Last updated on February 22nd, 2024

Finding the right brand colors that attract your ideal audience can be quite a challenge. Here’s how to apply color psychology when choosing brand colors for your blog!

Color can easily be as overwhelming as fonts, especially if you don’t know where to start. First, there are SO many colors to choose from!

What if it looks good to you but not to everyone else? What if you give off the wrong vibe or send the wrong message?

Believe it or not, color actually has the power to evoke a physiological response from the viewer.

This means you can literally cause people to feel things just by using color.

Working on your brand’s color palette? Use our FREE Color Guide + Palette Cheatsheet to help brainstorm the perfect brand colors for your blog!

You can make their heart beat a little faster. You can get them excited, even cause them to feel warm.

Some colors even cause a temporary increase in blood pressure.

We’re not saying all of that to overwhelm you even more. We just want to emphasize the seriousness of a well-thought-out color palette in relation to your unique brand.

Because between the terminology, psychology, and “deeper meanings,” or even just what looks good, it can cause a lot of bloggers to feel stunted. And we definitely don’t want that!

We’ll never forget a client telling us, “I suck at graphics. I don’t know what looks good. I wear polka dots and stripes together and don’t realize there’s anything wrong with it.”

So, if you’re a polka-dots-and-stripes kind of blogger, we’ve got you covered.

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

WHAT IS A COLOR PALETTE?

You’d find brand colors in a brand’s color palette that’s used consistently to represent a business.

Most color palettes range from 4-6 individual colors. But, some brands will go as far as to include 8-10 in a variety of different shades, which we’ll touch on later in this post.

Related Post: How to Create a Holiday Color Palette for Your Blog

Your brand colors need to be more than just a handful of your favorite colors… or a random color palette you found on Pinterest.

For the sake of transparency, that’s how we found our first set of brand colors for Simplifying DIY Design!

A well-designed color palette can attract the right audience and communicate the right emotions, making selling a whole lot easier.

Before we can dive into finding your brand colors, we first need to understand the psychological (or deeper) meaning behind colors.

UNDERSTANDING THE DEEPER MEANING BEHIND COLORS

As we said earlier, color has the power to evoke a physiological response, such as an increase in heart rate and physical warmth.

Color also has the ability to change a person’s emotions, such as sadness or anger.

On a more basic level, color can also attract (or deter!) people based on personalities.

For example, soft brand colors consisting of pastels wouldn’t accompany a brand personality of tough love but that of compassion. See what we mean?

PRIMARY COLORS

Now, let’s take a look at primary colors and why they’re so important.

Primary colors cannot be made from other colors. They’re the source of every other color on the color wheel. Pretty cool, huh?

YELLOW: Funny story: a couple painted their nursery bright yellow and couldn’t figure out why their baby wasn’t sleeping. Since yellow emphasizes warmth, joy, playfulness, and optimism, it was no wonder they couldn’t get their baby to sleep!

BLUE: Being one of the most popular brand colors, blue can represent intelligence, coolness, trust, serenity, efficiency, and logic.

RED: Most commonly associated with danger, passion, determination, and excitement. It’s also a well-known color in the food industry, as it’s linked to hunger. Red also represents energy, power, warmth, courage, love, and empowerment.

SECONDARY COLORS

Knowing that primary colors are the source of all other colors, can you guess what secondary colors are?

Secondary colors are made by mixing two primary colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel.

ORANGE: When you see the color orange, what comes to mind? You’re right if you guessed happiness, having fun, energy, determination, security, and creativity. It’s a popular color amongst kid-related brands, too.

GREEN: Green is a very versatile brand color, representing many things like freshness, money, tranquility, balance, health, wisdom, and harmony.

It’s commonly used in the finance, health, and nature industry. This is where terms like tint, shade, and saturation come into play, which we’ll dive into more in just a moment.

VIOLET/PURPLE: Purple is most notably associated with royalty and luxury, as it was incredibly difficult to produce and, therefore, only purchased by elites. Purple is also seen to represent spirituality, wisdom, ambition, magic, and mystery.

DESIGNING IN ABSOLUTES

Now, let’s say you have a food blog with a brand personality that’s fun and healthy. Does that mean you NEED to have red (hunger), orange (fun), and green (health) in your color palette?

Absolutely not!

• Starbucks doesn’t serve the healthiest drinks in the world, but its brand colors are shades of green
• For most, using/paying with credit isn’t fun, but MasterCard’s primary color is orange
• The thought of Toyota doesn’t generally exhibit passion or anger, much less hunger, yet their logo is entirely red

But it does provide a great jumping-off point if you’re stumped with choosing the right brand colors.

Related Post: Easily Achieve Brand Consistency with Your Blog

Remember when we said that a color palette needs to be more than just your favorite colors or a random palette you found on Pinterest?

Our first color palette for Simplifying DIY Design came from Pinterest!

While we fell in love with the colors, we also used our knowledge about color to ensure it would attract our intended audience.

We’re trying to say that going against the grain is okay. Not everything has to be in absolutes.

Your blog is 100% yours and yours alone. Have fun with it!

COLOR TERMINOLOGY

Speaking of absolutes, let’s chat about a few basic color terms that, even as bloggers, you should know.

These will help you better understand color programs like Coolors.co and Color Hunt and communicate effectively with brand designers if you choose that route.

Related Post: Top 3 FREE Design Generators for Bloggers

COLOR WHEEL: A visual illustration (usually a circle) representing the relationship between colors.

HUE: Refers to a color (synonym for color)

WARM COLORS: Think fire: red, yellow, orange, and pink/magenta.

Warm colors give an overall inviting feel. They generally get more clicks and convert well on Pinterest, specifically.

Keep note that it’s important to be thoughtful about your warm colors.

COOL COLORS: Think ice: blue, green, and purple.

While many cool colors are popular, they don’t convert well on Pinterest. They don’t stand out as well or shock the eye.

Cool colors are most often portrayed as pastels that blend well and provide a calm feeling.

‘Calm’ is a nice vibe for a blog, but ‘exciting’ is what gets the clicks.

If you’re set on having a color palette of mostly cool colors, there are ways to incorporate at least one warm color while keeping it complementary.

COMPLEMENTARY COLORS: Complementary colors are opposite on the color wheel.

Why is this important? It’s basically a quick way to find colors that go perfectly together.

A great example is the infamous red and green Christmas colors. These colors are directly across from each other on the color wheel, meaning they’re a perfect match and 100% complementary.

TINT: Lighter variation of a certain color (by adding white).

SHADE: Darker variation of a certain color (by adding black).

Tint + shade example made with Coolors.co

VALUE: Refers to the lightness or darkness of a color.

SATURATION: Used to describe the intensity of a color.

WHERE TO FIND COLOR INSPIRATION

We’ve seen bloggers use anything and everything as inspiration for their brand’s color palette. Things like a book cover, wallpaper, garden, fruits, sunset, fabric swatch, and even their favorite bird.

When we were designing complete brand kits for our Five-Minute Brand, we started with mood boards. This helped us develop a personality for each unique brand we created, making designing a color palette much easier.

With our Five-Minute Brand, you’ll get instant access to 40 complete (editable!) brand kits PLUS matching Canva templates to brand your blog. Get it now for just $27!

Pinterest is a great place to search for both mood boards and color palettes. Use our Color Palette board on Pinterest or palette cheatsheet in our FREE Color Guide if you’re still unsure where to start!

We also recommend using color-specific tools such as:

• Coolors.co (our fave!)
• Design Seeds (more soft than bold)
• Color Hunt (categorized by style)
• Color Picker (used to find hex codes from an image)

HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR BRAND COLORS

We truly believe that personality plays a big part in choosing a color palette.

Our personalities are very bold! We love creating fun, bold, and colorful designs for our brand and NEW Pinterest designs for our Mega Pinterest Template Bundle!

If we had to describe our personalities, we’d go with: Tell it like it is, honest, bold, and creative.

Related Post: Create a Brand Personality That Just Screams YOU

We wanted our brand to reflect just that because that’s who we are in our writing, designs, and teaching style. We don’t have pastels or neutral tones in anything we create online.

Likewise, a feminine brand usually has more of a delicate personality and would be best suited for colors such as soft pinks and creams.

If you struggle with determining your brand’s personality, open a document and title it “Brand Personality.”

Set a timer (five minutes will work) and brain-dump all the words that come to mind when you think of you and YOUR personality.

Refer to the list anytime you need to choose colors for your brand/blog.

If your brand reflects your personality, it’ll also attract other like-minded people. That’s how you’ll find your audience!

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS POST:

• FREE Color Guide + Palette Cheatsheet
• Coolors.co
• Design Seeds
• Color Hunt
• Color Picker
• Five-Minute Brand

Don’t forget to grab our FREE Color Guide + Palette Cheatsheet to help brainstorm the perfect brand colors for your blog or design project!

TRY CANVA PRO FREE FOR 30 DAYS

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

To be honest? It’s the best $14.99/mo OR $119/yr we spend on our business because that time we save with every single design is put back into making MORE money in our business!

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

Last updated on February 14th, 2024

Learn to brand your blog the right way for instant brand recognition. Here’s how to achieve brand consistency with your blog to build confidence with your readers!

Having a cohesive look is an essential part of your blog’s unique brand identity. It’s vital for recognizability and builds trust with your readers.

In fact, studies show that a person must “hear” about a product approximately seven times before they feel comfortable investing in it.

We think the same holds true for blogs in general. We firmly believe a person needs to “hear” about a blog’s message quite a bit before they’re ready to take action.

Sign up for our FREE Blog Graphics That Convert video training to learn how to create beautiful graphics for your blog that’ll increase clickthroughs, SEO, sign-ups, and sales!

We’re all working hard to establish trust with our readers – to get them to take action.

That’s why we put ourselves in front of the camera even though we’re VERY introverted.

It’s why we send out a weekly newsletter even though we’re afraid of bugging our readers. We crave that connection. We want that community of followers!

What good is a stat or number unless it means you’re making progress toward your goal? For many of us, our goal is to make an impact while generating an income.

Personally, we want to help bloggers reach their income goals by overcoming the graphic design hurdle.

And while we think some bloggers would love to be able to give it all away for free, this is our job, and it’s how we support our family and pay the bills.

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

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having income be one of your major end goals in blogging, especially when it’s completely possible to make an income while serving your reader.

Take us, for example.

We get to share our passion for graphic design with thousands of bloggers who are learning to love design through the use of Canva templates while making a six-figure income.

But that wasn’t always so. Before the six-figure income, before the +20k email list, before the incredible JV opportunities, came the foundation.

Your blog’s unique brand identity is a big part of that foundation.

Having that recognizable look to where your ideal reader says, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that chick!”

That’s where it’s at.

Prefer a visual breakdown of this post? We’ve got you covered!

BRAND YOUR BLOG

The first step to having a cohesive brand is to establish a brand for your blog. This is where our FREE brand board comes into play.

Related Post: Beginners Guide to Creating a Brand Board

You’ll need to figure out who YOU are and who you want TO attract.

We do this by establishing a:

• Color palette (generally five colors)
• Signature “look” or style
• Brand fonts (we recommend one premium font from Creative Market)
• Few branded design elements (optional)

If you have absolutely no idea where to start with how to brand your blog, not to worry. Pinterest is a fantastic option for brainstorming brand styles.

View our Branding Tips and Color Palettes boards on Pinterest for more information!

Be sure to set your ‘Inspiration’ board to private and start pinning anything that you feel represents your blog’s brand. You can pin patterns, color palettes, photos, fonts, and even your favorite style of pins.

To kick off your search, start with ‘brand board’ and go from there. After a little while, you’ll start to see some commonalities you can work with.

But if you’d rather skip all that and have the work done for you, you NEED to check out our Five-Minute Brand (+PLUS get 20% off!).

We’ve designed 40 completely unique done-for-you brands to where all you have to do is add in your blog’s name. It’s truly lived up to the Five-Minute Brand name!

COLOR PALETTE

Because color is so incredibly powerful, you can actually make a person feel a certain way simply by using color. The same holds true with attracting a specific audience.

Bold brands with fun personalities tend to use bright and powerful colors. Just like soft brands with very feminine personalities generally gravitate towards calm and comforting colors.

Related Post: How to Choose the Perfect Colors for Your Blog

One thing we need to make perfectly clear is that your blog’s brand should be more about your audience than you.

If you pop into any one of our team’s closets, you’ll find very neutral, earthy colors. But our brand’s first color palette? It was bold, bright, and fun.

We even threw up an impromptu survey in our Facebook group asking if their brand’s color palette matched their own personal style. The majority of the responses were, “The colors couldn’t be farther apart!”

Pinterest and Design Seeds (our fave!) are great places to find your brand’s color palette or for inspiration if you want to make your own.

Once you have your brand’s color palette finalized, add it to your Brand Kit in Canva or save it somewhere safe because these are the ONLY colors you’ll be using throughout your blog.

Brand recognition is about consistency.

That includes using the same colors on your Pinterest pins, blog graphics, and lead magnets – every aspect of your blog will use this ONE color palette.

The one caveat to that is seasonal content. You can absolutely 100% create a holiday color palette for your seasonal content.

There are some things you need to keep in mind, though, but overall, it’s a big YES from us!

BRAND FONTS

Using what we just talked about regarding color palettes, the same holds true for your brand fonts.

If you want to attract a bolder type of person, you might want a more “messy” script font for those designs that need a little oomph.

If you’re a delicate or very feminine blog, you might want to use a more elegant-style script.

Remember to take into consideration its readability. We’ve seen way too many designs that used a completely illegible script font that no doubt kept people from clicking over.

Related Post: Our BEST Typography Tips to Create Amazing Designs

Just because you think it looks stellar doesn’t mean it’ll attract your ideal reader.

Not to mention, knowing if your audience primarily uses their phone or computer to surf the web will make a big difference, too.

Our brand was solely designed with our unique audience in mind. We first started out with a very bold color palette and fun script font we purchased on Creative Market.

We used our two fonts, Poppins and Justinot Infinity, on every element of our blog – social media, lead magnets, digital products, blog images, logo, email signature, slide decks…

The only place we experimented with a few different fonts was on our Pinterest pins.

But as our audience (and their tastes) evolved, so did our brand.

Our brand’s style, while still bold, became a bit more mature with deeper colors and an outlined font (Black Diamond) to replace our script font.

SIGNATURE LOOK

Don’t get too hung up on this, and definitely don’t let this stall your branding process. This is something that may evolve over time.

That being said, it’s also not something you want to switch up every other day because you can’t make up your mind. Stick to something simple that you can easily recreate.

For us, we were known for our “multi-colored font with the off-set outline” style for the keywords in our graphics and products.

Additionally, some of the keywords we used to grab our reader’s attention were created using textured fonts in Canva.

Related Post: Create Jump-Off-the-Page Textured Fonts in Canva

Is it extra? Yep. Did it require more design time on our part? You bet. Did it pay off? You have NO idea!

Our audience instantly knew it was our Pinterest pin before ever reading the pin description.

We were consistent with our color palette. We were consistent with our brand fonts. We were consistent with our design style. And boy, did it pay off!

Other bloggers might use a shadow look or just keep the text simple and accent it with a specific layout, or use design elements like borders, banners, shapes, etc.

And yes, this can all be created using Canva.

They have so many text effects to choose from, like hollow, splice, neon, and even glitch! It’s very retro; we love it!

BRANDED DESIGN ELEMENTS

A great way to add branding to your visuals is by including design elements.

For us, we loved using banners to emphasize our free template text and twirly dotted arrows for a bit of fun!

Others may use stars, borders, or other designs. Canva has a great selection of design elements that can be easily changed to match your brand colors.

You can even take it up a notch and purchase a graphic pack on Creative Market. Another option is not to use any branded design elements because that’s okay, too!

We know plenty of bloggers who’ve been so consistent with their blog’s brand that no additional design elements are needed for instant brand recognition.

As we’ve mentioned before, what makes these things recognizably you and your brand is the fact that you stay consistent!

If you’re switching up your logo every other week or using 12 different colors, then your brand style won’t be consistent, and you’ll end up confusing your audience.

Related Post: How to Create a Stand-Out Logo for Your Blog

Just like everything else when it comes to business success, consistency is key. We know this to be especially true regarding blog posts (Google has made this perfectly clear!) and emailing subscribers.

Our readers know to look for us in their inbox every Thursday at around 3:40 pm ET with another ah-ha Canva design tip!

HOW TO BRAND YOUR BLOG FOR A COHESIVE LOOK

Now, let’s chat about how to brand your blog real quick.

You’ll want to incorporate your brand style in as many areas of your blog as you can.

• Pinterest ‘Pin It’ button (we use the jQuery Pin It Button plugin for WordPress)
• Sidebar (About Me graphic, popular post/category graphics, etc.)
• Fonts (legible fonts will keep readers on your site longer)
• Logo and blog header
• Graphics (including graphics throughout your blog posts)
• Freebies/products (maintains brand recognition after they’ve left your blog)

If you’re a visual person, just take a look around our blog to see what we mean.

We keep to our brand fonts and colors. Each page matches our brand style.

Every graphic we include throughout our blog posts is in line with our brand.

Related Post: 10 Must-Know Blog Design Tips

No matter where you end up on our blog, you’ll never feel like you took a wrong turn and ended up on another site.

You’re comfortable clicking around, reading a post, signing up for a freebie, or purchasing a product.

Maintaining a consistent style throughout won’t bore your readers. In fact, the opposite will happen.

When you brand your blog the right way, not only are you confident in yourself, but your audience will be as well.

Plus, it helps save loads of design time because you don’t have to think about what style, fonts, or colors you’ll use.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS POST:

• Canva
• The Five-Minute Brand (20% off!)
• jQuery Pin It Button plugin
• Creative Market
• FREE Canva Pinterest templates
• Design Seeds

Don’t forget to sign up for our FREE Blog Graphics That Convert video training to learn how to create beautiful graphics for your blog that’ll increase clickthroughs, SEO, sign-ups, and sales!

TRY CANVA PRO FREE FOR 30 DAYS

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

To be honest? It’s the best $14.99/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!⬇

Last updated on April 20th, 2024

Canva templates are great for cutting your design time in half. But they also need to grab your readers’ attention and get them to click. Here’s how to edit Canva templates to match your brand and stand out from your competitors!

Pretty much every aspect of our blog runs on a template, especially now that we’ve expanded into a full-blown team of amazing marketers and designers.

Design templates save time, which in turn can save a LOT of money.

Plus, they give bloggers with little to no design skills a fighting chance to get noticed in this increasingly visual world of online marketing.

But there also comes a point where everyone is learning the same techniques and using the same templates.

Want a FREE, no-fluff crash course on how to use Canva as a blogger? Enroll in our self-paced Canva 2.0 Quick Start NOW to dive in!

What do you get when all you have is the same? Same + same = Everyone’s graphics look the same.

There has to be something we can do to stand out in the sea of sameness and still get those clicks! Right?

Yes. A thousand times, yes. (We’re huge Matthew Macfayden Pride & Prejudice fans over here!)

As bloggers, there are a few things you can do to help you edit Canva templates so they’re unique to you and your brand.

And if you’ve been making any of these ‘mistakes’ with your current templates, we promise you it’s not the end of the world.

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

You’ll actually be better off because now there’s something you can do to help boost traffic to your site.

We’d oddly be a bit happy if we found something wrong because then that most likely explains the dip (or straight-up lack) in traffic or reduced sign-ups.

No one likes to have made a mistake. But when you know the error, you can fix it and move on. And in the case of bloggers, move UP!

SWAP FOR YOUR BRAND COLORS

We used to spend an unhealthy amount of time on Pinterest before hiring our Pinterest Manager. Those rabbit holes are so enticing!

Anyway, it would amaze us how many bloggers didn’t edit Canva templates with their brand’s color palette.

We created a MEGA bundle of Pinterest templates (65 Canva Pinterest templates, to be exact) with completely different styles to show how truly customizable our templates really are!

We would see some of our subscribers’ pins on Pinterest from multiple months with the exact same color palettes as the original templates.

Why is that bad?

When you don’t change the colors of your Canva templates to match your brand, there’s absolutely ZERO brand recognition for your audience.

Related Post: Easily Achieve Brand Consistency With Your Designs

This means your readers will never recognize you, which could definitely reduce your click-through rates.

When we’re looking for recipes on Pinterest, we’ll, without a doubt, click on pins we know to be from our favorite foodie bloggers versus ones we don’t know.

DON’T HAVE A BRAND COLOR PALETTE?

Creating a branded color palette is more than just choosing your favorite colors. There’s actually quite a lot of color psychology involved to ensure you’re attracting your ideal person.

And if you’re using the Canva template’s base colors because you haven’t created a brand color palette yet, make sure to check out this article and download the color guide in our free design library!

CHANGE TO YOUR BRAND FONTS

The fonts used in most templates, including ours, are really just placeholders to show you where your text goes.

We know pairing fonts is just as stressful as designing a color palette for your blog.

Because of that, we use visually appealing font combinations so that those who really struggle with choosing their brand fonts can have a starting point.

Related Post: Awesome Typography Tips to Rock Your Designs

Fonts are just as important as color when it comes to branding.

For example, our original brand used a script font and an outline font that was very distinct to the Simplifying DIY Design brand. It actually became our signature look!

We used both fonts in all our Pinterest, blog, and social media graphics, products, designs, and even printables.

Here’s an example using a Canva logo template from our Complete Blogger Template Toolkit. The bottom design is the exact template but with our brand fonts.

See how the top one is very generic, but the bottom one screams Simplifying DIY Design? That’s why you need to edit Canva templates using your brand fonts!

You wouldn’t even know it was a Canva logo template just by switching out the fonts. That’s how powerful branding can be!

DON’T HAVE BRAND FONTS?

Finding the right font combinations can be as overwhelming as choosing a color palette for your blog.

We use (and love!) this FREE font generator to help us choose the perfect font pairings for our design projects.

Even though we’re designers, we’ll happily take advantage of those done-for-you design tools because we all want a little more time!

ADD YOUR OWN IMAGES

All photos used in templates are meant as placeholders and should be swapped out to match your content’s topic or blog niche.

Unless you’re getting custom templates made for your specific brand, you need to remember that if everyone downloaded the template as-is, everyone’s graphics will look the same!

Even if you’re purchasing niche-specific templates, we recommend replacing them with the branded images you chose.

You need to stand out from your competition. If others purchased the same template pack as you (and you all kept the same images), your audience wouldn’t know which way is up!

Additionally, we don’t recommend using free stock photo sites like Pixels or Pixabay because of the copyright issues many bloggers have had in the past.

Long story short, photographers were adding their photos and removing them a little later so they could then file copyright lawsuits against those who used them on their websites.

Blogging alone is hard enough. No one needs that extra drama!

Instead, we use DepositPhotos and Canva’s Pro media library for all of our stock photos.

If your brand is more feminine, we cannot recommend Haute Stock, Social Squares, or IvoryMix enough! They have some of the most beautiful, high-resolution stock photos we’ve ever seen.

Be sure to check out their free images first to make sure they’re right for your brand!

MAKE IT YOUR OWN

While this isn’t a template edit must, it’s something we think you should consider.

If you have a signature look or certain design elements that you absolutely love to use, see how you can fit them into your Canva templates. This can be things like:

• Abstract patterns
• Scribbles, swirls, or hand-drawn lines
• Dotted or playful arrows

What we mean is, if your Canva template has a plain arrow and you prefer to use swirly, fun arrows, make the switch and see how it looks.

Remember that Pinterest template bundle we mentioned earlier? We combined grid, collage, and mockup style pin designs for MEGA variety and MAX conversions!

Anyway, here’s the perfect example of how to customize a template to fit your brand.

The template on the right is the same as the one on the left but edited using our brand’s color palette, fonts, and fun design elements, which we use throughout our blog’s graphics.

Even though it’s a template that other bloggers will use, it’s so unique to our brand that you wouldn’t notice other bloggers use the same design!

Starting from the top, we:

• Swapped out the bubbles for an abstract X design
• Added a second layer under the text for dimension
• Used a fun banner to emphasize the text, ‘5 Ways’
• Added our favorite swirly arrow for a bit of fun

If a template doesn’t have space for your website URL (as shown at the top of the template in the example above), try adding your logo to the bottom corner!

SIDE NOTE: You CAN create a logo for your blog using Canva’s logo templates – you just can’t trademark it because it’s impossible to claim exclusive rights to something other people can use.

Related Post: Read This Before You Make Your Logo in Canva

This is easily forgotten because logos aren’t generally included on a Canva template. Your logo is like your signature on a piece of art; it’s important!

It helps establish a connection with your branded style and also your website. Another added benefit is that it deters copyright infringement and helps people get familiar with your blog name.

If you’re making any of these Canva template editing “mistakes” and your traffic isn’t where it should be, it’s okay!

You’re actually in a really good place because you now know where to start ‘troubleshooting’ through experimentation.

Start by checking the Pinterest pins for your ‘low-hanging fruit’ blog posts. These are the posts that require minimal tweaking but will have a big impact on SEO.

You can also join us in our 3-Day Design Your Blog Growth Challenge to learn more about optimizing other areas of your blog with these simple (but impactful) design updates!

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS POST:

• Easily Achieve Brand Consistency With Your Designs
• How to Choose the Perfect Colors for Your Brand
• Awesome Typography Tips to Rock Your Designs
• FREE Design Generators to Brand Your Blog
• Read This Before You Make Your Logo in Canva

Remember to enroll in our FREE self-paced Canva 2.0 Quick Start course! It’s perfect for learning what makes Canva the best design platform for bloggers!

TRY CANVA PRO FREE FOR 30 DAYS

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

To be honest? It’s the best $14.99/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!⬇

Last updated on February 14th, 2024

There are so many Canva Pro features that bloggers don’t use properly or even know to exist. Taking a few minutes to get your Canva Pro account set up the right way can cut down on design time, helping you design faster and maximize productivity!

Here at Simplifying DIY Design, we’re all about efficiency.

Even though it may seem like an extra second saved by using bookmarked links or keyboard shortcuts, it really adds up when you spend your day in front of a computer.

Any and all designs, sales page links, copy, etc., are tucked neatly away in Asana so they can be quickly referenced.

Nothing is more of a time-suck than scouring a program looking for that one thing you created but cannot remember what you titled it for the life of you. Hey, it happens!

Want a FREE, no-fluff crash course on how to use Canva as a blogger? Enroll in our self-paced Canva 2.0 Quick Start NOW to dive in!

This is just ONE of the many reasons we upgraded to Canva Pro. And still, to this day, we cannot believe how long we waited to make the switch.

Actually, that’s a lie. We do know why.

What we didn’t realize was how much extra time was spent finding workarounds to what was available for Canva Pro users until we gave it a spin using their FREE 30-day trial of Canva Pro.

Ignorance is bliss, right?

Well, to our disbelief, we saved oodles of time by having all of our frequently used tools in one easy-to-use design platform.

We’re going to dive into all the amazing Canva Pro features and how they’ll benefit you as a blogger, so grab your favorite drink, get comfy, and let’s do this!

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BRAND COLOR PALETTES

Gone are the days of saved hex codes in Notes or digital sticky posts!

Use this section of your Canva Pro account to organize all of your brand colors. Just click ‘+ Add new’ and type in your individual hex codes for each color.

What we really like about this Canva Pro feature is that we can keep our holiday color palette separate from our main brand’s colors.

Related Post: How to Choose Brand Colors For Your Blog

You can even segment your complimentary colors and frequently used colors for clients or alternative products.

That’ll come into use here in just a minute.

Lastly, click on the three horizontal dots to the right of your palette title to reorder, copy, or delete.

And here’s what it’ll look like in a design project once you add your color palettes to your Brand Kit.

BRAND FONTS

This Cana Pro feature allows you to select which fonts you want for specific sizes.

Having a baseline does help with quick placement, but we wouldn’t stress about it too much since it varies based on your design.

We only have two brand fonts for Simplifying DIY Design – Black Diamond and Poppins. We generally recommend no more than three brand fonts, anyway.

Related Post: How to Rock Your Fonts with These Typography Tips

Since Poppins can look vastly different based on the size of a design, we uploaded different varieties, including Light and Medium.

Canva has since added Thin, Regular, and ExtraBold. Bonus points: we now have the complete Poppins set!

If you’re in the blog branding stage, we highly recommend these design generators to help you create the perfect brand.

We even use them for certain design projects, too!

To edit your uploaded fonts (regardless if they’re your brand fonts), click ‘Uploaded fonts’ to the right of ‘Text styles.’ Here, you can add/delete without interfering with your ‘Text styles.’

Here’s what it’ll look like in your design project once you add your fonts to your Brand Kit and any additional uploaded fonts.

BRAND LOGOS

Use this Canva Pro feature to add any and all logos. We’re talking main, alternate, watermark, products, the works!

If you don’t have watermarks yet, no worries! We used to use them pretty regularly on our Pinterest pins. But now they’re used on certain graphics for copyright protection/prevent theft.

Product logos aren’t necessary, either. But if you have them, add ’em! We use ours in promotional material and email signatures, so having them readily available has come in handy.

To add Brand logos, click ‘+ Add new’ on the right and upload away.

If you still haven’t found the perfect logo, be sure to check out our Five-Minute Brand!

You’ll get instant access to 40 complete (editable!) brand kits PLUS matching Canva templates to brand your blog. It’s truly lived up to its name if we do say so ourselves!

BRAND TEMPLATES

This spot holds all of your brand templates, so you’ll never accidentally design over your original!

We’ve done that a few times with our course mockups before using this Canva Pro feature. It was a hard lesson learned. But hey, now we know!

To add a design to your Brand templates, you can either click ‘+ Add new’ from the top right or click ‘Share’ –> ‘Brand template’ from within the design itself.

It’ll now have a ‘BRAND TEMPLATE’ designator regardless if you’re in your Brand Kit or on the Home page, which we love.

What makes this particular Canva Pro feature even cooler is that when you click on a ‘BRAND TEMPLATE,’ a pop-up appears asking if you’d like to use it as a template or edit the original.

It’s just another added layer of protection, preventing an instant stress headache when you realize you unintentionally edited your template yet again.

BRAND CONTROLS

If you have a team, this Canva Pro feature is for you! Remember when we said segmenting your color palettes would come in handy later on in this post? Here’s what we mean.

With Brand controls, you can limit your team’s access to specific color palettes and fonts, so it’s important you have a dedicated brand color palette.

We forgot to toggle the ‘Color control’ box when we onboarded a new assistant designer. Well, they ended up creating about 30 designs using the wrong color palette. Again, now we know for next time.

But what’s REALLY cool for anyone with a team is our ability to require ‘Design approval!’

Once you toggle ‘Design Approval,’ select the cogwheel icon to customize:

• Approvers (who is able to approve designs)
• Flexibility (either approval is required or encouraged)
• Conditions (applies to ALL or specific designs)

This is hands down the most exciting Canva Pro feature because we can ensure our designs are on brand before they’re scheduled to social media, uploaded to Pinterest, or added to any of our products.

Before, we were either using email or Asana to communicate approval/changes.

While that’s not a bad thing, it did take extra time flipping from one thing to the next, logging in, going back to our email to say it’s good to go, etc.

FOLDERS

Prior to mid-2022, free Canva users were limited to just two folders. Both free and Canva Pro users can now have unlimited folders (and subfolders), which is a type-A blogger’s dream!

We love to organize our designs based on categories to, you guessed it, save time.

Here’s an example of how we organize our designs with Canva folders.

[PRODUCTS] folder –> individual [Product Name] subfolders –> individual folders for promo graphics, seasonal graphics, testimonials, product templates, etc.

LIBRARY OF PREMIUM ASSETS

While this Canva Pro feature isn’t necessarily something you need to set up like we just did with our Brand Kit, we want to ensure you know how to ‘save’ your favorite premium assets for quick reference.

We guess if you really think about it, you’re still technically setting up your workspace, so we’ll roll with it!

If you find a stock image, design element, or anything else from Canva’s extensive library (except audio), you can either ‘Star’ it or ‘Add to folder.’

Starring sends that specific asset to your ‘Starred’ folder from your left menu. But if you want to take your organization up a notch, you can click ‘Add to folder’ and add it to, let’s say, a designated Stock Photos folder.

To add your Stock Photos folder to your left menu, click ‘Projects’ –> ‘Folders’ and again on your Stock Photos folder.

Now when you need to add a stock photo to your Pinterest pin design in Canva, that folder is now saved to your left menu for you to access with just one click!

If we just blew your mind with everything that Canva Pro has to offer, you’re going to LOVE our complete Canva course, Confidently Canva!

It’s EVERYTHING you need to know to feel completely confident in your designs because now you truly understand the tool you’re using and the design concepts involved.

Enroll now and get $20 off Confidently Canva today!

Other non-negotiable Canva Pro benefits for bloggers are:

• Downloading transparent images
• Smartmockup library of +8000 mockups
• FULL access to high-quality stock photos, videos, graphics, and audio
• Thousands of drag-and-drop templates in a variety of styles
• Instant graphic resizing
• Wide selection of page, text, and graphic animations
• Schedule straight to Instagram, Facebook, and more right from Canva

Speaking of other awesome Canva Pro features, make sure you check out these awesome Canva Shortcuts to help you design faster!

It’s the little things when it comes to Canva Pro features

Just like how extra change can add up, the same holds true for little time-saving features you’ll find with Canva Pro.

Your logo, colors, and fonts will only be a click away by setting up your Canva Pro account the right way.

Stop wasting time scrolling through your hundreds (if not thousands of Uploads), searching to no avail, and looking up hex codes to that one seasonal design you created ages ago.

And if saving time isn’t your cup of tea, but saving money is, how about this? We cut ALL of our stock photo memberships once we upgraded to Canva Pro.

We’re not going to drop any names, but we had annual memberships to three different (premium) stock photo memberships that, let’s just say, were NOT cheap.

It was upwards of $700/yr that we slashed from our budget just by upgrading to Canva Pro’s annual plan. Now, will this work for EVERY niche? Probably not.

But there’s a plethora of tech-style photos that are perfect for our brand.

And if we can put those hundreds of dollars into other things like ad spend or monthly site support, that’s a HUGE win for us.

Check out these Canva Pro features yourself with a FREE 30-day trial of Canva Pro. The only you’ve got to lose is time!

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS POST:

• How to Choose Brand Colors For Your Blog
• FREE 30-day trial of Canva Pro
• Confidently Canva
• Canva Shortcuts to Help You Design Faster
• 3 Easy Canva Resize Tricks for 2024

Don’t forget to enroll in our FREE self-paced Canva 2.0 Quick Start course! It’s PERFECT for learning the ins and outs of what makes Canva the best design platform for bloggers!

TRY CANVA PRO FREE FOR 30 DAYS

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

To be honest? It’s the best $14.99/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!⬇