Most Canva users either don’t know the starring feature exists, or they’ve starred so many things it’s stopped being useful. Neither version is doing much for your workflow.
Starring in Canva pins designs and folders directly to your left-hand sidebar so you can get to them in one click from anywhere in your account. No searching, no navigating through folders, no scrolling through Recents hoping the right file shows up. The things you reach for most are just there.
The key is being selective about what you star and keeping the list current as your work changes.
What Starring Actually Does (and Doesn’t Do)
Starring doesn’t move your files. Nothing gets reorganized, copied, or stored somewhere new. Your designs and folders stay exactly where they are. What changes is that a link to them appears in your sidebar under “Your starred,” giving you direct access without having to navigate there the long way.
If you haven’t starred anything yet, you won’t see a starred section in your sidebar at all. Canva shows a prompt when you expand the sidebar explaining how to get started — but if you dismiss it, it doesn’t come back, and the section itself only appears once something has been starred.
How to Star a Design or Folder
Hover over any design or folder from your Canva home screen or from within Projects, and a star icon appears in the top corner of the thumbnail. Click it and the item is added to your starred list immediately.
If you’re in a team account and want to star something for everyone on the team rather than just yourself, go to the three-dot menu on the design or folder instead and choose “Star for team.”
To unstar something, hover over it again and click the star icon a second time. From your sidebar, hover over the item in your starred list, click the three-dot menu that appears, and choose “Unstar” from there.
Keeping Your Starred List Manageable
The starred area works best when it stays relatively short — or, if you do need to star quite a few items, when it’s organized with sections so it doesn’t become its own navigation problem.
Think of it as a rotating shortlist rather than a permanent archive. The things worth starring are the ones you open regularly regardless of what you’re working on — your most-used templates, a client folder you’re actively in every week, your course materials if you update them constantly. Folders tend to be better candidates than individual designs, because a starred folder gives you one-click access to everything inside it.
What doesn’t belong here: designs from a campaign that wrapped months ago, folders you might need someday, anything you starred quickly and haven’t touched since. When a project wraps up, unstar it. The list should reflect where you’re working right now.
I keep my own starred list lean partly because I have an effective folder structure underneath it — I know I can find everything else easily, so I don’t need to star things as a backup navigation strategy. My blog folder and my Clean Up My Canva course folder are permanently starred because I’m in both of them constantly. When I have an active time-sensitive project — a promotion, a launch, a seasonal campaign — I’ll star that folder for the duration and unstar it when it’s done.
Using Sections to Organize Your Starred Items
If you need to star more than a handful of items, custom sections keep the list from becoming its own navigation problem.
To create a section, click the plus icon next to “Your starred” in the sidebar. Canva adds an untitled section at the top of your starred list and opens it for renaming immediately. Give it a name that makes it obvious what’s grouped there — you can also add an emoji if that helps you scan the sidebar faster. From there, drag your starred items into the relevant section to organize them, and reorder both sections and items within them by dragging.
Sections work best when they represent different areas of your work — active client projects in one section, your own recurring content in another, for example. If everything you star belongs to roughly the same category, a section probably isn’t adding much.
Starring Works Better When Your Folder Structure Is Already Solid
The shortcut only pays off if it leads somewhere useful. If you star a folder and open it to find a jumble of unnamed designs, duplicates, and files from two years ago mixed in with current work, you haven’t actually saved yourself any time.
Starring is one layer of a well-organized Canva account — a fast-access surface built on top of a clear underlying structure. The better your folders are organized underneath, the more useful the starring feature becomes. A well-named folder that’s easy to navigate is worth starring. A folder you’d have to dig through anyway isn’t.
If your folder structure needs work before starring will make much difference, the free Canva Organization Roadmap is a good place to start.
