How to stay on brand in Canva

One of the most important things in building trust and a relationship with your audience is having a consistent brand style. Canva offers a variety of features that can help you stay on brand, ensuring that your designs are consistent with your brand's visual identity.

Here are some ideas, tips, and secret hacks to help you achieve this.

01. Define Your Brand Guidelines

The first step is definitely setting up a brand, if you don’t already have one. Get clear on your brand’s color palette, typography (fonts), logos, and any specific design elements that represent your brand.

Check the Brand Builder course if you need help with setting this up.

02. Setup your Canva brand kit

If you want to stay on brand in Canva, the Brand Hub is the most important feature for you to set up and use. Inside the Brand Hub you can create a Brand Kit to save your brand colors, fonts, logos, graphics, illustrations and most important photos. This makes it super easy to access and use these elements consistently across all your designs.

In my opinion it’s impossible to stay on brand in Canva if you don’t use the Brand Kit. Inside the Canva Templates Bootcamp I show you exactly how to set this up.

03. Use Canva templates

Canva offers many amazing pre-made templates. It’s key to find a specific template style that aligns with your brand style to give your design a consistent look from the beginning.

I always like to recommend using templates from the same template designer(s), so you’ll have the best chance of staying on brand. The Canva Creators often create multiple templates in the same style. This saves you lots of time when you’re browsing for templates, because you can check if your favorite designer has other templates you can use. Instead of scrolling for minutes (or hours) through Canva…)

There are two ways you can do this:

1. The premade way: You can join The Templates Vault (TTV) to receive monthly pre-made Canva template kits for social media. You only need to tweak the copy, change the fonts & colors, drag and drop your own images or videos and you’re ready to hit publish. All templates always match style, so you skip the template browsing part.

2. The DIY way: If you want to search for similar templates in Canva by yourself, you can check this tutorial video.

04. Customize Canva templates

Welcome to the fun part! You’re ready to start customizing your templates. This is the part where I see people waste most of their time in Canva. Because they:

• Did not set up their Brand Kit…

• Don’t have an easy workflow on how to customize templates into their own brand style…

• Keep tweaking and tweaking…

After using Canva for 10+ years I find this is the best (and fastest) way to customize Canva templates:

1. Change the colors and fonts into your own brand style

2. Tweak the copy

3. Drag & drop images or videos

4. Add animations or transitions (optional)

Inside the Canva Templates Bootcamp I show you exactly how you can do this, step-by-step.

05. Reuse Canva templates

If you’re happy with your template and design style, you can reuse the templates over and over again. If you create recurring design types (e.g., social media posts), save them as templates in Canva. This ensures consistency and saves lots of time in the future.

You can also use Canva’s Magic Resize tool to quickly and easily resize your designs for different platforms without having to recreate your design from scratch. This means you can create a collection of consistent looking visuals over all of your channels.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Open a blank design and create a compelling visual to sell your brand.

2. When you are happy with the result, click on the ‘Resize’ button which is located at the top left corner of your screen.

3. A drop-down menu will appear, which provides you with different options to resize your design for various social media platforms. There is also a custom size option which allows you to create a post for any other dimensions that you may need.

4. Select the platform(s) that you want to resize your design for and click on the create button. Canva will open each of your resized items in a different tab.

5. Your posts won’t be perfectly resized so you will have to edit each one as necessary to make it look perfect, but this process will still save you a huge amount of time and ensure brand consistency.

6. Once you are happy with your designs, you can download them or (with a Pro account) share them directly from Canva.

Don’t have a Pro account? Sign up with my special link for a free 45-day Canva Pro trial!

Tips to stay on brand in Canva

Remember that consistency is key when it comes to branding. By using Canva effectively and following these tips, you can create visually cohesive designs that reinforce your brand's identity across all your marketing materials!

Here are 4 extra tips to help you stay on brand in Canva:

• Always stick to your own brand colors and fonts in every design.

• Use images and videos that reflect your brand's style and message.

• Try to use the same elements as much as possible. For example, use 1 or 2 types of arrows, lines, shadows or shapes, and then use them in other designs.

• If you use filters on your images, make sure you use them consistently on every image.

Happy designing!

X Lynn

P.S. I’d love to see your designs! Make sure to tag me on Instagram so I can give you a shout-out!