Canva Tools
Today I will be discussing how to create an advertising flyer for a student organization that I am a part of, Campus Activities Team (CAT). I have been a part of CAT since my freshman year, and I have been a coordinator for Warrior Entertainment events for 2 years and now I am a coordinator on the design and advertising team this year. As my role, I need to create flyers on platforms such as Canva and Adobe Spark. We host many events each week and we primarily advertise our events via flyers made on Canva through our Instagram account. As a team, the design and advertising committee works out a posting schedule and we make sure that we create our flyers in advance, ready to post on Instagram.
Regarding our events, we have on-campus events, and off-campus events. For our off-campus events, we need to make flyers for the event and explain how students can RSVP. We also need to create flyers that remind students about the event a couple days before the event. In addition to that, we need to make an original flyer presenting the event. So, it goes in the order of: “RSVP” post, “presenting the event” post and lastly, “reminder” post. With these three different types of posts, we need to make 2 different flyers. For the RSVP flyer, we create something that is not as elaborate, but it explains the type of event and the RSVP information. These posts are also on our Instagram story and not an actual post. For the “presenting the event” post, we make a more elaborate flyer that has more images/stickers to really demonstrate the event. This type of post will be on our actual page and not just on the story. For the “reminder” post, we just repost the “presenting the event” flyer in addition to creating a reminder with the Instagram remind feature. This type of post goes on our story.
Now we get into the good parts on how to create the flyer! So first off, you would need to download the Canva app and make an account and/or make the account on the Canva website. From there, you need to decide whether you want to create an “Instagram post (square)” design, an “Instagram story” design, or any other type of design, depending on what the flyer is for. Like I mentioned before, we use Instagram, so I use both the story design and the square post design depending on the situation. From there, you can either create a design from scratch or use one of the templates they already have and edit it to your liking. I personally choose a template and edit it to my liking because it is easier that way and it saves a lot of time.
In order to choose what template, you want, you can either search a specific keyword or just choose from what is in front of you. After you have the template, you want up, you can edit the words, sizing, and pictures on there and put anything you want. I only have the free version of Canva so sometimes there are certain templates and images that you cannot use. They are for people who pay for a subscription. This issue has come up numerous times, but I can work around it and find other templates and images that work best for my flyers. As you are editing your design, Canva saves everything automatically. I really like this feature as it would be difficult to save every little thing one at a time. Once you are done with your design, you have the option to save it to your camera roll or upload it straight to Instagram from the app. Before posting, we usually create a long caption that grabs the student’s attention while explaining details about the event. After we do that, we are all set!
Written by: Yasmine Amin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasmineamin1/