You already know that Canva is an incredible tool for creating beautiful, on-brand images and marketing materials for your business.
But there’s a specific challenge that most business owners will also run into at some point when working with Canva.
I’m talking about blurry Canva designs.
You create a gorgeous design in Canva and then you go to share it on social media or download it for an email newsletter, or as a feature image for your website. But when you go to post the image, it looks blurry, even though the original design looked crystal clear while you were working on it inside of Canva’s design editor.
It’s a concern I hear with reasonable frequency, so I want you to have a quick action plan at your finger tips to solve the problem.
Resources Mentioned
- 45 Day Free Trial of Canva Pro (Affiliate Link)
Transcript
First up, you want to make sure you’re using Canva’s correct dimensions.
When you’re designing on Canva, make sure that the document size is set to the appropriate dimensions required for the platform you intend to share your design on. Each social media platform is going to have specific size recommendations.
For instance, Instagram feed posts have different dimensions than an Instagram story, which is different than a Facebook page post, which is different than a Pinterest pin. And so on.
If your design is looking blurry, make sure your Canva document size is correct, which you can double check here under “File”. If it’s correct, great. If it’s not, you can use “Magic Switch” if you’re a Canva Pro subscriber, in order to quickly resize your design to the correct dimensions.
If your design size is good, then the next thing to check is the image format that you’ve downloaded.
To preserve the quality of your design, opt for the PNG format when downloading images from Canva. PNGs are going to maintain a higher image quality compared to JPEGs, especially for designs containing text, logos, or elements with transparent backgrounds. When exporting, choose the PNG file type to retain clarity and sharpness.
If you’re incorporating photos into your Canva design, make sure that the images you’re using are of a high resolution.
If the images you’re using are already blurry or too small to start, it isn’t going to matter what image format you download. It’ll still be blurry.
So make sure your initial photos are high resolution.
Finally you may just need to download a larger version of your Canva design.
Sometimes platforms compress uploaded images, reducing their quality, and I’ve definitely seen this happen with some consistency on Facebook and Instagram.
So, you can counter this by downloading your design at 2x the intended size.
For instance, if your design is meant to be shared as a 1080×1350 pixel image, instead download it at 2160×2700 pixels. This higher resolution can often compensate for potential compression, ensuring the uploaded image remains clear.
If doubling the size doesn’t do the trick, try downloading it at 3x the size. That’s what I end up doing for my email header images that I upload to ConvertKit, and this trick of downloading a larger version will usually solve the problem for most folks.
Plus, if you’re on a Canva Pro account, they make it easy in the download settings to specify a 2x or 3x sized image without having to actually resize the original design.
