In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create curved text using Canva. It’s a lot of fun and quite easy to do, and it’s a great way to create a slightly different look from the norm for your posts.
(If you don’t already have a Canva account you can sign up for one below. There is a free version, or you can sign up for Canva Pro which includes useful extra features. See full details on the Canva website and my affiliate disclosure at the end of this post.)
Watch the video tutorial below, or read the transcript that follows.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
A QUICK INTRO FROM ME
If you’re new here, I’m Sue from makerbizgraphics.com. I’m an ex-magazine editor and graphic designer who left the corporate world and started my own creative business. I am passionate about sharing my design knowledge to help other makers and creative business owners create consistent on-brand graphics and marketing materials with ease and confidence. I also want to help save you time and take the overwhelm out of creating your socials every week, so you can get back to doing what you love.
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HOW TO CREATE A LINE OF CURVED TEXT
Here we are in Canva, and I’m going to show you how to use the curved text feature. All I’ve done is just open up an Instagram template. So you can do that if that’s what you’re going to be creating. Come over to the sidebar and click on the text icon and create some text. Let’s just put in how to create a curved line. Okay, so you’ve got your text there. It’s super simple. You’re just going to highlight it, come up to the menu bar at the top, click on effects. And then you’ll see here in the bottom right-hand corner, there is something called curve. I’m just going to click on that. And there we go. As if by magic, the text is now curved.
What it will do is curve it into 180 degrees, sort of a semicircle of a curve. Now, if that isn’t exactly what you’re after, you just need to use this little slider here and you can reduce the amount of curve or you can increase it depending on what you want to do. And that is how easy it is to create curved text.
EXAMPLE OF CURVED TEXT IN AN INSTAGRAM POST
Let’s have a look at a couple of examples now. Here’s one. So let’s say this is your post where you’ve just got a main heading and a subheading. Let’s say we wanted to change this. We’re going to come back up to effects, click on curve, and I’m going to reduce the amount of curve for this one. And then I’m going to now rotate it so that I can create an arc that’s going to sit over the top of my heading. I might just make that a little bit more curved and then just line it up with the heading below. So that’s one example that just looks more interesting I think. It’s quite a nice way to make a big difference to the way that your posts look.
CREATING A SWIRL EFFECT
Let’s now have a look at another example. Here I’ve got community over competition and with this one, I want to make a swirl. So to do that, I’m going to click on one word and I’m going to now curve that this way. I’m going to come up to 72 and line that up. Now, what I want to do is actually the opposite with the word below. So if you want to get that swirl effect, all you would have to do is now click on the second word, back to effects. And this time it will be minus 72. So the mirror image of what we did on the other word, and then I’m just going to move that down to line it up. And you can see that we’ve now got a swirl, which actually I think looks quite fun.
HOW TO CREATE A CIRCLE OF TEXT
What about if you wanted to create a circle? Let’s have a look at how to do that. I’ll grab another text box and let’s say you wanted to create a new blog post. I’m going to just type in the words here. I’m repeating it because I want this to curve around into a circle. And between the words, I’m just actually adding this little dot here. To do that on… If you’re on a Mac, it’s option eight. So that will actually just add that in for you.
And let’s do one more and I’ll add another dot at the end. Now this is obviously a little bit larger. I’m just going to reduce the size. And to make a circle, come up to effects, come back to curve, and all you’re going to do is keep moving that slider around until it joins up. If you go too far, you’ll notice that the letters overlap each other. That’s pretty easy to see there. You just want to line it up so you’ve got the right spacing. Where I’ve got that little dot, for instance, you can see here that that sort of fits in nicely. And that’s how you create a complete circle of text.
EXAMPLE OF CURVED TEXT IN AN INSTAGRAM POST
I’ll just show an example of a way that you could use that. So here’s just a mock-up of a blog post that I made. And I quite like this, just sitting in the corner here, where it says new blog post in the circle. And yeah, you can obviously just add whatever color you want using your brand colors, so you keep your branding consistent, but that’s a nice way to make a little bit of a difference to your post. And then if you like that style, you could then use it each time you do a new blog post, create a template for yourself, and then just use that each time you create that post to keep consistency.
AFFILIATE LINKS DISCLOSURE:
Please note that a some of the links included in this description are affiliate links. This means that if you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge to you. I only recommend products or services that I highly recommend.
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HAPPY DESIGNING!