How to make a vision board using Canva and Pinterest

I live and die by my to-do lists — more often than not, the shot of dopamine I get from crossing off a task or two every couple of hours is a high I chase throughout the day. My poor Apple Notes app is completely filled with daily, weekly, and even monthly to-do lists. The life of a freelancer has to be organized or else the chaos you carefully navigate will cause your productivity ship to capsize.

Short-term to-do lists are as simple as an uneven bullet point scribbled in pen on paper, but I like to look at my long-term goals through rose-colored glasses. I won’t get too deep into the manifestation side of things (that’s a rabbit hole for your TikTok doomscroll later), but it taps into the power of visualization and mental rehearsal.

Mental rehearsal is a practice that countless people use to achieve their goals — famous examples include Jim Carrey writing a check for $10 million and a decade later landing a role that would pay him exactly that to Arnold Schwarzenegger visualizing winning competitions and then going on to become an international bodybuilding star. At the beginning of each year, I do my own visualization project to help manifest my goals with two particular apps: Canva and Pinterest.

I’ve been doing this activity for years, even throwing New Years parties to help my friends and family create their own. You can easily follow the steps below to make your own.

Related

Instagram vs Pinterest: which is best for new ideas?

Is Pinterest still the queen of inspo, or has Instagram taken over?

1 Write down your goals

Start with pen and paper (or your favorite note-taking app)

The first thing you need to do is decide what exactly your goals are for the upcoming year. I like to start with five different categories:

• Career / business
• Education
• Mental / physical health
• Relationships
• Travel / purchases

You can add anything else, of course, as it pertains to your life. Then, under each category, write another list of goals under that particular umbrella. Personally, I like to write in paragraph form and treat each category as a journaling exercise, really visualizing what it would look and feel like to accomplish that goal as if it were already done.

Related

Pinterest: the one social media app I can relax on

If a soft conversation or inspirational speech was an app, it’d be Pinterest.

2 Head to Pinterest

And create the first ‘board’

Instagram / Pinterest / Pocket-lint

Next, head to Pinterest and create a new board. You can call it anything you want, but it helps to differentiate it by month or year, especially if you plan on making more and more over the next few years. I personally called mine “Vision Board 2025” this time.

Now, it’s time to collect Pins. My favorite way to do this is to take each goal you came up with in the list above and type the general term into the search bar followed by the word “aesthetic.” It sounds silly, but Pinterest is used so frequently to gauge vibes and curate themes that I’d be willing to bet the search bar will anticipate it as one of its suggestions.

Related

6 AI-powered Canva features every creative pro needs to try

Canva can now use AI to generate custom graphics to add to your designs, but that’s not the only new feature to get excited about.

For example, if getting a promotion at your corporate job is on your goal list, search “promotion aesthetic,” or even “career aesthetic.” If lifting weights or trying yoga is on the to-do list, search those terms with “aesthetic,” too. You’ll find various imagery conveying different results, edits, and visions. Choose the ones that resonate the most with you and Pin them to your board — they’ll act as visual representations of your goals without having to go out and collect pictures in the wild.

Don’t shy away from quote cards or even vague images that capture your eye. Varying media will only make your board even more aesthetic when we get to the design part.

3 Narrow it down

To the images you vibe with the most

After you’ve collected your Pins for each category, it’s time to sift through your board. For each category, gather around four or five images that resonate the most with you. This is the first part of the design piece, too, so if you want to skew your choices to match in color, noisiness, etc., it will only make your final product look better.

However, don’t worry if you aren’t curating the perfect aesthetic. The important part is that you love all the images enough to look at them every single day and not get tired of them. That’s right — what’s the purpose of making this board for visual rehearsal practices if you aren’t going to stare at it all day every day?

Related

My top Canva design tips and tricks for any experience level

Canva’s popularity exploded due to its user-friendly design, but a few extra tips can take you from average to expert.

Once you have four or five images per category, add them to a new board (named something like “Vision Board 2025 FINAL”) or right-click to save the images right then and there, one by one. If you opt to add them to a new board for organization’s sake, head into that board and right-click each image to save it to your computer from Pinterest.

4 Head to Canva

And build your board there

It’s finally time to put your visions to paper — erm, well, the digital canvas you’ll turn into paper, hopefully. If you have Canva Pro, fantastic — if you don’t, don’t worry. You won’t need any Pro elements to create a beautiful collage, but if you know your way around Canva with a paid subscription, you don’t even need to keep reading. Take your images and go to town creating.

However, if you’re a newbie and stuck on Canva’s landing page like a deer in the headlights, here are a few steps:

1. Sign in with your email.
2. Click “Create Design” on the left-hand side.
3. Choose a design size. Canva has suggestions if you don’t know exactly what size you want — I typically go for “Desktop Wallpaper” which is 1920×1080 pixels, making it perfect to both print and throw up on my monitor all year.
4. A blank design will load. Head to the upper right corner to name it.
5. Click “Uploads” in the far left menu. Click the purple “Upload files” and select all the images you downloaded from Pinterest.

Related

ChatGPT finally got the upgrade writers and coders have been waiting for

Canvas makes working with code or long passages of text a breeze.

From here, you can drop each image in one-by-one and resize or reorder them to your heart’s content. Don’t feel like you’re limited to just the ones you chose, though — you can head to “Elements” in the left-hand menu to search through Canva’s own gallery or even run back to Pinterest to grab more photos.

Another strategy you can use is choosing a “Template” under the “Design” tab in the left-hand menu. This will give you a starting place to drop all your images into a design that’s already spatially savvy.

5 Display your vision board

Somewhere you’ll look at it for the next year

Once you’ve created your vision board, it’s time to display it loud and proud. I save mine as a desktop on both my laptop and monitor, so it’s always in the background of whatever I’m doing. Plus, it looks like a pretty cool collage that anyone can appreciate as a work of art rather than a visual representation of my goals — though this to-do list sure can be pretty.

If you don’t want it on your computer, print it straight from Canva or save it to print at your local printer. Make it into a poster, so the size can do your big dreams justice.