Each category inside your Canva Brand Kit appears as a visual tile, and customizing those cover images can make your brand space easier to scan and more intuitive to use. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to add or update category cover images, recommended sizing, and how to design cover visuals that function as clear visual signals rather than simple decoration.
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Transcript
Once you’ve started organizing your brand kit in Canva, you’ll notice that each category appears as a visual tile. By default, those tiles are fairly generic — functional, but not especially helpful once your Brand Kit starts to grow.
Custom cover images change that.
They allow you to bring your brand’s visual identity into the Brand Kit itself, making categories easier to recognize and the entire Brand Kit faster and more comfortable to use.
Where Cover Images Live in Canva’s Brand Kit
Cover images are applied at the category level inside your Brand Kit.
Any category (whether it’s one of Canva’s default categories or one you’ve created yourself) can have its own cover image. That image appears directly on the category tile and acts as a visual shorthand for what’s stored inside.
When cover images are customized, the Brand Kit page itself starts to feel less like a utility screen and more like a branded workspace.
How to Add or Change a Cover Image
To update a category cover image:
- Go to the Brand section in Canva.
- Open the Brand Kit you want to customize, then locate the category you want to update.
- Hover over the category tile and click the three dots.
- And then choose Update cover image.
When you do this, Canva opens a simplified editor, not the full design editor, and you’ll see that the size is pre-defined.
Designing Your Cover Image: Two Approaches
You can design the cover image right inside this simplified editor using colours, shapes, images, or graphics.
But if you prefer more flexibility, you can also pull in an existing design.
Inside the cover image editor, open the Projects sidebar and browse your designs just like you would in the regular Canva editor. When you open a design, you can select the specific page you want, and that page will populate directly into the cover image canvas.
This makes it easy to design cover images in the full editor first, then reuse them inside your Brand Kit.
Recommended Size for Brand Kit Cover Images
While Canva doesn’t publish an official size, 1924 × 1282 pixels works very well for Brand Kit category covers.
If you’d like a shortcut, I’ve linked to the free Canva template I used in this example. When you sign up to grab that template, you’ll also get a short training that walks you through how to customize it for your own brand (including colours, imagery, and category styles) so you’re not starting from scratch.
What Makes a Good Cover Image
The most important thing to remember is that a cover image is a visual signal, not decoration.
The goal isn’t just to make each category look pretty, it’s to make it instantly recognizable. And if you can do both? Happy days.
That means the image you choose should reflect what kind of assets live inside that category, not just something that looks on-brand in general.
For example:
- A photos category might use a sample brand photo or a cropped detail from your photography style.
- A brand graphics category might use a pattern, texture, or illustrative element you reuse often.
Personally, I find that using a standardized solid background colour paired with a simple image that reflects the category content is an easy way to create a cohesive visual system without visual clutter.
If you can scan your Brand Kit and immediately know where you’re going, without reading labels, the cover images are doing their job.
Bringing Your Brand Identity Into the Brand Kit Page
Beyond category cover images, you can also customize the Brand Kit itself.
Each Brand Kit has:
- an icon, which appears beside the Brand Kit name
- And a banner colour, which frames the top of the Brand Kit page
To update these, click the three dots next to the Brand Kit name and choose Edit details. From there, you can upload an icon and adjust the banner colours.
When combined with personalized category cover images, these changes make it much easier to visually distinguish between Brand Kits, especially if you manage multiple brands, sub-brands, or long-running projects.
Wrapping It Up
Custom cover images, icons, and banner colours don’t change how Canva works, but they do change how it feels to work inside your Brand Kit.
By using cover images as clear visual signals (and letting them look good too!), you create a Brand Kit that’s easier to scan, easier to navigate, and more comfortable to work in every day.
