Click your text, click Animate on the toolbar, and choose Typewriter on the Text tab. To keep the animation, download the design as an MP4 Video or a GIF from Share → Download. A PNG or PDF saves the finished text without any motion. The animation is free; a couple of its settings aren’t, and the free plan caps GIFs at 1280×720.
Add the Typewriter animation
These steps follow the desktop instructions in Canva’s help center. In the phone app, Animate is on the toolbar below the editor; scroll it sideways to find it.
- Click the text box you want to type out. One click selects the box; you don’t need to highlight the words.
- On the toolbar above the editor, click Animate. On a narrow window it may be hidden under the … (More) button.
- In the panel that opens, make sure the Text tab is selected. Page animates the whole page and Element treats the box as one block; the letter-by-letter styles are on Text.
- Hover over the options to preview them, then click Typewriter.
- Choose when it plays: On enter, On exit or Both. For a typing effect you want On enter.
- Set the speed with the Slow, Medium or Fast presets, or the duration controls if your panel shows them.
- Preview the whole page to watch it in context before you download.
Canva’s help page lists Page, Element and Text tabs. Some tutorials show Typewriter in a group called “Writing”, others under “Suggested”. The name of the group has moved between versions, but Typewriter has stayed on the Text tab in every walkthrough I read.
What’s free and what needs Pro
Canva’s help center says more animations are available on Pro, Teams, Education and Nonprofits plans and that those options carry a Pro icon in the panel. It doesn’t list them by name, so the table below mixes Canva’s own pages with what recent walkthroughs show. Where it says “reported”, look for the Pro icon in your own panel before relying on it.
| Setting | Canva Free | Pro and other paid plans | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typewriter animation | Yes | Yes | Listed without the Pro crown (Design Bundles) |
| On enter / On exit / Both | Yes | Yes | Walkthroughs 2021 to 2026 |
| Writing style: Character or Word | No, reported | Yes | yestotech 2024, BYOL 2025, CG Logs 2026 |
| Speed presets | Shown in Canva’s help with no plan note; older tutorials say Pro | Yes | Canva help, yestotech 2024 |
| GIF download | Up to 1 minute, up to 1280×720 | Up to 2 minutes, up to 1920×1080 | Canva help |
| MP4 download | Up to 30 minutes, 1080p only | Up to 2 hours, up to 4K | Canva help |
On the free plan, the default Typewriter reveals the text a character at a time, which is the effect most people want anyway. What you lose is the option to switch it to whole words, and that’s rarely a reason to pay.
Make it type slower, or stay on screen longer
Two separate things control timing, and they’re easy to mix up.
The animation speed decides how long the typing itself takes. Change it in the Animate panel with the speed presets or the intro duration. Canva caps every animation at 10 seconds, so a long paragraph will always type fast. If it’s a sentence or two, Slow is usually right.
The page duration decides how long the whole design runs, and so how long the finished text sits there before a GIF loops or a video ends. Tutorials show it as a clock icon with a 5-second default. If the typing finishes and the GIF jumps straight back to a blank page, lengthen the page. To control when the text starts, Canva’s help points to element timing: select the text, click … (More) on the floating toolbar, choose Show element timing, and drag the handles on its bar in the timeline under the editor.
In a Canva presentation you can also make the text wait for a click: turn on Appear on click for the element, then set the order under Presentation settings → Click order. That only matters when you present from Canva. Downloaded MP4s and GIFs play straight through.
Download it with the animation
- Click Share, then Download.
- Open File type and choose MP4 Video for social media and video editors, or GIF for slides, email and chat.
- For MP4, keep the default quality on the free plan. Canva says changing it to 480p, 720p or 4K brings up an upgrade prompt, which isn’t an error.
- For GIF, pick a Size from 0.2x to 1x, and turn on Transparent background if the text needs to sit on something else.
- If the design has several pages, choose All, This page or Custom.
- Click Download.
Pick GIF size with care. A full-size 1280×720 GIF is fine on a slide but far too big for an email signature, where you want something a few hundred pixels wide. For a signature or a small web banner, 0.4x is a better start. If you’re putting it in email, the email signature GIF guide covers the sizes Gmail recommends and a sensible file-size target.
Where Canva’s typewriter falls short
Canva’s typewriter is a reveal: letters appear and stay. Canva’s help pages don’t describe a blinking cursor, a backspace, or text that types, deletes and types a new word, so those are the things people try to build with stacked text boxes and timing tricks. The 10-second cap per animation and the 50-animation limit per design make long sequences awkward too.
Anyone who turns on Reduce motion in their own Canva settings sees reduced animations when they view or present your design in Canva; Canva says downloaded videos may still show them. And GIF only has 256 colours, so soft shadows and gradients behind the text can come out banded. Plain text on a flat colour exports cleanly.
When a typing GIF maker is quicker
If the typing is the whole design, say a headline for a slide, a line for an email signature, or a status for a README, I’d skip Canva. Our typewriter text GIF maker does a blinking cursor, deletes letter by letter between phrases, loops, and exports a transparent GIF or animated PNG without an account.
It won’t replace Canva for layout. It doesn’t export video, add music, or animate photos and shapes alongside the text. A sensible split is to design the page in Canva and make just the typing line as a GIF, then place it in your slide deck or email. For decks, see how that works in Google Slides, which has no typing animation of its own.