How to Make Custom Shapes in Canva

In this post, we will be covering shapes and how template-based Canva allows for a certain degree of customization. This should be most useful for beginners, but also interesting for those who have been using Canva for some time but keeping their focus on templates and pre-made resources. If you are looking to add a personal touch to your designs, follow along and find out all the bits and pieces we can customize and make things more unique.

This post is based on my Canva Essentials course! I’m excited to share it with you and help you get started with this awesome design tool! Hey, we already have awesome testimonies from students that have recently changed professional careers thanks to Canva and (proud to say it) BYOL! So, be sure to sign up to Bring Your Own Laptop! 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!

All set? Let’s start editing our awesome Canva shapes!

How to add shapes to a new design page

If this is your first time in Canva, this is how we start things up. From the Home menu, we pick Create a Design. There is a vast selection of projects you can work on, from social media posts, printing materials, video, presentations, and many more. Choose the one you want to explore out and tag along!

We can find basic shapes in the Elements tab of the Canva toolbar. Elements are pretty much all the resources you can place on a project page – images, shapes, video and audio clips, and even personal files you can upload to Canva and apply to your new designs. Inside Elements, you have the Shapes section, which you can expand by clicking ‘See all’.

Once we expand Shapes, we can find all the available basic shapes. Rectangles, circles, triangles, stars, and other cool options that will add new personality to your designs. These are represented by solid black thumbnails, but as soon as we bring them to our project’s page, they will come to life, don’t worry. Keep in mind that Canva doesn’t have the same drawing and editing abilities that software like Illustrator have to offer, but there are some plugins and third-party tools (Canva calls them Apps) to help you with some more advanced stuff. For this post’s purpose, we will stay on basic customization, so we will keep it fun and easy to follow!

Click on one of the shapes to place it on your page and let’s get started. You can also click and drag the shape into the project, Canva lets you pick your favorite method!

I’ll start with this star shape with six points. I had this earthy brown tone active on the project contextual toolbar, as you can see in the image below, so the shape automatically grabbed it as its own fill color, but I’ll show you how to add and edit this attribute.

Before moving on, take a quick look at all the editing options we will be exploring.

Edit – Sends us back to the Shapes gallery and allows us to change basic shape appearance, from a star to a rectangle, circle, arrow, etc.

Color – We can pick a new solid or gradient fill color for our shape.

Border Style – We can add a border, also known as outline, to our shape and customize its settings: style, weight, and color.

Corner Rounding – Your shape is feeling too sharp and angled for your organic-styled design? Make it smoother and more natural by rounding its sharp corners.

Text Settings – Shapes can hold text inside. You can edit text appearance from this section. Font, size, color, alignment, spacing, etc.

Transparency – Allows us to manipulate our shape’s transparency, hiding or revealing what lies behind it.

Animate – Canva starts getting awesome with Animate. You can create fun and eye-catching animations from basic shapes, customizing the animation or picking one of the presets. This is great for animated images (like GIFs), presentations, and videos. You’ll love exploring this!

Position – Helps us align different elements to form a balanced layout and access a Layers view of the project we are working on.

How to Add Color to Shapes in Canva

Adding color to shapes – and editing them - is super quick and easy in Canva! With our shape selected, we simply move our mouse cursor to the contextual toolbar and click once on the round Color swatch to open the Color panel!

Inside the Color panel we can use the Search bar to locate a tone or specific color we are looking for. As an example, we can type a name like “red” or “blue” or add a hexadecimal code for a more precise search.

Canva also shows us:

The colors that are being used at that moment on the page – this can be great to keep your color palette consistent across all the elements.

Brand Kit colors – if you have the Pro version, these will also be included in the Colors panel. We can learn and work with Canva using exclusively the Free plan, but I recommend you have a look at the features included in the paid version. If the price fits your budget and adds true value to your work, Brand Kits is one of the best Pro tools that Canva has developed for us.

Default Colors – Built-in color palette for general use, showing editable solid colors and gradients. If we hover our mouse cursor over the color swatches, Canva will show us the color’s name and hexadecimal code.

I’ll pick a light green color from my Brand Kit. To edit this color – or a gradient, if we happen to choose one – we click the ‘Add a new color’ button, the color wheel icon with the plus sign, and edit the available settings for full customization. Quick and easy, even if you are new to graphic design!

How to Add a Border to a Shape in Canva

Now we have a color selected, let’s continue with our shape’s customization. We will now add a border, or outline. Adding a border can make your shape richer in detail and context, color, and even make it stand out over a busy background, or other shapes included in the layout.

To add a border, we click the Border style button in the contextual toolbar. As soon as we set the first attribute to the border, a new swatch pops up – that’s the border color swatch.

From the border style panel, we can set:

Style – Presenting a Full, dashed, or dotted border line (or none, if we change our mind we decide to keep it simple).

Weight – We can manually define the border’s thickness, or weight, using the slider or the number field next to it.

One cool detail: all changes are displayed in real-time on the selected shape!

How to Round Shape Corners in Canva

Alright, the next item on the menu is Corner rounding. I picked a new start shape from the Edit option so we can all see all the pointy bits and how we can make them all nice and smooth. To open the Corner rounding panel, we click on the curved line button in the contextual toolbar. We can set the corner rounding intensity by dragging the slider or typing a specific value in the number field next to it. It’s that easy! Have a look at the image above.

Wow! Can you see what we did by simply making corners round? We moved from a sharp angled shape usually used as backdrop for urgent announcements or last-minute offers to a much more soothing shape, fit for a logo or a homemade product label! Cool, huh?

How to Edit Text Inside a Shape in Canva

Ok, let’s move on to Text. I’ll type a few words inside the shape (not over it) and show you how we can fully customize the whole thing! In the image below, we can see the text we will be working with and the available type settings on our contextual toolbar.

I’m not going to bore you by going through every Type setting in Canva. I’ll let you know what you can manipulate to make your text look special and eye-catching and allow you to try out some changes on your own.

These are standard word-processor settings, I’m sure you may have already worked with Google Docs or Microsoft Word, or similar.

Please note there is one small problem or limitation: we can’t apply Effects to text inside a shape. These will only be made available in the contextual toolbar if the text is placed as an individual layer on the page.

So, these are our Type customization settings:

Font – We can select typeface (font) and style (Light, Regular, Bold…) from this menu.

Font Size – Allows us to determine how small or large our text will look inside the shape.

Text Color – Add and edit text solid colors. Canva still doesn’t include built-in gradient colors for type. We hope it will be made available in future updates.

Appearance – Setting up Bold, Italics, Underline, Strikethrough effect and toggling Uppercase/Lowercase style.

Alignment – We can select text alignment from Left, Right, Center, or Justified.

List – Adds bullet points to each paragraph break.

Spacing – Allows us to adjust Letter spacing (space between characters), Line spacing (space between lines), Padding (distance between text and shape margins), and Vertical alignment inside the shape (top, middle, bottom).

How to Adjust a Shape’s Transparency in Canva

This makes ‘quick and easy’ feel shy! But first, why do we need to make our shape transparent?

Transparency is most useful in graphic design. It can be used to create overlaying effects, highlight content over a background, supports hierarchy and depth, keep brand identity colors present, but subtle, and so much more.

How do we do it in Canva?

We click the Transparency button and… can you guess? I’m sure you can! Adjust the slider or type a specific value in the number field next to it. 100 stands for no transparency (full opacity) and 0 stands for literally invisible (full transparency).

And that’s it! We can push on! Cool!

How to Animate a Shape in Canva

This is an awesome feature in Canva, which may be a bit limited for Free version users but will still allow us to add some fun actions to our static shapes.

Animate is also intuitive to use. With our shape selected, we click the Animate button in the contextual toolbar to access the Animate panel.

From this panel we can choose:

Custom – We drag elements across the page to define its animated movement and then adjust some additional settings for an extra layer of fun!

General animations – Movement-based animations that usually control how shapes appear, move, and disappear within a page. Great for all animated designs.

Add-on Effects – These are more frequently applied to text elements, although there are some options available for basic shapes, and can be added on top of general animations to add more personality to the content we are designing. Best for videos, not so efficient on GIFs or presentations.

Just for a laugh, I’ll add the Wiggle Add-on effect to my shape and watch it dance around for a few seconds. Feel free to explore the different options but always remember the ‘less is more’ rule when you are playing around with animation – at the end of the day, we want our design to be appealing, not overwhelming.

How to Manage Layers in Canva

We are almost finished, the next item on our contextual toolbar for working with shapes is Position. This feature supports both Arrange and Layers settings.

The Arrange tab helps us organize and position all the elements across a page, creating a clear and balanced layout:

We can move overlapping elements forward, backward, or change their stacking order.

We can also align and evenly space them, both vertically and horizontally.

We are also allowed to manually adjust elements’ dimensions, position on the page, and rotation angles.

The Layers tab gives us a more visual approach to how elements are structured on a page – very similar to the Layers panel we can find on Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop workspaces.

We can simply click and drag each layer (one layer for each element) to change its position on the page and how overlapping elements are stacked. All changes are previewed in real-time on the project’s page.

How to Copy Shape Styles in Canva

And we are down to the last item: Copy Style! What is this for? Let’s say we spent a considerable amount of time setting up our first shape. Now, we want to apply those settings to some other shape that is part of our project. Do we have to do it all again?

No! We can copy the shape’s settings – or Style – and paste them in a single click! How do we do it?

With the source, or original, shape selected, we click on the Copy style button, the paint roller icon to the right of the contextual toolbar. Then, all we need to do is drag the mouse cursor to the destination shape and click on it. Canva will automatically copy all style settings to the new elements. Saves time, speeds up your work, keeps everything consistent, what else could we ask for? Awesome!

Basic Shaped Frames in Canva

As a bonus, I’ll add a quick nod at Frames in Canva. I’ll do it because you may find the Basic Shapes category when you are exploring Elements and Frames and I don’t want you to get confused.

You can read about Frames with much more detail in this previous BYOL Canva blog post.

Basic Shaped Frames are different from the shapes we’ve been covering so far. These are not as customizable, except for adding a border, setting up transparency, or giving it some animation.

Frames are basically placeholders for other elements, like images or videos. In Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, these act pretty much as Clipping Masks, framing content within their limits and hiding all the information left outside.

As an example, I’ve added a frame to the page I was working on and adjusted its position to the back. Next, I’ve placed an image of a starry galaxy inside of the frame, by clicking, holding and dragging the photo from the Elements panel and releasing it over the frame.

With a little more creative magic, we could end up with a final project like this:

And There We Have It!

Alright! I really hope you have enjoyed this read and learned  more about shapes and how to customize them, so you can design a step beyond the usual templates and standard elements. We’ve covered how to bring new shapes to a project, change their appearance, add text and make it unique, as well, and we even had time to check animations, layers, and how to speed up our work with Styles. Awesome! 

What’s Next?

Join BYOL and have fun learning Canva or go beyond and access my Illustrator Essentials and Advanced courses as well as my 30+ additional courses on Figma, Photoshop,  Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Webflow, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Get started here.  

See you in class! – Dan