How to Set Up your Brand Kit in Canva

1. Introduction: All know creating a strong visual brand is essential, right? But what's even more crucial is keeping that brand consistent across everything we produce. Brand consistency is how people recognize and remember your brand or your business. In this video, we're diving deep into the Canva brandkit. I'll show you what they are, how to set them up, and how to turn them into your secret weapon for always designing on brand. Let's go. 2. What are Canva Brand Kits?: Okay, so I'm going to answer the second question first because often, I start tutorial and then people realize, Oh, this picture is for pro only. So I prefer to be straightforward this time and let you know that there are two different versions of the Canva Brankit. There is the full extended version that you can do everything basically that Bankits have been thought for. That is for Canva Pro and Canva for teams users. So Canva paid user E. Then you have Brand kit for free users. So I'm here in my other Canva account, my Canva free account. If I go to my brands tab right here, you will see the simplified version of Brankt. So here it is. I can only have one Bankit as a Canva free user, and that brankt is kind of locked. It's limited in its functionality. You see? I cannot add logos. For example, if I want to add one, I will be prompted to upgrade to Canva P. The only thing you can do really with a free brankt is to set three brand colors. You see, I can choose three different here, but if you wish to add a fourth color, again, you will be prompted to upgrade to CanavaP. So not super convenient. I mean, having three customized color is nice, but, I mean, no fonts, no images, no logos. That's a bit harsh. So again, if you are a free user and you're watching this tutorial, there is some value for you. First, because you will get a better understanding of everything you would get if you decide to upgrade. But also, I have a hack at the end of the video that will show you how to create pretty much a complete brankit that you will be able to use in Canva without needing to upgrade. So stick around for that. Alright, so now I can answer the second part of the question, which is actually what are the brand kits. 3. Fundamental Brand Assets: Branchits are a central hub where Canva will allow you to collect together all of your brand's assets. Well, think of it this way. Your Canva Bankit holds everything your brand needs to look good, to look fresh, to basically be that brand. So that is my best definition of the Bankit, a central hub where all your design asset can live all in the same place. But enough talking about the brankt, let me show you what it looks like right here in my Canva for Teams account. So this is my team run the account. We are team of ten people using this account. But this would look similar for a CanavaP account, even if you are the only user of the Pro account with any paid Cannava account. So in order to find the brand kit, you need to head over your brand icon right here from the homepage and make sure you are on the first tab that says brand Kits. It says kits in plural because Canva allows you to add multiple brand kits in your paid account. Here I have eight different brankits. My strategy when it comes to creating more brankits is that every design project or every project that I start, I tend to create a new brandkit. So you will see, for example, Bankits for some of my courses, the DL E course, the Chat GPT course, the Canva for social media course. Every time I start in course, I would start a branket. So inside such branket you will find the brand colors for, for example, the slides, you will find the thumbnail of the course. You will find the font and font hierarchy, some photos that my team can use when they edit the video, some elements, some assets, icons, et cetera, et cetera. So I like to yeah, create new brankits for every single course. Then we have our team's Bankit, the more serious stuff where our brand, Team Rondi actually lives. So the main one being this one, Team Rundi slide so from here, let me quickly show you what you can actually include in a Canva Branket. The first thing is logos. In order to add your logo, simply click on the Add New button right here and you can upload your new logos. What I like about this is that Canva also allows you to create guidelines for your team. So these guidelines will help your team make the right decision. For example, you have two versions of your logo. Let's say you have this one right here, which is kind of like a squared or rounded logo, this one, which is more like a bar so you could leave some guidelines on when to use the square logo and when to use the bar logo, for example. So these guidelines could be included here. You have 500 characters to do, so if you save them, people will see these guidelines directly into the object panel when they are on the design area in the editor of Canva. Show that to you in a minute. So the first thing you can add to your brand kit is all of your brand's logos. Okay? When you scroll down, you will see a different section, section about your colors. So colors are very important for branding, obviously. So by default, you will have only one row or one color palette here, but you can add more color palettes. I don't know exactly how many, but I've never run out of color palette. Each palette can have a multitude, like an infinite choice of colors. Typically, a color palette would be comprised of three to five, sometimes six colors. I like to decline my color palettes as my primary colors, neutrals, then you can create all of your secondary tertiary, et cetera, et cetera. Here, we decided to go for shades, so shades of blue, shades of pink, shades of red, orange, green, et cetera. So we take our main colors and we decline them, so we have more and more and more options when we use color. Up to you. The thing you need to remember is that you can create a multitude of palettes that all have infinite number of colors. All right. Then if you scroll down, you have your fonts. Again, you can add different fonts for your titles, subtitles, heading, subheading, section header. And you can delete some of these sections if you don't think you will be using them. So in order to set them up, simply select or click on the title, the title hierarchy, and change your font. You can decide to go bold, italic. You can decide on the size and obviously the font name as not going to mess with this because this is our team's brandkit. If you continue to scroll down, you'll find a brand voice section. And I'm going to show you how that works in a second, when I'm using a real case when I'm creating a new brandkit based on a specific brand. So a few minutes of patience for that. Next, you have your photos, very similar to your logo. You can add photos here. So here I just decided to add all of my courses thumb you have your graphics. So here we have decided to add some background, some elements that we use for our brands or the little patterns, elements, lines, and stuff. And then you have a last section, which is your icons. When you click on the add New button, Canva now lets you add a link folder. So you can actually link all of these assets or you can link your brandkit to a specific folder you have in Canva that may contain more of these elements. And then your team that can access that brandkit will have access to that folder in my case, right here, in all of my Canva projects, I have a folder called elements that contains all sorts of elements. So I could link that to my brankit. I just need to change the sharing access of that folder in order to do so. 4. How to set up your Brand Kit: Alright. Enough talking. Let's get into a real life project. And let me show you how I would create a brandkit from scratch. Okay? So I'm going to go back to my brand kit page right here, and all I'm going to do is to simply click on the add new button right here. My brandkit is going to be a Skillshare brankit. Recently became a top teacher on Skillshare. So I am going to be creating more branded content about Skillshare. And for that, I would love to have a Skillshare branket in my collection of branket. So the first thing, I'm going to give this brankt a name, okay? Skillshare, let's go. Before I start creating my brand kit, I want to show you the brand assets that Skillshare actually shares with its instructors or influencers that create content about the platform. So what you see here is basically Skillshare brand assets with a section with their logos, different version of the logo, some print version, some digital version, different formats of the logos. Then I have the color palette. Okay, so primary, secondary, even the tertiary color palette. Then I have some info on the fonts, okay? Primary font some are Google fonts, some are Adobe fonts, some are GT fonts. So let's see if I can download all of that. I have some templates and yeah, save zone indication and guidelines. Right here, we have some video and cards, so little animated swiggles and lines and stuff like that. And then we have some videos that are actually screen recording. They show you how to properly record your screen when you're showing Skillshare, the platform, the so this is what we have. So what I'm going to do is to grab that information, put that in my new Skillshare brandkit in Canva so that I can use the Skillshare brand whenever I need to and when I design in Canva. 5. What else can you add to your Brand Kit: So, let's go. First thing is that I'm going to decide which logos I actually want to add to my brandkit, you see? So this one, definitely, I'm gonna download it. This one as well. Skillshare for teams. Yeah, why not download this as well? Then we have versions of the logos with the trademark the T don't necessarily N. Good enough. That's a good start. I can now start adding the logos right here. They should be in my downloads. Yes, they are right here. So secondary primary logo. Let's start with the primary. Okay? I have a bunch of different versions right here. Yeah. Okay, primary logo green. You know what? I'm going to add the whole thing, and I can always delete them afterwards. So there you go. I see the different things. So some of them are all white, some of them are all white in vector, PNG, SBG, that's vector. Okay. So yeah, perfect. These are all of the squared. I guess, so I probably need to add a bit more. So up ron more logos. Okay. All right. Go back. To my download here, I have the secondary logos in digital right here. I'm going to go with these types so many logos that Skillshare provides. So I'm guessing this is too much, but you're better safe than sorry. It's better to have more when you are setting up your brandkit and then trim them down to what you actually really use and really need in your designs. Alright, so I'm going to quickly delete the ones I don't need and keep, I would say, four to six different logos. Right, I've decided to keep these ten logos right here. The primary logo being this one. And also, what I did, I only kept the SVGs over the PNG format. So SVG is the vector format, which means no matter how much I stretch them, they should not use in quality. So that's why I kept the SVG versions over the PNG. If you have luxury of having all of these formats, go for SVG. Me quickly split my screen into two here. There you go. So I can work faster. So this is my Canva account. This is the brand kit or the brand assets provided by Skillshare. I've done all of the logos. Let's move on to the color sections right here. Okay, so similarly, I'm going to scroll down right here on the left side, my Canva. Kit. So let's create the primary colors first, primary colors. So you can rename your sections, your color palette, which I love. Okay, so let's go for the first color, and you see you can either type in the hex code or even the CMYK code. So if I click on this color right here, I should have these code. You see, I have the code. I can copy it, just simply come back here and paste that color. Okay? So I have the exact same color as in the Skillshare guidelines right here. Create the second color. Okay? So this black right here, let me double check. This is pure black. Yes, it is pure black. So your pure black right here is very easy. You go to the corner like any of the lower corners. It should be all zeros, and that is your pure black. Okay, so I can close that and see if they have other colors. I would have thought they had also white. You know what? I'm going to add pure white right here. So pure white is the opposite of black only Fs. Okay? And there you go. So that's my first color palette. That's my primary color palette. Add a secondary palette. So secondary palette, add a custom palette. All right. And I'm going to name it secondary colors. So I remain consistent with the primary and secondary colors. So secondary colors, we have this navy right here. Going to copy the hex code and simply paste it here. Okay. That's the first one. Next color will be let's go for the gray right here. I have 3 grays. Okay, so this one right here, go copy this code, paste it here. And I'm going to speed up the video because this process is a little bit repetitive. One thing I would like to show you is that each of the colors can actually be renamed. Sometimes colors have names like here, we have green, navy violet. So the colors actually had a name, so I could probably rename them accordingly. So green. This one is going to be black. The way I rename them simply double click or you can use a little pencil icon right here. This is white. Now, this is the Navy, and then this is my gray one, two, three. Okay. So gray one, this one is gray. Two and gray three. There you go. So I have all my grays here. Then the last color palette I should create is the tertiary, which is the bright colors right here. So I have one, two, three, four. Okay. Alright, I'm done with my color palettes. Now let's move down to the fonts. Okay? So you see the font section right here. I'm going to go a bit faster because the process is pretty much the same. So I'm going to select my fonts here and see what I can actually find by default in Canva. My guess is that I will find the two Google fonts ones, these two DMSuns and Laura, which are the secondary funds. Okay? And the Adobe font and the GT fonts, I won't be able to download that because they are probably paid. Funds. So yeah, I'm going to focus on these two right here. But I want to show you that with a paid Canva account, you can add custom fonts. You see, you can manage your uploaded fonts. You can click on that button right here and choose a font on your computer and upload it if it's not yet in Canva. Okay? So that's how you upload a custom font in Canva, but you need a paid account for that. So I'm going to focus on these two other fonts, DM Suns and Laura. Okay? Let's see for my title, for example, if Canva has these fonts. So DM DMSans is here. So I'm going to go for the bold. And yeah, I'm going to bump up the size of this to maybe 72 bolded DMSans. Okay, great. I'm going to validate that. And now you see my title hierarchy is going to be by default DM sans bolded in size 72. And now for the body, I'm going to use this other font, Laura right here. Let's see if they have it. Pretty sure they do because I've used that before. So, Laura, there you go. Laura regular in size 30. I think 32 is good, body perfect. Okay, the other ones, I don't feel like I need them so much right now, so cannot delete them, but I don't think they will show if I don't set them up. So I'm going to stick with this. Alright, what else do I have? I have some video templates and some brand videos. Unfortunately, Canva doesn't allow us to upload video assets so far, only photos, graphics, and icons. But there is another button right here that says brand voice. And I think this part is pretty interesting. I can now collapse this window right here. Don't need this anymore. But I want to show you what brand voice is all about. Here, we can give Canvas specific guidelines to describe our brand voice using Canvas magic writes. Before I set up that brand voice, let me show you what magic Ride is and what it does. So you see this little magic button right here, the quick action button. The first button you should see to pro feature as well is magic write. So if I click here, I can prompt, for example, write a hook for a video tutorial about Canva brankits. I'm going to generate that. Canva should generate a little hook and discover how to elevate your brand's visual identity effortlessly with Canva brand this tutorial will unlock the secrets to creating cohesive and professional looking designs that resonate with your audience, etcetera, etcetera. Now, let me show you something you can do to force magic writ to write more like your brand, your brand's voice. So coming back to my Skillshare brand kit right here, if I scroll the way down to brand voice, I can add a description of my brand voice right here. Okay? I have 500 characters to do so. So what I suggest you do in order to define your brand's voice or in my case, I'm using Skillshare brand, okay? So how can I know Skillshare brand voice? Well, I decided to go check out their blog. So skillshare.com slash Blog. I am in the news section, and I'm just going to find an article written by Skillshare. You see, Skillshare as the author. Let click on this one, introducing the live sessions on Skillshare. And I'm going to copy everything on this page. So I'm going to control, see everything here, and then I'm going to head over to hATGPTGodol hATGPT. Going to paste that thing right here. It's a big chunk of text, okay? So I could probably delete long series of things that will not be useful for me. I'm going to start the first sentence here. Add a few spaces by holding my ships key so I don't launch the prompt because I do have a prompt for you to use right here. So I'm going to copy that prompt and paste it here, and the prompt goes like this. Analyze the tone of voice of this brand and define it into details using precise adjectives of what it is and what it is not. Ask me additional questions if you feel like you need more insights into the brand voice after analyzing this piece of texto. I want to make sure CHAPT will ask me more question if it doesn't have enough information. Description of the brand voice should not be longer than 500 characters. Remember that's Canvas limit in the brand kit. And then obviously, you paste the rest of your text. So I can write here sample text, column, and that's it. I have enough with this. This section is tailored for Okay, so I'm going to delete all of this right here, which I don't think is useful. Run this prompt and see what ChaGPT can come up with in terms of description of that tone of voice. Let's see. The tone of voice for this brand can be described as this. Engaging and encouraging, it creates excitement and enthusiasm about the creative process and learning opportunities. Inclusive and community oriented. It emphasizes a sense of belonging and community, inviting participation, interaction among like minded individuals. Clear and informative. The language is straightforward and easy to understand, providing detailed and practical information. Supportive and inspirational. It motivates and supports creative in their journey, offering inspiration and practical steps to achieve their goals. But it's not overly formal or technical, it's not distant or detached. It's not vague or ambiguous. That's great. So I'm going to go copy this. Hopefully, it's not more than 500 characters. It is. So I'm going to start by deleting all of the spaces here. Alright, so I cannot fit the whole thing here with my 500 characters. So what I could do simply come back to Chat GPT and ask it to make sure your description of the brand voice is no longer than 500 characters. Okay. Should understand that and rewrite the whole thing in less characters. Okay, so got it here. There you go. Okay, so I'm going to use this one right here, face that instead of this one, and now it should work. The brand voice is engaging and encouraging, creating excitement about creative learning. It's inclusive and community oriented, fostering a sense of belonging and interaction. The tone is clear and informative, offering practical, detailed guidance. It's supportive and inspirational, motivating creative to achieve their goals. It's not overly formal, technical, distance, Perfect. I love how HAGPT can always shorten or lengthen any pieces of text. Now, I've saved that. So now, this is saved as my brand voice. Okay? So what I can do is to go back to my magic write, asking it to write a hook for my video and see if it can come up with something any better. All right. So for that, coming back to magic write right here, make this full screen and find magic write. There you go. So my prompt was write a hook for a video tutorial about Canva. Banket and voice. And now I can see if I can add my custom voice. I'm going to click again on custom voice, like so. And I have the message that this brankit doesn't have a voice because I'm still here, if I'm correct, in my team run this brankt. So if I click on CO, I should be able to find my Skillshare branchetT one. So select that branket and now I should have my custom voice. There you go. Custom voice. We generate this answer, and here is my new hook. Unlock the full potential of your brand with Canvas Bankit. Join us as we guide you through creating a cohesive and stunning brand identity making every design effortlessly consistent and uniquely yours. Ready to elevate your brand game, let's get started. Now, this is way less boring than the previous hook that was generated with Canvas. So I consider this a success. So that's in a nutshell, how you use your brand voice. You have to set it up in your brankt, save that, and now you can use it whenever you are prompting Canvas AI or Canvas magic right. Now, that was pretty cool, kind of fun. 6. How to use your Brand Kits while designing: Alright, now that we have set up our brankt, I want to show you what it's good for, like, how to use your brankit while you are designing in the Canva editor. The brand kit and having all of your assets in one central place is so useful. It will save you so much time. So let me just give you a few of the use cases of a first, let's imagine you have circles. You have a bunch of different circles on your page and you need these circles to be on brand. Well, the first thing is that when you generate a new circle, I'm using the key, the shortcut C on my keyboard, it will create that circle in my primary color, the first color in my brand kit, okay? So if I go to my brand, you see this green right here is the primary color. So if you don't have your brand kit set up, this will come as the last color you've used in Canva, I guess. So this is the first thing. If you want to change the color of that just click on your color button, and you should see right here your brand kit's name. So that is Skillshare. If I click the drop down arrow, I can choose another one. I'm good with Skillshare. And now I have all of my different color palettes, my primary, secondary, and tertiary, which I didn't modify yet the name. At my fingertips, they are right here. So if I need a red circle, a blue, and a yellow, I can simply go and fetch these colors. If you don't have a brankit, you will have to go and select the color picker or the color button right here and change the hex code manually, which could be a time sucker. I just adds extra step extra clicks to your creative process. So that's the first thing colors very easily to get access to your brand colors. Also, you see all of your colors right here. You could very easily style a template or layout. So if I go to the design step, go and choose a layout, let's say I use this layout right here with a page like this, like an agenda and five points, then I come back to my brand. I could shuffle, let's say I want to use my primary palette. I could shuffle that. And you see it will basically apply my brands colors to this specific works with layout. It works with templates as well. So if you choose a template instead of a layout, let's say, let's use this template right here that I used in the previous tutorial. Let's go for this page right here. So you select it. Go to your brand tab right here. And now let's say you want to shuffle these colors. Well, very easily, you can do that as well. You can make sure this page is going to be using only the colors in your branket. So that's what it does for colors. You can do the same for fonts, okay? So for example, this big title right here, I could make that on brand. So if I want to do that, I can just click on that textbox and then click on my font button right here, and I should see right here my brand color. So if I scroll down a bit, I see my brand kit name right here. You see the brand icon, like the co kind of palette. So that is my brankit and you see the first one right here, DMSans is my brand, font that I chose that I set in my brandkit. So you will need to adapt the size a little bit. If you want this to fit. You can go all caps or not, and you can change everything pretty much like if you want to use the second font, the Laura, for example, do that as well. And just like that, apply your brand font to everything on your template. So you can also use the copy style button to set your brand font everywhere on your design. So red, yellow, orange. Okay, so there you go. That's how you actually use your brandkit from within the design area. There's so many other things you can do, okay. From here, you can add your brand photos in, switch to another brandkit of ours. Main brankt our team run for the slide, this one, select this brandkit. I want to show you how all of these logos, for example, if I want to add this logo, for example, to our page that you go, I can simply click on the logo. It's right here. It's always going to be available for me right here. What else? Like the photos that we have, if I need to add the thumbnail of a specific course, then you go. I have it handy right here. Similarly for my graphics and my icons everything that I need right here at my fingertips. Okay? So again, having your brand kit setup is really shortcut. Like, it saves you so much time and it allows you to always design on brand. If you stick with these colors, if you stick with these fonts and these pre approved visual, you will always design on brand. And this will strengthen the brand identity because people will be exposed to a consistent brand. Like, repeatedly, the messaging will be consistent makes sense so that people can remember it. It will reinforce your brand identity. 7. Complete Brand Kit with a Free Canva account: Alright, we are getting closer to the end of this tutorial. If you are Canva free user, I promised you a hack on how to create a complete branchet with everything that I showed you that is available for the P branket or Teams branket. There is a way you can do that without having to upgrade. It's not as convenient as it will not show in such a structured manner in your branket in the editor, where you can create a document. And I'm going to show you a shortcut to do that to gather all of these brand assets and information and attributes into a single document. Okay? I'm talking about, of course, a Canva. So let me show you how you would do that. Just from the homepage, click on the Templates tab right here. And the keyword you are going to search for is brand board. Okay? So brand board. There you go. Brand board. You should see a bunch of different brand identity, brand kits or brand guidelines. Like, so I don't know exactly how those are called, but in Canva, brand board seems to be the key so obviously a lot of these templates will be pro templates only. But me, I have created three ones that I believe are well designed that you could be using right now. So I'm going to present them to you. The first one is this one. You see, it's a free template. You can totally use that as a free user. So this one, it has a big header for your logo, then another space right here for a variant of your logo, a little bit of brand strategies, your brand colors, your fonts, and some brand imagery. This is a very cool template. You can obviously update this document with your brand assets. And instead of brand strategies, you could have a little blurb about your brand voice right here. And I think this could very well replace a brand kit if you are a free user. Now, let me show you two more. There is this one. It has a more like tech dark theme kind of vibe to it. But it has all of the information, the logos and their variations, the colors, primary and secondary, some gradients. Sometimes brands use gradients, custom gradients, the fonts. With a little bit of explanation or, you see these bubble speech open this. So you can see some guidelines here and some tips on how to use them. So this one also completely free. A few graphics or elements have been pasted there. So that's another great option for you guys. And then the third one that I have selected for you is this one right here, more like a feminine vibe, this one, floral, more abstract shapes, different, more vibrant colors, but still has these tips and extra information that you can add to your brand board. Let your team know how to use it. So similar kind of structure. So these three templates will be linked in the description for you to use. Alright, I am almost done. I believe you can see the value of having a canva for teams or Canva pro account because it really brings you the whole bang of the brand kit right there. You can create it in Canva and use it directly in the editor. Thank you for investing in your Canva education. Thank you for doing it with us. We appreciate that.