How to Make a Carousel Post in Canva

If you would like to grow on Instagram but you don't want to post Instagram Reels, this post is for you. In this post, I'm going to walk you through how to create beautiful looking carousel posts using Canva.

For this tutorial, I'm going to use this previous carousel post as an example to walk you through how you can create beautiful carousel posts in Canva. Now you'll notice when looking at this graphic that it's not a perfect square. It does crop perfectly to a square when it's in my feed. However, when you click to expand it, it takes up more space. I'm going to show you how to do that using the magic Resize tool when you're done but that tool is only available if you have a Canva pro account. If you want to try Canva Pro free for 45 days just click on this link.

What we're going to do is go to the homepage and we can either click on Instagram Post or we can select it in the top right hand corner. Once we do that we're going to open up a square Instagram post. In the corner, you're going to see a search bar within the templates for Instagram and what I want you to do is either type carousel or carousel posts. That is going to pull up some carousel post templates to get you started in Canva but I want to walk you through a very important feature. If you hover over the first image, some of them will say one of six or one of eight or however many there are. If there are multiple slides within a design, it will move when you hover over it, so don't take the first slide for granted because there's probably more variations once you hover over that.

The other thing you want to take note of is you can mix and match your designs. For instance, say I really like this graphic from my first slide, but this doesn't come with multiple variations. I can drop in that first design and then I can add a page and snag a design from another template. Maybe for the third one, I want something from this and so you can mix and match, that's what I did here for my graphics.

Now, another thing that you can do when you're searching, if you don't search carousel we can search for a specific design. For instance, if you want to recreate a slider, you can type slider and maybe one of your graphics in your carousel posts could emulate an Instagram slider. You could type quiz and you can see different graphics that emulate a quiz. Here's a little true false graphic. So if you're looking for an element that you want to add to your design, you can search by element, otherwise I would encourage you to search by carousel.

The first thing I do when I'm designing my carousel posts, is I decide on the aesthetic that I want for the post itself. And I really treat each different post like it's its own little magazine. As long as my brand colors are implemented in the design, it's going to work on my feed. So I don't have to worry about making it match perfectly and to be honest with you, the variation really does elevate the look of the post. Once you have all your different slides, I recommend maxing it out at 10 slides, then you can start to customize it for your design. For the sake of this illustration, we're just going to throw in some random different elements, so that we can max it out. When you click in the bottom right, you're going to see a grid view for your design. If you click on grid view, then you can click to rearrange your slides. So if you want to have a true false show up earlier or put the slider at the end, you can play around with where these slides appear in your carousel. And when you're done and rearranging things, then you can click on that grid view icon again and it will bring you back to this page. One thing you'll notice about this post is that the fonts are consistent, even though I use different templates to create this single post. The first thing you want to do after you’ve dropped in all your different layouts, is modify your fonts. So you can see each different side, I'm utilizing the same three fonts right here on a Brandon Grotesque, here I have Glacial Indifference and here I have TAN Angleton. You're going to see those same fonts throughout the post.

Another thing that you can do to make your slides match each other, even if you've kind of Frankenstein’d them together from multiple different templates, is to make sure that your brand colors are consistent. To do that, you're going to click on styles on the left hand side and then you're going to select your brand kit. If you have not uploaded your brand kit that is a pro of using Canva Pro, it will save you a lot of time. We're going to click on the palette and it's just going to automatically shuffle through your colors. That's going to allow you to save time to apply your brand colors to these designs and you just keep clicking until you like how it looks. And then you're going to move forward. Once you've matched all of your fonts, all of your colors, then you're going to go back and add your content to your design. When you're done, you're going to rename your post. Before you download it, you're going to click on, resize and right now it's 1080 x 1080, we’re going to change it to 1080 x 1350. If you wait until after you've designed the post it's going to be a lot easier for you to tell what's going to get cropped off when it crops to a square. We're going to click on resize. And as you can see, this is where the crop line is going to be on Instagram. You can click and drag it and move things around and just know that this is the line where things will be cut off. You can kind of rearrange things, for some of your designs it may not even matter. Nothing is going to get cut off. You would just go page by page and make your final adjustments before you click on download.

When you download this, it's going to download them in a zip file that you will need to unzip, to be able to upload on Instagram. If you click on the arrow, you're going to see none of the pages are selected now. To select all of them just click on all pages one to ten and those are all of the slides or pages for your carousel. All you need to do is select all and click on download and then it will zip them all. You'll unzip them to upload to Instagram. What I do is I actually just send it to myself as an email, I make the photos, the attachment to the email, I write my caption in the body of the email and copy and paste. Any system works, you can upload it to a cloud based program like Google Drive or Dropbox, if that's what you desire but the simple email works for me. When I'm planning my content, I'll just send myself an email and say Monday post, Thursday post, etc. The attachments are images I created in the carousel posts in Instagram and the body of the email is my caption.

That's my simple way of making carousel posts. If you find this super overwhelming, the other thing that you can do to be completely honest and save yourself some time, is you can go to Creative Market and you can actually search for Canva templates. You can even specifically search for Instagram templates and there are people who have already created hundreds and hundreds of custom Canva templates that you can just put in the cart and purchase. If you want to go beyond what Canva has available, that's another hack that will get you there. Click on this link to hop on over to Creative Market. Another thing that they do on this platform is they also give out free goods, every single week, so you definitely want to create an account, if for nothing else for the free goods. If you have other questions about creating content for Instagram in Canva, let me know and I'll be sure to create a quick tutorial for you. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel because I will teach you how to grow your biz without breaking the bank.