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What is Canva?
Ok, let’s start at the beginning.
Canva is (in my opinion) one of the greatest feats of software available for small business owners. I use my Canva account pretty much every single day. And that is no exaggeration.
I use it to design my logos, my social media graphics, the graphics for my courses, and my presentations. You name it – it’s probably created on Canva.
Canva is an online graphic design tool, created and run in Australia. It has literally thousands of templates and stock images for you to use to create your own graphics with minimal effort.
Canva has two levels of access: its free version, and its paid-for version.
The free version is pretty good as far as free plans go for online software. The paid-for version gets you more. And, in my humble opinion is the best £99.99/$199.99 I spend each year on business expenses.
What is the Brand Kit in Canva?
The Canva Brand Kit is one of Canva’s greatest and often most overlooked features.
In their own words:
“Brand Kit allows you to build a brand from scratch or add your existing brand assets so you can stay on-brand with every design. Once designed, you can access pre-set brand fonts, brand logos, brand colors and pre-designed brand templates, from corporate design templates to creative presentations and more.”
Canva
Is the Canva Brand Kit Free?
The Canva Brand Kit is not free.
It is part of Canva Pro with prices starting from $199.99 if paid annually, or $12.99 if paid monthly.
If you want to try Canva Pro (and the brand kit!) for free, you can get a 30-day free trial on me using this link.
Reasons to Use The Canva Brand Kit
Ok, onto the top reasons why I think that the Canva Brand Kit is so indispensable.
After all, when I signed up for Canva Pro, the Brand Kit was a huge draw for me.
Visual Branding
The Brand Kit is what allows you to take the templates available in Canva and to consistently apply your own visual branding so that you end up with something that feels unique.
This helps you create a sense of consistency across your brand and helps your brand to be immediately recognisable.
If you’ve ever been on your Canva account and seen on the left-hand side an option under tools that says Brand Kit, maybe you’ve never set one up before your visual brand kit, in general, is going to include various other components as well.
It’s going to include your imagery and your patterns.
Have all your fonts easily accessible
Your fonts are such an important part of creating recognition for your brand.
Using Canva Pro, you can store your brand’s fonts in your Brand Kit so you don’t have to hunt through a list to find your font every time you insert a new header or body of text.
Equally, if you’re using a font not found on Canva, the Brand Kit allows you to upload that font for future use.
Using the same fonts across your work is key to your branding.
Having one font on your website and something else entirely on your social media graphics can be jarring and doesn’t create brand consistency.
This can be confusing for your audience and can make people wonder if they’re even looking at the same brand if your online presence doesn’t appear cohesive.
So consistency is incredibly important. And the Brand Kit is not only going to ensure that you have that, but it’s also going to make the whole process of designing a lot easier. And you’re going to result in stuff that looks far more professional and a lot less amateur.
Catalogue your brand colours
The formal Brand Kit in Canva, though, includes your logos, your colour palette and your fonts. And it is really important to set up those because it just is a quick way of being able to grab those colours to very specific colours every single time. If you have a shade of blue in your colour palette for your brand.
For example, you want to make sure that you’re using that exact shade of blue on every single graphic, and that you’re creating not just some sort of approximation. But you don’t want to have to sit down and try to find that hex colour code every single time that you are trying to select the colour.
Store your logos for quick use and access
The Brand Kit allows you to store all of your logo versions in one place, which is easily accessed from your dashboard.
Having multiple versions of your logo might sound overwhelming, but after a while, you may want one with a transparent background, one in a different colour, etc.
Having all of these logo versions easily accessible to drop into your graphics is quick and efficient.
Save you time
Employing all of the strategies and functions of the Brand Kit might not save you enormous chunks of time. But, there’s a cumulative effect of all the little bits of time that you save.
And not only do you save time, but you’re protecting your mindset and mental health as well.
You’re not feeling frustrated that you can’t find a logo, colour, or font. You don’t feel like you’ve got all these tiny little stumbling blocks that are being put in front of you that can stall the whole process and have you falling out of some sort of flow state.
How to Up Your Canva Game
Listen to the episode of Bloggers Creating Courses where we interviewed Canva Expert Brand Cadman about brand kits, folder organisation, her favourite Canva features, and so much more.
Want to get started with Canva but need some help? Check out Brenda’s Canva for Beginners course and master the foundational Canva skills you need to know to create branded designs for your business.
What do you think? Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments!
