How to find Unique Fonts in Canva | Get amazing text effects and design like a pro!

How to find UNIQUE FONTS in Canva | Get amazing text effects and design like a pro!

In this video I'm showing you my hack for finding a ton of Unique and fun fonts in Canva! You can get amazing text effects to use in your projects that will help you design like a pro. Find out how to get 3D fonts, animated text, candy letters, florals, balloons, comics and so much more. Some are free and some require the Canva Pro upgrade, but I'll let you know which ones are which - don't worry, there are a bunch of great ones on the free plan!

#laurierusselldesign #chrysalisgraphicdesign #uniquefonts #canvatutorial #texteffects

Did you know that Canva has a ton of "secret fonts"? You can uplevel your designs with letters that look like candy, watercolor, marble, comics, and so much more! I'm also going to show you a special hack to let you customize your very own font.

Although Canva has a lot of great font choices, even on their free account, sometimes you want to be a little bit more creative, right? I know I do! Well, that's where today's video is going to help you out. I found a bunch of extra fonts sort of hidden away in one of the menus, but be careful... once you know where to look, you may spend a lot of extra time playing around with all the fun options!

*** NOTE: The rest of this post is the transcription of my tutorial video and won’t make as much sense without the video. I recommend following along with the video HERE. ***

Let's head over to my computer and I'll show you the trick to finding these extra fonts. All right. So here we are at Canva. I've got my document all set up and here's the secret. Basically, the fonts are not going to be in the text menu here. You're actually going to look in ELEMENTS and, some are going to be Free, some are going to be Pro, but, I'm going to cover a bunch and then you can find a lot more by just typing the word "letter" or "letter a" and this is how I found a whole bunch that I just picked a few to show in this video. But "letter a" "letter B", just pick a letter, pick your favorite letter. And, as you scroll down here, you can see all of the variety that they have and as you hover over them

You can tell if they're Free or if they're Pro, if they have that little crown. This is a great way to kind of get some inspiration for your designs and see what you'd like to do. Basically if you find what you like, you can hover over these three dots here. This is going to give you all of the keywords that you can search, to find the rest of the letters for the alphabet. And we're going to build these letter by letter, and you can also come up here to find the actual artist that designed this set. You can copy and paste their Brand ID if you want to get a more precise search.

This first one here that we're going to do, we're going to search for "letter cookie", and that's going to give us these ones here and just going to click to add them to my little plate here and adjust them, size them all together, and we can rearrange them however we like. Now to get these other ones, this one, we're going to search for "letter sugar cookie". Now this would bring up a whole bunch of other ones. And as you can see, they're different styles, different colors. So, I'm just going to do one of these for now, I'm going to make this bigger so you can see what I'm doing. And as you can see, if I click on this one up here, I have the option to change all of these colors. Because I was wanting to make a kind of valentine looking design here, I chose to change some of the colors on these to get that kind of a color palette. So that's something else that you can do with these and then, you can resize them and get them all lined up just the way that you want them.

The next one we're going to do is kind of a magazine letter cut out, ransom note. I'm going to ask you to "send more cookies" cause I have a sweet tooth. To find these letters the search that we're going to do in the elements menu is "letter magazine". And actually I'm going to set this filter to static. I don't want to have the animated ones right now. That's something else that you can do. You can run that filter. Okay. So those are going to come up and basically, we are going to just, again, build this letter by letter and I believe these ones again are ones that we can change the colors on. So, if you have a particular color palette that you're going for, for your, cookie ransom note, you can do that. Yeah. And again, you're just going to pick upper or lower case letters, whatever you want to do. And you're just going to start lining them up. And then once they're all the same size and where you want them, you can group them and then you can resize them together.

All right, for any of you that like comic books or that kind of pop art look, there are a couple of different fonts, alphabet letters in here that will work for that. Here's one example that I thought was fun. So, this is the one we're going to build here. This one I had to actually go find a brand to search for. So I will put this in here. So you guys have that, this is the brand that you can search for to find this particular letter that I'm using. And then I'm adding "block letter" because they have a bunch of different alphabets that this creator has made. As you can see, they have even under searching for block letters, there's a few different alphabets that they've made, but this will get you pretty close. This is another one where you are able to change the colors if you would like. So, depending on what background you're putting this on, you can make it work for you. On this one in particular, it looks like there's only three colors, but there's actually four because one of them is going to be this little shadow in here. I believe that's going to be this one here. Let me just put a completely contrasting color. Nope. See I picked the wrong one. All right, let's undo that. So it's going to be this color. Yep. It's going to be this kind of additional drop shadow in all of this font. With trial and error you'll find where it is and what works.

Again, just building that letter by letter. Here’s one little trick that you can do to help get these lined up. Now, Canva is pretty good about doing it's own little grid here. If you get it lined up close to the bottom, it'll try and snap it in pretty well for you there. But if you want to be really sure you can come up here to the file menu. If you turn on the rulers and the guides, then you're able to actually drop this down here. You can see those two blue lines. Then you can get everything sized exactly the same. It's going to snap instantly into those lines and you'll have all of your letters sized exactly the same. One more bonus little tip here. If you hold down the Alt or Option key, depending on if you're on PC or Mac, click and then drag, you can make an instant duplicate of whatever element you have. So that's another little tip. When you're done with the guides, just grab and drag them off of the canvas and they will disappear like magic.

Grab all three of your letters, click on Position, you can either tidy them up or make them perfectly distributed evenly horizontally. Just take your pick there. Then, if you want to group them together or resize them all at once and you're good to go.

The next hidden font that we are going to cover is how to make kind of watercolor looking letters. This one is really cool. I have done the word "PAINT" on a wall. This is actually a really fun font! Now, it isn't one that you can change the colors on. So, just think about what design you're going to use it in, before you go looking for it, there's a couple other paint like fonts, so if this one doesn't work for your design. Like I said, just search for search for letter, pick a letter, type it in there, and then you'll be able to see all of the other options that there are.

And again, if you hover over them, you can see if they're Free or if they are require the Pro upgrade. For example, I think this is one, Nope, that isn't the one that lets you change the color, but just play around with there. I believe there is some paint ones that let you change the color, but anyway, we're going to cover this watercolor one right now because it's really pretty and I like it. For this one, all you do is type literally "letter watercolor". And again, we're going to build this letter by letter.

Here's a little pro tip for making this background. These are actually two different pieces. This is a road that I have cropped. If you want to see what the full image looks like, that's what that is right there. And then I just stuck the brick wall on top of it there. And all of these buckets are just photos that I use the background remover effect on and it works really, really well. So that is how that works. Just going to add these on here. I think these are actually almost a perfect size for this design.

I'm purposely not aligning these that perfectly. I'm going to have Canva do that for me. I'm going to go up here to the Position tool. I'm going to have it lined them all up in the middle. Let's see what it does and then I'm going to move these out. There's a little bit of space. And so now instead of horizontal, I'm just going to have it tidy them up. So, you see what that did is it spaced them out a little bit too far. I'm going to undo that actually have it. That's not doing what, Oh, you know what? I have this background selected as well. Let's undo that. Hold down Shift to unselect the background. Now I only have my letters selected. See? Even professional graphic designers mistakes! All right. So now I'm going to tidy them up and that works. Now I can group them and reduce them just a little bit and get it lined up just the way I want it. All right. There we are.

For this next one, I wanted to find a font that it looked sort of like marble, but when I just typed in "letter marble", I didn't find something that really worked for me. What I ended up doing was "letter waves" to find this one.

And this is one that you can change the colors. So, I was able to pull up an actual photo in the background before I put this little man in the tuxedo here, I pulled up a photo from the photos tab over here of a black and white marble background. And I pulled these colors out of that. Then I got rid of that and did all the lettering and then put the background on. That's another little tip that, you know, you can pull colors out of photos in Canva. Here are the letters. They start out this kind of pink color here. This is a Pro one, like I said, I'm kind of been alternating back and forth in this video between some of these are Free, some are Pro it's about half and half. So, just know that some of these do require that Pro upgrade.

As you can see here, all three of these colors can be changed. I don't obviously have that photo here right now, but we can approximate with a gray and white stripe. I hop down here to the gray colors, it's not, exactly what we have here, but it's fairly close. So that is kind of my method for that. Now the other thing I did here, you can see it has a little bit of a drop shadow. There is a little hack for that as well and it only works if this is an image. So as you can see, what I did was I actually took, I got all my letters together. I grouped them just like I did up here, for "PAINT". And I basically put them on a new page and exported it. For that you do need the Pro upgrade for this part, absolutely. Export your picture with a transparent background as a PNG. And then I re-uploaded it into my Canva account. I just have that over here in my uploads. There it is, crop that so I don't have as big of a box to deal with. Okay, perfect. So, then since this is now an image and not actually those elements, I have this effects menu available to me and down here at the bottom images now have shadow effects available. And one of them is a drop shadow. Click apply. I forgot that takes the crop off. You have to crop afterwards, which is totally fine. We can do that. Okay. And then we have a little hack for getting a drop shadow on our custom text.

There are so many more than just this handful that I'm showing you today. I would love to see what you make with these! Tag me on Instagram (@cgraphicdesign) and let me see what you create.

All right. If you've ever wanted to write Happy Birthday in balloons, now you can. These yellow ones are Free. These blue ones are on the Pro plan. And it's really simple for this one. All we're going to do is search "letter balloon". And all of these are going to come up. So here are all of the letter balloons. Same thing. You can just build them one by one and you can either line them up manually, or you can turn your rulers on, turn your grid on, put a couple of grid lines down here and get everything snapping to grids to line it up.

Alright, this next one is similar to watercolor. You actually saw it come up when we did that search, but, it's easier to find it if you type in "letter melt" and this is one of the pro ones, again, this is not one that you can technically change the color on, but as you'll see, I have slightly changed the color on you and we'll show you the trick to doing that. These are obviously a little bit brighter, than the ones that are in my photo here. And I use the same type of trick that I use on the marble letters. Basically, I got this photo background all set up and then I exported just the words on a separate page as a PNG with the transparent background, uploaded them to Canva, so that then I can import just the word itself as an image. And then you have open to you all the image editing capabilities in Canva. For instance, I believe with this one, I did a lot more in the Adjustment menu up here. So, you can play around with things like the Brightness, you know, you can change the Scale there, change the Contrast, change out the Saturation levels, a little bit with the Hue there. things like that. So that is what I did just kind of play around with the until you like, look of it.

This next one is, in honor of my nephew, who is a huge fan of Minecraft. I was trying to find a font that was kind of that eight-bit can pixely look. It took me a little bit to figure out what was the best keyword to search for that. This is another one where I had to actually look up the letters by the Brand ID, just because there was so many options. And then I added "letter pixel" afterwards. For this one, as you can see, there is this yellow version with the red outline, and then there's also a grayscale version of this same font. I found this really cute background of this guy hopping out, and then, basically just, added the letters like we've done on all the previous ones, just adding them one by one, making sure they're all lined up perfectly and then grouping them together so that I can resize them, move them around as a word. And, you'll see if you move them around, you get that center line. You make sure that they're perfectly in the center and that's what you want. And then you have a cute little eight-bit scene.

You can even do animated letters for this, depending on what you're going to be using it. And if you need some fun animated letters for, say, a social media post or something like that. So, go up to here to elements this time, we are going to search for "letter marquee". And as you can see, the first ones that are coming up here are the animated ones. And then we have the static or non-animated ones. These are both of them actually free. And one way to think about using those would be on kind of like a movie board, depending on what you wanted to say there, something like "coming soon", animated or not for kind of a playbill sort of thing. So that's just one other way that you can use these letters. And there are, like I said, that some really cool ones that are animated that are free as well.

Remember, I promised you a special hack to get a custom font? For that, you're actually going to come back to the elements menu, and you're going to search for "frames." You may have used these before, but did you know that if keep scrolling you're actually going to find letters? The entire alphabet is in here, and this is how we're going to build our custom font.

We are just going to build our ABCs, whatever words you want. And then since these are actually frames, you can fill them with anything you want, any kind of photo, whether that's something that you've uploaded, or you can come over here to the Photos tab and search for a texture that you want to fill those with, make sure it goes into the frame and not into your background. And basically you can make a custom font of just about anything that you want.

Let me know in the comments, which of these hidden fonts with your favorite, and do you think you could use some of them in your designs?