Your colour palette will have the biggest impact on your customers, providing you use it right.
You want to have a varied colour palette with 5 or 6 colours. This sounds like a lot but you aren’t likely to use them all at one time.
When you are choosing your colour palette, remember to choose colours which will speak to your customers.
Of those 5 or 6 colours you’ve chosen, you should decide on 2 or 3 that you want to be your main colours. These will be the ones you use the most with the rest used as highlight colours.

Brand colours in Canva

Canva has a nifty section called “Brand Kit” and although not all the functions are available for the free version, saving your brand colours is!
The full brand kit functions are available with Canva Pro.
You can save your brand colours by adding your colours hex codes into the Brand Kit area.
You will then have access to the colours no matter what design you are creating.

If you already have a brand, stick to the fonts you have chosen. If you haven’t settled on your brand fonts yet, now is the time.
You want to choose 2 fonts which compliment one another.
One to use for headings and another for body text.
This might sound simple, but it can take some time to find just the right pairing.
You don’t want your fonts to be too similar. If they are too similar, you will lose the distinction between header and body text.

Using brand fonts in Canva

With Canva you have the ability to upload your brand fonts, but this is only available through the Brand Kit feature with a Canva Pro Subscription.

If you don’t want to subscribe to Canva Pro, try to find fonts that are free within Canva that are a close fit to your brand fonts. This will ensure there isn’t a visible disconnect between your online marketing and your website.

One fantastic feature in Canva is their templates.
Thousands of professionally made templates are at your fingertips, but you need to make them your own.
Think of Canva Templates as the base layer. You want to build on these template designs by adding your own colours, fonts and photos.
Play around with which colour fits better in the spaces.

Choose photos that fit with your colour scheme or have a neutral overall colour like white, that way they don’t clash with your colours.
You may find a template that works overall but smaller elements don’t work, just delete them.
You may not feel confident with this to begin with but the more you do it, the more confidence you will have. You will learn what styles suit your business and which don’t.

Yup! I said it.
Size does matter.
Canva has a multitude of different design canva sizes, so whether its for Facebook, Instagram or even a PDF document, there is something to fit.
One of the most common things I see is square Instagram designs on Facebook and while this isn’t necessarily a mistake, it doesn’t look as sleek as it could be. Facebook usually fills the rectangular space that is unfilled with a drab grey colour.

Since Facebook has introduced the scheduling option for Instagram, lots of businesses are just using the same graphic to save time.
I hear ya!

This is where Canva’s resize function is a life saver! You just resize the design you have created into Facebook size. You may have to re-place a couple of things but it saves you recreating the entire template.
Copy and Paste the text you want to use when you are scheduling and you’re done.

No ladies, I’m not giving you tips on your eyebrows, but the saying fits for your business too!

Every family has siblings that look alike, you can tell from a distance that they are related and that is what we want to see from your business too!
If you could take a snapshot of your social media, your website and marketing materials, you want them to look like they are related.
This is where the consistency of your colours, fonts and elements come in. I’m sure you’ve heard “consistency is key” more times than you can count.
If keeping your graphics consistent is a struggle, try creating your graphics in the same design.

You will find a a button that says “add page” at the bottom of your current design. You can add as many pages within the same design space as you like.
This will make it easier to check previous designs and judge whether the design you are working on matches the aesthetic of the rest.
It also makes it easier to copy any shapes and elements you might want to replicate.

Yup! Just like meal prepping!

Some days your brain will be in blogging mode and you will churn out blog ideas all day, other days you can be in creative mode.
Run with it while you are in that creative space and batch create your designs. Not only are you more likely to have that consistent feel throughout the designs, but you will have a stack of designs you can grab and go!

*The link to Canva within this blog is an affiliate link which means if you like using Canva and sign up to Canva pro I will make a tiny % of the profit for recommending you. This helps me to produce quality content which is free for you. If you’d rather not use an affiliate link but would still like to check out Canva, you can do so by searching for it via Google.