7 Canva tips that make your work in Canva more efficient

Working efficiently saves time, effort and unnecessary work (surprise ✌️). In this post I go through a few tips for all Canva users that will make your work significantly more efficient! Even those who are not yet active Canva users may find useful tips and hopefully end up trying Canva a bit more.

We use Canva a lot, several hours every day. Canva is our tool for everything from online store product images and blog visuals to website banners and marketing materials, brochures and other print materials. We also use Adobe's design programs, especially Lightroom and Photoshop. And although we use all of them side by side depending on the situation, Canva is fast becoming a really comprehensive, all-round tool for designers. Its particular advantage is how easy it is to use and how fast the workflow is.

I have previously written an in-depth Canva Pro review covering all the benefits Canva Pro offers. Read the post here. In this post I go through the most useful tips for Canva users to speed up and streamline daily work.

The tips I cover in this post:

• Canva Brand Kit, which makes it easy to keep your brand content consistent.
• The most important keyboard shortcuts to cut down on extra clicking.
• Canva Magic Resize changes an image's size automatically without extra layout work.
• Remove the background from an image (e.g. a product photo).
• Lock elements in Canva.
• Scale elements without them losing their proportions.
• Comments and notes to speed up your work.

#1 Canva Brand Kit

Even though Canva templates are a great starting point for many designs, a consistent brand identity is very important in the long run. You surely want even Canva's ready-made templates to match YOUR brand. Or if you create visual content for clients, Canva Brand Kit helps a lot, since you can save your clients' own brand templates in advance so you quickly find the right visual elements when starting a new project.

By using Canva's Brand Kit feature, you can save a huge amount of time in the design process. In Canva Brand Kit you can easily save and use a preset color palette, Canva fonts and brand images. Brand Kit keeps you consistent with your visual identity at all times.

You can use the Canva Brand Kit feature directly from your Canva Pro account's home page!

#2 The most important keyboard shortcuts in Canva

Canva has a huge number of useful keyboard shortcuts. Let's save the long list for a separate post and list here the ones I use most and find most useful:

• Add a line to your design: Press the L key
• Add a rectangle to your design: Press the R key
• Convert text to all caps or all lowercase: Press shift + cmd/ctrl and the K key
• Bold or unbold text: Press cmd/ctrl + the B key
• Duplicate elements: Press cmd/ctrl + the D key, or hold option/alt and drag the element
• Group several elements: Press cmd/ctrl + the G key

#3 Canva Magic Resize

Canva Magic Resize is perhaps one of the features I use the most. It saves a lot of time designing and re-laying out graphics for different platforms. In short, Canva Magic Resize lets you resize a design quickly in a few clicks so it fits many well-known image sizes (e.g. Instagram post > Instagram Story etc.).

Of course this was possible before by copying the Canva file into a new size, but then the resize required more rearranging of elements. The Magic Resize feature minimizes this, and although it does not work 100% perfectly, it is still a big help when you have lots of different projects on the go.

All Canva Pro users can find this feature in the editor under "Resize" > and by choosing one of the preset sizes from the list, such as a social media post.

#4 Canva's background remover

If you have ever tried to figure out how to remove a photo's background easily, quickly and precisely in Photoshop, Word or PowerPoint, you probably already know it is not exactly a simple process. But again, good news for Canva Pro users: you can remove the background from product photos, for example, in a single click!

Here are the steps to remove an image background in Canva quickly and easily, without fiddling around in Adobe Photoshop:

1. Create a design of any size,
2. Upload the image to Canva (the Uploads tab is in the left menu),
3. Click the uploaded image and it is added to your design,
4. Click the image so it is selected and choose "Edit image" in the top menu,
5. Choose Background Remover,
6. And Canva removes the background from your image!

Canva does a surprisingly good job of removing backgrounds. Background removal tools often leave a rather clunky or homemade-looking result, but in my experience Canva's result is very good.

#5 Locking elements in a Canva design

Locking elements is no longer only available in Adobe's programs, since now you can do it directly in Canva!

For those who do not know the lock feature: it lets you lock basically any design element in place so you do not accidentally move it while designing other parts of the graphic. It is also a very useful feature if you share your designs often or let other team members edit the same designs.

How to lock elements in Canva

You can lock Canva elements like this:

• Click an element or select a group of elements you want to lock in place.
• Click the padlock icon at the right end of the top menu.

How to unlock elements in Canva

If you want to edit an element or group you have locked, you first need to unlock it like this:

• Select the locked elements.
• Click the padlock icon (again, at the right end of the top menu).

#6 Scale content and elements without changing their proportions

Section 2 above covered keyboard shortcuts. But scaling content deserves its own section, because I use it constantly in my work. Just like in Adobe's programs, you can hold down the ALT key and drag elements outward so they scale in proportion.

Canva now has the same feature! You can scale up / down different elements such as images, logos, fonts and so on. You do it by holding down the ALT / Option key and dragging the element you want (or several selected elements) from a side or corner. Scaling keeps exactly the right proportions and layout!

#7 Comments and notes

For some people this feature is not needed at all, but for others, like me, it is actually one of Canva Pro's most useful features: the ability to add comments to designs and keep, for example, important brand graphics details in one place or a client's wishes on hand directly in Canva.

This is especially useful for all Canva Pro users with several people on their team. You can write notes to another team member and give feedback easily without jumping back and forth between messages.

You can also conveniently add the file's required quality details to the notes, for example, so when it is time to export the finished graphic, all the details are ready and I know exactly what quality to set so the image fits where it is going. For example, a product image going to an online store needs a much lower quality and file size than print material being sent to the printer.

Finally

If you have read my blog before, you may have noticed that I am a big Canva fan! I use it every day and it keeps getting better with new features. I hope you found a few new things and tips in this article that will stick in your own work. If you use the free version of Canva and are thinking about switching to Canva Pro, be sure to read my in-depth Canva Pro review and why it is worth the investment.