Creating a custom gradient in Canva is a game-changer for adding that perfect touch of visual interest to your designs.
While Canva offers a selection of pre-made gradients, designing your own allows you to fully customize the look to fit your brand or project.
Resources Mentioned
- Free Trial of Canva Pro (Affiliate Link)
Transcript
Here’s how to do it:
First, choose where you want the gradient to appear, and you can apply gradients to all kinds of elements in your design, such as shapes, backgrounds, borders, and so on.
Let’s choose a thin rectangle for this example.
Then, in Canva’s design editor, head over to the color tool and choose to add a new colour, but rather than selecting a solid color, you’ll instead choose this gradient tab.
And this is where the magic happens: you can choose your gradient colours here, and add however many colours you need to achieve your preferred gradient mix. You can even adjust the direction of the gradient under Style to get the perfect blend.
And that’s it! With just a couple of simple steps, you can create custom gradients that perfectly match your visual branding.
If you’re planning to use a custom gradient consistently across your designs, you have two ways to create and save it in Canva.
First, you can do this directly within the design editor by choosing to create your custom gradient in the brand color palette area of the color tool—not the document colors section. You’ll simply choose to Edit your brand color palette and add your gradient there. This ensures that your gradient is saved directly to your Brand Kit, making it easily accessible for all future projects.
Alternatively, you can create and save your custom gradient directly within the Brand Kit feature itself by navigating to the Brand Kit area and selecting the Colors section. Either method will help you maintain consistency across your designs and keep your brand’s visual identity on point.
If you’re on a free Canva plan, remember that you can add up to 3 colors to your brand color palette, including a custom gradient.
However, access to the full Brand Kit, where you can store as many colors and custom gradients as needed, is a Canva Pro feature.
