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How to Design Beautiful eBooks with Canva

So you want to learn how to design your own eBooks but you:

• Don’t have any design skills
• Are not sure what tools to use to design your eBooks with
• Have tried designing them in the past, but things didn’t shake out all that well…

Trust me I’ve been there and I understand your frustration. 

If you want to learn how to design eBooks with Canva, keep reading as I am going to reveal:

• The process that I use to design my own eBook covers with Canva (my favorite DIY design tool).
• Three great places to find design inspiration for your eBooks
• A video tutorial on how to design a “bangin” eBook cover using Canva!

Now:

While I’ll be sharing tips that you can use to design eBooks with Canva, (like the ones pictured below from the Blazing eBook Bundle in the shop… first let’s talk about how eBook design has gotten a whole lot easier for DIYers.

Designing Your Own eBooks Has Gotten Easier

Before DIY design tools like Canva hit the scene, for DIY design you only had two options:

Struggle with using difficult and expensive programs or outsource your design projects.  

The former option takes up a lot of time, while the latter option can get costly, as outsourcing design work can get expensive.  

Luckily for us DIYers there’s Canva.

Delightfully, Canva is:

1.  Easy to use  

With thousands of pre-designed templates eBook template designs and layouts, Canva is remarkably easy to use.

With most visual design programs you barely know where to start! However, with Canva, you won’t have to get stuck in a “design” rut.  

And here’s the best part:

This software contains numerous pre-designed graphics that make it easy to incorporate different fonts and elements into your designs.

You can pretty much do anything using Canva’s templates: change colors, add text, remove it and move it around as you please.

2.  Easily accessible from any computer in the world with an internet connection.

That’s right!

As long as you are using a computer with an internet connection, you can log in to your Canva account, access your eBook designs and make changes to them at any time.  

You’re also able to copy an existing image and change it into a completely new image.

Needless to say:

The possibilities are simply endless!

Once you create your brand new design, it’s conveniently saved to your free account so that you can go back and make edits to it in the future.

3.  The learning curve for DIYers is not steep  

Even if you’ve never designed graphics in your life, with Canva you can whip up beautiful eBooks in minutes, instead of laboring with difficult design programs.

Look at it this way:

Professional designers often have to sit down and think long and hard before coming up with the perfect design.

But with Canva, you can build custom graphics quite easily and create custom templates of your designs that you can use repeatedly for future design projects.

Isn’t that awesome?

How to Find Design Inspiration for your eBooks

Let’s face it:

Designing off the cuff can be difficult.

Sometimes I can envision how something is going to look.  Sometimes I can’t.

When this happens, the resource that I use for finding inspiration for design projects is none other than Pinterest.

Pinterest to the Rescue!

I used to think that Pinterest was just another visual network that people “saved” pictures to and that was it.

What I didn’t realize, though, is that Pinterest is much more than just some visual network.

Pinterest is a treasure trove of design inspiration and a mega visual search engine.

For example:

Whenever I need inspiration for Pinterest graphic designs, instead of starting a design from scratch, I would just head over to Pinterest, type in “Blog Graphic Design” in the search field, and then check out all of the designs that came up.

You can see an example in the screenshot below:

Example: Searching Pinterest for blog graphic design inspiration

Once the designs come up, you can simply “Pin” a design that you like to one of your Pinterest Boards.

(Psssst:  For you visual learners that want a step by step guide to designing eBooks with Canva that you can use for email opt-ins, passive income products and more, checkout the Elegant Ebooks workshop.)

How to Organize and Collect Designs that You Like

One of the best ways to organize and collect designs that you like on Pinterest for future projects is via the use of “secret boards.”

On Pinterest, a secret board is a board that only you can see, allowing you to keep your design ideas private. When you save a Pin to a secret board, it won’t show up anywhere else on Pinterest.

For example, here is a secret board that I created on Pinterest a while back to Pin interior designs and DIY projects in.

Example: Secret Pinterest board for DIY and interior design projects

Whenever I need design inspiration for interior designs and DIY projects, this is a board that I refer back to in Pinterest.

Other Places to Find Design Inspiration for Your Visual Design Projects

In case you are not able to find designs that you like on Pinterest, here are a few additional resources to consider:

#1:  Amazon.com (the eBook section) – As you may be aware, Amazon has millions of eBooks available with all types of cover designs. This is a great place to find visual inspiration that you can use for your projects.

#2:  Google Images – This resource pulls images from all over the web with a simple Google search, providing you with a near-infinite well of ideas to spark your imagination when it comes to visual design.

#3:  Instagram – This is another great site to mine inspiration from. You can use hashtags to search and find images on Instagram related to your design interests.

For example, searching “#ebookdesign” will bring up ebook designs that users have shared.

When you find a design that you like, you can use the nifty Pinterest Save Button to save an Instagram post to one of your Pinterest boards.

A 5 Step Checklist and Guide to Designing eBooks with Canva

Okay peeps, we’ve come to the good stuff…

Here is a running checklist of 5 design items to take into consideration when you design eBooks with Canva:

#1:  Choose great font combinations  

Choosing the right font combinations can be a bit tricky. However,  instead of struggling through to pick the right fonts for your eBooks, you can do one of two things:

Use a resource like FontJoy.com or just use one of the premade font combinations in Canva and add it to your eBooks. I would recommend using 2-3 fonts max for your eBooks.

 

There are three font combinations that you should focus on that include: a Heading Font, Subheading Font and a paragraph font.

Here’s an example of what pre-made font combinations applied to the cover page of an eBook in Canva:  

As you can see, Canva makes it easy to add font combinations to your design projects.  Simply drag one from the left side of the menu then add it to your eBook and you are all set.

#2:  Choose a great color scheme for your eBook

Not good at choosing colors that look good together?

No problemo!

Colorpalettes.net makes it easy peasy to choose color combinations for your eBooks.  All you have to do is find a color combination that inspires you and apply it to your eBooks design and that’s it.

(Psssst:  For you visual learners that want a step by step guide to designing eBooks with Canva that you can use for email opt-ins, passive income products and more, checkout the Elegant Ebooks workshop.)

#3:  Break up your eBooks content into scannable paragraphs

Folks,

Peeps like to scan what they read. So you want to make sure that you break up your eBooks content into scannable chunks (150-200 words).

Doing this will make your content easier to scan and digest.  There is nothing worse than reading bulky chunks of text.

#4:  Use professional looking images to “spice up” your eBooks design

One of the things that burn my biscuits yall is reading an eBook that has fuzzy images.  

This is a mistake and it comes across as super unprofessional.

Peeps, pleaseeeee refrain from using images that look super pixelated.  Instead, head over to check out Pexels.com or Unsplash and download some of the images here to make your books stand out and look amazing!

Oh and did I mention, the pics are free?  Can I get a whattt whattttt…..

So yea, please use pro looking images in your eBook designs.

#5:  Bring all of your design elements together using a Style Guide

One of the easiest ways to keep things in line on the design front for your eBooks with Canva is by using a style guide.  

In case you’re not sure what a style guide is, read this post to learn more about it. In a nutshell though, a style guide is a reference guide used to put all of your design elements into one place.

Watch Me Create this eBook Cover with Canva (FAST)

To show you how easy it is to whip up an eBook cover in Canva, check out this video tutorial.  Also be sure to download your free eBook Style Guide that you can edit and customize in Canva.

Learn How to DIY Design eBooks like a CHAMP with Canva

If you are looking for ways to make passive income selling eBooks, want to design eBooks to give away as email opt-ins or just want to step up your DIY design game with Canva, then I invite you to checkout the Elegant eBooks Workshop.

This workshop is jam packed with information that will get you on your way to cranking out beautiful eBook designs with Canva.

Thanks for reading yall and as they say, sharing is caring…