From Concept to Creation: Enhancing Your Brand With Canva's New Tool

Business owners know that to effectively engage with their audience, they need to create and share content that reflects their unique voice and style. That's where Canva's new Brand Hub come into play.

If you're a small business owner like me, creating content can be overwhelming. This is why I'm so excited about Canva's new Brand Hub feature.

Canva Brand Hub is a "platform" within the platform for managing your brand visual assets like logos, images, and content templates. Accessing everything in one place easily is a huge time saver.

One caveat, you do need to have a Canva Pro account. ?

In this article, I'll show you how to use Canva's Brand Hub to elevate your brand and save time.?

INSIDE YOUR BRAND HUB

Access the Brand Hub by 1) clicking on the "Brand Hub" tab on the left-hand menu of your Canva homepage or 2) clicking on the Brand Hub icon on the editing panel when creating a design.

Your Brand Hub houses your Brand Kit, Brand Templates, and Brand Controls.

BRAND KIT OVERVIEW

The Brand Kit makes it easy to maintain your brand identity by providing easy access to your brand colors, fonts, logos, images, etc., whenever you create a design.

Elements

Logos: Upload your brand logo in different formats and variations for easy access across various designs.

Colors: Your color palette should reflect your personality and style. Input HEX codes for primary and secondary colors to create a custom color palette. (See the video on finding color palettes below.)

Fonts: You can select your preferred fonts from Canva's extensive library or upload your own. Choosing a primary and secondary font will ensure consistency across your content.

Photos: Upload photos you regularly use, like headshots, vanity, and office shots. I'm using it to organize photos of frequent guests on my LinkedIn Live broadcasts. ?

Graphics and Icons: avatars, Bitmoji's, etc., you've created or purchased.?

WATCH THIS VIDEO FOR BRAND HUB OVERVIEW

BRAND TEMPLATES

My favorite part of the Brand Hub is the ability to create custom templates for various design types like social media posts, YouTube thumbnails, presentations, or flyers. That I could create Brand Templates from frequently used designs was a bonus.

If you're like me, you create "templates" for Sliders, LinkedIn Live broadcasts, and YouTube thumbnails that you edit as needed. Then when you want to use one, you have to search through the projects or folders to find what you're looking for.

Brand Templates put an end to that.?

WATCH THIS VIDEO TO LEARN ABOUT BRAND TEMPLATES

BRAND PHOTOS

Like many business owners, I use many of the same photos in my designs. I have spent a lot of time searching for headshots (of me and frequent LinkedIn Live guests), favorite Bigmojis, pictures of our dogs, etc. in the Upload Files.

Having frequently used photos in one easily accessible place is another huge time saver.?

WATCH THIS VIDEO TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BRAND PHOTOS

DEFINING YOUR BRAND

In the Brand Kit, you can customize and manage your brand's key visual components. Canva has a variety of Fonts to choose from, and you can even upload additional fonts if you like.

Color is a big part of every brand identity. If you don't have brand colors already or need additional program, product, or project choices, you can easily access color palettes online. Just search for palettes with HEX codes that you can use on Canva.?

WATCH THIS VIDEO TO LEARN ABOUT COLOR PALETTES

BRAND CONTROLS

It's easy to share your Brand Kit with your virtual assistant or team when they join your Canva Pro account. You can easily add guidelines to each element explaining how, when, and where to use elements like colors.

Setting Brand Controls, which restrict your team's access to only your brand colors and fonts and can even require design approval, ensures consistency.

Using Canva's Brand Kit to collaborate on designs helps maintain brand consistency across all your content.

Canva's Brand Hub can potentially be a HUGE timesaver for small business owners. Being able to organize my brand elements in one place has saved me time already.

Being able to create templates, even turning designs I've been using as "templates," is the bomb.

Like most new platforms, it will take some time to upload, create, and organize. But, based on my experience so far, I promise it will be worth it.?

??Thanks for reading. I hope you found this newsletter helpful, if you did please share your thoughts in the comments and subscribe. Thanks!

Annette

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