What are Canva Brand Hubs and How Can Withbrand Help You Set One Up?
Canva has become a useful tool for a range of organisations of all sizes and industries. It’s a fantastic platform for non-graphic designers and general marketing professionals to create high-quality and engaging assets such as graphics and videos for use across a range of channels. What’s more, the range of support and learning documentation makes Canva accessible to all.
However, by making the creation of great assets much easier for a wide range of staff, it’s more important than ever that brand guidelines are followed and are consistent, regardless of who has created the asset. This is where Canva Brand Hubs come in. In this guide, we will discuss what Canva Brand Hubs are, why they’re useful, and how we can help set one up for your needs.
What are Brand Hubs?
A brand hub is a place where organisations, design teams, freelancers or anybody working on branding keep their assets. This allows easy collaboration and effective version control, as well as provides an accessible, central hub to keep everything organised and in one place. There are plenty of different approaches to this, some companies use a dedicated folder on a cloud service like Google Drive, Sharepoint, Adobe Creative Cloud or WorkVivo. Some also set up folders on their own company networks and services.
Generally, organisations keep the following documents, files and assets within their brand hubs:
- Brand Guidelines
- Tone of Voice Documents
- Logos
- Fonts
- Brand Colour Palettes
- Live & Completed Projects
However, Canva adds another layer of usability that benefits a range of organisations and marketing teams.
What are Canva Brand Hubs?
Canva brand hubs contain everything we’ve outlined above, but they also allow you to create templates and brand kits from your colours, fonts, logos and other assets. When a user is in the editor, they can work directly on a template and apply a brand kit to work with. This makes creating great graphics and videos even easier and ensures everything is consistent.
Whether it’s creating assets for social posts, graphics for blog posts or adding the finishing touches to downloadable resources, using brand kits and templates means less time is spent to begin with, and there should be fewer rounds of amendments. Brand managers and teams can be confident that their guidelines are being followed, and efficiency is increased all-round.
Canva themselves say:
“Set up by your team admins, but accessible to everyone, your team is empowered to create on-brand, standout content. No more sending teams to outdated folders or multiple platforms to download the design assets they need.”
Moving on to discuss increasing efficiency, they add:
“We know the right design ingredients are only half of the equation. Give your team instructions right where they need them by adding written guidelines to your Brand Kit, which appears in the editor as they design.
Forget about needing a 20-page PDF for your brand guidelines. With Canva’s new contextual guidelines, you'll empower everyone to design within the lines – and have more control over how your brand shows up in the world.”
What’s more, multiple brand kits can be set up for different purposes. Maybe your brand has different divisions or products that have slightly different branding. Or perhaps it’s a creative choice to adopt different branding for different projects. Setting up a brand hub can be a worthwhile investment of time and effort to improve your asset creation process. Fortunately, here at Withbrand we’ve helped many of our clients set up their own Canva Brand Hubs with assets, guidelines and templates.
How to Set Up a Canva Brand Hub
At Withbrand, we love our clients to take charge of their branding efforts. We believe that sharing our expertise and insight makes for more productive, longer relationships that benefit everyone.
It’s important to note that the brand hubs are only available to Pro or Teams users of Canva i.e. those who pay, and it is not available to free users. However, if you fall into one of these categories, we highly recommend making the most of this functionality.
You can find your Brand Hub in the side panel of the homepage. In this section, you’ll be able to set up your Brand Kits, Guidelines and Templates. For the brand kits, click on ‘Create’ and follow the steps to add logos, assets, fonts and colours. Under the Templates section, you’ll also be able to upload or create templates for your team to use, as well as implement Brand Controls to ensure everything is consistent.
There’s nothing to stop you from doing this yourself, but we’re also able to set everything up for you. As part of our work, we’ll almost certainly have created brand guidelines, various assets and templates already. In this case, we can set up your Canva hub, as well as provide instructions and guidelines for you and your staff to utilise. We can also provide guidance on how to create fantastic graphics and assets to use on your socials, your website and as part of any offline marketing activity.
For example, we created the templates below for our client More4Apps. They’re used on their social channels to advertise upcoming webinars.
Contact us today to find out more about how we can empower you to make the most of your Canva subscription and start creating killer graphics and assets. No more inefficient processes and off-brand graphics, just great images for successful campaigns.
Whether you’re an existing partner of ours, you’re looking for advice on a fresh rebrand, or need an injection of creativity, we’re always keen to talk. Explore our previous work, or take time to understand our creative approach.
