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Canva Presentation Animation Explained

Canva adds notices that if the account is upgraded to a “Pro” account, animation features are added. But the animation is not what you expect. Yes, the content on each slide has entrance effects applied. No, you cannot control the animation effects in any granularity.

When logged in to your Canva account and have a presentation open, in the top right of the editable deck, there is a drop down button with ANIMATION as an option.

There are seven animation options; Fade, Pan, Block, Rise, Breathe, Slide, Instant. The critical thing to understand is the animation style chosen applies to EVERY object on EVERY slide. There is no granular control over what objects animate (everything does) and no selecting different animation styles, or no animation, for specific slides. There is also no customization of the animation duration/speed or ability to add on-click animations to elements on a slide.

The best way I can describe Canva’s presentation animation is it is a combination transition effect that applies an auto entrance to all elements on a slide.

The other critical item to understand about Canva’s presentation animation is an animated presentation is only available when exported as a .mp4 (or .gif). If an edit is made to the presentation, it needs to be exported again to add the animation.

In exporting our sample presentation to view the various animation styling we found a bug that altered the content of our bar chart (if this was PowerPoint I would submit a bug report to the Dev Team). The axis in the presentation itself looks correct but when exported as an mp4 the X axis label text becomes stacked (leaving the data to be interpreted as wrong).

Here is the demo presentation used for testing animation:

FADE Animation

[KGVID]https://thepowerpointblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/unnamed-file-2.mp4[/KGVID]

BLOCK Animation

[KGVID]https://thepowerpointblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/unnamed-file.mp4[/KGVID]

RISE Animation

[KGVID]https://thepowerpointblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/unnamed-file-3.mp4[/KGVID]

Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2019-10-28T10:09:50-07:00June 28th, 2019|Software/Add-Ins|

Canva Presentations by the TLC Creative Design Team

Today I am posting Canva presentations developed by several of the TLC Creative design team, along with their likes and dislikes of working with Canva. The key takeaway is Canva is a capable presentation creation platform and presentation design is not so much about the application used, but how visual design is applied to the content. The below presentations are all unique in visual styling despite everyone working from the same content outline. Reading through the likes & dislikes, the focus is on design limitations Canva currently has (compared to PowerPoint, which has 20 years of refining the application), which require more design time to manually format content to create the desired effect.

Presentations developed by the TLC Creative design team, all entirely in Canva Presentation:

Amber:

Christie:

Jake:

Sara:

The Good and Bad the TLC Creative design team noted while working on this project:

The Good:

1. Nice selection of ready-made templates

2. Good library of assets, making it easy to drag and drop for your presentation with a lot of free options

3. Web-based, can access designs from any web browser

4. User friendly for first-time use with an intuitive interface

5. Translates to a website seamlessly

6. Can share your slides as a template

7. Great, preset text styling options

8. Exports nearly perfectly to PowerPoint (no animations, poor backend Master Slide & Layouts, but slide level is very good)

9. Animation tool animates all elements on slide with one click (easy to use, nice visual effect, good for non-designers. Beyond the simple 1-click setup animation customization is a negative – not an option)

10. Free version is good enough to use, enough features to not have to go to premium

The Bad:

1. If there is no internet you can’t access and no offline app version

2. No table formatting options

3. Cannot animate individual elements

4. Cannot copy and paste elements from slide to slide in same position

5. The line width can’t be manually set

6. No color picker/eye dropper tool

7. Template does not control font of added text boxes. Every new text box uses the Canva default font

8. Cannot change multiple text box font sizes or font color in one action, have to do each text box separately

9. Cannot have more than 1 font size per text box

10. Limited object grouping

11. No quick ribbon for tools

12. Cannot customize chart styling or separate actions for axis’s (chart styling and options are very limited!)

13. Cannot add text inside shape, must stack separate text box on top of a shape (ugh!)

14. Adding a new page, or changing a layout (which has problems too), does not open to that template, leaving the user to hunt through the template options to find the template (tip: remember the categorie and name of the template selected!)

15. Cannot customize animation per slide, or animation on a slide

16. Master layout place holders are skewed

17. Minimal set of formatting tools

18. Presentation features seem geared more to image/visual heavy presentations rather than data/copy oriented ones

19. Even with premium not all assets are included

20. No image/asset search filter to show just the images included with the plan (do not want to search through 1,000’s of pay images)

Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2019-06-27T08:46:06-07:00June 26th, 2019|Software/Add-Ins|

Canva 101

Canva Overview:

Launched 2013 (Beta) and full release 2015
Based in Sydney, Australia
Free and paid/”Pro” subscription options (Pro account ~$15/month)
Pre-formatted templates for social media images (eg. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter). Pre-formatted templates for eBook and kindle book covers, business cards, brochures, flyers, and presentations. All templates take advantage of built in design tools for layout and design including font, colors and a built in extensive stock photo/asset library.
- Notable recent additions to the stock photography offerings is the acquisition of both Pixabay and Pexels.

(example of image and graphic asset searches)

For all design types, Canva has a good set of image tools for basic photo editing; tint, saturation, brightness, contrast, crop, resize, flip, etc.

A key advantage of Canva being a web based app is it can be used on Windows and Mac, in any of the major web browsers, and a robust mobile app for work on Android and iOS devices.

I am going to focus on Canva’s Presentation capabilities over the next series of blog posts, so check back!

Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2019-06-19T23:48:22-07:00June 20th, 2019|Software/Add-Ins|

Canva Images

Canva is best known as an online graphic design tool for creating social media-print-presentation graphics through its thousands of preset layouts. All of those creative layouts use lots of images, and Canva is also a resource where you can download high-quality stock photos – for free.

To download image, you must sign up and create a profile.
Go FEATURES > PHOTOS (which will include both free and paid photos in searches), or go to this webpage which is a search for only the free images Canva offers.
Use the search bar to look for specific images by category.

Or, simply scroll to the bottom and click the next page/arrow.
Click on the desired image> Download this Photo> The download will start automatically (or if not logged in, it will redirect to the log in page).
Images are part of a curated collection, so while the images I found are very high quality, they are limited.
Here is a sample of some of the images downloaded, added to a PowerPoint slide and stylized:

Troy @ TLC

By TLC Creative Services, Inc.|2018-07-02T18:20:51-07:00July 11th, 2018|Resource/Misc|