Our Top Ten Canva Tips, Tricks, Tutorials, and Hacks of 2023
As small business owners, we need to create stunning visuals and content to market our businesses online. We rely heavily on Canva to produce engaging graphics and designs for our social media, websites, and more.
And as the self appointed Canva experts… we have given you a TON of Canva tips, tricks and hacks throughout the year in our content.
And we wanted to put it all together for you in ONE place!! Let’s review 10 of our top pieces of Canva advice from the past year so you can level up your Canva designs!
Number One: Use Canva AI Tools to Turn a Carousel into an Email Newsletter
Canva introduced a TON of new AI tools in 2024, and this was one that we were blown away by. You are probably already creating amazing content for Instagram, and using Canva tools you can repurpose that content for other platforms. In this quick tutorial we show you how we transformed a top performing carousel into the first draft of a newsletter that we can send out to our email list!
Number Two: Why AND How to Name the Slides in Your Canva Designs
We know this may feel like an extra unnecessary step in the design process, but we promise you, naming your Canva slides in your designs is so important. If you are creating a ton of content within one design, you are able to quickly identify the slides you need in the downloading process if each of them are named properly. It’s just another way to easily speed up your content creation workflow.
Number Three: How to Create Multiple Colors in One Text Box in Canva
Honestly we used to think this was way more complex than it needed to be… but having multiple colors of text in one text box can really make your design pop. Here is how you can do it SO easily in Canva!
Number Four: How to Create a Folder of Videos to Repurpose in Canva
This one is more of an organization tip, and not a design tip, but it is an important one. We love to repurpose content. But we don’t love storing all of our video content on our phones or in expensive apps where we have to pay for storage. Our solution? Create a dedicated video folder inside of Canva. We can re-use these videos over and over again, inside of Canva designs, or cross promote on multiple platforms. But this will be a game changer for your visual assets and storage!!
Number Five: How to Add GIFs into your Canva Designs
Yeah, you can add GIFs in your Canva designs without having to leave the app! Personally, we love adding GIFs into our designs for social media posts because it truly helps them stand out from the crowd… oh and it integrates really well with our templates, and our audience resonates with the post on a deeper level if the GIF can tug at their heart strings or their funny bone.
Number Six: Use the “Styles” Feature to Add Your Branding to Canva Templates in MINUTES
It is actually really easy to customize a template that doesn't quite fit in with your branding. The "styles" feature in Canva is such an underrated tool that you can use to save you a ton of time when branding Canva templates. With just a few clicks you can add your brand colors and fonts to any (or all slides) in your Canva designs.
Number Seven: Create a Folder of Your Headshots with the Background Removed
We know it is super popular to quickly add an image of you to your design, and using the Canva “remove background” tool, it's pretty quick. But it can be even quicker. When you use this design element often, you are wasting a ton of time removing the background from the same image over and over again. Instead, remove the background once, download it as a PNG, and add it to a “cutout headshot” folder in Canva to quickly add it into your design without having to edit the image every single time!
Number Eight: How to Add a Cutout Image into a Circle Shape in Canva
This one is just fun, and looks trickier than it is! If you want to add some visual interest to your design, this layering tutorial is for you!
Number Nine: Fastest Way to Download Multiple Videos in Canva
When they dropped this feature this year, our minds were truly blown!! You used to have to individually download each slide when you created short form videos in Canva. But with the click of a button, well checkmark, you can download ALL the videos from one design, and have them be separated and not just one long .mp4 video. Thank you Canva. You are welcome for the tutorial.
Number Ten: How We Organized our Canva Workspace
We used to struggle with Canva organization, and this is how we fixed it... these are the 8 things we changed that helped us go from disorganized designs to an easy-to-navigate workspace! I know it can be overwhelming trying to figure out where to start, so use this post as a starting point. Or if you want a bit more help, grab our Canva Organization Workshop!
And there you have it - 10 of our handpicked Canva pro tips from 2023 to help you visualize your ideas, collaborate seamlessly, utilize handy creative assets, and so much more.
Don't forget to reference back to our previous tutorials for more details on any area you want to develop further skills in. As Canva continues releasing upgrades, you know we will be back with more of these tutorials and tips in 2024.
top canva templates of 2023
Oh, and don’t forget that we have a TON of Canva templates for you if you don’t want to design everything from scratch.
So here are some of our FAVORITE templates that we released last year.
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Manu Muraro is the founder of Your Social Team, an Instagram training membership and template shop that help social media managers and Instagram-savvy small business owners to grow engagement and sales using Instagram and content marketing, without the overwhelm. Born and raised in Brazil, Manu moved to the U.S. in 2000 right out of college to work for Cartoon Network, where she made an award winning career in creative and strategy. In 2021, Manu started Your Template Club, a Canva template subscription service to help social media professionals and Canva-savvy business owners to create content that performs on Instagram, add more Instagram features into their strategy, such as Instagram Lives and Reels, and save time.