Now I know what you’re thinking. Swish Design are graphic designers right? So why on earth would we be teaching people how to create their own images for sharing on social media? Well the simple truth is, there are not a lot of people out there who can afford to pay a graphic designer to create something that will have a shelf life of one day (as social media images tend to do). The other simple truth is, being graphic designers, it hurts us having to look at ugly images on the internet. So we’re starting a war on ugly social media images. And the humble quote is a good place to start.
Today we’re going to show you how to create a very simple yet beautiful quote image (that you can share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or even in a blog post) using Canva. Canva is a fantastic program that allows even the most technically challenged people to produce pretty graphics. The other wonderful thing about Canva is it’s not a program you have to download to your computer. You create your images in your browser window. Let’s get started!
Step 1: Choose your quote
The quote I’ve chosen is:
“If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.” —Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO
Step 2: Go to the Canva website and login or create an account
Canva lives at www.canva.com/ Once you are there, login if you have an account already … or create a new account for yourself.
Step 3: Choose the poster option
Step 4: Click ‘background’ to view the background options
Step 5: Select a background
Canva have free backgrounds and paid ones. For now, just choose a free one. And don’t agonise too much – all the backgrounds are beautiful and we’re going to overlay a box on them anyway.
Step 6: Click the ‘text’ button
Step 7: Pick an element for your text to go into
You can resize this element by pulling on the corners. I like to choose elements that have just one piece of text in them. I also favour simple shapes.
Step 8: Paste your quote into the shape you’ve chosen
You can change the font, font size, and font colour here as well. 
Step 9: We’re nearly done!
Step 10: Save your image
Step 11: Admire your creation
You can now upload this image to your social media accounts safe in the knowledge that you are not causing harm to the eyes of graphic designers anywhere 🙂