Okay. I'm a little nervous for graphic designers right now because it's starting to get real when it comes to AI tools being applied to design, because now marketers are able to become designers. And I did an episode on this a few weeks ago and an episode of Bot Bros. But today I have a new announcement around a tool that I think every single single marketer needs to have a subscription to. It is a low cost, and it will save you so much time and frustration. And it is Hanva. I know a lot of tool that a lot of you already use. I haven't. I've always been an Adobe guy. But over the last few weeks, Canva has dropped this tool that is just freaking magic. In fact, they even named it after Magic. It's called Magic Layers, and it is something that is revolutionizing my design workflow already. So in this episode, I wanted to give you a preview of what it looks like, how I'm incorporating it into my workflow as a marketer and what you need to look for now as, as. As a designer. Because all marketers, you're pretty much now a designer. The design tools make it possible, and I guess it's the AI doing the design, but really now you're essentially the art director, curating, fixing, and adjusting and getting stuff sent. It doesn't mean you don't need a designer. You probably should have a designer still on staff because they can go faster and push it even harder than you can. They have a sense of taste that maybe you don't have. If you don't have that sense of taste, definitely hire a designer to help you. But if you're a solopreneur, if you are building a business of one, or you're just a marketing team of one, this is going to revolutionize everything that you do when it comes to graphic design. So pay attention because I'm going to walk you through exactly how to use this tool, what I'm already doing with it, and show you my workflow of how I'm using something like ChatGPT in tandem with Canvas. New Magic Layers feature. So welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends call me Dan Chez. And today we're going to be. I'm going to be sharing my screen a lot because I. This is a visual thing, so if you're listening into the audio, just know I'm going to do my best to describe it. So if you're doing a workout, if you're. If you're driving along in the car somewhere and, and then come back to the video version on YouTube if you want to go through the step by step. But I promise everything I'm saying I will be showing visually. And if you're, if you're listening just now, I'll be describing what I'm seeing as I'm seeing it. But you know, preview it with the audio and then come back to the video and watch it sometime. So here we go. I had a project this week which is a very common project. I needed to make an announcement about a new speaker at the event. Again, I'm working for a company called Trim Healthy Mama. It is a creator led business with two ladies, two mothers that wrote a book that went like viral, hit the New York Times bestseller many years ago and now they have a whole e commerce company where they sell supplements and all kinds of things and books, lots of books. And they have an event coming up this summer called the Gathering. It's for the audience, you know, but a lot of you marketers, you've had to promote events before. You've had to make announcements on social. And I needed to come up with a graphic announcing a new big keynoter, right? We just landed Lisa Previre, which is a big deal to this particular audience. And if you don't know who it is, it doesn't really matter. But you've all had to make announcements like this one. And I have to come up with the graphic and this is a big keynote person like this, it's gotta, it's gotta look important. I was like, ugh, like I could design this from scratch in Photoshop, but I don't even know where to start. Sometimes you just end up with blank page syndrome and you're just kind of like. Even when you know how to design, sometimes it can be intimidating stepping up to that blank page, not knowing. So most designers usually go through Pinterest and start looking for inspiration. And then you pick a few, you combine them, build it. It takes forever just to build one simple graphic. And the rest of us, you know, you go into Canva, pick a template, slap the, the speaker's photo in there, change the name and call it, call it day. But it's an okay, you know, ish looking graphic. So let me show you my process of what I did. I started off in ChatGPT. I just find ChatGPT to be a great design tool. It's better than Nano Banana. As good as Nano Banana is even with version 2. Man, ChatGPT is just really good at dealing with the ambiguous. Like you can give A make me an announcement, make it look important. That's kind of ambiguous. And then say make it look fancy. You're like, gosh, that's, that's. If you give designers that language, they're gotten good at interpret interpreting ambiguity. But dang, as a designer, you're like, what is fancy? What does fancy mean to you? You gotta, you gotta actually pull that out and interview people to get it out of them. But ChatGPT is pretty good at interpreting it. Nana Banana. More of a struggle. More of a struggle dealing with ambiguity. ChatGPT is pretty good at it. So that's why I start with ChatGPT and often go into Nano Banana to refine. But now Mike, I might not need Nano Banana to refine except for a few search certain situations because now I could do it in Canva. So let me show you what I got and my cam chat account. I gave it a basic prompt. I said I need a speaker announcement graphic to announce that Lisa Bevere is speaking at the gathering. Should be a taller rectangle graphic attached as a photo of Lisa and a screenshot of the website design of what the website design looks like for you to emulate. Make it less whimsical and more like a design in the website sophisticated. That actually ended up being a second like this whole. Make it less whimsical because the first one I did, which is what I'm going to show you, was a little bit too whimsical. I might still test it as a Facebook ad, but that's the one I'm going to show you. Because the one it gave me below is more like the one we actually ran more of a straightforward. Looks kind of like an elegant looking book cover, I guess, which was fine. Um, but the one that it ended up giving me ended up looking more like this. Right. So this is more. It's almost like it could be a full movie poster level design. It's. It's something that I would have never been able to come up with myself. It's glowing, it's radiant. It literally looks like a movie poster. It's. It's good and it's beyond what I would have been able to design myself as a designer. I just wouldn't have been able to hit this. But it's not all correct. The logo for the gathering is almost there. Even though it had a picture of it, but it's not quite there. And you know, a logo, you probably need to stick to the exact logo. And then some of the information on it was wrong. It has the wrong Dates. It's got the wrong URL because I didn't give it the URL, so hallucinated that bit. And that's fine, by the way, I gotta say, like, when you're asking it to design things for you, this is a little pro tip. When you're asking Gemini or ChatGPT to design things for you, give it the assets. So like I gave it a photo of Lisa because I needed that in there, but. But I also gave it the whole web design. Like this whole website I made for the gathering. This is built with Replit, by the way. So like Replit designed this and made it. It's a pretty nice looking website. Sophisticated, elegant, simple, but it's like, it's a nice looking website. It looks like it's for a conference that you'd want to go to, right? Or at least that the target audience would want to go to. It looks nice. Another pro tip. This is a tip on top of the tip. If you ever want to take a website design and get the full picture of it, there's this great little Chrome plugin that called. What is it called? I'm going to hover over. Go full page. I have this pinned in my Chrome browser all the time, simply so I can click it. And it literally takes photos of all the different parts of a long landing page like this one, and then stitches it together in a single image. The work that this would have taken in Photoshop is intense. It's hard to stitch it together to make it look like one page. But now I have a full image of this one website. So if I want Chat GPT to understand what the design concepts of this thing look like and what needs to be there. And it's got a little long, but ChatGPT can handle it. You can see I attached it here in the original prompt and I said reference the design of the landing page and ChatGPT can look at it intelligently. And that's why even this graphic looks like it belongs to the website design. It's got the right looking fonts, it's got the right color palette, and it just looks like it belongs to the same design. So instead of describing your design that you want, you can, it helps to describe it also just give it a sample of what you want it to look like. Also you can't give it specific fonts. I see people do this all the time. Oh, here's my color codes, here's my specific fonts. Don't do that, don't do that. Just show it. Just show it. It's not going to be perfect because it can't pull in fonts. It can only kind of emulate the font look, you know, and it gets pretty close. So you could see, even kind of hallucinated the image, but it kind of understood that it's trim, healthy mama with the butterfly, but it's not the right logo. And this is where, you know, so we end up with something like this, or we end up with something like this. And it looks good, but it's not quite right. The dates are wrong and it looks beautiful, except you got to change the fonts, right? And it's. And some of the text is wrong and it's got the wrong information. So most people go through prompting hell in order to get it through, because you're like, no, can you change this? And then it comes back and it's not quite the same and it hallucinates something else and you just go through prompt after prompt after prompt, and it's exhausting. And that's why most people end up still going back to Canva or to their graphic designer. Because before, this was impossible to deal with. But it is no more. To kind of give you an example of how I dealt with it before is I would open this graphic up and something like Photoshop, like, use the Marquee tool to select something that I didn't want there. And I'd have to say, go to Generative Fill and say, like, remove text. Probably the most common thing that I do in Photoshop now is just going to Photoshops and it's good, you know, like, I can highlight over the Gathering the logo that it messed up in Photoshop, say remove text and then bam, the text is gone. And let's see, next, I could just drop in the Gathering logo where it's supposed to be, resize it, you know, I have to restylize it, add a little drop shadow to make it stand out a little bit more. And I'm getting there, you know, And I'd have to do this for every little section that I wanted to change in, in this design layout, right? I have to go and say, remove text from this part and then reset the text. And it wasn't hard. It was honestly a lot easier to deconstruct an AI image in Photoshop than it was to build it from scratch, for sure. So I did it and it was way faster and it was amazing. I loved the process. And the problem with that is, is unless you have Photoshop skills, this was really hard. Pretty much out of reach for most people. And so my. My friends, like Ken Ferre, who I co wrote own the show with, would struggle because they tried to get into Photoshop and not be able to quite tear it apart like they needed to. So he'd kind of use Nano Banana to use for edits, because Nano Banana could do more precise edits, but it would hallucinate too and mess up. So this is the process we can now leave behind. And I'm seriously considering dropping Photoshop entirely. And I'm now exploring if Canva can take up all the rest of my Adobe needs with vector illustrations and maybe some. I don't know if I need it for print, because who does print anymore? All right, it's just rare. I don't do it, however, anymore. But I'm now exploring to see if I could just use Canva entirely rather than Adobe, because Canva has this new tool. And that's what you're here for. It's what I want to show you because we're going to take this same image. I want to show you the magic that now is Canva, because again, it's called Magic Layers. And if you're logged into Canva on the home screen, it's now this little icon just below the little search bar where you can search for designs and uploads and all kinds of things. And I'll just click on that and I'm go ahead and select that same image that ChatGPT gave me. It's got Lisa Pavir and it says it's speaking at the gathering and it's got the wrong logo, it's got some of the wrong text on it, but it's good. I'm just going to upload it as I downloaded it from ChatGPT and. And as soon as I get it, ChatGPT goes to work and it gives you this graphic that looks like it's scanning it, scanning for error, you know, like that kind of little scam swipe going on. And it takes. I think it takes less than a minute. We're just going to watch and see it go by right now. And it's doing its work. It's going to make it so this. Oh, there, it's already done. Look at that. You could tell that some of the fonts have changed, but it's still pretty close. And if I click it, like I'm hovering over Lisa Revere the photo, and I can actually click her and move her anywhere I need in this whole layout. And it is perfect. Her hair looks fantastic. Like all the little details of her photo are Cut out better than if I had cut it out myself in Photoshop. So I'm going to go ahead and put that back where it was because I actually like the positioning of where she was and the exciting announcement text that turned into a graphic rather than text. That's okay, but at least it's now easy to move. The Gathering is now a graphic too, so I'm just going to go ahead and delete that. And just like I did in Photoshop, I'm going to grab drag in the Gathering logo and bam, it's looking good. And all the text has been converted to the closest font. Let me get rid of this. It's been quoted to the converse. And all the text has been converted to an editable font. Yes. So now I can come in here and say, no, it's from the 9th, July 9th to the. To the 11th, not the 15th through the 17th, because that was wronged. And now I can come in here. I still have to get used to Canva, by the way. And now I can come in here and change the URL and actually get that right at the bottom of this little graphic that I want to post to Social and it's done. It's all editable. I can move things around. I can edit to my heart's desire. I can even readjust this little line just above her head. And then, bam, we are now done. And I can export this as a graphic and I can move it around. I could save it for later. This is magic. The ability to take what ChatGPT gave me and it converts into this is just amazing. Now, some caveats. It doesn't do a perfect job. Like, this exciting announcement piece is not as nice as it was as what ChatGPT had made. In fact, let me open up the original image and you could see some things changed from here to there. You can see it's not quite the right font. It's. It's a little bit heavier on the feet of the serif. You know, this is all little design nuances, but for most of y', all, this is going to be pretty dang good like. And yeah, I could still change the font out because it's editable. I can go and find a serif that more closely matches what ChatGPT gave. Now, what's the font Chat GPT had? I don't know. ChatGPT doesn't have specific fonts. It just designs, you know, it's doing it by pixel, not by font. So you have to look for something that looks similar. You can ask it for recommendations if you want to, but you know, it's not going to be entirely perfect. But it's pretty close look at the before and after on the screen here. It is dang close to what I had with ChatGPT and honestly, I love that I now have this option. This is going to change the game for a lot of you out there because you don't need Photoshop to reconstruct it anymore. The subscription for this is about 15 bucks a month for Canva Pro and that's it for you. Don't get it with free. You do have to pay 15 bucks, but it certainly beats the heck out of an $80 a month or more Adobe subscription in order to get like the whole suite to be able to edit things or even just the, you know, the subscription you would need just for Photoshop alone, which is an incredibly heavy tool and hard to learn tool where canva's much easier. In fact, you don't even have to learn all the little things in Canva because you just drop this, drop, drop, drag and drop this graphic in here. It does the work for you. And then you can just do the slight edits that you need to make. No design skills requ. Just make a few edits and leave things the way they are. Because chances are ChatGPT is a better designer than you. And so just leave it with whatever design choices ChatGPT make, leave it, just stick with it. Design advice for marketers As I was working on a thumbnail for this very show now I made this thumbnail and I had Canva recreate it. It's like a rest in peace Photoshop kind of thing going on and it did a great job. But I want to show some detail, some, some differences between the two. This tool isn't perfect, as you can tell from this original file that I got from ChatGPT. Yes, it gave me like a repetitive. It had resting head, the. What do you call this? The caption and the thumbnail twice it said rip Photoshop, rip Photoshop. One on the gravestone and one as a header. And that doesn't make sense. So I just got rid of the one in the header. But look at the difference and even the way the words look on the gravestone, you could tell the one in ChatGPT looks better. It's got a little bit more of the color bouncing onto it. It just looks like it's part of the image better versus in Canva, you could tell it doesn't have quite the color splash. It's not overlapping with Travis's hair as much. It's just not quite as, I guess. What do you call that? Like as cohesive as what ChatGPT gave. But I have to say it's pretty dang close. Close enough that if I were recreating it I would have ran into the same issue and you could probably still, if you're really good with canva, recreate some of the effects of that. But look at what it did do. It still gave me a pretty close font comparison on most of this. It looks like the rest in peace canva that ChatGPT had got converted to a sans serif that matches the Photoshop one. And that's fine, but it's still a white one and it still gave it this almost very similar looking drop shadow. So you could tell that it's actually doing multiple things. It's not just looking at the font, but it's looking at the font color and the font treatment here with this drop shadow underneath this, the word Photoshop. So it's good to know that it's going pretty far in getting you to the original image that was in this compressed one version one image design here. And it separates out all the little meaningful things into separate images. So you can see I have myself and I have Travis here. But of course Travis isn't here. So I might remove Travis from the image and and then I might need to recenter everything else into the image now I might recreate this entirely. Now my arm is getting cut off. Might have ChatGPT do a redo on this one, but now it's possible to do that because everything's an editable piece. Or I might just extend this background graphic where Travis was to give it more visual interest on this side. Ultimately I think we need to come back and restart from scratch and have ChatGPT try again. But having this in cam in Canva now gives you way more ability to just move things around a little bit and try to be able to edit things and be able to make corrections that you just couldn't before. Now it's possible, so give it a try. You could do a free trial of Canva. I think there's like a seven day, 14 day free trial or something. I don't quite remember, but I remember I've done free trials of Canva before and I'm going to recommend this to all of you. If you don't have a Canva subscription, you need to get one. Unless you touch no design work like no design passes your desk, you should probably get one. You should probably start experimenting with this. If you're a business owner, if you're a freelancer, you have to have a Canva subscription because this feature is just overpowered. And I think this is where Canva is going to start overtaking Adobe. If you didn't know Adobe's CEO is stepping down because it's getting harder and more competitive and harder for that big old company to keep up, I think this is where Canva is going to start to shine with their smaller fee and their smaller, I don't know, light, more lightweight design tools because AI is starting to fill in the gaps of what non designers could make. And it's not that designers are going to go away again. Designers are going to be able to take this and hopefully run even farther with it than us marketers could. But for things like little announcements, little graphics, little Facebook cover photos and all that kind of stuff that we have to do all the time, email, headers, whatever, this is a game changer, ChatGPT or Gemini Plus, Canva now gives you a creative powerhouse and you don't have to be very skilled in order to move the ball down the field.
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