How to Use Canva Effectively with Your Brand
Canva is one of the greatest tools for a small business owner!
With so many templates, it’s easy to be overwhelmed or get lost in the endless ideas! At Raine & Rose, part of our process when handing off a brand, website, or marketing strategy is to educate our clients on using tools like Canva. We’d like to share some of that insight with you, now!
First thing’s first, you don’t need to invest in Canva Pro BUT it does help (especially if you plan on uploading your own brand fonts!) and could help you effectively carry out your brand. This blog post will cover our tips for using Canva Pro, as the investment is something we truly believe will help build a better brand experience for your target audience.
Creating Your Brand Kit
When you go into your Canva account, navigate to the Brand section. Click “Add New” and select the Brand Kit. Title the new brand kit with your company name or abbreviation. For example, for Raine & Rose we use “Raine & Rose,” but we could also put “RR.”
Upload your logo (or logos) as .png files with a transparent background. This will allow your logo to seamlessly fit into future designs without having to worry about removing the background or adjusting the frame.
Select your brand colors. If you don’t already have a set of brand colors, try to select up to 6 colors that really express and capture the vision of your brand’s aesthetic.
Select or upload your brand fonts. If you don’t already have fonts selected, keep in mind that they should be cohesive with what is on your website!
Using Your Brand Kit with Templates
Now, you have your brand set up in Canva. So, when you go to a template you’re wanting to use, you’ll:
Update the fonts on the template to match your brand fonts
Update the colors on the template to match your brand colors
Update the logo or place the logo on your template to ensure that people who share your finished product know that it came from you
A few additional items you’ll want to consider are:
Uploading your personal business photographs OR researching through Canva’s available photographs for content that fits your brand aesthetic (another option is uploading photos from Unsplash that fit with your brand aesthetic, that way they’re always there for you to use)
Updating the shapes or frames within a template to match your brand aesthetic (meaning, if the template has hearts and you never use hearts, then replace the heart with something you do use! Or, simply omit)
Brand Kit with Templates In Action:
One last piece of advice, is that not every template is ideal for your brand. Again: NOT EVERY TEMPLATE IS IDEAL FOR YOUR BRAND. What does that mean? It means that if the Canva template shown above does not match the visual aesthetic of your brand, then skip it!
It doesn’t match Raine & Rose’s aesthetic, so we won’t be using this template. With thousands of templates to choose from, it’s easy to think “I’ll just adjust all of them to fit my needs,” but we challenge you to look through them and select only templates that fit your brand’s aesthetic AND the purpose of your content.
Have questions? Schedule office hours for a marketing or design session with us!
