We need to talk about Canva. For small and large communications teams, it’s been a game changer — empowering a larger collective of team members to whip up professional-looking visuals for social media and beyond. Many of our clients use it every day as an integral part of their communications workflow.

But from a brand standpoint, there’s a problem we’re seeing: Canva is an endless buffet with literally hundreds of thousands of templates and endless customization options. A good brand is a meal with foods that match up. But with Canva, it’s possible to have a bowl of tikka masala on the same plate with banana pudding. They might both be delicious, but yeah, no.

It’s easy to get starry-eyed over a shiny new template that looks amazing. But if everyone on your team is leading with their personal taste, it’s most likely those templates don’t fit together on your feed, and they don’t fit your brand. 

We've watched this happen with clients time after time, so we cooked up a way to turn Canva from a tool that can dilute a brand to a tool that serves up exactly what you need.

The Benefits of a Customized Canva Setup

By setting up your Canva account in the right way you can:

• Increase team capacity: Accomplish more without stretching your resources, or equip a wider net of contributors.
• Adapt quickly to communication needs: Make changes on the fly with fewer baton passes between departments or outside collaborators.
• Simplify editing and collaboration: Maintain a single source of truth in a user-friendly platform that allows for real-time collaboration.

How It Works: The Canva Process

When we work with a client on a custom Canva setup, we make sure we’re creating something that’s going to last a long time and be usable without a ton of support. We aim for teams to be self-sufficient — that’s what’s so great about Canva in the first place.

Putting Together a Plan

First, we start by diving deep into your content. This analysis is crucial because it forms the foundation of our strategy. We look at several key aspects:

• Visual Consistency: Are your posts immediately recognizable as your brand?
• Content Mix: What types of content are you sharing? Is there a theme? Is there a new way of relaying that information?
• Engagement Rates: Which posts are resonating with your audience?
• Brand Alignment: Does your content accurately reflect your brand values and voice?
• Design Elements: Are you using consistent colors, fonts, and graphic styles?

From there, we can build a strategy. Sometimes we do a whole content plan, with content themes and posting cadences, and sometimes we just build a visual strategy and set of guidelines. It depends on the needs of our client. But what’s most important is that we’re thinking about ways to make the future work easier.

Creating a Custom Template Library

Once we establish the strategy, we work with our client to identify the types of templates that will be most flexible and useful for their team.

Then we design custom templates that utilize specific and unique features from your very own brand. This is where we step away from Canva’s library of mismatched aesthetics, creating a custom library that is rooted in the voice and visual motifs that are central to your brand identity.

One of the great advantages of Canva is that it’s easy to create multiple variations for each design. This way, content doesn’t become stale, even if you’re using the same templates. Starting with one template, we can alter it in various ways:

• Alternate color schemes from your brand palette
• Different layout options (image and text can flip, for example)
• Various background patterns or textures
• Different versions or sizes of logos or calls-to-action

This approach is similar to website component theming, where a single component (like a button or CTA) can have variations to choose from that are visually distinct but brand-consistent. It makes it easier for your team to create varied content quickly, adapting to different messages, campaigns, or platform-specific requirements without starting from scratch each time.

Setting Up Your Account

Then our team will take care of setting everything up in Canva.

First, we build the brand kit in Canva. This will include all of your core brand elements — such as your color palette and fonts — making your brand ingredients accessible to everyone who joins your team.

Next, we'll focus on your image library. We offer two options here: we can either upload your existing brand images or curate a new library of images for upload. This step ensures that you have a rich selection of on-brand visuals at your fingertips.

Finally, we'll build out all of the custom templates in Canva. We’ll organize them by type, general usage, or color theme, depending on the strategy outlined before. The goal is to make the library and templates as easy to navigate as possible, reducing training time and potential overwhelm from learning how to use a new tool.

Training and Guidelines

It’s important that your team knows how to use these resources effectively, but we also realize that onboarding people into a new tool can be time-consuming. With the full setup, we’ll provide a guide that covers best practices, template usage, and brand guidelines. This helps maintain consistency, especially as teams change or grow.

A Real Life Example

A great example of this process in action is our work with a local library system. They were already using Canva, but their social media presence lacked visual cohesion. Posts varied wildly in style, making it difficult for followers to immediately recognize their content in busy social media feeds.

We were already working on a brand evolution for them, so it was the perfect opportunity to align their social media presence with their refreshed brand. Our analysis revealed several key issues:

• Lack of Visual Cohesion: Each post was created from scratch, likely from various Canva library templates, leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies.
• Inconsistent Color and Font Usage: They were using a wide range of colors and fonts, many of which weren't part of their official palette.
• Missed Opportunities: They weren't fully utilizing their unique assets, like book cover images or library event photos. At first glance, it may have been hard for visitors to identify their profile as a community library.

Based on these findings, we proposed a new Canva setup that would make their future content creation not just easier, but more cohesive and impactful. We developed a set of templates for different post types – book recommendations, event announcements, library news, and more. Each template was designed to be flexible enough for various content needs while still maintaining a consistent, on-brand look.

We also set up the brand kit within Canva that matched their new brand colors, and set up a font hierarchy that could be easily applied across all templates. This ensured that no matter who on the team was creating content, it would always align with the library's visual identity.

The result was a transformation in their social media presence. Their feed went from a mismatched collection of posts to a cohesive, visually appealing representation of their brand. Engagement rates improved as followers began to recognize and interact more with their content.

A Great Tool for the Right Job

It's important to recognize that Canva is great for creating social media content or making quick presentations and simple marketing materials. However, for large-scale professional print jobs or highly specialized design work, you might need more robust design software and professional expertise.

By approaching Canva with a new lens, you can transform it from a potential source of pain into a powerful tool for creating cohesive, engaging content. It's about finding the right balance between creativity and brand alignment, between flexibility and consistency.

Remember, the goal isn't just to create pretty graphics — it's to communicate your message effectively and reinforce your brand identity with every piece of content. With a thoughtful approach, Canva can be a valuable asset in achieving these goals.