The Canva design editor is where you’ll spend most of your time creating. In this Canva beginner tutorial, I’ll walk you through the editor step by step so you understand how it’s organized and where to find everything you need.
Resources Mentioned
- Free Trial of Canva Pro (Affiliate Link)
Transcript
Once you’re logged into Canva, the design editor is where you’ll spend most of your time actually creating. This is the workspace where all of your tools, features, and design pages come together, and knowing how it’s laid out will make your workflow much faster and less confusing.
In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the Canva design editor step by step, so you feel comfortable navigating the layout and know exactly where to find what you need.
Keep in mind that Canva frequently updates its platform to improve functionality and introduce new features, so your layout might occasionally look a little different from what you see in this tutorial, but the core areas and tools will still work the same way.
General Overview of the Layout
You’ll see that Canva’s design editor has four distinct areas that serve specific functions.
The Design Pages area serves as your primary workspace. Here, you interact directly with your design, making changes, arranging elements, and navigating between different pages or slides. It’s the area where you’ll spend the most time, actively creating your design.
Supporting this is the Object Panel, located on the left-hand side of the screen. This panel gives you easy access to all the tools and elements needed to enhance your design.
As you work, the Floating Toolbar will appear whenever you select an element within your design. This toolbar provides quick, contextual editing options that keep your essential design features within easy reach.
And then at the top of the interface is the Menu Bar, which offers overarching controls for navigating your project and accessing key features. This area lets you manage project settings, such as resizing designs, switching modes, or sharing your work with others.
Working with Pages
Every design will open up with a single design page, and then you can easily add pages by clicking on the add page button at the bottom, and it will then automatically add another page to the end of the design. Or you can add a page in between existing pages by using this icon here at the top of the page.
You can duplicate a page design by clicking on this icon, and you can move pages up or down in the design file by using these two arrow icons.
And then if I want to delete a page, I will simply click on this trash icon to get rid of the page altogether.
If I want to change the background colour of a page, I’ll select the design page, and then you’ll see that floating toolbar appear that I mentioned in the overview. The toolbar will only provide editing options that are available for the specific component that I’ve selected, so to change the background colour, I’ll select the colour picker and choose a different page colour.
I can choose from one of the default colour options, including solid colours or gradients. Or I can choose a custom colour, and again, I can specify a solid colour, or I can create a custom gradient.
You can also give each page a title that describes the page, and then when you download a design that has multiple pages, rather than labelling the pages with numbers, for example, 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, etc., it will instead label the pages with the description that you have set for the title.
You can also add comments to a page in your design by clicking on this comment icon here. This can be very helpful if you are collaborating on a design with somebody else and you want to be able to leave comments or questions for each other about the progress of a design.
You can add notes by clicking on the notes option here, and any notes you add in this area will be displayed in presenter view if you present a design in Canva.
And then down at the bottom section here, you can access the zoom settings, so if you wanted to zoom in closer to a design, you can zoom in… and you can zoom back out.
You also have different ways to view and navigate through your pages or slides, including Thumbnail View, Scroll View, and Grid View. Each of these views offers a unique way to interact with your design, particularly when working with multi-page documents or presentations.
The Thumbnail View displays small previews or thumbnails of each page or slide along the bottom of the design editor. It allows you to quickly navigate between pages and see a condensed version of your design. This is helpful for reviewing the overall flow of your document or your presentation.
In Scroll View mode, which tends to be the default display for many design types, all pages are shown in a continuous vertical scroll, one after the other. It’s what I’ve been showing you so far in this video, and it makes it easy to work on multiple pages without switching between them, so you can seamlessly move up and down through your design. It’s especially useful when working on projects that require consistent design elements across multiple pages.
Then there’s the Grid view option, which arranges all pages into a grid format, displaying all pages as thumbnails in one overview. It’s an efficient way to get a bird’s-eye view of your entire design at once, which helps in reviewing the structure and overall consistency of your project. And it also enables you to easily move pages around, placing them exactly where you want them.
Each view offers flexibility depending on how you want to navigate and interact with your multi-page designs.
So let’s move on to the object panel and the various options that are available for creating content in the design editor.
Design
Templates
At the top here, you’ll see your most recently used templates, so this can be very handy if you have a particular template that you like to re-use regularly as a starting point.
You can also search for templates here in the search bar.
Styles
And then you have Canva’s “styles” tool, which you can use to have Canva automatically change the colours and fonts used in a design.
You can shuffle through your brand colours and change the look of a design without clicking on each element and changing the colours manually.
However, I find that the way Canva applies your colour palette or fonts often won’t necessarily be in line with your consistent brand guidelines, so while this is a neat tool, I do prefer to teach business owners how to customize a template and make design decisions for their colours and fonts that will ensure their designs are consistent and cohesive.
Elements
Elements are essentially the building blocks of creating designs in Canva.
From basic shapes and lines to more complex options like videos, charts, and even AI-generated images, these versatile components allow you to customize your designs for any purpose or platform.
If you’d like a more detailed overview of all the different types of elements and how to use them, look for my tutorial called “How to Use Canva’s Design Elements” and I’ll link to that in the description with this video. But for now, just know that this is where you’ll go any time you want to start adding visual pieces to your design.
Text
Next up is text, and your brand fonts will appear at the top, and then there are a bunch of font combinations that you can also select from. These are just kind of like text templates. They’ve already taken text and organized it into a predesigned template that you can modify from.
Brand
If you have a Canva Pro or Teams account, you’ll be able to use this Brand area, which enables you to access the contents of your brand kits, including your logos, colours, fonts, photos, graphics and any brand icons.
So this makes it extremely easy to access all of your brand elements so that you can create consistently on-brand marketing materials for your business.
Uploads
Next is Uploads. You can upload images here, and you can also upload your videos here.
Tools
This Tools option groups together several handy features that help you create and customize content quickly. Inside Tools, you’ll see:
- Draw, which lets you create freehand drawings and sketches directly inside Canva. It’s perfect if you want to add custom illustrations, icons, or other unique graphical elements to your design.
- Shapes, Lines, Text, and Tables are essentially quick shortcuts to the same elements you can also find under the Elements tab. Clicking here just gets you to those basic building blocks faster, without having to navigate through the full Elements library.
- And Sticky Notes, which let you add simple, colourful callouts to your design. They’re especially useful for brainstorming sessions, quick reminders, or visual annotations — for example, if you’re mapping out a presentation or collaborating with a team and want to highlight certain points.
So while many of these are simply faster ways to reach elements you’ve already seen, the Tools panel pulls them into one easy spot, along with helpful extras like Sticky Notes and the Draw feature to bring a bit more flexibility and creativity into your workspace.
Projects
In the Projects area, you’ll be able to access from the design editor any custom folders you’ve created, including any of the images and designs contained within those folders.
Apps
And then we’ve got the Apps tab, and this is where you’ll find access to a variety of Canva’s other apps and tools.
Menu Bar
To wrap up, let’s look at a few other features to be aware of in your design layout.
Clicking on “File” will tell you more information about your design.
Canva tends to update its interface fairly often, so the exact options you see under File may change, but as of this recording, the options include:
The file’s name, document type, owner and size.
You can create a new design or import files.
You can also access the document’s settings, including rulers and guides, margins, print bleed and more.
Canva’s Design Accessibility Tool is a feature that helps ensure your designs are accessible to a broader audience, particularly those with visual impairments or disabilities. These tools help creators design with inclusivity in mind, making your content more accessible to all users.
You can save your design here, although it does tend to save pretty frequently on its own.
You can also move the design to a folder, make a copy, or download the file.
Version History is a feature that is available on Canva Pro accounts. With Version History, you can view and restore older versions of your design, which can definitely come in handy if you’ve made a variety of changes in a design and want to go back to a previous version of it.
You can move the design directly to the trash if you decide you no longer need it.
And you can also access the Find and Replace text feature from the File menu, or open the design in Canva’s desktop app version.
Finally, you can suggest an improvement to Canva.
Resize is a Canva Pro feature that gives you the ability to quickly and easily take an existing design and adapt it into different dimensions. This is incredibly useful if you want to repurpose your content across multiple platforms without starting from scratch each time.
For example, you might have created a graphic for an Instagram post, and now you’d like a version that works perfectly as a Pinterest pin. With Resize, you can simply select the new dimensions you want — or even multiple sizes at once — and Canva will automatically adjust your design to fit.
It’s one of the features that saves the most time, especially if you regularly need to create consistent graphics in lots of different sizes. And it means you don’t have to rebuild each design from the ground up every time you need a new format.
You’ll also notice a mode selector up here in the menu bar, which lets you switch between three different ways of interacting with your design:
- Editing mode is the default, and it’s what you’ll use when you want to actively make changes to your design.
- Commenting mode lets you leave feedback or notes on the design without accidentally changing anything. This is especially handy if you’re reviewing work with a team member or a client and want to point out tweaks or ask questions right on the design itself.
- And then there’s Viewing mode, which is a simple read-only option. It’s helpful if you just want to double-check how a design looks without the distraction of editing tools, or if you’re showing it to someone else and don’t want to risk making any changes.
As the design owner, you can easily flip back and forth between these modes at any time, depending on whether you’re actively creating, reviewing, or just doing a final look-through.
The arrows here enable you to undo or redo changes.
This just gives you the status of whether your updates have been saved.
Over here is the name of the design file. You can rename it anytime by clicking on it here and just retyping it in.
You’re able to control who has access to the design here.
The Analytics feature provides performance metrics and data about your designs, giving you an overview of how your content is being received or interacted with.
It is a Canva Pro feature and is particularly useful for tracking engagement on shared or published designs.
Next to that, you can see the comments on a design.
You will find all options for downloading and sharing the design under this Share button.
If you simply want to download your design, you can skip all the rest of these options and click directly on the “Download” option here, and that will open up the download settings.
And that’s your tour of Canva’s design editor!
Once you’re comfortable with this layout, you’ll be able to focus less on hunting for tools and more on bringing your ideas to life. Canva does roll out updates often, so don’t worry if something shifts slightly; the main functions we’ve covered here should remain the same.
In other tutorials in my YouTube channel, I go deeper into some of these areas — like working with design elements, or downloading and sharing your finished files — but now you’ve got a solid foundation for navigating the editor itself.
