Choosing fonts and colours for your brand when you’re doing it yourself is harder than it sounds, not because the decisions are complicated, but because it’s difficult to evaluate individual elements without seeing how they work together.
If you’re in a position to work with a professional brand designer, that’s always the stronger path when your business is ready for it. But if you’re just getting started or working with a limited budget, you need something to work with in the meantime.
Canva’s brand board templates are worth knowing about for exactly that situation. They won’t replace a professionally developed brand identity, but they give you a more considered starting point than choosing elements in isolation, and this tutorial walks through how to use them effectively.
Note that moving your choices into your Canva Brand Kit requires Canva Pro, and you can start a free trial here before you begin.
Transcript
Opening Canva’s font library can feel very overwhelming — thousands of options, no obvious starting point, and no clear sense of which ones belong together. That experience is common. The same thing happens with colours. Without a defined palette to work from, colour decisions tend to happen in the moment, design by design, and over time that produces content that doesn’t quite feel like it belongs to the same business.
Before we get into it, if you’re in a position to work with a professional brand designer or brand strategist, that’s always worth investing in when your business is ready. A designer brings strategic thinking to your visual identity that goes well beyond font and colour selection — they’re considering your positioning, your audience, and how your brand will need to grow and evolve. That kind of expertise is hard to replicate on your own.
But not every business is at that stage yet. If you’re just getting started, working with a limited budget, or building something on the side while you figure out whether it has legs, you need something to work with in the meantime. That’s where this tutorial is useful.
Brand board templates won’t replace a professionally developed brand identity, but they can give you a starting point that’s more considered than picking fonts and colours at random, and sometimes that’s enough to get moving.
Brand board templates are one of the most underused tools in Canva for solving exactly that problem. Most people think of Canva templates as Instagram posts, presentations, or flyers. But there’s an entire category of templates specifically designed to help you define your visual brand from scratch — and they’re worth knowing about if you’re in the early stages of figuring out what your brand should look and feel like.
Before we get into it: this tutorial leads into setting up your Canva Brand Kit, which is where your font and colour decisions become part of your actual design workflow.
Brand Kits require Canva Pro, so if you’re not on Pro yet, I’ll link to a free trial at brendacadman.com/upgrade. It works even if you already have a Canva account — it just upgrades your existing plan and your designs stay exactly where they are.
What a Brand Board Template Does
A brand board is a layout that displays fonts, colours, and often example imagery together on a single page. Its purpose isn’t to produce a finished design — it’s to help you see how your brand elements work together before you commit to them.
When a heading font sits next to a body font, you can tell whether they feel balanced or disconnected. When colours are displayed side by side, you can quickly sense whether the palette feels cohesive or whether something is off. When everything appears together in one layout, you stop judging each piece in isolation and start seeing how your brand actually shows up visually.
That shift — from evaluating individual elements to seeing them as a system — is what makes brand boards useful. You’re not just picking fonts and colours you like. You’re making visible decisions and seeing how they interact.
How to Find Brand Board Templates in Canva
To find brand boards in Canva, go to Canva’s template library and search for “brand board.” You’ll find a wide range of layouts — some minimal and clean, some more elaborate — but they all share the same basic structure: a font pairing with clear hierarchy, a defined colour palette, and usually some example imagery or graphic elements that support the overall tone.
What to Look For as You Browse
The goal when browsing isn’t to find the most visually appealing option — it’s to find one that reflects the tone your business needs to communicate. That distinction matters, because a template that looks beautiful in the abstract may send completely the wrong signal for your industry or audience.
Start with the font pairing. Look at the heading font first — does it feel refined and elegant, modern and clean, friendly and approachable, or bold and confident? Think about how you want people to feel when they encounter your business, and whether that heading font matches that impression. Then look at the body font. It should feel readable and supportive — there to carry information clearly rather than to compete with the heading for attention.
Then look at the colour palette. Colours communicate mood before a single word is read, so pay attention to what the palette makes you feel. Does it feel calm and grounded, energetic and bold, warm and welcoming, or cool and minimal? Think about your audience and the kind of experience you want them to associate with your business — and then ask whether the palette supports that.
Many brand board templates also include example photography or graphic elements. You likely won’t use those exact images in your own brand — that isn’t the point. Those visuals are there to communicate mood. Notice whether the imagery feels bright and airy or dark and dramatic, minimal and spacious or layered and expressive, soft and organic or structured and bold.
Even if photography plays no role in your brand at all, the imagery on the board tells you something about the overall atmosphere the template is designed to convey. If that mood aligns with how you want your business to be perceived, that’s a strong signal you’re moving in the right direction. If it feels completely disconnected from your audience or industry, that template probably isn’t the right starting point.
One more thing worth saying: your personal connection to your brand choices matters — you’ll be living with them across everything you create. But personal preference and brand strategy need to work together. A preschool and a financial consultant might both have owners who personally love muted, minimal palettes, but those palettes would serve one business far better than the other. The strongest brand choices are ones you like that also make sense for who you’re serving.
Taking Your Choices Into Canva
Once you’ve found a brand board template that feels right (or a direction that’s close enough to refine from) the next step is to capture those decisions so you can use them consistently.
Before you close out of the template, take a screenshot or jot down the font names and hex codes from the colour palette — those are the two things you’ll need when you go to set up your Brand Kit, and it’s easy to lose track of a template you liked once you’ve kept browsing.
Once your fonts and colours are stored in your Brand Kit, they’re available inside the editor every time you design — no looking things up, no second-guessing, no recreating palettes from scratch. The decisions you made here become the defaults you work from going forward.
If you want the full steps for setting up your Canva Brand Kit, look for that tutorial linked below.
If you’re not on Canva Pro yet, brendacadman.com/upgrade is where to start your free trial — and as I mentioned, starting through that link works even if you already have an existing Canva account.
Choosing fonts and colours from scratch is one of the harder parts of building a brand when you’re doing it yourself, not because the decisions are complicated, but because it’s difficult to evaluate individual elements without seeing how they work together. Brand board templates give you that context. Once you’ve found a direction that feels right, you’re no longer designing from guesswork, and that changes how the rest of your Canva setup feels entirely.
