10 Tips and Tricks for Clever Workflows with Canva Pro

It doesn't always have to be Adobe Creative Cloud - companies and hobby designers have long discovered the platform Canva (in the paid version Canva Pro called) for themselves. Not without reason: With the online tool, impressive merchandise articles, brand logos or social media posts can be designed quickly and easily thanks to various templates. If you also belong to the group of people who use the platform regularly, we have summarized 10 tips and tricks for an even more effective workflow.

What is Canva Pro? 

Canva Pro is a powerful graphic design tool developed by Canva, one of the most well-known online design tools on the market. It is an advanced version of the free Canva Free and offers a variety of advanced features and options relevant to designers, teams, and businesses.

With Canva Pro, users can create professional graphics, presentations, posters, flyers, social media posts, marketing materials, and much more. The tool offers a wealth of features that allow you to further customize and edit your designs to achieve the desired end result. These include access to advanced fonts, the ability to integrate your own brand colors and logos, the use of team templates, and much more.

Canva Pro is aimed at individuals, teams, and businesses aiming to improve their design skills and create appealing and sophisticated graphics. Thanks to the intuitive user interface and numerous templates, it is also popular with small businesses that do not have their own design team.

Canva Pro offers various pricing models, including monthly and annual subscriptions. Canva Pro starts from €11.99 per month for individual users or €13.99 per month for teams with up to 5 members. In addition, there is the aforementioned free version Canva Free, which offers a reduced, but still respectable range of functions and templates for you.

10 tips for your workflow

1. Shortcuts

From Word to Photoshop to Google Chrome: There are shortcuts for almost every application that speed up your workflows. This is also the case in Canva Pro. Here are some particularly practical keyboard shortcuts that can help you work even faster in the design tool:

• Insert text: T

• Insert rectangle: R

• Add circle: C

• Insert line: L

• Add blank page: ctrl/cmd + ↵

• Undo action: ctrl/cmd + Z

• Group elements: ctrl/cmd + G

• Select all elements: ctrl/cmd + A

You can find all other shortcuts on the Shortcuts overview on Canva.com.

2. Brand templates for a consistent corporate design 

For companies, a consistent brand image is indispensable. To ensure this when working with Canva Pro, the tool offers the ability to create brand documents. In this, you can store assets such as logos, brand colors, or your own fonts, which you and your team members can then access. To create brand documents, open the left sidebar on the homepage and then click on “Brand”. There you will find all previously stored designs and can add additional documents.

3. Image search by colors

Speaking of corporate design: Surely you already know that Canva Pro provides access to millions of stock photos. But did you also know that you can filter these by color so that they perfectly match your brand? To do this, you simply have to do the following: While editing a design, click on “Photos” in the sidebar and select the color palette on the far left of the filter options in the top bar. Now you can enter the color code for your corporate color and you will receive matching photos in the image search.

4. Sorting pages with the grid view

If you're editing a document that's several pages long and you want to edit their order afterwards, the grid view is a practical function. With this, all pages are shown in an overview, so you can arrange them by drag-and-drop. The grid view also helps to check whether your individual pages look good together - this is especially important for presentations! To open the grid view, you can simply click on the grid view icon at the bottom right in the open design. Alternatively, you can also use the keyboard shortcut Option + Cmd + 3.

5. Align elements freely

Normally, when you move elements in Canva Pro, they align to invisible guidelines. This is of course practical when you want to ensure that different paragraphs are optimally aligned. For creative designs, however, pixel-precise alignment is often important. To freely align elements, just press cmd or ctrl on your keyboard before moving the desired object.

6. Apply styles to multiple pages

If you want to transfer a certain style to multiple pages, Canva Pro also offers a practical function for this. To do this, simply select “Style” in the left sidebar. Here you will find all style templates that you have already stored. By clicking on the desired template, the style is applied to all pages of your design.

7. Animate designs

With Canva, you can animate your designs quickly and easily. After all, this doesn't just go down well on social media. Simply click on the desired element in your design that you want to animate. You can then choose from several templates under “Animation” in the function menu. In this way, for example, you can slowly display text or fade in visuals.

8. Create QR codes with Canva

For flyers or business cards, QR codes are a great way to link the offline world with the online one. If you want to create such a code for your design, it's easy in Canva Pro: Open the left sidebar again and click on Apps in the selection at the bottom. Here you just need to open the QR code generator, where you can enter the desired URL. Then click on “Create a QR code”, and the desired element is added to your design.

9. Cut out objects in the picture

With Canva Pro, image objects can be quickly and easily cut out from their background. To do this, select the desired photo and then click on “Edit image” in the options bar. Here you can now select the “Background remover” which separates the central motif from the image background. This understandably works best if the image has a uniform background and clear contrasts and edges.

10. Expand Canva Pro with apps

In addition to the QR code, there are various functions and extensions that can help with your work. In the left sidebar, under “Apps”, you will find additional applications such as AI image generators and drawing programs. You can also link Canva Pro here with other tools like Google Drive, YouTube, or Google Maps.

6 Alternatives to Canva Pro

Besides Canva, of course, there are many other Graphic Design Tools. We have listed a few of them for you here:

• Adobe Photoshop or respectively Adobe InDesign
• Procreate®
• GIMP
• CorelDRAW
• Mate