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Being able to quickly and easily create visuals is an essential asset for any organization — especially those with limited budgets, large teams or multiple projects rolling at once. For this reason, we know that many of our clients and partners rely on easy-to-use platforms like Canva for quick, in-house projects.
As we’ve mentioned before, visual storytelling reinforces your organization’s mission and values in a way that words alone can’t. That said, it’s important to know the best use cases for Canva, and when it’s more appropriate to work with a designer or agency partner to maintain your brand’s integrity and quality.
Canva is wonderful for many reasons, especially its affordable access to design tools for individuals and teams. The platform offers free and paid access, allowing people to choose the best option for their budget and needs. Its intuitive layout and tools require virtually no prior design experience to get started. Ready-to-use templates and drag-and-drop graphics can be easily implemented for widespread use across teams with different skill levels and little time for platform training.
Canva has also rolled out many features that help teams stay on-brand, even if they aren’t trained designers. For example, the brand kit feature (available for paid plans) allows for the ease of use of brand assets across all Canva design work. The brand kit can include everything from your logo, uploaded brand fonts, colors, photos, graphics, icons, charts and brand voice. This is a living area for your in-house team or agency to add to or edit over time. For those within your organization who aren’t designers but help in the creation of deliverables, you are able to update settings within your brand controls that make it so you can only use brand colors and fonts within designs. Within this area, you’re also able to refine settings that force a design approval before something can be shared.
While we appreciate many things about Canva, it does have limitations when it comes to professional production.
For logos and brand assets, it is essential to have scalable, vectorized files that can be used in many applications without losing quality. Canva, however, cannot create or properly export these file types.
Another shortfall of the platform is the color refinement between RGB and CMYK. RGB is a color format used for digital deliverables, while CMYK is used for print deliverables. These two formats use completely different builds of color. While Canva allows you to input CMYK conversions for RGB colors, we have noticed that those numbers often end up getting skewed after setting them. While this may not be a huge concern in RGB, it’s a big deal for printing, where assigning certain color inks determines the final color in printed form. When working with professional printers on projects like invitations or packaging, it’s critical to account for bleed, trim, color profiles and color accuracy, and Canva doesn’t consistently hit the mark when it comes to the demands of professional printing.
By now, we all know that video is driving a lot of engagement across digital platforms. Canva’s built-in video editing software is a good start at creating content for these platforms. However, we do not recommend developing long-form video within Canva, due to its limited capabilities with video editing and lack of motion design ability.
Ultimately, Adobe and other professional design software programs offer specialized features that Canva is not built for. Adobe, for example, has over 20 creative apps that are each specialized for a different facet of design. While Canva tries to incorporate as many of these as it can into a budget-friendly option, it simply cannot match the complex features needed for advanced designs.
With an ever-growing audience using Canva and its easy-to-use templates, people have noticed a recent trend where many small businesses and organizations that rely heavily on Canva have marketing materials that look similar. These templates are now in such high circulation that materials seem familiar or are easy to spot as a Canva template.
In professional design, a strong, visually distinctive identity and strategic hierarchy are essential for effective communication. Consider the branded Beanstock materials from the Nebraska Department of Education: their identity includes Native American patterns and colors, bean imagery and fonts following Woodstock-era trends. Now imagine if these materials used a generic template — the impact of the visual storytelling would be lost. Your brand can lose its power and identity if you rely too heavily on pre-made templates and stock graphics and imagery.
Canva is a powerful tool for speed and handling those daily, quick visuals that are digital first. But it should be seen as a tool, and not the foundation for complex design systems. Ultimately, the best strategy is likely a blended one — utilizing a trained designer for your most critical, original assets and fine-tuned design needs, and Canva for your smaller needs.
We help clients blend these strategies to create custom, branded templates in Canva that maintain brand integrity. This ensures every member of your team stays on brand every time and can help maximize your Canva investment. Need guidance on how to strike the right balance? We’re happy to help.
