Canva.com is an online program you can use to design a PDF from start to finish. You can be as sophisticated or simple as you like, but for a family history PDF, I say the simpler the better. Our goal is to create an attractive and inviting family history PDF that focuses on the photos and the story, not on our fancy design.

Log into your Canva account and click on custom dimensions in the upper right corner. Enter 1024 X 768, and then be sure to choose pixels from the menu. Then click on Create A New Design on the left. Click on Uploads, and then click on Upload An Image to upload the images you plan to use. I’ve already uploaded my images on the left.

Click on Elements. If All is selected at the top, you’ll see grids right here as an option, but you can also type grids, not just grid, but grids plural into the search field. We’ll be using grids to create our PDF pages, so click on All so you can see all the grid options.

My first page has a title page with two columns, so I’ll click on the grid that best matches what I have in mind. Click on Uploads and click and drag your photo into a grid section. Double click on it to see the edges so you can adjust it.

Click on Done above the document to commit the change, or simply click outside the document. Click on the right section and click on the Color icon above the document, and I’m going to click on white to make this section white. Click on Text on the left. There’s lots of text already designed for you, but sometimes it’s easier just to click on “Add a text box,” and then you can do whatever you want. When you see that little crosshairs, you can click and drag it to a new spot. I’ll move it over to the right and then let’s type a new title.

I’m going to do this all caps and I’ll select it all and let’s change the font over here. We’re going to change it to Allegra Sans Black, and then let’s increase the size to around 42 and we’re gonna work on the spacing just a bit—line height. We’re going to make it a little bit less and that looks pretty good right there. So now just going to drag these out to the edges of this white text box and that will center it in the middle, so click anywhere outside to deselect that.

Let’s do one more thing though on this. Before we move on, let’s change the color, so I’m going to highlight that and click on the color icon and I can choose one of these colors here, but, if I want to adjust it, I can click on the little plus mark and then I can move the sliders. Make this any color I want. I can even type in a number down here, a hex number. That looks good to me though. I’ll make a second text box and add info about our family. Now I’ll just paste some text here and let’s go over here and change the font size and I’m going to go ahead and use that font. That looks good to me.

We’ll center this, move it up a little bit and now here I ended up grabbing the wrong thing, so you have to realize that you can’t just press Control Z. I’ve tried doing that or Command Z and it doesn’t do it, so you have to go up here and click on that little back arrow. May do it for you. I hope so, but I’ve found that I’ve had to to go up there and click that arrow. So I’m going to click and drag this up just a little bit further and now let’s add one more text box. I’m going to move that over and again we got the wrong thing. It’s a little bit picky with that. Going to go ahead and type in circa 1990 and use a very small font. We’ll do maybe a little bit bigger than that. Okay. 14. Yup. That looks good. And then we can click and drag that up a little bit. And now I’m done with my first page. So now you’ll want to go on and click add a new page and you can continue adding pages for your PDF.

Here are my finished pages. I’ll collapse the panel on the left and show them to you. The last two are just images to give your document an appropriate name. Click on untitled in the bar at the top and I will call this 1990 Hike to Mirror Lake. Then I’ll click on the download icon and we’re going to select all the pages. The file type will be PDF Standard for this because it will be viewed on a computer or mobile device. So I’ll choose that and then I can click download and it will download to my computer. So that’s how to use Canva to create a family history PDF.