Page numbers, drawings and photos, oh my!
And Basil Fawlty ... Que?
It’s been half term here and I took some time off with the family. On our way to our holiday, we stopped at a tiny heritage steam railway for lunch. (One of my kids likes steam trains and so do I). It was a bit late for lunch, so the cafeteria was emptying out when we got there. Slowly, people started coming back in. A steam train arrived, with a couple of dining carriages, and stopped at the platform outside. We didn’t think anything of it and carried on quietly having our sandwiches.
Then a man in a little white jacket and black trousers arrived. “Huh,” I thought. “That guy looks like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.”
The guy started theatrically wiping tables, and some of the punters, and talking about how he was from Barcelona. It WAS Manuel!* (A different actor, obviously). At this point the rest of the family noticed too and the kids were looking really perplexed. Then Basil Fawlty walked in and started being spectacularly rude to everyone. He and Manuel did a little bit of banter - you know the sort. Sybil Fawlty came in and told Basil to direct everyone to their seats on the dining cars. She did the laugh (she was so good, she got a round of applause) and left. By this point, my husband could barely breathe for laughing.
Basil and Manuel told everyone which carriage they were on and where to sit. We got mildly heckled for being interlopers who just happened to still be having lunch when the show started. And then all was quiet again.
All in all, it was one of the more interesting lunch stops we’ve had. Embsay and Bolton Abbey steam railway -Tremendous fun all the time, sometimes with extra Fawlty.
Okay, back to the Canva stuff.
You can do automatic page numbering now! It’s probably more useful for people who make long documents in Canva. Technically, you could probably format your paperbacks in Canva, but I would recommend you use something designed for the purpose - like the free formatters fromDraft2Digital (here’s an affiliate link, if you want to try it ) or Reedsy, or one of the paid options like Vellum (Mac only) or Atticus (on the web). I use Canva to make PDFs of short stories and sign up magnets for people who sign up to my newsletter. Page numbers would be useful for that.
Canva draw - not exactly new, but it’s new to me. This now has drawing assist which will smooth out your drawings of basic shapes. It’s interesting, but not hugely useful, I don’t think. If you can think of a use I’m missing - let me know.
New images and videos - POC Stock is a site that specialises in stock photos of people of colour. It’s really exciting that this in available in Canva, because the range of photos available before were quite limited in this regard. In video, Canva Pro users now have access to the video library from Artlist, which has some lovely things on it.
Here’s the walkthrough of these features, including how to find a particular photo or video library and search ONLY within that library.
I hope you didn’t mind my random story about the Fawlty Towers themed steam train. Did it annoy you? Let me know. I’m still playing with the format of this email. I can tell you more stories, if you like them.
Oh, and if you enjoyed this, please tell you friends!
I’ll see you next week. Have fun designing!
Jeev
*If you’re wondering what on earth I’m talking about - Fawlty Towers was a UK sit com from the 70s. It’s very funny.