How to Create a Vision Board for Your Desktop and Cell Phone in Canva

A vision board is simply a visual collage of images and words that represent your goals and dreams in life. I've heard lots of folks using them as a way to have a visual reminder of what you're hoping to accomplish in the calendar year. The problem is, I’m not a crafty person and if I made the vision board that hangs on my wall, as soon as I leave my office, I no longer have that visual reminder. In this post, I'm going to show you how to make a digital vision board for your desktop and cell phone just using Canva. Without further ado, let's hop in.

Before we get started, I want to make one quick note. While you can create a desktop wallpaper and a cell phone wallpaper utilizing the free version of Canva, it's going to save you a lot of time and it will be easier with a pro account. You'll have access to more elements or photos and the magic resize tool. So in order for you to get started for free, you can go to www.lashondabrown.com/canva45 to claim your 45 day trial. Now when you open up Canva, what I want you to do is to locate the search bar and this is what I want you to type in: vision board desktop wallpaper. There are tons of desktop wallpapers on Canva but when you add a little bit of a description to this specific type of template you’re looking for, it narrows down the search and actually gives you a better starting point.

So we're going to type that in and click on enter and you'll see they’re actually a lot of designers who have created templates that work well for a vision board. So what I'm going to do is click on this first design here, and then click on customize this template. Once you open the template, what we need to do is to rename it so it's easier to find later on. So at the top we're going to click on the text and type in 2022 vision board. After we rename it, what I want you to do is actually duplicate the page. And what this will do is it will leave what you have here as an example but it will allow you to move things around to your liking down here for your specific vision. So with this template, you have a bunch of the Polaroid images with text underneath it describing what the person is trying to accomplish in this year. You can have less goals or more goals. If you have fewer goals, what you can do is click on the elements and delete them. If you have more, then you can select images here and copy and paste so if I needed more boxes, say I had eight goals for the year. I could select all of these, click copy and then paste, then I could drop them here.

From there if I wanted to evenly space them, what I could do is highlight everything and group it first and this will group the text and the frame then I can highlight everything and drag it to the middle. Grouping your elements makes it easier to edit later, that is why I do that but you don't have to. You can go one element at a time. Now if you want to change the text, you can click on the text here and find one that better fits your aesthetic. If you want to change the colors, you can click on the text color, select one from your color palette, you could select one from the photos involved in the template or you can even utilize the color picker tool which will allow you to directly pull a color from the design.

So once you've decided on your fonts and colors, then you can honestly click on everything in the template and modify it to fit your needs. You can click on the background and delete it if you wanted a photo instead of a texture. If I wanted a beach background instead, I could click and drag it here and then move it backwards. If I wanted to change any of the images, I could ungroup it, delete a photo and add my own photo.

Now what's great about Canva Pro is you have an incredible photo library built into Canva which will save you tons of time. You can click on photos and type in the type of image you’re looking for and it will search Canva’s database to pull up images that fit your description. Now when you're done designing your vision board, this is what I want you to do: Number one is go ahead and click on download and download the specific page that is your design, remember page one was our example in case we needed to refer to it later. Page two is our vision board. So you can click on page 2, download the png and then you'll have it saved to your downloads or your desktop wherever you have your downloads saved and then you can make it your desktop wallpaper.

Now another thing that you can do is go ahead and get rid of our inspiration and now that we have the desktop version created, we can modify this for our cell phone. This is where the magic resize tool comes in, I use this feature all the time. If you create something, say for instance, Instagram, and you want to put it on Twitter. You can resize a square graphic and make it a horizontal graphic for Twitter or vice versa. I always create my images the biggest version that I want them to be and then make them smaller for other purposes and magic resize makes that super easy. We're going to click on resize and we're going to type in cell phone and that is going to pull up phone wallpaper. For this example, I don't want it to automatically resize it, I want it to copy and resize. So I'm going to click copy and resize and what it's going to do is actually add the words phone wallpaper to the name of my template, and then it's going to make it fit for a cell phone.

Now here's one thing to keep in mind, I personally don't like to have text behind the icons on my cell phone. If you are an iPhone user or you use Android and you happen to have lots of icons on your phone, keep that in mind as you edit your design. So what I'm going to do is click and drag this text down here and really leave that top area open. I'm also going to select these four, bring them down here, select all eight and then click and drag here. You can play around with the format, if you prefer to have a three in a row, then maybe two and then three again, that might be a better format for you.

The purpose of you creating a cell phone wallpaper and a desktop wallpaper is so you’re able  to remind yourself of your goals whether you are sitting at your desk or you are on the go. Canva makes it really easy for you to find those images that fit the goals that you have in your mind, you can easily add text to your graphics so that you're reminding yourself day after day after day of what you’re working towards. 

I really hope that this tutorial inspires you to make your goals more concrete, to give yourself visual reminders and to refer to them often to encourage you along the way. I hope this tutorial inspires you to create your own digital vision board. Remember, if you aren't currently using Canva Pro, and you'd like to have access to magic resize and more photo options, go to lashondabrown.com/canva45 to get a free 45 day trial. Be sure to subscribe to my channel because I'll teach you how to grow a biz without breaking the bank.