Canva Design Tips | 7 Canva Tricks Every Blogger Should Know

Last updated on January 20th, 2023

Are you ready to learn some amazingly game-changing Canva design tips? These Canva tips and tricks save us so much time and help make designing in Canva easier than ever.

Want these tricks super fast? Grab our FREE Canva Tricks Cheatsheet in our ever-growing Design Vault! Get instant access along with design templates, tutorials, and more today!

Canva can be an amazing design tool for any online business owner.

However, when we first started using Canva, we felt really limited. Making ONE simple line was a challenge. Curved text? Don’t even think about it.

Over the years, we’ve come up with tons of Canva design tips, and since then, we’ve been able to create everything from full workbooks, journals, course slide decks, and SO much more using this one tool.

No more feelings of limitations. It just takes a little creative thinking!

We have a fantastic audience of people that LOVE chatting about Canva design tips and a great Facebook community of bloggers invested in mastering their design skills.

The benefit of this is we know when there’s a common denominator regarding Canva. It’s incredible feedback for Canva’s design team and great for blog posts to help YOU in the NOW.

So today, we’ll be chatting about the latter, the most COMMON Canva design questions.

And, Canva design tips for making the program even easier to use and more versatile for any blogger. Heck yes!

TRICK #1: COPY AND PASTE

This is hands down the most common thing we’re asked – “How do you copy and paste in Canva?”

Copy and paste is the single most often used keyboard shortcut in our bag of Canva design tips.

Seriously! We use it ALL THE TIME, making our lives so much easier.

REMEMBER THIS POST LATER! PIN IT TO YOUR FAVORITE PINTEREST BOARD!⬇

We often have multiple tabs open on our browser and copy and paste from tab to tab. This helps us save time and stay consistent with our designs.

Related Post: How to Brand Your Blog + Achieve Brand Consistency

Not trying to go off-topic, but having a second monitor has been a total game-changer.

Okay, back to the question, “How do you copy and paste in Canva?” It’s super simple!

First, click off to the side and drag your mouse over whatever you want to copy. After it’s highlighted, click Ctrl+C (PC) or Cmd+C (Mac) to copy your design.

NOTE: If you accidentally select more objects than you meant to, hold the Shift key down and CLICK on anything you want to de-select. Then, Ctrl/Cmd+C to copy.

Next, open the project you want to paste this into.

You can also paste it into the same project (on the same or different pages).

We do this a lot when we’re creating a workbook to keep the border, layout, and headers consistent. This again also helps us design much faster.

To paste, use your keyboard shortcuts again, using Ctrl+V (PC) or Cmd+V (Mac).

Super simple, right?

If you don’t want to use keyboard shortcuts, you can also right-click your mouse to open up a menu that has copy-and-paste options.

SIDE NOTE: The header templates shown above are available in our FREE Design Vault and many other Canva templates and design tools!

TRICK #2: HOW TO MERGE CANVA DESIGNS

Another question we get on the regular is how to merge Canva designs. There isn’t a trick to merge designs, but we do have a similar solution!

To successfully merge Canva designs, you’ll have to view ALL of your pages by clicking ‘Grid View’ from the lower righthand side of your project screen.

Next, click and drag your mouse over all the pages/designs you want to add to a different project. Click Ctrl+C (PC) or Cmd+C (Mac) to copy your highlighted design.

Head on over to your new project and add a blank page to wherever you want to merge your copied designs. Select that page by clicking anywhere within it and then hit Ctrl+V (PC) or Cmd+V (Mac).

Canva will automatically push all other pages down to accompany every page you just pasted within in this new project.

While this doesn’t quite answer how to merge Canva designs, it’s still a great addition to your bank of Canva design tips!

TRICK #3: DOWNLOAD JUST ONE PAGE

What’s interesting is that we get this question the most during Q3. (From all those early Q4 preppers!)

Our readers want to design all the product mockups for Pinterest, social media, and more to fully leverage Q4 traffic and sales.

Sharing the cover image from your blog printable or digital product in a mockup converts really well. It’s something tangible to where they see and knows what they’re getting instead of an assumption.

Related Post: Designing in Canva | Anatomy of a Killer Blog Printable

Once they download the cover page of their digital product (let’s say a workbook), they can:

• Re-upload it into Canva and add it to a Pinterest pin
• Add it to a social media/sales page image
• Upload it to a cover mockup generator like myecovermaker.com

Either way, this is another really easy Canva design trick! Look to the left of the page you want to download to find the ‘Page Number.’

Once you find that number, click on ‘Share,’ ‘Download,’ and the ‘Select pages’ dropdown.

Deselect ‘All pages (1-XX)’ and select the page number you want to download.

TRICK #4: SELECTING AN OBJECT BEHIND ANOTHER OBJECT WITHOUT MOVING IT OUT OF THE WAY

This trick is shown in the video at the top of this post at timestamp 02:46.

This one is a game-changer for SO many people, including us! Have you ever tried to click on something, and there’s a text box or object in the way, and you end up clicking the wrong thing?

Yeah, you’re not alone.

It’s such a time suck and can make designing in Canva just a tad bit frustrating.

Related Post: Canva Shortcuts That Will Help You Design Faster

There’s a super simple trick for this, and it’s one of the many tricks I cover in our Confidently Canva course (get $20 OFF through this link!), but we’ll let you in on it here…

The Command key! (or Ctrl key for PC users)

Here’s what you’re going to do if another object is selected.

• Hold down the Command (or Ctrl) key
• Click again (WHILE holding that key)

This will select the object that’s behind the first object.

If the object you’re trying to select is way in the back, you might have to keep holding Command (or Ctrl) and clicking.

Each time you click while holding that key, it will select the next object in the back.

Did we blow your mind?

TRICK #5: MOVING OBJECTS JUST A TEENY TINY BIT

This trick is shown in the video at the top of this post at timestamp 08:16.

We get this question a lot regarding positioning text just right so that it’s perfectly lined up.

Sometimes, it’s hard to get the text boxes right when you move the text boxes around with your mouse.

But, if you click just outside of the text box, you’ll notice that there’s a little cross arrow that looks like this:

When that symbol appears, click again. You’ll know it worked because you won’t be able to type in that text box anymore.

NOTE: This is only necessary when trying to move a text box. You only need to click once if you want to move a shape or other object.

Finally, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the object to just 1px. It’s effortless to get it lined up just right doing it this way!

You can also hold down the Shift key and use the Arrow keys if you want to move the object 10px.

This is probably one of our favorite Canva design tips because it lets us be precise with our movements!

TRICK #6: ADDING A SHADOW TO AN IMAGE

This was such a requested feature among our audience that we created actual shadow jpegs to use.

Even though they were a bit bulky and only worked on perfectly square and rectangular images, it made their product mockups POP!

Fortunately, we can leave all that behind now that Canva has finally added the ‘Shadow’ feature to their bag of Canva design tips.

And it works for all images, stock photos included!

First, you’ll add whatever image you want to use. If it’s not already cut out, you can use pixlr.com, remove.bg, or one of the many online sources for removing backgrounds.

CANVA PRO USERS: If you have Canva Pro, use their ‘Background Remover’ from the ‘Edit Image’ dropdown.

Click ‘Edit Image’ from the top left menu and select ‘Shadows.’

Canva tests out numerous layouts at any time, so you may have to scroll down a bit. Then, choose the shadow you’d like to apply.

Click on the ‘Shadow’ button again to open up more options like ‘Size,’ ‘Transparency,’ etc.

Follow this same method if you’re looking to give a cover design or printable a shadow (we recommend it!).

Related Post: Best Features for Editing Design Templates In Canva

You’ll find more really cool editing tricks to cut down your design time and make you feel like a graphic design pro!

TRICK #7: CREATE A PROJECT WITH MORE THAN 100 PAGES

We can’t even describe the level of happiness we felt when Canva finally announced its new page limit of 100 pages!

After sharing this achievement with our community, we immediately opened up this post to add to our list of Canva design tips!

Being limited to just 30 pages was a headache for both clients and us. Sheesh!

What if your project exceeds 100 pages?

First, don’t panic! Start a new project, use the copy and paste method mentioned above to copy your layout for consistency, and keep going.

Related Post: The Easy Way to Create and Sell Printable Products

As Mac users, we use ‘Preview’ to merge our pages. (Don’t worry, we’ll talk about PC users in a minute!)

Open each document in Preview. If you don’t already see the thumbnail views on the side, go to ‘View’ and select ‘Thumbnails.’

Next, drag and drop the pages you want to add from the second document into the first one.

DESIGN TIP: If you want to select multiple pages, you can do this by clicking on the first one, holding Shift, and then clicking on the second.

This will select all the pages in between, and you can drag and drop them all at once.

You can also reorder pages by dragging and dropping the thumbnails in the order you want.

For PC users, there is this nifty free online tool called ilovepdf.com.

You do NOT have to download anything to your computer; it is 100% free. Upload both of your documents and choose the ‘Merge PDF’ option.

Related Post: The Easy Way to Create an Editable Printable for Your Readers

SIDE NOTE: We often use ilovepdf for turning uneditable PDFs from courses into Word documents so that we can type right in the document.

There are so many simple Canva design tips & tricks!

Wondering how to resize in Canva? We wanted to add it here, but it deserved its own post since we cover 3 quick and easy ways to resize in Canva.

We love figuring out these little Canva design tips and hacks. There are so many more that we could literally spend all day doing this!

Instead, we created our COMPLETE Canva course, Confidently Canva! It’s an in-depth course that teaches you ALL the Canva design tips and tricks in easy-to-follow video lessons.

Plus, you’ll learn how to design social media graphics and printables. Enroll in Confidently Canva NOW to get $20 OFF!

Canva is always adding incredible features to help its users design faster. Seriously, we can barely keep up with all of the updates!

What features would you love to see in Canva? Let us know in the comments below!

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS POST:

• How to Brand Your Blog + Achieve Brand Consistency
• Designing in Canva | Anatomy of a Killer Blog Printable
• Canva Shortcuts That Will Help You Design Faster
• Best Features for Editing Design Templates In Canva
• The Easy Way to Create and Sell Printable Products
• 3 Quick and Easy Ways to Resize in Canva

Don’t forget to download our Canva Tricks Cheatsheet now! It’s all our best Canva design tips for easy reference. Just think of all the time you’ll save with these quick keyboard shortcuts!

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Start your FREE Canva Pro trial today and unlock ALL of their incredible time-saving features that’ll cut your design time to just minutes.

To be honest? It’s the best $12.99/mo OR $119/yr we spend on our business because that time we save with every design is put back into making MORE money in our business!

WANT TO SAVE THIS FOR LATER? PIN IT TO YOUR FAVORITE PINTEREST BOARD!⬇