My Top Canva Tips for Small Business Owners

I was recently lucky enough to spend the morning with a bunch of amazing small business owners who all came to my workshop “Better Branding with Canva”.

As a Brand Designer, it is easy to create an amazing visual identity for a business and then send them off on their merry way to utilise their new brand to its full potential. What I find though, is that most of the small business owners I work with, struggle to either have the skills to pull something together on Canva or don’t have the design eye to make it look consistent and on-brand.

So, I developed a workshop for the Mundaring Chamber of Commerce, which focused on two parts.

Firstly, the all-important, What is Branding and Why is it Important?

The second part covered the basics of Canva and some magic tips and tricks to make creating on-brand, consistent social media tiles really quickly.

The key to making sure social media isn’t an onerous task, is to schedule and plan your posts and having a set of designs already uploaded in Canva for you to tweak and change slightly each time, saves a whole bunch of time when you are batching content.

Canva Tips & Tricks

So here are my top three Canva Tips that I shared with my workshop group, there were all sorts of “OOHhhs and Ahhhs” going on around the room. Hope it helps you have some light bulb moments also.

• If you find a photo you like that fits your brand. Filter by the photographer. You will hopefully find a whole lot more images that are on brand.
  
• Alignment: Select the objects you want to align, go to position and click on the “Tidy Up” function. This will automatically space out your objects so they are even.
  
• You can create hyperlinks in your designs. This is great if you are doing a presentation and want to link to an external web page. Just highlight the text in your design, click on the link icon, type in your url and hit enter. The highlighted text will now be a clickable link.
  
  And one more because I’m extra nice.
  
• Lock objects in your designs so they don’t move around or distort while you are doing other things. Highlight the object and click on the lock icon. Easy!

Canva is an amazing tool for small business owners and I highly recommend you jump on it, the free version is fine for any small business. If you would like to attend one of my Canva workshops, they are fun and affordable, please email me.