Have you ever wanted to put multiple photos on one slide, or use really creative, design-heavy slides in your Haiku Decks? Maybe you’d like to build some flowcharts, use icons to illustrate your ideas, or apply interesting and colorful filters to your background photos. If any of the above sounds intriguing to you, read on — we’re about to show you how.
The app: Canva
Canva is a free web app made by a super talented team of designers in Sydney, Australia. You can build all kinds of content – from Twitter headers to real estate flyers – with a very simple and intuitive interface (it’s kind of similar to ours, actually!). You can use your own photographs in the app, or take advantage of Canva’s crazy-huge library of images and icons. Some of Canva’s images are free, while others are only $1.00 each. You don’t pay until the end, though, so you can get everything laid out exactly as you’d like it before you have to spend a dime (and you can always go back and make changes if you’d like).
The possibilities:
- Multiple images per slide
- Icons and vector images for slide illustration
- Additional layouts for text
- Additional color filters and options for images (uploaded or purchased)
App mashup example:
Here’s a little deck I threw together by building my backgrounds in Canva:
App Mashup: Canva – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
How to use it with Haiku Deck:
- Set up an account at Canva.com.
- Walk through their quick and easy tutorial to get a feel for the app.
- Once you’re ready to go, choose Presentation under “Start a new design.”
- Build your slides.
- When you’re ready to send them to Haiku Deck, click Link & Publish in the top right.
- Choose Image on the right in the window that pops up.
- Save your images to your computer.
- In Haiku Deck, import your downloaded Canva slides as slide backgrounds.
Tips:
- You can leave the text fields blank in Haiku Deck if you’d like just the Canva slide to show, like I did in the example above.
- When you download your image files from Canva, put them in Dropbox or Google Drive to use them from the iPad app easily.
- Check out the Easy Guide to Creating a Presentation in Canva for some great tips on making the most of your Canva slides.
- If you select any image in your Canva project, you can click the Filter button to apply some nifty effects. However, clicking the advanced options in the bottom left corner of the Filters popup will allow you to really play around with the colors, blur, contrast, etc. in your image – try it out!
- If you’re searching through images in Canva, any that say “free” are free; if they don’t say anything over the thumbnail preview, they’re premium selections and will be tallied up at the end when you publish.
- Need help with Canva, or want to learn the basics? Check out their support site here.