Fancy typography effects and other new stuff
A small selection of things unveiled in Canva's latest update
If you’ve been following me for some time, and you’re curious about the sort of books I write, two of them are on sale for 99p this week. Girl Having A Ball is a rom com that centres around a ball in a gorgeous old house in Oxford (it was shortlisted for an award). That Holiday in France is set in (you guessed it) the South of France and about a young woman who breaks free from the people she didn’t even realise were stifling her.
Now, back to the point of this email…
Canva had their 2025 Canva Create event earlier in the week, where they unveiled a load of new updates. They’ve changed the home page again (I know, I know), but it not too dramatic a change and you can still find stuff.
A lot of the new stuff is to do with new AI capabilities. I have thoughts on whether or not we should be using AI, but this is not the newsletter for that, so I will cover some of the AI tools in a later video. For this week, let’s talk about the two biggies.
Bringing everything into one design. This is amazing. I’m already thinking about how I can use it to keep things tidy when it comes to my next book.
Typography tools. Canva now has the ability to do superscripts and subscripts and there’s new tools for kerning (yay!) and ligatures (double yay!). This is particulary useful for book covers. Often the difference between a book cover that looks professional and one that looks home made is the typography. Word placement, ligatures (which I always think of as ‘twiddly bits’) and alternates (where there are slightly different sets of letters) all help make the titles look more polished.
You can use ligatures and alternates in Canva, but it’s really, really fiddly. The current ligature tool only works on certain fonts. I found one through trial and error! I’m hoping that this is something that will be rolled out in phases, with more fonts added as they go.
Enought background. Here’s the video. Just click on the play icon to watch it on YouTube.
I’ll be back with more videos on some of the other exciting updates in the next few weeks.
If you found this useful, please tell a friend!
See you next week.
Jeev