1. Brand Kit (Pro Subscription)

Ever heard of a branding style guide? Well Canva’s Brand Kit feature is exactly that. It’s an easily digestible guide to keeping your brand’s identity consistent and a quick reference to understanding your logos, colours, fonts.

Your brand kit ensures that all marketing and communications are accurate and on-brand. There are plenty of strategic reasons to set up your brand kit. As your business grows, it’s vital to ensure your brand image and messaging doesn’t become diluted or misrepresented to your audience and marketplace (fish swimming upstream anyone?).

No matter who works with and on your brand from your designers (ahem, that’s us!), web guru, copywriter, sales reps, marketing team and beyond, the brand assets within your business should always use the same colours, fonts, logos and on-brand imagery. Otherwise you’ll be confusing your audience with the likes of maybe a competitor? Eek!

There are a few key essential elements that make up your brand kit and are the tools you need to communicate your brand message in all its glory;

• Your logo in all variations and sizes
• Colour palette
• Typography (Fonts are often overlooked as a visual component, the signature fonts you choose for your brand go far beyond the letters, numbers and symbols)
• On-brand imagery
• Branded icons/illustrations/patterns

2. Pre-Made Templates (Free and Pro Subscriptions)

There are tonnes of professionally designed templates ready for you to make your own. If you can think of it, Canva generally has a template for your needs.

Having ready-made templates make it easy to produce tonnes of on-brand and on-trend content, plus they’re a total time-saver. Canva Provides all kinds of styled frameworks for everything from Facebook Covers to Instagram Stories to Pinterest Pins. In literally minutes you can swap out colours, imagery and fonts to make these designs your own. Just select a layout that you like and hey presto – instant, beautiful design!

This is really great for a small business with a small budget and needs instant graphics!

3. Crop Your Images for Trim, Precise Compositions (Free and Pro Subscriptions)

Uploading your imagery to Canva for your next post to the gram? You go to drag and drop the image to the artboard and get annoyed because it’s not centred? Then this feature is your new best friend!

Crop your photos the simple way! After snapping a sizable stack of photos, Canva’s cropping tool can help transform your shots so they look gorgeous with your next project and are trimmed to just the right size.

Even if you favour design grids or ‘frames’ when designing in Canva, the crop function allows you to be ‘manually’ in charge. All you need to do is select the box and click ‘crop’. Scale and tweak your image until you are happy with how your photo looks.

4. In-Built Stock Photos (Free and Pro Subscriptions)

Over the years, Canva has acquired a number of free stock photo sharing companies to further enhance their DIY design platform game and the experience of its users (that’s you!). Now dubbed “The Netflix of Photo Subscription Services”, they have millions upon millions of high-quality, royalty free and not so stocky-looking imagery.

With so many combinations at your fingertips, this feature speeds up the process of editing your pre-made templates a breeze. Having access to such a library empowers you to take your work to the next level using some of the best free photography in the world.

The coolest part is that they’re always adding more, so you will never run out of incredible photos to use. What a game changer!

5. Transparent Image Backgrounds (Pro Subscriptions)

Ever wanted an image without a background so it’s transparent and easily sits over the top of another coloured background or photo?

Images with transparent backgrounds are super useful for layering. Whether you are adding a watermark over your photos, creating social tiles or a banner for your website, having something like your logo with a clear background can assist you in creating beautiful designs.

Now if you’ve ever been brave enough to attempt to remove the background from an image in Photoshop, Word or Powerpoint (um, go you good thing!), then you already know it’s not a simple click-of-the-one-button process.

What would you say if we told you that Canva has actually made this possible? Yep! You read that one correctly.

6. Colour Palette Generator (Free and Pro Subscriptions)

Think about a time you saw a beautiful image in a magazine, you cut it out and stuck a series of inspirational images on your wall. It comes time to create your branding and you oh-so-love the colours in one particular image, but for the life of you cannot seem to match anything remotely close to it, no matter how hard you try.

Canva’s Colour Palette Generator is one of the coolest tools…ever! Simply upload a photo, and they’ll use the hues in the photo to create your palette, extra the hex codes and bob’s your uncle, branding colours, done!