There’s no straightforward way to do it, but you can “trick” people into thinking that’s exactly what you did!
For example, let’s say that I want to write a word (or just a few words) on a Canva design and make it look like I can see a background photo through the letters (like what you see in the featured image above,) as though the letters are lenses through which we can look into what’s behind those letters.
How do you accomplish that with Canva?
The ideal way would be to have an entire word as a frame, but there are 170k+ words in just the English language… how the hell do you make a frame for each of those? That’s absurd!!!
However… you do have individual letters available in Canva, and you can use them to create entire words and even sentences!
But this doesn’t solve our problem entirely. Because with Canva, you can only place one image into one frame… so how the heck do you make it seem like there’s one single image behind all of the different letters of a word?
That’s what this tutorial is for! There’s a way to “trick” this effect on Canva, and I’m going to show you exactly how you can create a graphic just like the one you see below:

It’s a bit tedious to create, but not hard. Just a lot of repetitive work. I’ll show you exactly what I mean in the video below.
But before that…
You do not need a Canva pro account to create a graphic like this one. That said, Canva Pro comes with a TON of features and other benefits. And now, with my unique affiliate link, you can get Canva Pro for free for 45 days! Grab your free trial now!
It’s hard to explain all that’s going on in this video, but here’s the gist of it:
- Create a new design.
- Use Canva’s letter frames to write your word (Go to the “Elements” tab, and use the search bar to look for the specific letter you want, and then choose your preferred frame.)
- Once you’ve written your word using individual letter frames, place your intended image (either from the Canva photo library or upload your own image) on each of the frames. This should be the same image for each of those frames. (So you can create the illusion of looking into one single image when you’re done making this graphic.)
- Double-click the first frame to show all sides of the photo. Then use your mouse to click and drag the corners of the image to enlarge it so that its edges go beyond all the other letter frames.
- Now, turn on Canva rulers and guides (by going to File > View settings > Show rulers and guides)
- Drag some guides with your mouse to mark the exact edges of the image (three guides on three sides should do the trick.)
- Click somewhere on the editor (outside of the first image) to snap the image back into the frame.
- Now repeat this process for all the frames.
- Voila!
Again, it’s not easy to understand unless you watch the video above. Please watch it to see the details.
And that’s all!
Enjoy, and let me know in the comments if you’ve found this video and tutorial useful.
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