Module 1 · Foundations — what Canva is Lesson 3 of 15
The screen: where every control lives
A tour of the interface you will live in — an infinite canvas with a left panel of elements and a top toolbar; the AI features appear as buttons in the toolbar and in a magic panel. Every panel has a reason to exist, and half of them are the difference between a chat and a system.
The concept
The interface of Canva is an infinite canvas with a left panel of elements and a top toolbar; the AI features appear as buttons in the toolbar and in a magic panel. That sentence is worth slowing down on, because the single biggest cause of bad output is not a bad prompt — it is a good prompt typed into the wrong place.
The history list is your memory of what worked. Name your conversations. The temporary or private mode is for anything you would not want in an account's history. The settings panel holds the personal instructions that apply to everything, which is where your context belongs rather than repeated at the top of every message.
Common mistakes
Do this once, properly: resize one design into three formats and fix what breaks in each. Automatic resizing is a head start, not a finished job.. It takes fifteen minutes and saves you those fifteen minutes every week after.
Worked example
The AI panel is convenient and the templates underneath it are what actually decide how the result looks — start from a plain canvas when you want it to look like yours.
Your practice task
Spend fifteen minutes doing nothing but clicking. Open every panel, rename one conversation, and save one setting you will want again. Fluency with the screen is what stops you re-explaining yourself every session.
Do this before moving on. Reading a solution teaches the shape of it; typing it teaches you.
Key takeaway
The interface of Canva is an infinite canvas with a left panel of elements and a top toolbar; the AI features appear as buttons in the toolbar and in a magic panel.
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