Canva’s Brand Kit comes with a set of default categories — Logos, Colours, Fonts, Brand Voice, Photos, Graphics, Icons, and Charts. Out of the box, that’s your structure. Canva now also lets you create your own custom sections and categories, so you can organize assets in a way that matches how you actually work rather than a structure you have to work around.
Understanding when custom categories are worth creating — and when they aren’t — will save you from building a Brand Kit that looks organized but slows you down.
At a Glance: Use custom categories in your Canva Brand Kit when they make reusable brand assets easier to find while you’re designing. They’re most useful for larger collections of photos, graphics, icons, textures, patterns, or other recurring brand visuals. Don’t use them for one-off campaign content, temporary project assets, or categories you’re creating just in case.
What the Default Categories Actually Do
The default categories aren’t just labels. Each one has built-in behaviour tied to the type of asset it holds. Colours surface in the colour picker while you’re designing. Fonts appear automatically in the text tool. Logos show up in the Brand panel. The Charts category uses a dedicated colour palette linked to your brand colours.
These categories actively support how Canva works. Custom categories don’t have that same built-in functionality — they’re flexible containers for reusable brand content that doesn’t fit neatly into the defaults but still belongs in the Brand Kit.
The Difference Between Custom Sections and Custom Categories
In plain terms: custom sections create broader groupings inside your Brand Kit, while custom categories let you organize assets within those groupings. In other words, custom categories are most helpful when one of your existing Brand Kit areas has become too broad to scan quickly. For most small business owners, custom categories are the more immediately useful of the two.
When Custom Categories Are Worth Creating
Custom categories tend to earn their place when you have enough assets within a section that scanning for what you need starts taking real effort. If your Photos area contains a large and varied mix of brand photography, background textures, and product mockups, splitting those into separate categories makes the difference between a Brand Kit that’s easy to move through and one that requires as much hunting as your uploads folder.
Some examples of custom categories that tend to be genuinely useful: brand photography, background textures, patterns, product mockups, icons grouped by theme, signature illustrations, and recurring visual sets like testimonial backgrounds, podcast cover elements, or branded illustration styles. What these have in common is that they’re assets you return to regularly and that benefit from being findable quickly.
The test before creating any category: will it make a reusable brand asset easier to find while you’re actually designing, not just easier to look at when you’re browsing your Brand Kit?
What Custom Categories Aren’t For
Custom categories — and Brand Kits generally — are designed for assets you return to repeatedly. A graphic created for one upcoming webinar, a temporary sale banner, a one-time launch image, or a single client project visual usually belongs in a folder or project elsewhere in Canva, not in your Brand Kit.
The exceptions are worth knowing. A recurring annual event with its own consistent visual identity, or a large project where you’re creating enough content that a dedicated structure genuinely speeds up the work, may be reasonable candidates for their own category structure. The question is always whether you’ll actually be coming back to these assets, or whether the project will be done and the assets will sit unused.
Where to Start
Start with the default structure and only add custom categories when the volume and variety of your reusable assets genuinely call for it. When that point comes, start small: if one area is getting crowded, split only that area first. If Photos are the problem, create photo categories. If Graphics are the problem, create graphic categories. Don’t restructure the entire Brand Kit just because one section has become harder to scan — solve the specific problem that’s slowing you down.
If you’re ready to build out your structure, these tutorials walk through the process:
- How to Create Custom Sections in the Canva Brand System
- How to Create Custom Categories in Your Canva Brand Kit
- How to Add Custom Cover Images to Your Canva Brand Kit
The goal is a Brand Kit you can move through quickly — not one that looks impressive when nobody’s using it.
