How to Make a 10-Slide Carousel in Canva

Canva is great for small and new businesses to start design work. It's simple to use and has many ready-made templates, graphics and designs that you can edit and the standard package is free for life. If you have design experience you may find it a bit basic and prefer a programme like Figma but for quick simple artwork and social graphics, Canva is a great option.

But, you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, Canva has an 8000px width limit. For most artwork 8000px is ample width, however, a 10-slide Instagram carousel is 10800px and there lies the problem. The maximum number of slides you can create in a single image is seven (7560px) so we need to work around it, less than ideal but workable.

There are two ways I have found to get around this:

1. Create a five-slide template and duplicate it 
This is the obvious answer but can mean that slides five and six may not slide cleanly depending on your design

2. Create a seven-slide template and a three-slide template
Sounds odd but each one serves a different purpose. This is what I do to create my seamless slide across a 10-slide carousel.
I’m going to walk you through this method.


Creating your 10-slide Carousel
This is a step-by-step guide so go with it as it goes into a LOT of detail…

We begin with the three-slide design template. Start by creating a new custom-size design. You want to set the width to 3240px and the height to 1350px for portrait or 1080px for square and click ‘Create’

Fab, you now have a blank 3-slide design. This will make up the title, conclusion and ‘follow me’ pages of your carousel. These three slides will require less re-designing than the middle seven which is why I separate them. Plus, if I decide I only need an eight-slide carousel, these are still good to go. 

Now you are on your design page, first thing first, you need to see the individual carousel slides. Go to ‘File’ ‘View Settings’ and click ‘Add guides’. You then want to select ‘Custom’ and change the columns to six (yes, six not three) and make everything else 0. Or you can add two rows to easily see the mid-way point.

TIP
The reason we do six rather than three is so you have a center guide for each slide which helps with aligning your design. 

Next, if you have opted for a 1350px height design you need to add some extra guidelines. 
(If you went for 1080px height skip this section.)

Go to the ruler at the top of your design (if you dont have a ruler hit Shift+R or add it in ‘File’ ‘View Settings’ ‘Show Ruler’) when your cursor becomes a double arrow, click and drag down a guideline to 135px, the small number will appear on the vertical ruler on the left. Then do the same again but drag the guideline down to 1215px. You have now created a square. 


TIP
This square is really important for your title slide because although in the Instagram feed you will see the first slide in portrait, on your grid you still only see the middle square so make sure all the relevant information is within that central square.



And there you go, you can now start designing your three slides. I recommend these three slides have a single-coloured background, we can look at adding more excitement in the middle slides next.

Here is mine as an example:

As you can see I have slides one, nine and ten, the title, conclusion and ‘follow me’ slides.


Great job!
Now let's move on to the middle section template. Similar process as this one. Create a new custom-size design, set the width to 7560px and the height to 1350px for portrait or 1080px for square and click ‘Create’

Add in 14 columns and two rows (if you like) and you are ready to design. There is no need to add in the extra guidelines as slides 2-10 won’t be seen on your grid. 

I also add a guideline at just above halfway. This is for the headers of each slide so I can make sure they are all aligned.



Then you can start your design work using every odd vertical guideline as the centre of the slide and every even vertical guideline as the border. 

Here is mine for example:


I have named it ‘Template’ and locked it as the first page of my design. Now every time I work on a carousel, I can duplicate it, unlock it, rename it and add new text.

Congratulations you now have two carousel templates that you can quickly and easily duplicate and remake as needed. If you want a shorter carousel you can repeat the middle section instruction as many times as needed with the following measurements:

Three Slides - Width - 3240px / Columns - 6
Four Slides - Width - 4320px / Columns - 8
Five Slides - Width - 5400px / Columns - 10
Six Slides - Width - 6480px / Columns - 12


Once you are happy with your designs, download both the three-slide and the seven-slide images as PNGs, then go to https://mysocialboutique.co/instagram-grid-maker/ and split your carousels out into individual slides. Make sure you have selected ‘Carousel’ and the right amount of slides. 

And there you have it, 10 slides ready to be added to Instagram that scroll beautifully. Once you have the templates set up the work becomes a whole lot faster and the easier you will find it.

Hope this helps you get more from Canva and your designs but if you have any questions, give me a shout. I would love to see what you create, so if you follow these instructions to create a carousel, tag me in the post so I can see the results.

TIP
Why put all this hard work in just to put it on Instagram? If you go to pdfcandy.com/split-pdf.html you can upload your slides and it will create you a PDF with each slide as a page. You can then download it as one document, and boom you have a carousel for LinkedIn too!