12 Canva Tips and Tricks EVERY Beginner NEEDS to know (2026 Tutorial) 💡

Are you just starting out using Canva and feeling a bit overwhelmed at the thought of having to learn the entire platform? I remember what it was like, jumping into Canva for the first time, staring at a blank project and thinking, okay, now what? It can be really intimidating as a beginner, which is why I wanted to create this video. Because the truth is, you don't need to become a Canva master from day one. You just need to know a few of the most important basics that'll get you feeling confident navigating through the features and creating your designs without hours of trial and error. So today I'm walking you through 12 Canva tips and tricks that every beginner should know right from the start. These are tools and features that are going to make your design process a ton easier and honestly the ones I wish someone had told me when I first started using Canva. I'm especially excited to show you number seven. It's probably my all-time favorite Canva capability. Now, before we jump in, I do want to note that Canva has a few different plans available and if you're just starting out, you're likely using either the Canva free plan or the Canva pro plan. A lot of the features I'm going to be showing you today are accessible on the Canva free plan, but a few are pro-only tools, which means that they can only be used by those who are on the upgraded Canva pro plan. I'll make sure to mention which ones are Canva pro features as we go through, but I just wanted to go ahead and mention that. If you feel like you might be interested in trying out Canva pro, I've got a free 30-day Canva pro trial linked in the description box below, or you can scan the QR code that's on the screen right now to try it out completely for free for 30 days to see if it's a good fit for what you need. And with that, let's jump into Canva. Okay, first off, let's talk about starting a project. Now, there are two options for starting your project. Number one is you can start from a pre-made template. That's one reason why so many people love Canva is because they have this template section you can access here on the left where it says templates, and there are tons and tons of different templates for different types of designs. You can scroll through what's in here by type, so you can click on presentation, poster, resume, email, invitation. They've got lots of different types of templates, or you can search for what you want here in the search bar. So I might type something in like workbook template. Now Canva will show me the results only for the types of templates that are applicable for workbooks. And if I see one I like, I can click on it and choose customize this template, which will bring me into the editor where I can see the template and I can just simply click in and change anything about it, like swapping out the photos, changing out the text or the colors, the fonts. I can edit this and revise it to make it exactly what I want it to look like. This is a great option if you don't want to start from scratch, but you can start from scratch if you want by coming up to the top left-hand corner where it says create. And this is where you're going to choose the size project that you want to create a blank canvas for. Canva has a lot of preset sizes already in here, so you don't even have to research to know what size you need. For instance, if I want to create a social media post, I can click on that category here and then choose the one I want. I've got everything from YouTube thumbnails to Instagram posts, Instagram stories, YouTube shorts. But if I don't see the size that I need here, I can also click here where it says custom size. And this will let me input any kind of custom size I want. I can just input the width and height and then change the units to what I want. I can use pixels, inches, millimeters or centimeters. So let's say I want a five by seven inch, I'm going to just change that two inches and then input five by seven and click create new design. And here it's bringing me into the editor. But this time, since I'm not using a template, I've just got a blank canvas that I can start building on from scratch. Next up, let's talk about how to find the right elements. So you're likely going to want to use photos or graphics or icons, some kind of element in your design. So we're going to come over to the left hand side where it says elements and click there. And there are a few different ways you can search here in the elements library to find what you need. Number one is to simply browse the categories that are listed here. So you can click where it says shapes, graphics, animations, photos, whichever one is most relevant for what you're looking for. So let's say I want to find a graphic, I want to click into the graphics category. And then I can see some subcategories here from featured to gradients, animation, social media icons. So I can simply click what I want from one of these sections and add it straight to my project. The second way I can find the right graphic is to use this search bar here and type in what I'm looking for. So let's say I want to find a pineapple wearing sunglasses. I can just type that in here and click search. And then it'll bring up all the results within the Canva elements library for a pineapple wearing sunglasses. Now again, I can see some subcategories here for the types of elements. So if I'm looking for a graphic or a photo, I can click see all next to either of those and just see all of the different matches within that subcategory. So graphics are going to be things more like icons, illustrations, sketch style, whereas the photo section are going to be actual photographic images. Now one thing to note here is you'll see next to some of these elements, this little crown symbol, that's telling you that that specific graphic or photo is a Canva Pro piece of content. Some of them have it and some don't. The ones that don't have it are Canva free content and Canva has different licenses that tell you what you're allowed to use the pro content versus the free content for. So especially if you're wanting to create designs to use commercially, like on products to sell, you'll want to read up on those Canva licenses to know what you can do with the pro and the free content. If you are on the Canva free plan and you want to use one of these pro elements, you'll have to pay individually per design before you download it to remove the watermark. But if you're a Canva Pro user, you'll have access to all of these pieces of content regardless of if it's free or pro without having to pay anything extra. Now let's say you look through all of these categories and you still can't find exactly what you want. There's a third option here, which is to use Canva AI to generate your own element. So with this phrase still typed in, pineapple wearing sunglasses, I can come down here instead of hitting search, I can tap generate or use the dropdown menu here to tell Canva AI what specific kind of element I want it to generate. So it's still going to use my prompt here, but I could, for instance, click on graphics to tell it I want a pineapple wearing sunglasses in more of a graphic style rather than something like a photo or a video. And here are the four options it's given me. So if I like one, I can simply click on it to add it to my project. Now, did you know that you can use Canva to create digital products to sell online? If you're looking for a way to make passive income, which means that you can create something once and make sales on it over and over again on autopilot, then selling digital products is an amazing way to do this. And my personal favorite thing to use Canva for, so if you're interested in selling digital products, but you really have no clue where to start, then I've got you covered. I've got a deep dive masterclass called Digital Product Powerhouse that goes through my personal four step system to starting and growing a profitable digital products business. It's about 45 minutes long. It's completely free for you to watch, and I've got that linked in the description box below, or you can scan the QR code that's on the screen right now. I definitely recommend you hop over and watch that when you're done here watching this video to get a shortcut to making money online selling digital products. All right, let's talk about Canva tip number three, Canva frames. So we're still over here in the elements library. You'll notice one of the categories that's here says frame. So if we click into the frame area, you'll see all different kinds of Canva frames. You can spot that it's a Canva frame because they all have this little scene with the grass and the blue sky with the white cloud. If you ever see anything with that design on Canva, that's your clue that that is actually a Canva frame, which has a specific purpose. Let's take this computer frame, for instance, because it has a frame built into this computer graphic, I can use a photo and simply drag it over the frame and it automatically snaps into the frame, making it appear like my photo is now in this computer. There are all different types of sizes and shapes of frames. Let's take this one, for instance. Here's a cute little scalloped edge flower shape. Again, I can drag my photo over it and it'll snap my photo into that shape. So it appears like a cutout of that shape. This is so much easier than trying to manually cut out a shape like this for a photo. So Canva again has this huge library of all different types of frames, everything from basic shapes to film and photo, devices, paper. And if you're ever wondering if there's more to it, you can click the see all next to the name of the category and you'll be able to see all of the different frames that fit within that subcategory. There's just so many that you can browse through. They've got flower shapes, blobs, retro, letters, numbers. There's even a trending section. So you can find the one you want by just browsing through these or you can describe what you're looking for. So let's say, for instance, I want one that looks like a Polaroid. I could type in Polaroid and here are the different ones that would match that. So I could click on this to add it to my project, drag my photo over and it looks like it's inside this Polaroid. Now you'll notice back here in the main elements library where we clicked on frames, there are two other sections that also make use of frames. One is called grids and one is called mockups. So the grids area also makes use of frames, but has them in just different grid layouts. If you ever need multiple photos or images that are evenly spaced in a certain way, this is where you would come for that. And then the mockups section is more for products. They've got some for digital products and physical products. So let's say you want to put your design on a t-shirt. You could click on the apparel section and choose any of these cute little mockups with these models and just drag your design onto the frame here. So it appears like it's on the t-shirt. All right, next up, let's talk 3D elements. Okay, we're still in the elements library. You can tell I love this whole elements section. There's so many amazing things you can find here. And one of my favorite sections here is this one that says 3D. So unlike the normal 2D graphics and photos we might be using, these elements are specifically 3D, which means if we add one to our canvas, we can click in the middle here to rotate this around and see this graphic from any angle. So of course, like we've seen before, we can just choose one by browsing what's already here in the library, or we can use our search box to describe what we want. So let's try a teddy bear. And we've got all of these different cute teddy bear results that we could add. If we're not finding something that we like here, we can also use Canva AI like we did before clicking this generate button. We want to make sure before we click that to select the dropdown menu and choose 3D. And here it's given us four different options for our 3D teddy bear models. And the one we like, we can simply click to add it to our project. And again, it'll have the same functionality where we can click here in the middle to rotate it to whatever angle we want to see this teddy bear from and keep it there. Okay, now let's talk about solid colors versus gradients. When we're working with colors on Canva, we've got a lot of options, which I love. So let's take just the background of this canvas. For instance, when we select that, we'll come up here to our top floating toolbar, click on the little color circle here, which will open up our full color menu here to the left. Now, right off the bat, we've got two sections that are titled default. We've got default solid colors. So we can just click on one of these to make our background one solid color from these options. And we've got one that says default gradient colors. And if you're not familiar, a gradient is where you're using more than one color, and it's sort of fading or blending in from one side to the other. So there are these default gradients in Canva that look really nice together. But if you don't see what you want in either of these default categories, you can also create your own from scratch. So this is where we would come up to the top, where this little plus button is that says add a new color. We can either just choose the color we want by clicking on it here at the top. We can use our slider to move this around to the color that we want. But all of this is within the solid color tab. So this is how you would choose your own solid color. You can also input the individual hex code here if you know that. But if you want a gradient, you can switch from solid color over to the gradient tab, which allows you to choose more than one color. It'll start with two colors off the bat, but you can always add in more by clicking this little plus button. And if you want to change out the colors that are showing, you just simply click on the circle that you want to change and select your new color here. You can also change the style of the gradient here under style. So right now it's going from left to right, but we could do it from top to bottom. We could choose the diagonal style, a radial style, which goes from the center out, or this last one, which goes from the top left corner down. So gradients are just super fun to play around with. You can add multiple colors and experiment with this until you get the look you're wanting. Now, if we come back over to solid color, let's say we already have something like a photo or an image that we're working with that we want to match the color of, but we're not quite sure what the hex code of it is. We can use the color picker tool here. It looks like a little eyedropper where it says pick a color. When we click on that, it'll give us this big round cursor to hover over the area of the image or the photo that we want to match the color of. So let's say we want to match this pretty kind of greenish color in the water here. Then I'm going to click on that and it automatically matches that color. So it's changed my background to this really pretty sea green color to match. Another option that pops up when we do have a photo in our project is this photo colors section. So this will pull the colors that are already in this photo and have them appear here. So we can just easily, with one click, change from one to any of these that it's pulling from our photo. And lastly, if we have a Canva brand kit, we can pull colors from there. So you'll see my Kate Hayes brand kit is appearing here. These are my brand colors that I use for my brand to stay consistent across the board. So if I'm wanting to just use one of my brand colors, I can have quick and easy access to just pick one of those as well. Now we're about to go more in detail into what this brand kit is. But if you're finding value in this video so far, would you give it a like and consider subscribing to our channel? We release new videos and tutorials every single Tuesday. So that way, if you're subscribed, you'll never miss any of our new content and it truly helps our business. OK, so your brand kit in Canva is where you can house things like your logos, your colors, your fonts, your brand voice, any stock photos or images or icons that you use repeatedly. You can really customize this and make it whatever you want. So here's my brand kit. If I click into, let's say, logos, you'll see all my different logo images that I've uploaded for different products and launches I've had. I can click into colors to see all of my different brand colors. I've got a font section with my brand fonts, a brand photos section with all of my brand photos. And why this matters is because when I am in here in the editor working on a project, I don't have to go individually search for my fonts or colors. So for instance, if I have text here and I want to change this to one of my brand fonts, I can just come to the font section. And instead of having to search for my individual brand font manually, it automatically pulls it up here under my brand kit section. And with one click, I can just change this to my brand font. Same thing with colors. If I select my color area, it's got my brand colors here. So I'm not having to go look for my colors. I can just click and change it over super quick and easy. That works for text, but it also works for elements. So let's say I want to change this computer. Element to one of my brand colors. I can easily do that as well. When I'm here in the editor, I can come over to the left where it says brand and pull in a photo from my brand photos section. So again, I'm not having to individually upload this every time I want to use one of these. It's going to go ahead and just have it here with one click. I can easily add it to my project and continue working with it. Now, it's important to note here that technically you do have access to build a brand kit on both the Canva Free and Canva Pro plans. But with the Canva Free plan, it's extremely limited. All you get access to are three colors to add to your color section. And that's it. If you're on the upgraded Canva Pro plan, then you get access to all of these different colors, fonts, photos, everything that I just showed you inside the brand kit. And you can have up to 100 different brand kits, which is super useful if you're wanting to have different brand kits for different projects. Or if you're working with multiple clients and you want to keep them all separate, you can have multiple kits and switch between them easily. So again, remember, if you don't have Canva Pro yet, but you want to have access to this and try it out. I've got that free 30-day Canva Pro trial link below. So you can grab that, set up your whole brand kit and see everything you can do with it. I do actually have an entire video showing how to set up a brand kit. So if you're interested, I'll have that linked in the description below as well. All right, moving on to our next Canva tool, which is the background remover. OK, this is absolutely one of my very favorite Canva features, if not my top one. And it's because it is so easy and removes hours of manual work. So take this photo, for instance. If I wanted to remove this white wall that's in the background here, all I have to do is come up to the top where it says BG Remover. Now you'll notice this does have a crown symbol next to it, which means this is a Canva Pro only tool. You'll have to have Canva Pro to use this. But once you do, you'll be able to click this. And in a matter of seconds, it removes that entire background. So all I'm left with is the subject of the photo. This is great for layering. So let's say I wanted to just use this picture of me for a social media post. Maybe I want to change the background color. I can do that quick and easy. And voila, this is possible because of that background remover tool. And next up, let's talk photo editing tools. When we're working with a photo inside of our editor, with the photo selected, we can come up to the top where it says Edit. And that'll open our full photo editing menu here to the left, where we can see this tools section. If we click to see all, we've got lots of different options here. The first one I want to show you is the blur feature. So if we click where it says Blur, we can blur either a specific area of our photo or the whole image. So we can leave it on brush or click over to whole image. If we want to blur the whole image, we can choose the intensity. So you'll see as we take our intensity slider to the right, the image is becoming more and more blurry. To the left is less and less blurry. So this is really helpful if you're wanting to use this as a background and wanting to add something like text on top to make it more readable. If we click back over to the brush option, we can choose our brush size. So that'll make it larger if we take this to the right. And we can choose the intensity of the blur. So how blurry we want this. So let's say we want to just blur out only this laptop area. We can take our brush and just click and drag it over the area we want. And as we're dragging it, you'll see it's adding a little bit of purple over it. So you can see where you're actually selecting. You'll continue until you've highlighted or selected the entire area you want to make blurry. And then once you release, you'll see the blur appear over just that area. You can go back over it if there are parts that didn't really apply correctly until you're happy with it. Now there's another tool called Magic Eraser, which is super helpful. This one is a Canva Pro only tool. But when you click on Magic Eraser, you'll be able to erase one or multiple parts of this image without having to get rid of the whole thing. Again, you have options here. You can choose to brush over the area you don't want. Or you can change it from brush over to click. This will allow you with your cursor to just click on the one item or area that you want to delete without having to brush over it. You can also change it from click to foreground or text to highlight specific areas in your photo. For now, I'm going to leave it on click. And let's say I want to get rid of this hat. I can simply click on that and choose erase. And there we go. It's removed that hat and filled in that area with the same white background. So it looks seamless. There's also a tool here called Magic Layers, which is super helpful. This will just take a flat static photo like this and create different editable layers. When it's done, you'll see all of the different layers individually selected. So you can actually just click in here to any of these and move around just that one part of the photo, which is super impressive compared to just having a static image that we couldn't move anything around in before. You can use this to delete certain items or to enlarge or make them smaller, move them around to a different position. The sky is really the limit with what you can do with this Magic Layers tool. All right, let's say we just have this laptop here and we want to make this look like a different style. We can come in our editing menu to the style match section and click see all. And this will let us see all the different styles that we can turn this into. So it's going to take our laptop but make it look totally different in a different style. You can choose anything from watercolor to doodle to line art, pixel art, pop art. There's so many different fun choices here. So let's say we want this in a pop art style. I'm just going to click that. And here is our pop art style laptop. So this is a fun way if you have a certain design style in mind to accomplish that. If you're not seeing the exact element you want from the elements library, let's go back and try one other style. This time I'm going to choose etching. And here is the laptop in the etching style. So this is just one of my very favorite tools because in a matter of seconds, again, you can totally change the look of an element to what you want it to be. Okay, the next thing I want to show you is the suggested apps section. So Canva has a lot of apps that you can use to accomplish the different things. But I love that they suggest apps for you depending on what you have selected. So let's say I have this photo of pineapple selected. I come up to my editing menu, which opens here to the left. If I scroll down, I'll see where it says apps. And it's going to give me some suggested apps that do different things. So for instance, this Vectorify app will take a photographic image like this and turn it into a vector. So more of an illustrative icon style. Again, this Vectorify app is a Canva Pro option. So you'll have to have Canva Pro to use this. But when you come into the Vectorify app, you can choose if you want the vector to be full color or black and white. And if you choose black and white, you'll see this threshold slider. You can adjust how you want it to look. For now, I'm going to choose full color and then click convert to vector. And here is our vector style pineapple. So you'll see as I hover over it, you can select different parts that are different colors. You can choose the number of colors. So right now there's 18 colors. But if I take this slider down, I can simplify it to include less colors. It'll get more simple as I bring it to the left. And I can change any of the colors that are being used in this vector here where it says all colors. I can simply click into it to change just that one color. There's lots of options here to make this look exactly like I want it to. Now coming back to the apps section, that was the Vectorify app. There's also one that says texture, which I love. I get questions all the time about how to add different types of textures to projects inside of Canva. And this is my favorite way to do it is by using this texture app. There's all different kinds of textures from paper texture to paint. They've got VHS, grit, film grain, light, grunge, fabric. So let's click into one that we like. I'm going to try this grunge category. I'm going to change over to show you one of my brand photos. So you can see how this applies to a photo like this that has a built-in background. So here in the grunge area, I'm going to choose the one I like the best. So I think for this, I'm going to choose this one that says grunge surface. And it'll give me some options here on the left. So I can see the preview of what it would look like over my photo. Right now, it's on the screen mode, but I can change that as well to any of these options. I can also scale it larger or smaller. I can rotate the texture, and I can even choose the opacity. So when I bring this to the left, it's going to be a little less drastic and more see-through. And then to the right, it's going to be more drastic and noticeable. Then I can click Save. And there, I've got a nice grunge texture over my photo. So there are all kinds of textures again here. This is so fun to play around and experiment with. OK, next up, we're talking about adding text. There are several different ways you can add text to your project inside of Canva. You'll come to the left here where it says Text. The first way you can add text is just completely from scratch, which is at the top here where it says Add a Text Box. If you click that, it'll add a little placeholder text box here that you can then work with from scratch. So let's say I want to type in my name. And everything here is just being done manually. So I can come up and change the font by clicking on this little font button at the top. That pulls over my font menu here to the left, where I can choose a different font to change my text to. I can also apply fun effects by coming up to the top menu where it says Effects. And then looking here on the left and clicking on the effect that I want. So I could give it a screen print effect. I could give it a neon effect, a glitch effect. There's lots of different fun options here. But again, this is all just applying these manually when you start from scratch. The next option for adding text is instead of clicking Add a Text Box here at the top, if you have a Canva brand kit, it will automatically show your brand fonts here. So for instance, this is my heading font. I can just click on Heading and it adds it to my project. I can then change what it says, but it's already in my desired font there, just straight from my brand kit. Now on the left, if I scroll down, I'll see this section that says Font Combinations. And this is really great if you kind of don't know where to start. These are presets that Canva has come up with that already have effects applied. So let's say I like this one. I can click to add it to my project and I can click inside to change what it says. I can change pretty much anything about it, like the colors, the fonts, the effects. I can see what effects are already applied. When I have it selected by coming again up to the top where it says effects. So I can see right now it already has a glow effect applied, but I can change that easily if I want to here in the effects menu. So you can think of this font combination section as sort of like text presets. And the next way to add text is through an app. So you'll see this apps section here. I can click to see all and this is going to show me all of the different apps in Canva that have to do with text. All of them do slightly different things, but they have capabilities that aren't built into the normal editor here. So for instance, if I click into the Type Studio app, it'll let me create a new design or choose from a template that is specific to this app. So let's say I like the look of this one. I can start with this template and change this to look like what I want. So I can change what this says. I can change the font. There's a section called warp effect. So I can basically edit the shape here by pulling on different sections with these little circles to warp it in an individual and unique way. I can use this decoration effect to apply some cool little decoration line effects and shadows. There's a texture section, a gradient section. There's just so many different things you can do with this text here. But when you're happy with it, you'll click add to design. And this basically adds your text as its own element. So here I wouldn't be able to click inside of this text because it's not actually adding it as a text box. It's adding it as its own image. But you can work with these different options here on the left to build it out how you like. So that's just an example of the Type Studio app specifically. But there's different apps that do different things. So again, you can play around with these. Many of these apps are Canva Pro. So you'll have to look and see if it has a little crown symbol. But that's another fun option for adding really cool looking text. Now, the next one in our lineup is super helpful. It's also one of my very favorite Canva features. And this is the resize tool. So let's say you have your project finished, but you need it in a different size. Remember, we created this project as an Instagram post size. But let's say I need multiple sizes of this same design. Instead of having to manually and individually create these different sizes one by one and copy and paste our design over, Canva's got this really handy little resize option here at the top left. So if I click Resize, I can use one of their preset sizes here. So for instance, I could choose social media and then choose any of these different preset sizes that they have for different types of social media content. Or I can click on Custom Size to input my own. So let's say I want to make this into a Facebook cover size. I'm going to click on that and then just click Copy and Resize. And here's my new Facebook cover size. I can click in here and make any adjustments I need to to make it look right for this new size. But that is just a quick and easy way to get multiple sizes of the same design. And it's super helpful, specifically, if you're wanting to repurpose one design across multiple social media platforms. Or maybe you want to have a bundle of different sizes of digital products, like a wall art design. This resize tool is going to save you a ton of time. All right, moving right along to our next tip, which is talking about the sharing options on Canva. When you've got your design completely finished and you're ready to move on to the next step, you're going to come up to the right where it says Share. This is going to give you all of your different options for what to do with your design when it's completed. The most common option here is Download. You can obviously just click there if you want to download this as an individual file. You'll see where it says File Type, and you can click here to change from something like a PNG to a JPG to a PDF, SVG. There's lots of different options here for what file type you might choose. And each one has its own different options. So, for instance, if I switch this over to a JPG, I'll see these size and quality sliders. Since I have Canva Pro, I'm able to use these to increase or decrease the size and quality before I download. And once you've got your settings where you want them, you'll just click Download. Another one you might be interested in is this Template Link option. Now, you'll notice this does have a crown symbol. So this is the Canva Pro tool. But if you have Canva Pro, you can create your own template link for this design, which means that Canva is going to create its own unique URL that you can share with people if you want them to be able to come in and edit this as their own template. This is really useful, especially for digital product sellers who are selling Canva templates. You would just create this and then copy and paste this to deliver to your buyer. And then when they go to access it, it'll open up a new unique copy for them. So it never touches your original, but it's opening it up as a new template that they can go in and edit themselves. There's also this one that says a public view link. So if you want to share this with someone, but you don't want it to be an editable template like that one was, this is going to give you a link that you can share with people that is a view only link. So anyone can view the design. They just can't go edit it like they could with this template link. Now, if we click See All, we'll see a lot more options pop up here. One of these is where we can save it to a different platform like Google Drive or Dropbox. We can also send our design straight to a social media platform. Or if we scroll all the way down, you'll see printing options. So you can click on Use My Printer if you want to just print this out yourself, or you can click Print with Canva to use Canva's printing service. But again, lots of different sharing options for when you're done with your design. So remember, if you don't have Canva Pro yet, click on the link in the description box below to grab your free 30-day Canva Pro trial, or you can scan the QR code on the screen right now to hop over and start using that right away. And don't forget to click the link below as well to hop over and watch my deep dive digital product powerhouse masterclass if you're interested in starting and growing a profitable digital products business online. Happy designing!