How to Setup Your Canva Brand Kit

Brand Kit functionality depends on your Canva plan. Canva Free may offer limited brand setup options, but fuller Brand Kit functionality — including features like custom fonts, expanded Brand Kit options, and more advanced brand asset management — is available on Canva’s paid plans. If you want to test the full Brand Kit workflow, Canva’s current Pro trial is a practical way to try it before deciding whether to continue.

Start with the reusable assets you use most often: logos, brand colours, fonts, Brand Voice, brand photos, graphics, icons, chart colours, and Brand Components. Focus on assets that support your brand identity and help you design more consistently — not everything connected to your business.

Yes, depending on your Canva plan and account type. Multiple Brand Kits are useful if you manage more than one business, create designs for clients, or have sub-brands, product lines, or divisions with separate visual identities. If all your assets belong to the same brand, one well-organized Brand Kit with custom categories is usually more practical.

Canva’s Brand Kit is where you store your reusable brand assets — logos, colours, fonts, Brand Voice, imagery, and other brand materials. The Brand System is the broader workspace where those assets can be organized into categories, sections, components, and other brand-related areas. Think of the Brand System as the broader workspace, and your Brand Kit as the collection of brand assets you organize inside it.

Categories are where your assets live. Sections are broader groupings that help organize those categories. For example, you might have categories for logos, colours, fonts, and Brand Voice inside a broader section for core brand assets.

No. Your Brand Kit should hold reusable brand imagery you want available while designing. Campaign-specific images, seasonal graphics, one-off uploads, and project-based visuals are usually better organized in Canva folders or projects.

Yes, on supported paid Canva plans. Before uploading a font, make sure you have the correct license to use it in Canva and for your intended purpose.

The Brand Kit stores reusable brand assets for use while designing. Canva folders and projects are better for organizing design files, uploads, campaign assets, seasonal materials, client work, and broader content collections. Brand Kit is about brand consistency while designing — folders are about organizing the rest of your Canva workspace.

Your Brand Kit setup should stay connected to your account, but access may become limited if you return to Canva Free. If you upgrade again later, your Brand Kit should still be there. Here’s more detail on what happens when your Canva Pro trial ends.

Brand consistency is one of the easiest ways to create a polished and professional look for your business, and Canva’s Brand Kit feature makes it simple to maintain that consistency across all of your marketing materials. If you’ve ever found yourself manually reapplying your brand colours or trying to remember which fonts you used last time, the Brand Kit is about to make your life a whole lot easier.

Why is a Brand Kit Important for Business Owners?

When you’re consistently using the same fonts, colours, and design elements across all your marketing materials — whether it’s Instagram posts, lead magnets, or your website—it helps build recognition and trust with your audience.

Without a Brand Kit, it’s easy to make small but noticeable mistakes, like using a slightly different shade of blue or defaulting to a generic font that doesn’t match your brand identity. These small inconsistencies can add up, making your brand look less polished.

By setting up a Brand Kit in Canva, you’re not only saving time but also ensuring that every design you create is visually aligned with your brand.

The Brand Kit is available on paid Canva plans. If you’re currently on the free plan, you can try Canva Pro for free at BrendaCadman.com/upgrade. If you decide not to continue after the trial, any Brand Kits you create will still be there if you upgrade again in the future.

What You’ll Need to Set Up Your Brand Kit

Before setting up your Brand Kit in Canva, it helps to have all your brand assets organized. The specific items you’ll need will depend on whether you already have a professionally designed brand or if you’re creating a brand from scratch.

If You Already Have a Brand Created by a Designer

If you’ve worked with a professional designer or branding specialist, you’re already ahead of the game. Having a professionally designed brand means that many of the decisions about colours, fonts, and logo variations have already been made for you, making it easier to get set up in Canva.

Before setting up your Brand Kit, ensure you have all your essential brand assets organized. Start with high-quality PNG or SVG versions of your logo, ensuring you have variations such as a full-colour version, plus a white or light version for dark backgrounds. Additionally, having different orientations, such as a stacked and horizontal version, can also be helpful.

Next, gather the exact hex codes for each of your brand colours to maintain consistency across all your designs. A hex code is a six-digit alphanumeric code that represents a specific colour. For example, pure black is represented as #000000, while white is #FFFFFF. Using hex codes ensures that you are applying the exact same colours across all your marketing materials, preventing unintentional variations that can make your branding look inconsistent.

Identify the fonts used in your branding. If your brand uses specific fonts that aren’t available in Canva’s library, you’ll need to upload the font files (typically in .OTF or .TTF format).

Finally, compile any brand-specific imagery, such as graphics, icons, or photography, to complete your cohesive brand identity within Canva. These could include your brand photos, headshots, custom patterns, branded textures, or unique visual elements that set your brand apart. If your brand uses specific iconography or stock images consistently, having them stored in your Brand Kit will streamline your design process and ensure visual uniformity.

If You Don’t Have a Brand Yet

If you don’t have a professionally designed brand yet, that’s okay! Canva provides everything you need to create a simple and effective starter brand that aligns with your business.

While investing in a professional brand designer is incredibly valuable when your business is ready, many new business owners begin with a DIY approach using Canva, so they can establish brand consistency early on.

A professionally designed brand is created based on strategic decisions that ensure long-term success. A designer will consider your brand personality, brand values, brand voice and ideal audience, carefully selecting colours, fonts, and imagery that align with your messaging and positioning in the market.

However, if you’re in the early stages of your business and not yet ready to invest in professional branding, you can still build a cohesive and visually appealing presence using Canva. In my *How to Create Your Brand in Canva* video, I walk you through selecting a colour palette, choosing fonts that match your brand style, and designing a basic logo to get started.

This isn’t a replacement for a professionally developed brand, but it’s an excellent option for those who need a functional, visually consistent brand identity while growing their business.

And you can find a link to that video training in the description below this video.

The Canva Brand System

Navigating the Brand System

When you click Brand in Canva’s left-hand navigation, what you see first depends on where you are in the setup process. If you already have brand templates, you’ll land on those. If you’re just getting started, you’ll likely land on the asset dashboard directly.

Either way, clicking All Assets in the sidebar will take you to the visual dashboard — that’s where you’ll find tiles for each category: Templates, Logos, Colours, Fonts, Brand Voice, Photos, Graphics, Icons, and Charts. Each tile represents a category inside your Brand Kit, and clicking into one lets you view, manage, and update the assets stored there. You can use the sidebar to move between categories at any time.

Using Multiple Brand Kits

Near the top of the Brand section you’ll see a dropdown showing your current Brand Kit. That dropdown is where you’ll go both to switch between Brand Kits and to create a new one. You can also search for a specific Brand Kit by name from there, or — depending on your Canva plan — access Brand Controls.

Multiple Brand Kits are useful in a few different situations. If you run more than one business, separate Brand Kits keep each one’s assets clearly distinct. If you work with clients — as a virtual assistant, social media manager, or designer — individual Brand Kits for each client keep things organized and easy to access. And if your business has sub-brands, product lines, or divisions that each need their own visual identity, separate Brand Kits let you maintain consistency within each one without mixing assets together.

Custom Categories and Sections

One of the biggest advantages of Canva’s updated Brand System is that you’re no longer limited to a fixed structure. You can create custom asset categories to organize your brand assets into named groups, and custom sections to act as broader groupings that contain those categories. This gives you more control over how your Brand Kit is laid out and how it supports your day-to-day design work.

To create a custom category, click the plus icon next to All Assets in the sidebar and select Asset Category from the menu that appears. Canva creates a new untitled category and opens it immediately — give it a name specific enough that you’ll know at a glance what belongs there, then add your assets.

Sections work best when they represent broad types of assets rather than specific use cases or platforms. For example, you might create a section for core brand assets like logos, colours, fonts, and brand voice, and another for imagery that represents your brand’s look and feel, including photography and graphic elements that support your overall visual style. Those are just examples. The right structure depends on how you actually work.

To create a section, make sure you’re in the right Brand Kit, then click the plus icon next to All Assets and select Section. Give it a name, and from there you can click and drag your existing categories into it. You can also reorder sections and the categories within them by dragging them into the position you want.

If you have custom sections set up, you can also add a category directly to a section by hovering over the section name in the sidebar, clicking the three-dot menu, and selecting Add Asset Category.

In most cases, fewer clearly named categories and sections are easier to work with than a long list of very specific ones. And if Canva’s default structure already works well for you, there’s no obligation to change it. The flexibility is just there when you need it — not as something you have to use.

Custom Cover Images

Each category in the Brand System can also have its own custom cover image. When you hover over a category tile, click the three-dot menu and choose Update Cover Image to assign a visual — a sample image, pattern, or graphic — that represents what’s stored inside that category.

I’ll link below to another tutorial that walks you through the details of how to create and update your brand kit category cover images.

How to Add Your Brand Kit Components in Canva

Once you’re familiar with how the Brand System is organized, the next step is adding your actual brand assets. This is where you’ll upload and define the core components of your brand — logos, colours, fonts, brand voice, and any supporting imagery or graphics you want available while designing.

You may notice a “Get a Head Start” option at the top of your new Brand Kit. This uses AI to pull in brand assets automatically and you’re welcome to explore it, but at this stage I’d recommend setting everything up manually. The feature doesn’t always work as expected, and going through the process yourself means you know exactly what’s in your Brand Kit and where everything lives. That’s worth more than saving a few clicks at the start.

Adding Your Logos to Your Canva Brand Kit

When you create a Brand Kit for the first time, you’ll see an option to add your logos directly inside the Logos category.

You can click on Add to Category, and then Upload Brand Assets to upload your logo files, or simply drag and drop them into the Logos category.

So let me show you where you’re going to find those logos when you are creating a design in Canva’s design editor.

You’re going to be able to find those logos inside of the Brand area, which is available on your left hand navigation.

And inside that brand area, you’ll have access to all of your logos at your fingertips.

Adding Your Colours to Your Canva Brand Kit

Before we move on to adding your colours, there’s something worth flagging. When you upload your logos, Canva will automatically generate a suggested colour palette from each one, and you’ll see a notification at the top of the screen letting you know. When you go to the Colours section, you’ll find a separate palette has been created for each logo file you uploaded.

This sounds helpful, but in practice it can create more problems than it solves. If you’ve uploaded four logo variations, you’ll now have four separate palettes sitting in your Colours section, and the colours Canva extracts aren’t always your exact brand hex codes. They’re close, but close isn’t consistent.

My recommendation is to delete all of those auto-generated palettes before you do anything else in the Colours section. Hover over each one and remove it, then start fresh with a single palette built from your exact hex codes. That way you know precisely what’s in your Brand Kit and you’re working from one source of truth rather than four approximate ones.

Once you’ve removed those auto-generated palettes, you’ll notice Canva has already created a blank colour palette below them, so you don’t need to create a new one. Click the pencil icon next to the palette title to give it a name, then start adding your colours using your exact hex codes, which you should have already compiled in advance of creating your brand kit.

If you need to remove any of the colours, hover over the colour you want to delete and then just click on the X button.

If you want to make a copy of a specific palette, you can click on the 3 dots, and choose make a copy, and you’ll also see that you can copy it to another brand kit.

Note that at this time, you cannot re-order your colours later, so try to add them in the order that you want to have them to appear in the palette.

Then, once you have your palette set up, when you open up a design, you’ll see that you can easily access your brand’s colours directly from the colour selection tool. And if you have multiple colour palettes, they’ll all show up here as well.

If you’re not on Pro yet, you can start a thirty-day free trial at brendacadman.com/upgrade — everything you set up during the trial stays if you decide to continue.

Adding Your Fonts to Your Canva Brand Kit

When you’re setting up your fonts in a new Brand Kit, you’re going to be able to select the font you want for each style, and also change the size and formatting of it, if that’s part of your brand’s typography.

Then when you’re working on a design in Canva, you’ll be able to access your brand kit fonts through the font selection tool.

If the font you use for your brand isn’t already included in Canva’s list, you also have the ability to upload your own fonts.

You can do this by clicking on the Plus sign and selecting Upload a font.

So I’ll upload a custom font, and you’ll notice that when you upload a new font, Canva is going to ask you to confirm that you have the rights to use it.

That means if you’re using a font you downloaded without paying for it. and it’s something that should have been purchased or is marked as personal use only, you need to make sure you have the correct licensing before uploading it to Canva.

Once it’s uploaded, it’ll be listed under your Uploaded fonts section when you’re working on a design.

Uploading custom fonts requires Canva Pro. If you’re not on Pro yet, you can start a thirty-day free trial at brendacadman.com/upgrade.

Adding Your Brand Voice to Your Canva Brand Kit

Your Brand Voice is how your business “sounds” in written and spoken communication. It’s what makes your content feel like *you* — whether someone is reading an email from you, watching one of your videos, or listening to you on a podcast.

When you document your Brand Voice in your Canva brand kit, Magic Write will use your tone and style preferences to generate text that aligns with your established voice.

In order to add your Brand Voice to Canva, go to the Brand section and locate the Brand Voice area. Click “Add Your Brand Voice” to start defining how your brand communicates.

In addition to your brand voice description, you can also add Guidelines by clicking the plus icon in the top right corner of the Brand Voice section. This gives you a Summary field where you can describe what your brand voice achieves and when to use it, along with a Do and Don’t field — use the Do field for specific guidance on tone and vocabulary, and the Don’t field for common mistakes or language to avoid.

Both sections are worth filling in. The brand voice description gives Canva’s Magic Write feature a quick-reference summary of how you communicate, and the Guidelines give it the detail and specifics, so together they give Magic Write the most complete picture of your brand voice to work from.

Adding Your Brand Imagery to Your Canva Brand Kit

Your brand’s imagery plays an important role in creating a consistent and recognizable visual identity. The Brand Kit gives you a place to store key visuals so they’re easy to access whenever you’re designing.

Depending on how your Brand Kit is structured, imagery might live across default categories like Photos, Graphics, or Icons, or inside custom categories you’ve created within your own sections.

Your Brand Kit works best when it contains imagery that is central to your brand and reused frequently. This might include:

• Brand photos — such as headshots, product images, or signature brand photography
• Graphic elements — patterns, textures, illustrations, or background graphics that define your visual style
• Brand icons — custom icons or icon sets that you use consistently across designs

These are the kinds of assets that are helpful to have immediately available inside the editor, without needing to search or re-upload files.

How to Upload Brand Imagery to Your Canva Brand Kit

To upload brand imagery, go to your brand kit and open the category where you want the assets to live. From there, click the plus sign and choose Upload Files to select your images, or drag and drop them directly into the category. Once uploaded, your images will be available through the brand area whenever you’re working on a design.

The upload and management process works the same way across all imagery categories, whether they’re the default image categories or custom categories you’ve added.

When deciding what belongs in your brand kit, be sure to focus on imagery that you return to repeatedly, that’s central to your brand’s visual identity, and that you’d want immediately available while designing. Imagery that’s campaign-specific, seasonal, or rarely reused usually doesn’t need to live here — those assets are better managed through folders and projects elsewhere in Canva.

Keeping your Brand Kit focused makes it easier to navigate and ensures that what you see there genuinely supports how you design day to day.

Adding Components to Your Canva Brand Kit

You’ll notice a Components category is added to your Brand Kit by default. Brand Components are reusable graphic elements that you can update from a single source and push those changes out across your designs.

For example, I have a combination of elements I use consistently on my title slides, made up of a laptop mockup, a pattern background, a placeholder icon, and my Canva Verified Expert badge. Rather than rebuilding that combination every time or updating each piece individually across multiple designs, I can save the whole group as a component and manage it from one place.

If you create Brand Components, you’ll have the option to save them to your Components category, but you’re not limited to storing them here. You can save a component to any asset category in your Brand Kit, and if you’d prefer not to have a Components category at all, instead relying on your other categories, you can delete Components altogether.

I have a full tutorial on how to create and manage Brand Components that I’ll link to below if you want to explore that further.

Updating Chart Colours in Your Canva Brand Kit

In your Brand Kit, you’ll see a section labeled Charts which is where you can set a dedicated colour palette for any charts you create in Canva. It’s kept separate from your regular brand colours because sometimes charts will need more distinct shades to keep categories easy to tell apart and your data easy to read.

Unlike your main brand palette, which may only include a handful of core colours, charts can often call for more variety. For example, a pie chart or stacked bar chart can quickly become confusing if the same few brand colours are repeated across multiple categories. By setting up a chart palette, you’re ensuring that every chart you create is not only on-brand but also clear and legible.

A dedicated chart palette also helps with accessibility, since some brand colours may look great in logos or marketing graphics but be too dark or too light when applied to thin lines or small chart segments.

To add or update your chart colours, you’ll want to open your Brand Kit and scroll down to the Charts section. Then click to add the colours you want Canva to use for your charts in the same way that you did to add your main brand colours. Your chart colours might include your main brand colours, along with complementary shades that give you enough variety for multi-category charts.

Once your chart colours are set, Canva will automatically apply them to any new charts you create, and if you ever need to make changes, you can return to the Charts section of your Brand Kit at any time to adjust your palette.

If you don’t set up a chart palette, Canva will default to its own color selections, which you will then need to manually change, so taking a few minutes to define your chart colours ensures your reports, presentations, and infographics look consistent with your visual identity while keeping your data easy to understand, and saving you design time.

Adding Assets to Custom Categories

The same process you’ve seen for the default categories applies to any custom categories you create. Whether you’re adding photos, graphics, or any other type of asset, open the category, upload your files, and manage them from there. Once you’ve done it in one place, it works the same way everywhere.

Your Brand Kit Is a Living System

At this point you should have a clear picture of how the Canva Brand System is structured and how to add your brand assets in a way that supports how you actually design. The real value isn’t just having everything stored in one place — it’s the reduction in friction. When your colours, fonts, logos, and visuals are organized in a way that feels intuitive, designing becomes faster and more consistent with less second-guessing along the way.

As your business grows or your brand evolves, it’s completely normal to revisit your Brand Kit and adjust sections or categories so the structure continues to reflect how you’re working today.

The system is meant to support you — not stay fixed once it’s been set up.