Making My Digital Vision Board (Using Canva)

First off – let me start by giving credit where credit is due. I was watching a muchelleb video last week where Michelle creates a vision board using Canva (the resource I already use to create images and graphics for my blog already, more on that later), and I immediately paused the video and opened the same source.

Here’s the video I’m referencing.

Secondly, I’ve never been a big vision board kind of gal. I love to surround myself with memories, but I rarely hang up future goals around my room. Last year I started a Pinterest board titled, “Vision Board 2019,” where I pinned items I came across that I found inspiring or related to “goals” (loose term) I had.

While this is incredibly easy to do, I never found myself actually referring back to this vision board. Something else that never worked for me was a physical vision board. I’ve never had that much luck (nor much joy) in ripping things out of magazines.

Here’s my finished copy – which isn’t perfect, but neither is life so I’m not mad about it.

Step 1: Decide what you want to put on your vision board!

This sounds easy, and in theory should be easy, but I found it difficult to get started. I found it helpful to search for inspiration in a few areas of my life:

• Is travel is important to you. Where are your huge bucket-list locations?
• What do you want to do more of in your day to day life?
• Go through the “saved” part of Instagram to see what you have bookmarked
• Have a bucket list? Pull some things off that.
• What are the things in live that bring you the most joy?

Here’s a bit of my list:

• My top travel bucket list: Sweden, Israel, Uganda; to ride in a hot air balloon, scuba dive
• I’d like to spend even more time at art museums and surrounded by art
• I want to continue to support and create a culture of strong, diverse women around me
• I want to spend even more time in nature, have more dance parties, and continue to learn (new skills, new cultures, new languages, Jesus, money management, cooking etc)
• Coffee. Always coffee.

I’ve always heard the more specific the better, but I’m still figuring those out. I figured this was a good start!

*Spoiler alert* Step four is recognizing that this can – and will – change over time. Don’t stress about picking the perfect things, you can always change.

Step 2: Figure out the Dimensions

On a Mac, you can click on the apple in the top left-hand corner and open up “About This Mac,” then “Displays” to see the size of your screen in pixels. Or, take a screenshot and use that as your template. If you don’t have a Mac, I’m sure it’s easily Google-able, or you could use the “Zoom backgrounds” template (or another one suited to desktops).

Not sure what Canva is? It’s a website where you can pretend you’re a graphic designer, basically. There are lots of resources for you to add text, photos, graphics, etc, into their own templates or creating your own. It’s free, and what I use already for all of my blog graphics. If you’re looking for something like this and aren’t willing/wanting to jump on the Photoshop or Lightroom train, I can personally vouch that Canva has been great. But hey, no harm if you use another tool. It’s all the same concept!

Step 3: Collect Your Photos/Images/Quotes

This is where you get to be creative! For me, that sounds scary, but I did my best to ~let it happen~. To get the images from Instagram, I did a screenshot. For Wikipedia, I right-clicked to save as image. Everything else is from Canva’s free archive!

You can use text (or whatever else you fancy – it’s YOUR vision board so don’t let my examples stop you), but I decided to let the images speak for themselves. If you watched Michelle’s video (above), you’ll see that her design is much different than mine. That’s the beauty of it! That’s her vision!

I personally don’t do well with the whole, “free-styling” of design, so I decided to put things into a sort of grid pattern. In Canva you can easily move things around, change their sizes, and move things from the front to back of the display. If you’ve never used Canva before, I promise it’s super user friendly and you’ll be using it in no time.

Step 4: Recognize that this can change!

This vision board, though saved as a picture, can be EVER CHANGING. That goal no longer serve you? Completed that goal? Take it off! Think of something else you’d like to tackle? Add that sucker on!

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Bonus!! I did a big ole copy and paste from the computer desktop-shaped file and onto a phone-shaped file. To do this, I used the “Instagram Story” template on Canva which is pretty close, but if you’re really an overachiever you can create a file shaped exactly like your phone.

Here’s what it looks like –

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Have you made vision boards? I’d love to hear about the things you put on yours!