Creating a Cool Poster in Canva for DH

Canva is a versatile graphic design tool that can be used to create a wide range of digital humanities projects. For this tutorial I will be going over how you can create your own digital humanities Canva.

Once you’ve created an account and logged in, you’ll be brought to the canva home page.

Here you will have many options such as viewing templates and projects by others for inspiration. I chose to look at the templates to find a suitable format for a digital humanities poster.

I found a cool template that seems ideal to relay information to an audience.

Click on the template and click on the button that says “Customize this template”.

Once you do this, you’ll be brought to a designing page.

Here you can see there are so many options to customize the template you selected. Selecting a template that is more suited for your digital humanities project means less customization. Here, I selected a poster that has a lot of space for information and infographics for this very reason. You can also create a Canva design from scratch if no templates match your desired look.

To customize your Canva, it’s all about exploring the options and finding how to make the information you are trying to display stand out the best. The design page is very user-friendly and doesn’t require much exploring to understand. I’ll go over some of the options here:

• It is very easy to click and drag items already added to the poster.
  • Firstly, hover over the item you would like to move. Canva will outline all items you hover over so that you know what you are trying to select.
• Once you’ve selected something, you can adjust its sizing with the circle and boxes that appear on the items outlines (shown below).

• There are a lot of normal word document features like changing font style and size. Canva offers much more than a word document, however. You can also animate items and ad effects to effect to make your poster more vivid and attention-grabbing. You should experiment with the animation options below.

• In the image of customizable options you can also see on the left-hand side, you can add elements and text boxes. Currently, the template many elements and text boxes that are formatted in a way that looks nice. You should experiment with adding these to get an idea of how you can make you visualization look nice.
• Canva has a variety of tools that allow you to create charts, graphs, and other visualizations. These tools can be especially useful if you’re working with quantitative data, as they allow you to present your findings in a visually engaging and accessible way.

That is all that I will be going over in this tutorial. Overall, Canva is a powerful tool for digital humanists, as it allows you to create professional-looking visualizations, infographics, websites, social media content, and presentations. By using Canva, you can communicate your findings and ideas in a more engaging and accessible way, making your digital humanities project more effective and impactful.