You probably know by now that I’m a very big advocate for creating your brand kit inside of Canva and then using that brand kit consistently in order to create always on brand graphics and marketing materials for your business.
However, if you’ve ever found yourself struggling to figure out just how to apply your brand fonts and colours to a template to make it unique to your business, then you may want to check out the Styles feature available from Canva.
It can be a good source of design inspiration for applying your brand kit, and you may not have seen it before because it tends to be a bit hidden.
So in this tutorial, I’ll show you where to find it and how to use it.
Don’t forget to join us in the How to Use Canva Facebook community, and be sure to grab your 45 day free trial of Canva Pro.
Transcript
I’m going to open up an Instagram post template here, and I’m using a template from Canva Creator Melissa LeMay, who has some really lovely templates available on Canva.
So let’s use this as a starting point.
You most likely will not see Styles appear by default in the left hand navigation here, and what you’re going to do in order to access that feature, is to come down here to the three dots that say More, and click on that.
And then you’ll see Styles as one of the options to choose from.
So what is this feature?
The Styles option can be a source of inspiration for you if you’re not sure how to apply your brand kit colours and fonts to customize a template.
I will admit that I don’t use this option myself because I’m a bit of a control freak and I like to have complete control over how colours and fonts are applied to my designs, but if you’re not a customization control freak like me, you might want to give this a try.
You’ll see a variety of trending brand styles available here, but I am going to strongly advise you to NOT use these… because they aren’t your business’s brand kit.
And if you’ve listened to any of my presentations or courses or tutorials about branding on Canva, then you know how important I think it is for you to set up your own branding and to consistently use it for your business’s graphics.
Choosing another brand style, as pretty as it may be, is going to create visual confusion.
However, you can also see that the fonts and colours from my own brand kit are also showing up here, and you will see YOUR own brand kit options here, so that’s what we’re going to use in this example.
I’ll click on the fonts, and then it’ll choose a combination of my fonts to apply to this template.
And then I’ll click on my colour palette and it will apply a combination of my brand colours to customize the template.
If I don’t like it, I can click on my colour palette again, and you’ll see that it says “shuffle” – which means it’s going to shuffle up the colours it’s using.
I can continue to click on the colour palette until I get a combination I like.
And then of course you can make manual changes to the design as well. For example, you might like 80% of what Styles has applied to your template but want to make some additional minor modifications to get it the way you want it.
For example, I might be mostly happy with this, but want to change one or two of the fonts.
Now if you have multiple pages in a design, once you’ve applied Styles to a page, you’ll also be presented with an option to apply to all pages.
So I’ll just open up a quick Presentation template here that has multiple different slide page layouts…
Let’s apply Styles to it.
And then I can choose to Apply to all pages.
At this point, you’ll likely need to go through and make some manual changes as you probably won’t love how it applies the styles to all of your pages.
So that is the Styles feature, and if you’re ever struggling on how to apply your brand kit in order to customize a Canva template to make it unique to your business, this can be a helpful source of inspiration.
