If you’ve chosen fonts you genuinely like, and your designs still don’t look quite right — something feels flat, or unclear, or just a little off — the problem is usually not the fonts themselves. It’s how they’re being used in relation to each other.
Most of the time, that comes down to hierarchy.
Font hierarchy is the way you organize your text so it’s immediately obvious what someone should read first, second, and third. In practical terms, that means a large, prominent heading — a slightly smaller subheading — and clearly readable body text.
Each level is distinct enough that someone can scan your design and recognize the structure before they’ve read a single word.
When all your text is roughly the same size, weight, and style, everything competes for attention at once. When the levels are clearly defined, your design feels organized and intentional — and that shift alone can make a significant difference to how professional your content looks.
What Font Hierarchy Looks Like in Canva
The easiest way to see hierarchy working is to open a brand board template in Canva. Go to the template library and search “brand board.”
These layouts are specifically designed to show a heading, subheading, and body paragraph together, which makes them a useful reference point before you start building your own.
What you’re looking for is a layout where the heading is clearly the focal point — large enough and visually distinct enough that your eye lands there first. The subheading sits noticeably smaller, supporting the heading rather than competing with it. And the body text is clean and readable, designed for longer stretches of copy rather than for visual impact.
Even before reading the words, you can see three distinct levels of information. Your eye lands on the heading, moves to the subheading, and then settles into the body text. That movement — that sense of being guided through the design — is exactly what hierarchy creates.
For a full walkthrough of how to use brand board templates to find and evaluate font pairings, my tutorial on how to use Canva brand board templates to choose your fonts and colours covers that process in detail.
How to Build Your Own Hierarchy
Start with your heading. This should be your largest and most visually dominant text, large enough and present enough that someone can immediately identify it as the main message. If you have to study the design to find the focal point, the heading needs to be bigger, bolder, or more distinct.
From there, define your subheading level. This is where a lot of people get stuck, because they assume they need a third font. You don’t. Your subheading can be a variation of your body font — adjusted for size, weight, letter spacing, or formatting — as long as it reads as clearly different from both the heading above it and the body text below it. What matters is that it signals a different level of information, not that it comes from a different typeface.
Then establish your body text. This font should prioritize readability above everything else. It carries the bulk of your information and needs to feel comfortable at smaller sizes, across a range of design formats, and for anyone reading on a mobile screen.
The most important principle throughout all three levels is contrast. The difference between your heading, subheading, and body text should be obvious at a glance — not subtle, not something someone has to look closely to notice. Visible contrast is what makes hierarchy work.
How to Test Whether It’s Working
Once you’ve set up your hierarchy, there are a few practical ways to check whether it’s doing its job.
Zoom out so your design appears smaller on screen and, without reading the words, ask yourself whether you can clearly see separate levels of information. If everything blurs into a similar visual weight, the contrast between levels needs strengthening.
Then lean back slightly and notice where your eye lands first. If there isn’t a clear focal point — if your eye wanders rather than settling somewhere immediately — your heading may need to be larger or more visually distinct.
A third check: duplicate the page and temporarily replace your wording with placeholder text. If the layout still feels structured and organized without relying on the meaning of the words, your hierarchy is working. A strong hierarchy should be readable as a structure before anyone reads a single sentence.
Two Patterns That Get in the Way
Two things tend to trip people up when they’re building hierarchy for the first time.
The first is choosing different fonts but making them too similar in size. A heading at size 36, a subheading at 32, and body text at 28 technically creates three levels, but visually, those sizes are too close together to establish a clear structure. The differences need to be obvious, not incremental.
The second is emphasizing everything. When every section is bold, capitalized, or heavily styled, there’s no clear focal point left to guide the eye. Hierarchy depends on visible differences, and when everything is treated as important, nothing stands out. Restraint is part of what makes hierarchy work.
Where to Go From Here
A simple font hierarchy makes your designs easier to read and much easier to repeat consistently across everything you create. You don’t need advanced typography knowledge to build one, you need clearly defined roles for your text and enough contrast between those roles that the structure is immediately visible.
Once you’ve decided what your heading, subheading, and body text styles will be, adding those fonts to your Brand Kit is the natural next step. When they’re stored there, they’ll appear directly inside the font selection tool whenever you’re designing — which removes the guesswork from typography decisions entirely and makes staying consistent far easier across every design you create.
For a full walkthrough of setting up your Brand Kit fonts, my tutorial on how to set up your Canva Brand Kit covers the process in detail.
When your font hierarchy is defined and your fonts are stored in your Brand Kit, you’re no longer adjusting sizes and styles every time you open a new design. You’re applying a system, and that’s when designing in Canva starts to feel noticeably faster and more consistent.
