When I do Canva trainings for business owners, the audience breaks into two clear groups: those who already have a brand kit setup, and those who don’t yet have any brand assets.
I’ve increasingly been encountering folks in the latter group, particularly solopreneurs such as authors, musicians, makers, and so on.
So if you don’t yet have a visual brand kit setup and you’re wanting to use Canva to help you create your branding components, this week’s tutorial is for you.
Resources Mentioned
Transcript
I know that many of the amazing business owners in my audience already have a visual brand kit in place, including a logo, colour palette and brand fonts… but not all of you do.
In fact, some of you have probably started using Canva to begin with because you want to be able to use it to create your brand assets.
I firmly believe that it’s extremely worthwhile to invest in hiring a graphic designer or branding specialist to help create your core brand components, but realistically, not all businesses are ready to take that step right out of the gate because it can be quite costly.
So if that’s the position you currently find yourself in, let me confirm that yes, you CAN use Canva if you want to create a visual brand to market yourself.
However, it’s important to understand some of the limitations when you’re doing that, and when it comes to creating your logo in Canva, there are two particular types of limitations you should know about.
First is the ability to trademark your logo.
On one of Canva’s licensing pages, it says:
“In creating a unique logo in Canva from scratch, you can use basic lines and shapes from our Free library. You can also use all of our fonts.
However, you can’t use stock content (e.g. photos and graphics) as we only give you a non-exclusive license to this. Other Canva users are free to use the same content which means that using stock content for your logos isn’t suitable for use in a trademark. Elements in a logo need to be exclusive to you.”
In other words, if you want to have a logo that you can officially register as a trademark, you can’t use the icons or illustrations that you find in Canva’s elements library, but you *can* use fonts and basic shapes and lines.
Alternately, if you’re just starting out and you’re not worried about having exclusive rights and if you don’t have the time or budget to design a unique logo, using one of Canva’s logo templates can definitely be a simple way to create some basic branding to market your business.. but it’s important to understand that you won’t be able to trademark it.
The second limitation is going to be the file formats you can export your logo to and you may find yourself in a position where a designer or print company requests either an AI or EPS version of your logo, neither of which are formats that Canva provides.
So not having those could possibly restrict your ability to use the logo in high-quality printed marketing materials in the future.
With all of that in mind, if you do want to create a logo in Canva, you can hop on over to the Templates area of Canva and search for “logo templates,” and you will find quite a lot of them to use as a starting point to customize to fit your own business name and desired branding.
For example, something like this logo template would be a very simple one to customize the text and font if you just wanted to have a personal brand logo consisting of stylized initials plus your name.
Or if you wanted something with a more illustrative component, you’ll easily be able to find a starting point as well.
You’ll also find some great inspiration in Canva’s template library for your brand colour palette, and in particular, if you search for a brand board template, you’ll get lots of results to inspire your own brand colours and your own brand fonts as well.
Or, another quick way to create a colour palette in Canva is to find a photo that you feel captures your brand’s personality and essence, and once you add it to a design page in Canva, you can select the background of your design canvas and you’ll see the colour tool come up here.
I’ll click on that and then you’ll see that your photo’s colours automatically become available in this area, and those look quite pretty together.
And here’s another example of colours pulled from a photo in Canva.
Canva also has a couple of colour palette design tools available, including a palette generator and palette examples, and you’ll find those as well as various other design and stock photo resources at BrendaCadman.com/design-resources.
Once you have your brand kit elements ready to add into your Canva brand kit, you can easily add those through the Brand area of your Canva account, but note that you will need to have a Canva Pro or Teams account in order to access that Brand Kit feature.
