When you first log in to Canva, the homepage is where it all begins. In this beginner-friendly Canva tutorial, I’ll walk you through the Canva homepage step by step so you know exactly where to find your past designs, start new projects, and access Canva’s core tools.
Resources Mentioned
- Free Trial of Canva Pro (Affiliate Link)
Transcript
When you first log in to Canva, the homepage is where everything begins. It’s the central hub that helps you find your past designs, start new projects, and access the tools and features you’ll use most often.
And whether you’re brand new to Canva or coming back after a while, this overview will make sure you’re not missing anything important on the homepage. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the homepage step by step, so you know exactly where to look and how to get oriented before you dive into creating.
What Will You Design Today?
When you first land on your Canva homepage, you’ll notice right up at the top, there’s a big prompt that says “What will you design today?” This is really Canva’s way of helping you jump straight into whatever you need, without having to hunt around.
Just below that, you’ll see three clear options:
- Your designs — this is where you can search through your own existing content, including your past designs, folders, and any uploads. If you know you’ve already created something and just need to pull it up to tweak or reuse, this can often be one of the quickest ways to find it.
- Templates — this opens up Canva’s huge template library. It’s great if you want to start with a design that’s already laid out for you, and just customize it to fit your brand.
- And Canva AI — here you can explore Canva’s AI-powered tools that enable you to create AI images and video clips. You can even create a custom interactive app or tool using Canva Code. I have separate tutorials showing all of those options, and I’ll link to those in the description with this video.
Right below this search area, you’ll also see a row of icons that make up Canva’s Visual Worksuite, and these represent the main types of designs you can create. You’ve got:
- Sheets, Docs, and Whiteboards for planning and collaborating
- Presentations for slides
- Social Media graphics for just about any platform
- A Photo Editor for quick image touch-ups
- Videos, whether short reels or longer content
- Print Products, like business cards or flyers
- And even Websites, if you want to put together a very simple site.
If you already know exactly what you want to make, you can click on any of these and dive right in.
Or you can also start a new design with custom dimensions if you have something specific in mind; you can upload a file like a PDF or Word doc to edit directly in Canva, or click on More to see a full overview of all the different design types available.
So whether you’re searching for something you’ve already created, browsing templates for inspiration, experimenting with AI, or starting completely from scratch, this section of the homepage makes it really easy to jump straight into your next project.
You can also use the “Create” option at the top of the left-hand navigation as another quick way to start a new design, and when you click on it, it opens up the same design type overview that you’d see if you clicked on “More.”
It’s basically a complete list of all the different types of projects you can create in Canva, so whether you’re after a social media post, a presentation, a video, or something else entirely, this is an easy place to start fresh with exactly the design type you need.
Before we talk about this Recent Designs area, there is an area on the left here where you can see folders and designs that you’ve starred.
Or if you don’t see this starred area, you can click on the little hamburger icon to expand the navigation and show it.
Your own starred space will be empty unless you’ve already starred files here.
By clicking the star icon on any of your folders, designs or brand templates, you can add it to the “Your Starred” collection, which is available in the left side navigation.
This makes it convenient to find your preferred items without having to search through all your folders and projects. Essentially, you’re bookmarking or favouriting items here for quick access.
I’ll talk more about using the starred section later in this video, when we get to the content about Canva’s organizing features.
You’ll also see that you can access all of your recent designs in this area of the homepage, but this is not the best place to go looking for your designs, as you can see how you could spend a lot of time scrolling and searching for a design you created a while back.
Instead, you’ll want to explore the Projects section to find and organize your designs and images.
Projects
The Projects area is where you’ll be spending most of your time when you’re looking for your designs, as this is the area of your Canva account where you’ll be able to create an organizational structure.
You’ll be able to create custom folders in this section, and you should definitely be utilizing folders in order to properly organize all of your designs and images.
Note that you can only create folders and organize your designs and images in the Projects area… You can’t organize the designs on your home screen, so that’s why I always recommend that you jump right into the Projects section immediately if you’re looking for something you’ve already created.
Templates
When you click on Templates, it’s going to take you directly to Canva’s template library, which will look something like this.
You can look for templates in a variety of ways, including using the search field at the top of the page, browsing through the various choices that are presented to you here in the main feed area of the templates library, or by using the options presented to you in the templates navigation on the left-hand side.
Brand
Brand is a Canva Pro feature, and it enables Canva users to store and manage their branding assets in one centralized location within Canva.
This area is where you’ll go to upload your brand’s logos, colours, fonts, photos, graphics and icons, which can then be easily accessed when you’re working in the design editor.
Plus, it can also be accessed by any of your team members, which helps ensure that all designs adhere to the brand’s guidelines and maintain a consistent look and feel.
In addition to brand assets, the Brand area also houses your brand templates and various brand controls to ensure that any new designs created by team members adhere to your brand’s guidelines.
Though if you’re an individual business owner, you’ll primarily be using just the brand kit component for the most part.
Knowing how to use the brand kit in Canva is typically the focal point of a LOT of what I teach in Canva, and the reason I focus a lot of time on this component is because I believe it is so central to being able to create consistently branded graphics in Canva that look professional and unique to your business.
So you’ll want to ensure that you add your own brand kit components into this area of your Canva account.
Canva AI
Clicking on Canva AI will open up the same suite of AI-powered tools we saw earlier under the “What will you design today?” section on the homepage. It’s where you can explore features like DreamLab for generating images, Google Veo 3 for creating short video clips, and Canva Code for creating interactive tools. If you prefer jumping straight into Canva’s AI tools without navigating through other menus, this is a really handy shortcut.
Note that you will likely not see the “Create a video clip” option if you are on a free Canva plan, as it is a Pro-only feature.
Apps
The final section is Apps, and on the Apps landing page, you’ll see all of the various third-party apps that Canva integrates with. This basically just gives you access to a variety of content apps, image enhancement apps, and publishing apps.
For example, you might want to be able to integrate your Canva account with Dropbox to have easy access to images you’ve saved in your Dropbox account, for use in your designs in Canva.
You will also find some Recommended Apps already featured here for you.
For example, they have included Content Planner here.
When you click on the link, a calendar will appear, and you can use this tool to create posts that can be directly scheduled to many social media platforms. That said, I personally don’t use this scheduling tool myself as I feel that it still requires a bit more polishing on Canva’s part before I will be replacing my existing social media scheduling tools with the content planner.
You can also access the Product Photos app here, which enables you to bulk edit photos to prep your product imagery.
And then below that are mockups.
Canva’s Mockups app is a feature that allows you to create realistic mockups of your designs on various real-life objects, like computer screens, clothing or all kinds of other things.
Trash
Then, at the bottom, we have the Trash folder, which will contain any of the designs or images that you have recently deleted.
Other Homepage Features
Canva did a bit of a reorganization of its interface in Spring 2025, rolling it out alongside all the new features from Canva Create. So if you’ve used Canva in the past, you might notice that a lot of the options that you used to access through the top of your workspace have now been moved.
You’ll find them under your profile icon in the lower left corner of the screen. This is where you can manage things like:
- Any other accounts you’ve connected to your login,
- The different teams you might belong to,
- Your account settings,
- Plus help and resources for using Canva,
- And a handful of other options, including where you can log out of all your accounts.
And finally, if you ever need help or want to access Canva’s support features, you can simply click on the purple question mark icon in the lower right corner of your screen. That’ll give you quick access to their help articles, guided tips, and ways to reach out for more support if you need it.
That’s a complete tour of the Canva homepage. Once you know your way around here, it becomes much easier to jump into the projects and tools you need without wasting time searching. In a separate tutorial, I’ll show you how to navigate Canva’s design editor — the place where you’ll actually build and customize your designs. Look for a link to that in the description under this video.
