How to create animated gifs and videos using Canva

If you want to stand out online there is no question that you need to include impactful visual content in your articles, press releases or social media posts.

Canva.com has proved to be a great platform for creating social media posts through to presentations and I have used it since the early days of it being available in beta.

Today I received notification of a new feature which will make it of even greater value to visual content creators – though it is only available for the paid Canva for Work plan. It is called Canva Animator.

Now you can create animated gifs and videos from your Canva creations.

This is going to be really helpful for example if you want to create

• video content for Facebook that get engagement on Facebook
• animated gifs for your posts on Twitter or your blog posts
• video intros and exits for your YouTube video creations
• engaging videos for your Instagram account
• video content for ther live streams or when repurposing your live streams.

In the short video below (or watch it on YouTube) I take you through how this new feature can be accessed and demonstrate a few of the animation styles available in Canva for Work.

The graphic in the video animation was a template that Canva had created and linked to for users from their announcement today – I did change the words however. In doing so, I noticed that if you add too many words then the animation feature does not seem to work and you get an error notice. At the time of writing this article I can not find any details in the Help pages on Canva of the maximum number of characters that will animate.

One thing I noted when adding the animations to my site is that the size of the animation is smaller than the format if you were to download a JPEG. This means that the file size worked fine for the image I created and wanted to share from my phone on Twitter which has a restriction on file size. However, it meant that the animation did not work for my website theme as a featured image so I had to go back and download a JPEG or PPNG of the image from Canva – it did not work with the animated gif. It would be good to have dimensions on the animated gif on Canva and it would also be good to have the option to download the video in different resolutions.

Note: I have not checked if this new animation feature is available on the Canva mobile apps.

How can you imagine using this new feature of creating animations using Canva?

If you have questions about using video and animations for your content marketing you can schedule a confidential conversation with me here.

Update – Advanced Tips From Canva On The New Update

• The Canva team came back to me in relation to questions I posted in this article which I think you will find of interest:
• The new Canva Animator is a download feature exclusively available to Canva for Work users. It is still in its experimental stage so there are a few limitations.
• Downloading your design with premium elements as animation will not prompt payment yet. There will still be watermarks in your design upon download. To remove the watermarks, Purchase and download the design first as PDF, PNG or JPG. Afterwards, re-download the design as Animation.
• The feature does not support uploaded fonts. The preview will show an “invalid design” error. Use Canva fonts on your design if you want to download them as an animation. The team is working hard to make this available for you in the future.
• Downloaded images as animation all get downsized to 500 px width. The resolution will not be as crisp as an actual still image.
• If you encounter this (red) error in the download dropdown box – “This feature is experimental and doesn’t support some elements in your design. You could try making your design simpler.” – it could mean a few things: there may be some elements in your design that will not be supported once downloaded as animation. Please check for and replace SVGs with simpler images or illustrations. Ensure that your design is properly saved. Click on File > Save to manually record the last changes you made. You may have a part of the design selected when you clicked on the Download button. Go back to the design and click outside of the page. Then try downloading as animation again.
• The downloaded movie will only play once as compared to a GIF that loops. This is a default feature of the file.