7 quick and easy tips from a design pro to up your Canva game
Creating beautiful designs that herald your brand identity is a must-have in this digital day and age.
You don’t have to look too far through your competitors’ socials to get a sense for their visual language and the brand voice. The bigger fish that have been around the proverbial pond all have access to in-house designers and the money to splash on agency work. As a small business owner myself, I understand the need to prioritise my funds carefully on the tasks I’m not comfortable doing. In essence, I’m lucky that I have my unique design skills; just don’t ask me to do the bookkeeping.
If you’re not in the position to hire a designer but are desperate to get your business out into the wider pond, consider this approach – make sure you invest in a logo and brand identity. There are plenty of designers, such as myself, that specialise in small business designs. We understand the strategy needed to elevate your brand and position you to become easily recognisable in your market. Creating logos in Canva is dangerous – sure it’s a cheap option but changing an existing template that 15 other people also mutate and use will cheapen your brand. If there is one thing you invest in for the future of your business, make sure it’s your logo.
Once you have your brand locked down, this will include your logo, your fonts and brand colours, using a platform like Canva can help you to create all of the marketing collateral you need to bring awareness to your business. Canva has a tonne of templates that can be easily tweaked to suit your brand look and feel, from printed flyers and brochures to social media graphics – even small video graphics.
HERE ARE SEVEN QUICK AND EASY TIPS TO HELP ELEVATE YOUR CANVA SKILLS:
1. USE YOUR BRAND KIT TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
Taking the time to collate and upload all of your brand assets, colours and fonts into your brand kit is worthwhile – sure it’s about as enjoyable as making the bed, but it will make your life easier. Each of these items in your brand kit is accessible to use in each design item you create. Change the colour of a background and your colour pallet is a click away – no more trying to type out your HEX code numbers. It’s all ready for you to access immediately in the left-hand panel – even your brand fonts which I will talk about in the next point. Same goes for your logos or graphical brand elements – saves you having to upload your logo every time you create a new graphic.
2. UPLOAD YOUR BRAND FONTS INTO CANVA
This one is HUGE – gone are the days of having to find a font this is “close enough” to your brand fonts. I love that Canva includes this as an option. I’m lucky to have a large font book of all the pretty fonts you can imagine – and being able to advise people that they can upload their brand font is nothing short of magical. Uploading your brand fonts means you can create an entirely cohesive suite of graphics that all look like they belong to your brand, which is massive for brand recognition.
3. EASY TO MAKE VIDEOS FOR YOUR SOCIALS
The video function in Canva is something that even I use – sure I have all the fancy design software, but I can’t beat Canva for creating graphics with videos embedded in them. I’ve never claimed to work with video nor will I ever; not my circus, not my monkeys. I prefer leave any of the fancy videos for the people who are brilliant at it.
For the sake of my socials, however, you can upload your mini-tutorials or client testimonials and insert your brand graphic elements over the top. A quick and easy way of increasing your social engagement – videos are widely accepted as a way of slowing the mindless scroll of your customer. They also form an incredibly valuable asset in the storytelling of your brand.
4. USE THE CANVA TEMPLATES TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
The native Canva templates with your brand fonts and colours will make the templates feel less like everyone else’s generic brand graphics and more like your own. Using the Canva templates as a base will take the frustration out of trying to come up with ideas and the use of your brand and colours will make it consistent with your brand voice. There are some stunning templates on there that you can modify to suit your needs.
5. IT’S ALWAYS SAFER TO TRAVEL IN A GROUP
Once you’ve got your elements in your design and you’re happy with how they interact with each other, group the critters. Select them all and click on the group link in the top right corner. Grouping elements will make life easier to scale them up or down or move items around the canvas that relate to each other. Saves you having to select and move each item individually.
6. THE RESIZE FUNCTION IS FANTASTIC, USE IT!
The resize function is another ingenious hack by Canva – especially when you’re creating graphics to use across the different social media platforms! Instead of having to create a graphic for Instagram individually, then a completely new file with exactly the same elements for Facebook, rinse and repeat for Pinterest. Canva has a neat little trick that allows you to select all the different sizes and creates a new file for each size chosen that already contains all the elements for you. I will admit that it’s not fool-proof, you will need to move some things around due to the different shapes of each size – what works for a square won’t always work well for a rectangle and vice versa. It still does all the heavy lifting for you.
7. SAVE YOUR DIGITAL GRAPHICS OUT AT 3X THE SIZE FOR A CRISP LOOK ON RETINA SCREENS
When it comes time to publish or save your graphic, it is good practice to save any digital items out at 3x the required size. When you upload to platforms, mainly social media platforms, they go through a compression process, and it can severely impact the quality of the final post. Making the files much larger, in the beginning, will make the final quality just that little bit better. It is also worth noting that saving your digital graphics as a PNG yields a much more beautiful final artwork as JPG has its own compression issues. At the end of the day, it all depends on your intended use and what your platform requires.
I know that for a lot of people the ideas and strategy behind design and marketing feels uncomfortable – this is why I do what I do to make your life easier. If it’s not in your budget to be investing in design right this minute I hope these tips will help you lay a foundation and start bringing in business. You are only limited by your capacity to create, we all have ideas, and Canva is a brilliant tool for small business owners to utilise.
Even after reading this, if the thought of creating your own marketing collateral has you in a cold sweat, I offer creative mentoring packages where I can help walk you through the processes that I employ to get my business across eyeballs.
Enter your email below for a free one on one consultation to see how the mentoring process can elevate your skillset and your business.