Brand Kits in Canva

In this post, we are covering a Pro feature in Canva, Brand Kits – available only to paid subscribers. Brand kits, along with Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, are one of the main reasons for subscribing to Canva's premium option. The brand design process becomes a new experience, streamlining workflows and team collaboration. Let's explore Brand Kits, how to build and cohesively apply them to any project in Canva!

This post is based on my Canva Essentials course. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to this course as well as my 30+ additional courses on Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Figma, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

Let’s get started!

What are Brand Kits in Canva?

Brand Kits are fully customizable collections of guidelines and design elements like logos, color palettes, fonts, images, icons, and other assets. By keeping these elements organized in one interface, Brand Kits help designers create a wide range of visual projects with a consistent and professional look, saving time and resources, and allow for simplified and cohesive team collaborations, ensuring that everyone is working under the same updated guidelines.

In this quick and easy step-by-step guide, I will show you how to set up a new Brand Kit and apply its contents to a project in Canva. I designed a presentation mockup homepage for a toy store brand, added some text (Comic Sans, oh no!), a basic grayscale color palette, and an empty frame shaped as the letter ‘E’. I kept this close to a wireframe format so we can learn how Brand Kits will make our designer life so much easier!

Let’s dive into brand kits and see the available options we can work with. To open the Brand Kits feature in Canva, we click the Brand button on the Homepage’s left toolbar.

Once inside the Brand Kits page, click the ‘+ Add new’ button to start adding assets to a new Kit.

Let’s begin by naming our new Kit. I’ll keep it simple for purpose of this post, but I always recommend you be clear and detailed when adding a name to files or, in this case, Brand Kit, including information like Brand name, date, or version number. Ex: Ellie’s Toys 2024 – v1. Hit the Create button when it’s finished.

Next, let's have a look at all the visual assets we can add to a Brand Kit in Canva:

Logos – Logos are a brand's visual signature, many times the first and best reference to the identity, style, audience, and type of service or product.

Color Palettes – Color resonates with a brand's identity just as strongly as logos and wordmarks. Keeping your brand color palettes cohesive is key for a professional level designer.

Fonts – Typography is another vital identity feature for a successful and recognizable brand. Brand Kits allow us to collect typeface and font styles and set up text hierarchy for our brand projects, from Titles and Subtitles to Body text and Quotes, each with individual format settings like Font, Size and Weight.

Brand Voice – Brand voice saves the brand's missions, goals, mood, and emotional connection with users. Canva AI will help you generate new content for your brand projects according to these foundations.

Photos – Photos also create a strong emotional link between users and a product or service. Keeping a solid and consistent collection of visual elements for print or screens will keep your designs aligned with the brand.

Graphics – Visual communication depends on photos and graphics to send a solid and clear message. Social media postings, infographics, marketing materials, documents, presentations, all these need appealing graphics to call for the user's attention through aesthetics, help with reading and understanding data and information, or simply making messages more fun and engaging.

Icons – Iconography is yet another important set of assets to keep in mind when creating a new Brand Kit or designing for an existing brand. Icons can be as unique as a well-crafted logo or wordmark, images, or typography.

We won't be covering all these topics, of course. This post would double in size, and I know you just can't wait to finish reading and get your own on Canva and start exploring! I'll show you how to set up Logos, Colors, and Fonts, and add a brush stroke or two on some of the other awesome features.

How to Add a Logo to a Brand Kit in Canva

Let's begin with a Logo. I recommend you add finished artwork to this category, previously exported to the desired format or formats. Before moving on to our new logo, one cool feature on Brand Kits: Guidelines!

If you have had any previous experience with Design Systems, or Brand and Marketing teams, you've already seen many guidelines supporting visual elements. These guidelines usually define a set of rules that apply to those elements, from dimensions, colors, placement, and others.

Always respect these guidelines when they are presented! You don't want to see your work sent back because the color wasn't accurate, or the logo was two or three millimeters larger than it should. This happens! To add Guidelines to our logo, we click the Add Guidelines button and type the necessary details.

One final note: Guidelines can be added to every Brand Kit item, except Brand voice.

 Guidelines can be set by designers when working on new brands or brought into Canva from a client's Marketing brief or a previously developed Design System. Once we have all the rules inserted, we click on Save to finish.

Moving on to uploading a logo to a brand kit, there are some differences between doing it from a computer on desktop or browser versions, or a mobile device, using the app.

On a computer:

Upload the logo by selecting the file on Finder (Mac) or File Explorer (PC) and clicking and dragging it into the Logo upload box.

Click on the Logo upload box, browse your Mac or PC computer folders, select the file, and click Open.

On a mobile device:

Click on the Add button to upload from the Photos Gallery.

You can also upload it browsing the device’s Files folders.

On some devices, like iPads, it is also possible to upload a camera photo.

As we can see below, once the file is selected, Canva displays a preview thumbnail, file name, and an upload progress bar.

Quick and easy, let’s move on to Colors!

How to Create a Brand Kit Color Palette in Canva

Alright, I have previously studied and planned my Primary Brand color palette and now comes the time to import it to our Brand Kit in Canva. It's just as easy as Logos, with just a couple more steps for color picking.

Keep in mind that we can also add Guidelines to Colors, for this brief’s purpose I’ll skip that step and push on straight to adding new swatches to my color palette.

We can name our new palette and all the swatches we create inside. Keeping things properly labeled and organized is vital for efficient design work. To start bringing colors in, we click the add ‘+’ button. We can set Solid colors and Gradients and select our primary color using:

The color picker, by clicking on the color panel and dragging the hue slider below it.

Color codes, like hexadecimal codes (highlighted below).  

The eyedropper, sampling from other screen elements.

If this was a class video, I’d ask the editor to fast-forward the part on which I add four more colors to our color palette. Since I am writing this up, I’ll go on a quick time travel on my laptop and show you the result. I repeated the previous step, so there’s nothing too difficult about it! 

Now that we have our brand’s logo and color palette, it’s time to jump to typography and hierarchy! This is an exciting one! Tag along!

How to Add Font Styles and Set Hierarchy in Canva

Let’s talk about fonts and have a quick tour through text Hierarchy, a major design principle that designers must work hard to understand and master. Adding fonts is easy, simply scroll down the Brand Kit window to Fonts and click the Edit button on each hierarchy level.

It’s those hierarchy levels that require a bit more attention.

Let’s try a basic exercise: Open a newspaper (paper or digital) on a news content page and see if you can spot all these levels on it.

Title – The largest and more impactful text object on the page, is meant to catch the reader’s attention.

Subtitle - A smaller title, setting context and expanding information from the main Title.

Heading – A text element, larger and heavier than Body, that breaks the content into relevant and complementary sections.

Subheading – Text smaller than Heading, divides main sections into more specific pieces of information.

Section header – Marks the start of each divided section, most used to guide the reader along longer and more complex reports or set a factual or chronological order.

Body – The main area on a page, where the bulk of the document takes form. Body is much smaller in size than Titles or Headings, the font should be clear and consistent, clarifying the message and making the reading more comfortable.

Quote – a small block of text that highlights a quote or a relevant detail from the page content. It is often heavier than the body, could be presented in italics and limited by quotation marks.

Caption – can be found usually below images and graphics, setting context and further information about the visual elements and described situation.

How many did you find? Almost all of them?

It is possible that some of these hierarchy levels weren’t considered on the page you were studying, and that is perfectly normal. There is no rule that sets that all levels must be used on every document page. It depends on the design under development, how much written content it will hold, and how much we can divide and organize to deliver a clearer and structured result.

Moving on, once inside a hierarchy level, we can adjust multiple text settings:

• Typeface and font Style

• Hierarchy Level

• Size, Weight (Bold), and Angle (italics)

There is a small preview below the text settings to guide us while we make the necessary adjustments. Click Save to finish editing and move to the next level. 

I’ll take a second time-travel to repeat the text editing process across the whole hierarchy structure and quickly show you the result.

Pro tip: Notice that Title and Subtitle display a decorative and heavy look. This is acceptable because these are usually presented in large sizes. Small font sizes make complex shapes very hard to read, so keep it simple and light from Heading down. As you may have also noticed, there are only three different typefaces, or font families, on this Brand Kit. It is better to use size and weight variations of the same font than having too many different fonts in a single project.

To finish building our Brand Kit, I’ll quickly show you two more options you can set up. If you’ve never worked or studied Branding, you may have never heard of the term Brand voice. If you are familiar with this, you will be amazed with this cool AI-based feature. Brand voice ensures that brand style, personality, mission, and core values remain consistent across all the projects you work on. This principle is called ‘voice’ because it makes communication clear, distinctive, with deep emotional connection with users and clients.

After setting up our brand’s voice description, Canva AI Magic Write will consider these guidelines when helping you generate new written content for your projects and documents. It’s a real game-changer, believe me! Start a new document, pick Brand Voice, and type a prompt as simple as “present new Tik Tok profile” and Canva will add the Brand Voice elements to the generated content. Cool, huh?

One last option I’d like to show you is Photos. Uploading photos follows the same steps as logos and graphics, so I’m sure it’s ok to skip over these and move on to the fun part: bringing our presentation’s homepage to life!

Let’s go!

Timeout #1

Brand Kits are exceptional! Understand why branding assets are vital for a professional designer in this interesting read. 

How to Apply Brand Kit Assets in Canva

Alright, let’s jump back into our presentation and start working on some Canva magic! To get started, we open the document and click Brand on the left toolbar.

I’ll start by uploading the logo into the page. It couldn’t be easier. All I need to do is click the logo’s thumbnail, adjust its size to the shape where the placeholder graphic was, and that’s it! Easy! The real impressive action happens in Colors, and it’s called Shuffle! When we click on the color palette, Canva reads the saved colors and randomly applies them to all the color editable elements in the layout. It’s amazing! With each new click, Canva shows a different combination. These combinations aren’t always perfect (or even close to what we need), but they’re great for practice and inspiration and we can always fine tune colors on each individual element after the Shuffle. Win-win!

We can also apply brand colors from the Brand Kit’s saved palette by selecting an element inside the layout and clicking on the Fill color swatch, up in the Contextual Task bar above the page.

Like many other actions in Canva, there is more than one way to achieve the same effect. Inside the presentation page, let’s click Design on the left toolbar, and then Styles. Our Brand Kit color palette is there! If we click the color palette thumbnail, colors will be automatically shuffled around on our presentation. You can use the option you prefer, either way will work wonders on your projects.

We can always adjust any elements on our Brand Kit, by clicking the Edit button next to each category. Canva will pop open the Brand Kit panel and allow us to fine tune a graphic, a color, a font, whatever we need. Clicking the ‘X’ next to the panel closes it and saves our changes. All intuitive and stress-free, Canva only needs a mediation feature to go full Zen! Awesome!

To manage font and text hierarchy, you get extra control by following these steps: Select the text element, or elements, you want to change to a specific Brand Kit style, click on the Font field in the Contextual Task bar, and inside the Font panel, select Text styles. Our Brand Kit’s font options and hierarchy are presented. All it takes then is a single click on one of the levels to apply its settings to the selected elements on the page.

Now, let’s learn how to place a photo inside the empty frame to the right. We go back to Brands, scroll down to Photos, and click on the photo’s thumbnail to place it on the page. Next, we click and drag the photo over the frame and Canva will automatically place it inside. We can edit the photo inside the frame by double-clicking it. Next, we are allowed to crop, rotate or resize it, to best fit the shape. We can also edit photo attributes by selecting the frame and clicking Edit on the Contextual Task bar.

Timeout #2

We are almost done! After this read, check this article from Canva revealing some awesome  secrets and tips on how to create a successful branding experience. 

There we have it! There are still a few more adjustments to make, but does it look better?

For you to have a clearer understanding about how Brand Kits can make your designs feel cohesive and compliant with brand guidelines, I designed an Instagram post and built it using only Brand Kit settings. Can you tell the similarities with the previous design?

And There We Have It!

Incredible! Brand Kits are a simplified version of complex design systems like Google’s Material, fit for the on-the-fly design style that apps like Canva have to offer their users. Keep in mind that this is a Pro feature in Canva, available only for paid subscriptions, but if your business style and demands justify the investment, Brand Kits are one of the top design perks that you will use on this app! Explore Brand Kits, create your own brands and settings and make them part of your design workflow. You will be amazed with the productivity boost that such tools can provide.

What’s Next?

Join BYOL and discover all Canva has to offer in my Canva Essentials course. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to this course as well as my 30+ additional courses on Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Figma, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

See you in class! – Dan