How To Create and Use Brand Kits In Canva (Explained!) (2024)

Creating a strong, recognizable brand identity is crucial for any business.

But juggling multiple logos, color palettes, fonts, and design styles can get confusing fast.

That’s where Canva’s handy Brand Kits come in.

Brand Kits allow you to store your brand’s visual identity like logo, color palette, fonts, etc in one place for easy access later.

This saves you tons of time and headaches when designing marketing materials, social media graphics, presentations, and more.

In this guide, I’ll walk through everything you need to know about building and using Brand Kits with Canva.

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What Exactly Are Brand Kits?

Think of a Brand Kit as a digital style guide or toolkit for your branding. It’s a single home base for:

• Your logos
• Color palettes
• Fonts
• Graphics
• Photos
• Icons

With all these elements together, you can quickly brand anything by tapping into your kit. No more guessing which color theme or font to use.

For example, let’s say I have a client called “Julia Nursery” Their branding is bright, playful colors with a fun handwritten logo.

Every time I make them a new social media post or content piece, I can pull in their Brand Kit to apply the right logo, color palette, and cursive font.

This saves so much time compared to digging through folders and notes to piece together branding every single time.

Imagine if I have 100 clients, it will be so difficult to manage all their branding assets without Canva brand kit.

Pro Tip: Brand Kits help you maintain a cohesive look and feel across all touchpoints like your website, ads, social posts, presentations, etc. This strengthens brand recognition.

Who Can Build and Use Brand Kits?

The Brand Kit feature is exclusive to Canva Pro subscribers. But before switching to Pro, you can test drive Pro with a free trial:

• 30 days freeon the desktop site to try it on a laptop or computer
• 14 days free trial for the mobile version of Canvathrough the Canva mobile app

Once your trial ends, a paid Pro subscription costs $10.99 per month.

I know what you’re thinking…yet another monthly fee?

But hold on. The amount of time Brand Kits saves you on future design work makes the price well worth it.

Let’s say creating marketing graphics and presentations without a Brand Kit takes you 2 hours each time to assemble all the materials.

With a kit, it only takes 30 minutes.

If you make 5 new branded projects a month, that’s 5 hours saved, which quickly adds up!

And you get access to Canva’s massive library of templates, images, and design elements too.

Note: You can manually apply branding without a Brand Kit for free. But you have to manually upload all your brand assets like logo, color palette, style, and fonts every single time which is going to be very time-consuming.The kit automates the process.

How To Create a Brand Kit In Canva (Step By Step)

Ready to start assembling your kit? Here’s exactly how to do it within Canva:

1. Add Your Branding Assets

Go to Canva.com and click “Brand Hub” or “Brand Kit” (Only For Pro Members) on the left sidebar. Click On “Add New” to create your brand kit.

A Popup will come asking for your brand kit name, just name your Brand kit anything you want and click on“Create”

Now you can start creating your brand kit while previewing it live.

This is so much easier than uploading items one by one without seeing how they look together.

a) Uploading Your Logo

Start by uploading your brand logo file to your brand kit:

Click the “Upload” button to pick your logo file from your system.

PNG format with a transparent backgroundworks best so you can overlay it anywhere.

For now, you can only add 1 logo to your kit. You can manually upload more later if needed.

Pro Tip: Make sure you have copyright permission to use the logo in your kit if it’s not 100% your own creation.

b) Choosing Your Color Palette

Next, it’s time to pick the perfect color palette:

Canva will automatically generate a color palette based on the dominant colors in your logo.

If you like the auto-generated colors you can click on “Keep” else you can click on “Remove”

You can create a custom color palette by clicking on the “+ Add new” button and then selecting “Add Palette”

There you will see a lot of premade color palettes, you can choose any of them if you like or you can click on “Add a custom palette”

Now a new palette will be added, you can adjust the colors by clicking on the color box and selecting a color from the color picker or you can also enter brand-specificHEX color codesif you have them.

You can add multiple colors in a color palette by clicking on the square “+ Add New” button.

Choosing the right colors is crucial for good branding. Bolder tones feel energetic and fun, while muted palettes come across as more elegant or serious. Make sure it fits the vibe you want!

For “Julia Nursery”, I’d pick minimal greens and browns inspired by real plant nurseries to match their playful brand personality.

c) Upload Your Fonts

Now for the fun part – fonts!

You want a minimum of 2 complementary but distinct fonts:

• One attention-grabbing fontfor headings and titles
• One simple, easy-to-read fontfor paragraph or body text
• Make sure they pair well with your logo and colors

To upload a font on your canva brand kit, click on the Pencil icon next to the heading type.

Now select a font from the drop-down menu, select the default sizing if you want, and click on the small tick icon, now that font will be applied to that type of text.

For eg. here I have used League Spartan for my titles and Glacial Indifference for my body text.

d) Upload Photos, Graphics & Icons

If you have any photos, graphics, and icons that you frequently use throughout your designs then you can upload them in the given sections.

So whenever you are creating designs and creatives for your brand, you don’t have to locate them again and again, as you can just pull up your brand kit and everything will be available there.

To upload your files, just drag and drop them to the given sections and they will be uploaded, it’s very simple.

2. Save Your Completed Brand Kit

Once you’re satisfied with how your brand kit looks altogether, you can simply go back and your kit will be saved automatically.

Canva will generate templates pre-populated with your branding. You can tweak them later for different projects.

And that’s it – you built a Brand Kit! Now let’s put it to use.

How To Use Brand Kit In Canva

Here comes the fun part where all that setup pays off! Your kit makes it so easy to quickly brand anything.

Start a new Canva document like a social media post or presentation.

Over in the left “Brands Hub” panel, you will find all the assets that you uploaded in your brand kit like fonts, colors, etc.

You can use them to create a new design.

You can also open the premade templates from canva and click on the color palette from the brand hub to quickly change the color scheme of that template.

You can add new titles and the body text from your brand hub and they will by default have the fonts that you applied to them while creating the brand kit.

You can find your logos and all the uploaded images and graphics over there too.

All your brand-related stuff could be found there and you can use them to create consistent branding materials for yourself or for your client.

Wrapping Up

I hope this deep dive into creating and using Brand Kits has shown you how valuable they can be.

Personally, I can’t imagine designing social media creatives without having my logo, fonts, and colors ready to go in Canva. It makes maintaining a consistent brand identity so much easier.

Start by trying Canva Pro’s free trial to build your own starter kit.

See firsthand how it streamlines making on-brand graphics, presentations, and more. Once you get the hang of it, have fun developing kits for different business lines or campaigns.

The ability to instantly apply your visual identity with a click will change your design game.

So give Brand Kits a shot and take your brand style to the next level!

Let me know if you have any other brand kit-related questions – I’m always happy to help you out.