The Brand Kit
Transcript
The ability to setup and use the Canva brand kit feature is probably one of, if not the biggest reason, why I encourage anyone using Canva to support a business to upgrade from the free Canva plan to Canva Pro.
Having a visual brand kit is essential for any business and it’s going to help to ensure the consistency of your marketing, which in turn will foster recognition and a sense of trust among your customers.
When you set up the brand kit feature in Canva, it enables you to have quick and easy access to all your brand logos, colours, fonts, photos, graphics and icons so that as you design graphics and content for your business, you can effortlessly apply your brand and ensure consistency across all your marketing assets.
You’ll also have the ability to set brand guidelines, ensuring any team members always stay on brand, plus if you work with multiple brands, for example, if you have multiple clients or more than one business, then you’ll also be able to create and manage up to 100 separate brands kits, all in one convenient location inside your Canva account.
If you’d like a detailed overview of the brand kit feature, look for a video in the Tutorials area of this mini course called “Introduction to the Canva Brand Kit.”
But for the rest of this video, I want to answer two questions that often come up when talking about this particular reason to maintain a Pro subscription:
- Is there a workaround on the free plan?
- And what happens to my brand kit if I downgrade to a free plan in the future?
First let’s tackle the workaround question.
Yes, to some extent you could create a bit of a workaround for the brand kit. You could create a custom folder to house your brand assets with subfolders for your logos and your various brand imagery.
And yes, you could create a design that contains your colour palette hex code values so you can copy them when you need to know your specific colour codes.
However, neither of those options will be as reliably quick or streamlined when it comes to actually apply your branding to your designs, and I’m always going to champion for the most efficient solution. In this case, that means using a feature that consolidates all of your required brand assets into one spot in the Canva editor, and that’s exactly what the brand kit is going to do for you.
Additionally, there is no workaround when it comes to your fonts. If your brand fonts are not already on the free Canva plan and are only available as part of Canva’s pro fonts, OR if your fonts aren’t available on Canva at all and you need to upload custom fonts, then you’re going to need to have a Pro subscription in order to have access to your brand fonts so you can use them in your designs. Full stop.
So for example, my brand fonts are Cinzel for my headings, Baskerville for my subheadings and then Raleway for body copy. And it turns out that all of those are actually available on the free Canva plan! But if one of my fonts was, for example, Calgary, then you can see the crown icon there which means it’s only available as part of Canva Pro’s fonts.
Or if I wanted to use Aurellia Script, that is not included in Canva’s fonts at all, and I had to upload that one to get it into my Canva account… and like I said, uploading fonts will only be possible on a paid Canva subscription.
Now onto the other question.
What happens if you set up your brand kit but you decide either to not upgrade after the trial or you do upgrade but you want to downgrade again in the future?
When you return to a free Canva plan, you will not be able to access any of the brand kit features but your brand kit should be preserved behind the scenes. Which means that if you do decide to upgrade again in the future, your brand kit should be happily awaiting your return and you won’t have to re-create it again.