Ultimately, whether you create your graphics and marketing materials from scratch or use a template and customize it, it’s going to be important keep some key design principles in mind when creating your graphics to ensure they look as polished as possible.
So in this Canva tutorial, I’ll talk about 7 things you need to always keep in the back of your mind when you’re designing in Canva.
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Transcript
Ultimately, whether you create your graphics and marketing materials from scratch or use a template and customize it, it’s going to be important keep some key design principles in mind when creating your graphics to ensure they look as polished as possible.
So here are 7 things to always keep in the back of your mind when you’re designing in Canva.
1. Don’t use too many colours.
Stick with your brand’s color palette, because if you stick to your brand palette, it’s going to create a sense of cohesiveness across all of your graphics. it’ll feel less visually cluttered, and it’ll result in much less brand confusion for those who follow you.
2. Similarly, don’t use too many fonts.
As part of creating a visual brand kit, you need to choose a set of brand fonts that you use consistently across not only your Canva designs but also on your website and any other marketing materials that you use.
Additionally, your brand fonts should also have a visual hierarchy set up for them, so for example, you should have one font treatment for your headings, another for your subheadings, another for body copy, and so on.
That doesn’t mean you’re necessarily choosing a completely different font for each of those items, but it does mean that you need to choose a particular font and formatting for each of them and then use them consistently.
3. Don’t use too few fonts either.
You do want to have enough variety to be able to establish that font hierarchy, and you won’t be able to do that if you only have one font being used.
4. Consider proportion.
Make sure your various elements are balanced in their sizing and that the most important text items are sized accordingly.
5. Allow for white space!
Don’t feel that you have to use up every single little bit of real estate on your design layout. Having lots of space for your design elements to breathe is important. If you have a ton of visual clutter on your design, it will feel overwhelming.
6. Make sure that you’ve got consistent spacing around the edges of your design… you don’t want something really close to the top but then have a big gap at the bottom. So allow for whitespace around the edges as well and make sure it’s all even.
7. Finally, make sure you have even alignment between your elements.
If you have a couple pieces of text or elements next to each other, make sure they are evenly aligned so they feel balanced. Using Canva’s “Tidy Up” feature under the Position menu item can help you achieve this.