If you use Canva often for your designs, you might have discovered some features that are absolutely amazing and easy to use. What if I told you you still haven’t discovered ALL the rich features of this app? You may know some of them already but there are a lot of features you probably overlooked or never thought twice of.
This post covers some of those amazing features and how you can use them to make your life easier when designing. Most of them are free but I also included the ones that require a Canva Pro account.
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1. Styles
Have you ever clicked on the “More” folder at the bottom of the Canva navbar? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. I only recently discovered the gems that were hidden in that folder too! One of them is the Styles feature.
It consists of a list of curated fonts and colors you can use to easily create your designs. There are different color palettes you can automatically add to texts and backgrounds in your design. It has recommended grouped fonts that work well together and you can easily add them too.
It also provides you with options of combined color palettes and fonts so you can just use them out of the box!
2. Apps Integration
This feature is also accessible via the “More” folder and one I also recently discovered. It lists several commonly used apps and allows you to integrate them into your Canva account.
You can connect your Instagram account and be able to add pictures directly from your feed. You can also connect other apps like Facebook, YouTube, Google drive to use their content. It even grants access to adding bitmoji avatars by integrating Bitmoji or GIFs by using Giphy.
There are a lot of options and this definitely makes life easier when it comes to importing content you’d require for your designs.
3. Copy Style
Ever noticed this “paint brush” icon on your tool menu? This tool is called “copy style” and it allows you to copy the styles and settings from texts and applies it to any other text. This makes formatting very easy and I wished I’d discovered it while I was designing my eBook on building self-hosted websites.
I also tried to use it to copy styles on images (filter, crop,etc) but it seems to work only for texts. Regardless, it’s still a very useful tool and should be used more often.
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4. Lock
The Tools menu also has a Lock feature which you can access via a “lock” icon. When used on any part of your design, it “locks” that section in place and makes it immovable. This can be very useful especially when you’re designing with your mobile phone and different sections keep overlapping and getting distorted. You can use this feature to fix them onto specific positions.
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5. Position
Like the name implies, the Position tool can be used to modify the position of different sections in your design. I usually use it to specify how overlapping sections should be positioned; which one is supposed to be forward and which goes to the back. However, it can also be used to automatically align sections of your design relative to the page.
6. Group
You can use this feature to group different parts of your design together. This helps a lot when you need elements to be associated with each other. Grouping elements makes it easier to move them around as a whole, without messing up their spacing, alignment or any other configuration you might have added to them.
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7. Link
The link feature can be used to include external links and URLs in your designs. This makes the targeted element clickable and when clicked, it redirects to the URL just as normal links work. It can be used on texts, images, added icons, elements and even the design as a whole. I use this feature to add links to resources in all my eBooks.
8. Music
I don’t use this feature but you might find it quite useful if you love to add background music to your designs. A typical example is if you are creating a YouTube intro for your channel or an animated video for your Instagram feed. You can also add videos with customised options.
Other Apps to Try: SPLICE: The Video Editing App You Must Try
9. Multiple Fonts
You most likely already know you can use multiple fonts for different texts in your designs. However, you can also use multiple fonts with different sizes and styles for the same text! All you have to do is ensure the words are separated by using your “Enter” key (on laptop) or your “Return” key/icon for phones.
There are a lot of creative ways you can customise your designs in Canva, I discussed some of them in this previous post. The post highlights and explains features like Text and Image Effects, Stickers and animations you can use to make your designs more fun.
10. Saving your designs to other sources
Until recently, I only used the different “Download” options when exporting my designs. However, there are several other options to explore like:
– saving directly to your Google Drive/Dropbox,
– sharing on Twitter, Pinterest or
– sending it to emails.
You can also:
– share a direct link to your Canva workspace to friends,
– upload to Mailchimp or
– publish it as a responsive website all on its own!
11. The “Elements” feature
Did you know the “Elements” feature had a very wide variety of options to explore? There are like 28 different types of elements you can add to your designs. From unconventional image grids in “Frames” to animations in “Stickers”, these could make your designs more fun to interact with.
Canva Pro Features
So far, all of the above features are free to use. However, the rest of these features are only available in Canva Pro. I had a 30-day free trial and was able to try them out.
You can get your free trial too if you sign up for a new Canva account. Sign up here.
12. Brand Kit
This feature allows you to create a collection of color palettes, fonts and logos for your brand. The kit is made available on all designs so that you can use it to maintain a specific look and feel for your brand. You also get to upload custom fonts to your kit.
13. Create Folders
You can create folders to group your designs together. The free version allows you to create a maximum of two folders, you’d have to upgrade to Canva pro to be able to create more folders. I created a folder for my blogpost banner templates and another one for my media kit and eBooks.
14. Resize
The Resize feature allows you to resize a design easily into different sizes for different social platforms.
15. Transparent backgrounds and File compression
You can export your designs without backgrounds by using the Download option and selecting the transparent background option. You can also use the Background remover feature I mentioned in my last post to get rid of all backgrounds.
There’s also a “Compress File” option available to minimize the size of your designs before exporting and downloading.
With Canva, the possibilities are endless! You can fully explore and bring your imaginations to life with these features. I hope you were able to come across one or two features you didn’t know about.
Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment if you’ve come across some of these features and which ones are new to you🖤
With Love,
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