Get More from Canva with Strong Branding Fundamentals

Canva makes graphic design accessible to almost anyone with its user-friendly interface and extensive collection of templates for social media posts, presentations, posters, and more. It's an incredibly powerful tool for nonprofit associations seeking to improve their visual content.

However, Canva is most beneficial when your organization first does some essential groundwork with a professional designer and creates rules for using Canva as part of your branding and communications strategy.

Define Your Brand Identity and Guidelines

Be clear on your core visual brand identity elements before diving into Canva. Best practice is to have an experienced brand designer create your brand identity – the look and feel of your design work – before you start creating your own pieces. Components of your identity include:

Logo

• What are the exact hex color codes and fonts used in your logo? These should inform all other design choices.
• What’s the minimum clear space required around the logo on all sides? Don’t let other elements encroach.
• How will it be placed? Centered, top left, over an image? Be consistent.

Color palette

• Which hues make up both main and accent palette? Having official hex, RGB, and CMYK codes ensures color accuracy.
• When do you use each color? Assign roles – primary for logo, secondary for headers, etc.

Typography

• Specify both display/headline fonts and body text fonts to guide font pairings.
• List approved font sizes and weights to use for different text hierarchy levels like H1, H2, etc., and headlines.

Photo styles

• Establish the types of photo or image styles allowed. Is your main look graphic or realistic photography? What subsets of those styles are acceptable?
• Define any photographic filters or effects that reflect your brand.
• List preferred concepts and keywords for selecting images.

With clear guidelines, Canva’s massive template options become far less daunting. Brand guardrails guide you in customizing templates effectively while consistently maintaining your identity.

Create Brand Kits

One of Canva’s most useful, but under-utilized, features for branding consistency is its Brand Kits tool. With Brand Kits, you can create an always up-to-date centralized hub for your brand visual identity elements, along with guidelines to inform all your design work in Canva.

Brand Kit Components

• Color palettes - Add the official hex color codes and hue names from your brand style guide for easy access
• Logos & brand assets - Have cleared versions of your logo, wordmark, and any custom illustrations or icons handy, as well as any approved images
• Typography - Load in your headline and body text fonts so they stay consistent
• Brand guidelines - Outline rules for visuals, color use cases, logo clearance space, and more
• Brand folders for elements - Curate folders of design elements like shapes, icons, and images that suit your aesthetics for quick use

Whenever you create new designs, use ?your Brand Kit to ensure you adhere to all brand standards for fonts, colors spacing, layout grids, and visual elements. This keeps work on-brand across your team, leveraging Canva’s power while maintaining consistency.

Things to remember:

• Refresh your Brand Kit anytime brand guidelines get updated
• Share read-only access with your team to sync assets
• Add new users to the Brand Kit when people join the team
• Have your professional designer review your brand kit periodically to ensure brand consistency

Canva Brand Kits that have professionally designed brand identities are a great way to ensure you stay on brand when you need to create something on the fly.

Understand Core Design Principles

While Canva simplifies the design process, you still need foundational knowledge of key design elements to create professional, cohesive visuals, including:

Composition

• Use the rule of thirds to establish visual balance. Imagine the layout in 3 sections vertically and horizontally and place elements at intersection points.
• Remember asymmetry. Overloading one side of the design flattens impact.
• Employ negative space (blank areas) to draw attention to your key message. Don’t fill up every area arbitrarily. Leave room to breathe.

Color theory

• Choose colors strategically for your brand based on the emotions and tones they evoke.
• Use 60-30-10 proportion for accent colors to create a palette that pops while maintaining brand identity with your core color.
• Employ light/dark color contrast to make focal elements stand out against backgrounds.

Typography

• Pair fonts that complement each other. One display font for headers paired with one easy-to-read body text font is best.
• Establish a clear hierarchy moving down from the largest, boldest headline text to smaller subheads and readable paragraphs.
• Limit to 2 font colors for best legibility.

Understanding key fundamental techniques helps you strategically customize Canva’s layouts and elements to suit your brand’s specific needs rather than piecing these elements together randomly. Without these fundamentals in place, once you start editing a template, things can go very wrong very fast.

When in doubt, it's always good to have your professional designer check your work and ensure that you have the fundamentals just right.

Mind the Relationships Between Design Elements

When building out a design in Canva, carefully consider the way all elements relate to one another. Place them intentionally based on visual hierarchy rather than just filling in sections, being mindful of:

• Order and layout – Start by establishing a layout grid to organize sections logically, drawing the eye in the appropriate sequence to absorb the key information.
• Comparative size - Make headers significantly larger than body text. Subheaders should be smaller than H1 but larger than body text – a clear step-down in scale.
• Image sizing – Scale images proportionally with text blocks. An image should never be so tiny that key details are indiscernible or so massive it dominates over your messaging.
• Spacing – Separate elements like text blocks, icons, and graphics visually, using plenty of negative space. On the flip side, related items should have closer proximity.

Proportion can make or break a design. Using the right strategic proportions help create polished designs that represent your brand well across channels.

The Bottom Line

?With a professionally designed brand identity in place, Canva’s simplicity can help you create impactful, authentic, branded visual content. The right principles guiding your work empower you to create beautiful, effective designs for social media and email quickly, affordably, and consistently.