basic video tools, and even cloud storage, so your designs are always saved and [00:19:00] accessible. My recommendation is start there. No risk, no credit card, just have fun with it Go to canva.com, again, create your free account and just explore.

Look at the templates. You don't even have to try to make something specific yet, but I suspect that you will be inspired. Just look at what's possible. I think you'll be surprised. Now, there's also a paid version called Canva Pro, and that is what I use, and I wanna explain it to you honestly. First of all, it costs 13 or $14.

You know, you'll have to save for a while before you can afford it, right? Canva Pro gives you access to a larger library, for one thing, millions of premium [00:20:00] templates, stock photos, graphic elements, more fonts, really more everything. It also unlocks a suite of AI-powered tools that I genuinely am in awe of and use all the time.

So let me tell you about my favorites. The background remover, oh, this one still amazes me when I think about how I struggled with this back in the day with Photoshop You upload a photo, let's say a portrait of someone or a product shot, and with one click, Canva removes the background instantly. I'm not exaggerating.

It's instant. And then you just have the subject That used to take a long time in Photoshop, and you trace the, so carefully around [00:21:00] the hair and now it happens in three seconds. It's pretty astonishing. Another tool is Magic Resize, a massive time saver, saver. You design something once, let's say a promotional graphic, then with one click, Canva will resize that same design into every format you need.

For example, Instagram Square becomes Instagram Story, Facebook banner, YouTube video instantly. The alternative, which I have done many times in my work, is manually recreating each version from scratch, and Magic Resize does it in seconds. No wonder it's called magic, right? Now there's Magic Write. This is Canva's built-in AI writing assistant.

If you [00:22:00] need help writing copy for a flyer or brainstorming headlines for a presentation, or just drafting a caption for a social media post, Magic Write can give you a great starting point right inside the design tool. You don't have to switch between apps or anything. Here's another one, AI image generation.

This one is a p- pretty much a mindblower. You type a description of what you want. Let's say I want a warm, vintage style illustration of a kitchen table with flowers and a cup of coffee. Canva generates a custom image for you. It's not always perfect uh, but it's genuinely useful for finding visuals that feel specific to you and what you wanna create.

And you can [00:23:00] adjust it. The software works with you. Canva Pro is a subscription, as I said, about $13 a month, and it's less if you pay annually. It's well worth it to me. I can't believe the value you get out of this $13, but it does blow my mind that you can get so much of it for free. I use Canva almost every day for podcast graphics, YouTube thumbnails, social media content, H-School materials, workbooks, lead magnets, and my Lock in Your Legacy projects.

Oh, it pays for itself many, many times over. But I wanna say again, start with the free version, use it for a while, see if it agrees with you, if it becomes sort of a go-to for you. If it [00:24:00] does, Pro is just a reasonable upgrade. If the free version gives you everything you need, if you're just looking to make, like, a personal card now and then, just stay there

Now, let's take a moment, and I wanna speak to those of you whom the word, for whom the word technology feels a bit like a four-letter word. I hear you, I do. But here's what I want you to know about Canva. It was not designed for designers. It was designed for regular people who have never touched design software in their lives, people who don't know the difference between a JPEG and a PNG, people who just...

Those are file types, by the way. Those are image file types. It's for people who just wanna make something that looks nice. Melanie built Canva [00:25:00] specifically because she watched regular people struggle with complicated tools. God bless her. Her whole mission was to remove that struggle, and she succeeded.

Most people, people with no design background whatsoever, can sit down with Canva and create something so attractive and eye-catching within an hour, often within 30 minutes. If you can click and drag and type, you can use Canva. That's not a marketing gimmick. That is true. And here's something else Canva offers that I think is wonderful, and again, it's free: Canva Design School They have courses, tutorials, even certifications, all taught in plain, [00:26:00] approachable language, very graphically attractive, as you can imagine.

And if you want some guided instruction, start there. And as I mentioned, I've got links in the show notes. So I'd really love to know how Canva actually shows up, or let me tell you how Canva actually shows up in my life, because I think personal examples are so much powerful than abstract lists. So I came to Canva with, with a background in magazine editing and design, so I wasn't exactly starting from zero.

But even for me, Canva was a revolution because it made things go so fast. Things that used to take me an hour, or more like three hours in InDesign, it takes [00:27:00] me 20 minutes in Canva. Here's where Canva shows up for me regularly. Every single graphic design you've ever seen associated with this podcast, the cover art, the social posts, episode promotional images, Canva.

All my social media graphics for all my different projects, Canva. They make it so easy. When I was building Hschool, my online course for hotel sales careers, the workbooks, the checklists, the lesson slides, the lead magnets, all of it designed in Canva. Having a tool that lets me create professional-looking course materials without having to get into those big programs, it's just been really significant for me.

And for my Lock In [00:28:00] Your Legacy work, which is all about helping people capture and presuve- preserve their stories, Canva is central. And we're talking about memory books, family tribute pages, beautifully formatted documents, using photos, which Canva does wonderfully. You can easily upload your own photos.

I also use it for fun. I do almost always make greeting cards and signs, for special occasions using Canva. Just things I'm gonna print and hang up for people That for me is one of Canva's greatest gifts. It makes the creative impulse and the desire to do something special for others so easy to make into a reality [00:29:00] So here's something about Canva that maybe doesn't get talked about enough.

I think it's really meaningful to our generation. Canva is collaborative. Multiple people can work on the same design at the same time, so you can share a project with someone, leave comments, make suggestions, and build something together even if you're thousands of miles apart. Just think about what that means.

Your daughter lives three states away, your grandchildren are scattered, your siblings are in different time zones, and yet you could sit down together on a Saturday afternoon virtually and work on a family cookbook, a reunion memory book, a family history project that captures your parents' stories before they're, they're lost.

A photo tribute for an [00:30:00] anniversary would be a great project, a memory book for a graduation, or a scrapbook style document that tells the story of a trip you took together. Canva makes collaborative creative projects like these genuinely accessible, not just possible in theory, actually easy. I have not done this yet, but this talking about it inspires me.

I think about the things that we meant to do with our old family photos, with our grandparents' stories, with recipes that are written on index cards in our mother's handwriting. How many of th- those things are still sitting in boxes? With Canva, you don't have to do it alone. Some of the most meaningful ways in which you can memorialize and use these pieces of [00:31:00] memorabilia is in creations that you might be able to do together And there's another thing that people may not know about Canva.

You can print. Not everything has to live on the screen. So if you make a little, let's say you make a little digital postcard just to say hi to your grandchild, right? You text it to them. Easy. Easy peasy. But what if you wanna print it? What if you wanna make a sign? What if you s- wanna send them a letter in the mail and put this cute little flyer you made for them?

Canva will download a file that you can print on your printer, and they have a print on demand service built right in. You can design a photo book, a calendar, a set of greeting cards, your Christmas cards, a poster, invitations, [00:32:00] and then order them professionally printed, and they'll send them to you in the mail.

The quality's good. It takes a step out, otherwise you have to download and then send to, as I said, Staples, an office shop, or a print shop, or a drugstore like Walgreens will do stuff like that. So if you wanna make a, let's say a beautiful hardcover photo gr- book of your last big family trip, just have Canva do it.

Or a calendar featuring your grandchildren's photos. Give it as a Christmas gift. Canva can do it Not everything has to stay digital. Just keep that in mind. And Canva can be the bridge between digital d- design and physical printing. It can make it remarkably [00:33:00] easy. Now, I wanna talk about what I consider Canva's most meaningful potential for people in our season of life, us 60-somethings, legacy projects.

Now, I kinda touched on it before this, but I'm talking about memory books, family stories, photo collections with real meaningful captions, photo collections with real captions and content, recipes that have been in your family for generations finally formatted into something beautiful that won't just get lost, won't just be in a box in the attic.

Oh, I hate that. Timelines of a life, tributes to people we've loved. You know, we have decades of material, photographs, letters, [00:34:00] stories that live only in our heads right now, history that belongs to our families, but will be lost if we don't do something with it. Canva is one of the best tools I know of for turning that material into something tangible, beautiful, lasting, and shareable.

And you don't have to create a masterpiece. You just need to start. A simple photo book, just one family recipe beautifully formatted, a single page about your grandparents' story with a photo of them at the top. Start small. Start imperfect. Just starting, that's what matters. This is what the work [00:35:00] I do with the legacy stuff, this is what it's all about.

And if that resonates with you, I sure hope you'll look into this, because preserving our stories is something I'm just so passionate about. But even completely apart from my interests, your stories matter. The people who come after you will want them, and Canva is one of the tools that's most accessible and available to help you share them

let's just daydream for a moment. Forget about the how. Just think about the what. What would you create if you knew it was easy? Maybe it's a family cookbook that you've been talking about for 20 years. So many of us [00:36:00] do. With your grandmother's recipes, your mother's handwritten cards. You could use the images of those cards in the cookbook itself.

That's what I did when I made mine. Or your own versions that have evolved over the decades, all in one place, beautifully designed, printed, and given to your kids for Christmas, or you could just make a PDF. Or maybe you'd like to create a memoir. Not a full memoir, maybe just a chapter. One story. The year we got married.

The summer you kids were little that we'll never forget. My first real job. One beautiful, well-told story formatted and illustrated with some photos and given as a gift. Compile enough of these, and you have your life story. [00:37:00] Or make a travel journal from a trip that mattered to you Or a tribute to someone that you lost.

Every year on my dad's birthday, we used to go out for dinner when my kids lived in town and when my mom was alive, and every year I would create a flyer for everybody that, would feature these c- corny sayings that my dad used to say or unforgettable features of his. His smile, his eyes, his laugh

And that, that can be very meaningful. Maybe it's a church newsletter. Maybe it's the business you've been wanting to start, and all you needed was a way to create materials that looked professional without the expense of hiring someone. [00:38:00] You know, print products are very big right now. You create them, you post them on Etsy with a price, and you can share them.

And it's very it... This is standard procedure now to share designs via a Canva link, and they just open up in Canva once you've purchased them. That's pretty cool, and I'm not sure i- this is clear, but Canva saves everything. Once you open it, it's saved. It's always in there for you, so you don't have to worry that you've forgotten to save your work.

It's always saved. Canva does it for you. So back to your projects. Something for a grandchild, a custom storybook. You could write it yourself. The illustrations you can find in the Canva graphics [00:39:00] Like a keepsake book about their first years or something about your childhood Something that they'll always have.

I love that idea. So what's the project you keep thinking about but haven't started? And you haven't started it because one of the things is you were limited i- in what you could create. Here's the key. Here's the key to creation. Canva is not gonna write the story for you, but it will give you a canvas on which you can write your story, and it will make it so easy for you to make it beautiful and publish it, really.

All you really need is the courage to start

I will say this one thing because I think it's important, and it may [00:40:00] not be an issue for you like it can be for me, but I think you know me well enough by now to know that Canva, for me, can sometimes be a procrastination tool in disguise. It's very easy to spend three hours in Canva looking at templates or designing, let's say, a workbook instead of writing the workbook, right?

To spend an afternoon designing a gorgeous website instead of actually launching the business? Ai yai yai. Play with logos and color palettes instead of, seeking customers, right? Canva is a tool. It's not our goal, is it? The design of the [00:41:00] thing is not the thing, even if it's something as simple as a greeting card. Gotta finish it, and you've gotta produce it, and you've gotta make use of it. So if you catch yourself spending more time making your project look beautiful than actually doing the work that you must do to complete the project, then

Step back and remind yourself of why you're doing the project to begin with, and then finish it I wanna close with a reflection, 'cause I think we're having a moment that deserves to be appreciated. Now, I'm old enough to remember typewriters. God knows I received a typewriter for my birthday, I think at the end of seventh grade I'm old enough, I'm sure you are too, to remember film [00:42:00] cameras.

Putting that film in and taking your 24 shots and dropping the film off at the drugstore and waiting a week to see if any of those pictures came out. Just waiting to find out. Oh gosh, and I am old enough to remember paste-up boards. If you didn't do like, newspaper, magazine work you might not even know what those are.

But for those of you who did work in publishing or advertising, you know what I mean. Literally cutting and pasting physical pieces of paper to lay out on the page, and then photographing the page to create a plate for the printing press Oh, how far we've come, huh? And I'm also, as I've described to you, old enough to remember when design was [00:43:00] gatekept.

The only way to produce something that looked professional and beautiful was to either pay a designer, work for an organization that employed one, or spend years and a lot of money mastering expensive, complicated tools. And now? Now a 60-something grandmother sitting at her kitchen table can open her laptop, go to a free website, and create something that w- would have required an entire design department 30 years ago.

I don't think we always stop to recognize how extraordinary these things in our modern world are. Yes, we get frustrated when the technology is complicated, it doesn't cooperate, if the learning curve [00:44:00] feels steep, when something doesn't work the way we expected, and wondering what the future hold, holds.

Wondering what the future holds. Hey, those frustrations are real. I feel them too, but so is this. What is available to ordinary people today, to us, is genuinely unprecedented. The tools exist, the time also is available, more than it was before, and the stories, the creativity, the things we wanna make and share and preserve they've always been inside us.

Canva just makes it easier to let them bloom Now, if you've already used Canva, I'd love to hear what you've created, and if today's episode inspires you to [00:45:00] give it a try, please let me know what you make. You can find all of my contact information in the show notes, and if you'd like to see Canva in action, be sure to check out the video links that I've provided.

And,, they will walk you through the basics of Canva as well as the design school That teaches you a little bit more about design, which is very handy

Now, if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you'd leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help our 60-something friends find the show. Thank you for spending this time with me. I've really enjoyed talking with you. Until next time, keep learning, keep creating, [00:46:00] keep dreaming, and keep believing that some of your best creations

are in front of you. And whatever you do, keep your sunny side up. I'll see you next time.