How To Set Up Your Brand Kit in Canva

Hi, friend! I’m so glad you’re here, because today I’m sharing how to set up one of the biggest things that saves me time in my business: a brand kit in Canva! Note: Brand kits are a feature of Canva Pro and aren’t available on a free plan.

I’m a huge fan of Canva for templates and things like printables, resources, and social media graphics (not for branding + logos, which we’ll talk about later). It’s so quick and easy to learn and use, and helps you stay consistent with your visuals.

One note before we talk about uploading files: Canva doesn’t know the difference between a file that represents your logo, a brand photo, a graphic, etc! Think of these as more like folder names to help you organize and be able to easily find things when you’re designing.

Now, let’s take an inside look at my own brand kit!

How to Set Up Your Canva Brand Kit

1 | Add Your Logos

Add your logo files to this section! I actually seldom use many variations of my logo in Canva designs (most times I’m using my logo, I’m in the Adobe suite) so I don’t have many here. But if you have different colors of your logo on various backgrounds, I recommend adding your most-used options!

At the time of this post, Canva also has a beta feature that allows you to change a logo across designs! For example, if I ever changed my logo mark (the “&” file above), I could delete it and upload a new one with “replace across designs” and any templates/graphics that this mark appears in would be updated with the new one. Time = saved!

2 | Add Your Colors

Add the HEX codes for your color palette here. You can have multiple palettes (I use mine for things like just the colors on my website, all of my core brand colors, and any variations of those colors), which helps keep things organized! You could go through and rename these colors (like “Orange”) but I prefer to leave them as the hex codes so they’re easy to copy/paste if I need to.

A HEX code is a 6 letter/digit code that represents a specific color. Other types of color codes include things like RGB and CMYK. If you ever need to convert codes to another type, I find the Google Color Picker to be an easy, quick option!

3 | Add Your Fonts

You can use the fonts section here to create settings for several types of text in Canva. By clicking “add new,” you can upload a font file (it accepts pretty much all types, so .otf, .ttf, and .woff will have you good to go!) and customize even further! One flaw of Canva templates (in my opinion) is that it will typically only show you the top 3 options on your brand kit’s fonts list when you’re in a design. If I deleted “heading” out of here, the 3 options I’d be shown when making something would be “Title,” “Subtitle,” and “Subheading.” Regardless of whether or not you have brand kit specifications for a font file you uploaded, you can use that font in a design – so I’d worry most about setting the top 3 fonts to be formats you use most frequently!

Another downfall of Canva, in my opinion, is that you can’t set font/line spacing in a brand kit – so if you typically have a certain spacing on your letters for all of your headings, you’re going to have to do that manually as you design. You can keep this in mind as you make template files and set up spacing there, though!

4 | Photos & Graphics

This section can be used for any photos and graphics you use frequently! If you’ve done a branding shoot, you likely have a small handful of headshots that you rotate through for things like profile photos, user profiles, etc. and this is a great place to keep them! I also use this section for the stock photos I keep on heavy rotation.

I use the “graphics” section for my custom brand patterns. From there, they get used as background/other design elements in social media graphics.

5 | Icons

This is one of my favorite features in the whole brand kit! Add your branding icons as SVG files to be able to change their color once you’re in a design.

Once you know how to set up your brand kit in Canva, creating designs is so quick and easy!