How to Make a Calendar in Canva

Canva has many customizable calendar templates to choose from. You can just change the color, text, or elements to your liking. But if you want to challenge yourself, you can definitely create one from scratch so that's what we're going to make in this tutorial-a calendar in Canva from scratch using Design Bundles' premium resources.

Step 1: Create a new document

Create a new document with customized dimensions by tapping the Custom Size button and entering your preferred dimension. For our calendar, we are going to use 8.5 x 11 inches. Next, click the Create a new design button.

Your design space will appear in a new window.

Step 2: Add a background

There are three ways to add a background to your design. First, you can add a plain background by clicking on the color tile on the toolbar, then click on any color on the left side panel to apply the color to your background.

Second, by selecting the background option on the left panel, then scroll through the different background styles and click on the style you want.

The third option, which is what we're going to use in our design is by using your own background photo uploaded in Canva. Here, I want to use a peach and mint watercolor background that I have uploaded earlier.

Step 3: Make a calendar grid

From the editor panel on the left, Click Elements > Lines & Shapes and choose square. Your shape will now appear in your design. You can adjust the shape to change it to a rectangle by clicking the white handle on the middle and drag it in to decrease its height.

Change the color by clicking on the color tile on the toolbar, then click on any color on the left side panel to apply the color change. We're going to choose mint green. This will be our grid for the days of the week.

Add another square shape and do the same process. Scale it accordingly to make a shorter but chunkier rectangle. Then click the transparency button in the toolbar and move the slider to the left to lessen the opacity of the shape.

Make6 more rectangles with the same dimension. Select/highlight the rectangle> right-click> copy or press Ctrl/Command + C>paste or press Ctrl/Command +V and arrange them across.

To make sure everything is perfectly aligned, select/highlight all 7 rectangles, click position from the toolbar > tidy up.

Now that the shapes are perfectly aligned, let's make more rectangles to complete the grid. Hold the shift key down while clicking each of the rectangles then press ctrl/command + C> ctrl/command + V to make a copy of all 7rectangles and arrange them in the second row.

Repeat the action four more times until you have 6 rows and 7 column grid- a total of 42 rectangles. This will be our date grid.

Step 4: Add texts

Now that the base of the calendar is made, we're going to add our texts. There are tons of great font duos available on Font Bundles to choose from but for our calendar, I will be using the Le Mores font collection from Font Bundles that I've uploaded earlier.

For a complete tutorial on uploading your own fonts in Canva, check out our tutorial on “How to Use Your Purchased Fonts in Canva".

Now to add text, click the text button>Add a heading or just simply type "T" to quickly add a text box. With the sample text selected/highlighted, start typing your own text. It will automatically change the sample text. Our calendar is for the month of August so we're going to type "August".

We can change the font by clicking on the font name drop down and scroll through the options. We will select the Le Mores font script to apply it to our text. Let's also change our font color to dark green by clicking on the color tile on the toolbar, then click on the green tile on the left side panel to apply the color change.

Let's add the year 2021. We're going to use Le Mores font Serif.

Using the same font, let's add the days of the week. We're just going to use the first letter. And again, to make sure everything is perfectly aligned, select/highlight all letters, click position from the toolbar> tidy up.

Repeat the same process when adding the dates of the month.

Let's also add an inspirational quote at the bottom.

Step 5: Embellish

To make our calendar prettier, we're also going to add some watercolor succulent clipart from Design Bundles that I've uploaded earlier. Tap on the Uploads button from the left panel, and select your chosen clipart. We're going to choose this corner succulent arrangement. It will be added to your design. We will place it at the top left corner of our calendar and we scaled it to just the right size so it won't cover the text.

We're going to add another watercolor succulent clipart and this time, we will place it at the bottom right corner of our calendar.

And here's our finished August calendar created in Canva from scratch.

You can create the other months of the year by following the same process. I hope that this Canva tutorial will be able to help you design a personalized calendar that will inspire you every day.

If you liked this tutorial make sure to check out our guides on using templates in Canva, making blog templates, and creating email headers in Canva.