I think we can all agree that Canva is a lifesaver when it comes to easily creating graphics for your business. With the array of templates available and user-friendly interface, it makes graphic design a breeze, even for those with little design experience. I’m officially obsessed! 

I’ve been using canva ever since I started my business and being a Pinterest manager, it has become a necessary tool for creating eye catching pins for my clients. I have also designed social media graphics, presentations, mood boards, business cards, reports, party invitations, and my resume. With a template for virtually any design you can imagine, it’s easy to quickly customize them to make them your own.

If you are a regular user and have not yet upgraded to canva pro, I highly suggest that you do. I believe it’s well worth the money and will save a lot of time in the long run with the added functionalities. The main reason I did was because it allowed you to re-size images in one click. (Total gamechanger). Who has time to re-do a design from scratch if you need both a insta post and a pin graphic? For $9.95 a month you can get these benefits:

• Upload your own fonts
• Create multiple folders to keep your designs organized
• Access to tons more images and templates
• One-click design resize 
• Background remover
• More storage 
• Extra support
• A Brand kit where you can set your colors, fonts and logos. 

I confess I could literally happily spend a whole day messing about on Canva! But when you have a business to run and money to make, you don’t want to spend any more time than necessary getting that design “just so”. So I’m sharing 6 time-saving Canva hacks that you might not be aware of! 

My first piece of advice before we dive in is to make sure you have set up your brand kit with colors, fonts and logo so it will be easy to start designing branded images with a click of a button. Secondly, I would suggest making folders to keep yourself organized. You don’t want to be wasting time trawling through all your designs on the main dashboard to find the one you want to edit. I recommend setting up folders for social media, website graphics, presentations etc to keep similar designs together.

1. Canva Hack: Quickly insert commonly used elements

If you want certain elements you use frequently in a flash, instead of searching for them you can use these keyboard shortcuts. Simply click R (for rectangle), C (for circle), L (for Line), T (for text).

2. Canva Hack: Move multiple elements together

If you have a number of elements that you wish to move, instead of painstakingly moving them all separately, you can group them together and move the whole lot at once. For this you need to hold down SHIFT and click on each of the elements, then you can click “Group” on the top right and it will group the selected elements. These will then move as one element. You can also duplicate it too if needed.

3. Canva Hack: Freely move elements

Sometimes it’s difficult to move elements to exactly where you want them because of the automatic alignment feature that canva has. By holding down the SHIFT key you are then able to drag elements around with your mouse as this prevents canva from automatically aligning your image if you only need to move them a very slight amount.  

4. Canva Hack: Layering images / adding a logo to an image

Have you ever wanted to add a logo onto a design with an image but it keeps replacing the image instead, when you want to lay the logo on top? This can be very frustrating and you may waste a lot of time trying to get it right. However there is a fix!! When you have selected the image, go to the top right and click on the padlock symbol, this locks the image to enable you to add another image or logo on top.  

5. Canva Hack: Change all colors in a design at once

Say you are working on a template and want to change all colors on a template from blue to your brand color, there is a quick way! Select the color you want to change and make the change to your desired color. Then look right at the bottom panel of the color palette and you will see this box to check to select ‘change all’ to your color. It looks like this:

6. Canva Hack: Save commonly used elements

If there is an element you use all the time, click on the 3 dots in the top right of the element and select like, this will store it in a “likes” folder that you can quickly refer to for future designs. Or you can even create a folder for different elements.

Wanna save even more time? Check out my template shop for Canva templates and more. Simply add in your own branding to make them your own.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions about canva? I’d love to hear from you!

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