If you’ve ever updated a graphic element in your brand — a decorative asset, a custom icon, something you use consistently across your content — you know what it means to find that same element sitting in dozens of designs, all needing to be updated manually. Brand Components are Canva’s answer to that problem.
The idea is straightforward: you turn an element into a reusable block, save it to your Brand Kit, and when you need to update it, you publish the change from a single source rather than hunting it down design by design. Document Components work the same way but stay scoped to a single design, which is useful when you have a repeated element across multiple pages of a presentation or document.
Both are Canva Pro features. If you’re not on Pro yet, you can start a free trial here — it works with your existing account and nothing moves. The tutorial below walks through how to create, edit, and manage both component types.
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If you create content consistently in Canva, you’ve probably built up graphic elements that are part of how your brand looks — decorative assets, custom icons, styled visuals you use across your content. And at some point you want to update one of them. Change the colours, refine it, swap it out for something better.
Brand Components, one of the features that launched with Canva Create 2026, are designed to address exactly that. You turn an element into a reusable block, and when you update the source, you can push that change out to your designs rather than replacing it manually in each one. The update process has a few steps to it, but it makes more sense once you see it in action.
Before we get into it: Brand and Document Components are both Canva Pro features. If you’re on the free plan and want to follow along, you can start a thirty-day free trial here.
The Two Types of Components
Components in Canva come in two versions. They work similarly, but the scope of each one is different, and that distinction matters for how you’d use them.
A Document Component is a reusable block that lives within a single design. Say you have the same decorative graphic appearing on multiple pages of a presentation. If you make that a Document Component and later want to change its colour, you can update the source and then choose to apply that change to all instances within that design at once, rather than selecting and updating each one individually.
A Brand Component works the same way, but instead of being contained to one design, it’s saved to your Brand Kit, which means it’s available across all of your designs. That’s the more powerful version, and it’s the one we’ll focus on primarily. But because the creation process for both starts in the same place, it’s worth understanding both.
Creating a Component
Start with the element you want to turn into a component on your page — something you’ve placed, customized, or styled the way you want it. Select it, then either right-click or go to the three-dot menu in the floating toolbar. You’ll see “Create component” in the menu.
A dialog box appears asking you to name the component. There’s also a checkbox for “Save to Brand Kit” that’s unchecked by default. This is where the two types split. If you leave that box unchecked and click Create, you get a Document Component, scoped to this design only.
To make it a Brand Component, check that box. The dialog expands to show two more fields — which Brand Kit to save it to, and which asset category it belongs in. If you’ve set up custom asset categories in your Brand Kit, they’ll appear here too — I’ll link my tutorial on how to do that in the description if that’s something you want to explore. Give it a clear name, make your selections, and click Create.
Once it’s created, you’ll notice something changes when you select that element on the page. There’s now a label above it showing the component name, and a Source link next to it. That Source link is your direct path back to edit the component — more on that shortly.
Using Your Component in Another Design
Once a Brand Component is saved to your Brand Kit, you can pull it into any design from the Brand panel in the left sidebar. Find your Brand Kit, go to the asset category you saved it under, and click to add it to your page. From there it behaves like any other element — you can resize it, reposition it, work with it as needed. The connection back to a source is what makes updating it across designs possible.
How Editing and Publishing Updates Works
To update a component, you have two ways to get to the source. From within a design where the component is being used, click on it and select the Source link in the label above the element — that takes you directly into the component’s editing file. Or go to your Brand Kit, find the component, click the three-dot menu on it, and choose Edit Component.
Either way, the component opens in its own dedicated editing space. It looks a little different from a regular design — there’s a dot-grid background similar to what you’d see in a whiteboard. And in the top right corner, instead of the usual Share button, there’s a “Publish updates” button.
Make whatever changes you want here. When you’re done, click Publish updates. A panel opens showing you exactly where this is publishing including the Brand Kit name and the asset category, and there’s a note worth paying attention to: once published, your team will need to apply updates for each design individually. Existing designs won’t change unless updated.
I anticipate that’s an intentional design choice on Canva’s part, so you have control over where and when the update gets applied, rather than having it automatically change designs you might not have intended to touch. It does add a step, and ideally at some point there’d be an option to push automatically to all instances at once, but that’s not available yet. Click Publish updates to confirm.
Now go back to a design where that component is being used and select it. The label has changed — there’s now an Update indicator alongside the component name. If there’s only one instance of that component in the design, clicking the Update indicator will apply the change automatically. If there are multiple instances, you’ll get two options: Update instance, which applies the change to just that one, or Update all instances — and Canva shows you how many exist in that design. Once applied, the label goes back to showing just the component name and Source link.
Detaching and Deleting a Component
If you right-click a component in a design (or click the three-dot menu and go to Component) you’ll see a Detach option. Detaching removes the component connection entirely, turning it back into a regular element on that page. It’s no longer a Document Component or a Brand Component, just an element.
To remove a Brand Component from your Brand Kit entirely, go to your homepage, open the Brand section, find the component, click the three-dot menu on it, and choose Delete. Canva warns you that this is permanent. If there are instances of that component still living in designs and you haven’t detached them first, those instances will become Document Components rather than disappearing — so nothing gets broken, it just loses its Brand Kit connection.
When Your Brand Evolves, This Is How You Keep Up
For small business owners who are regularly creating content — social graphics, presentations, client-facing documents — Brand Components are a meaningful step forward. When something in your visual brand evolves, you’re not replacing every instance of a component manually. You update the source, publish it, and then open each design to apply the change throughout. It’s not fully automatic, but it’s far less work than what came before.
If you’re not on Canva Pro yet and this is the kind of workflow that would make a difference for you, the link for a thirty-day free trial is here.
