41 | Build a Brand Kit in Canva [TDTH Challenge #8]

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Chapters

• 5:31 Introduction to Mini Challenges
• 42:05 Importance of Branding and Creating a Brand Kit
• 9:40:37 Summary and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey y'all, welcome back to another episode of Turn Down the Hustle. You are listening to an episode that is part of a special series. Every Monday. I'm dropping a very quick thing that you can do as mini challenges to move the ball forward in your business. We are focusing on working smarter, not harder. Now that we're a couple of months into 2025, I have to ask you guys how are these challenges going so far for you? Are they helping you get more organized, helping you streamline your business? I'd love to hear what's working for you and what wins you've had so far, maybe even a few aha moments.

Speaker 1: 0:42

This week, we're talking about something that will save you a ton of time and make your business look polished and professional setting up a brand kit in Canva. So today we're covering why branding matters and it's probably more than you think also how to set up a brand kit in Canva step by step, and how to use high quality designs in minutes, not hours. So why does a brand kit matter anyways? Branding isn't just for the big businesses. It's for anyone which hopefully is also you who wants to be recognized, consistent and professional. Whether you're selling shirts, handmade goods or digital products, we want our brand to be recognizable. Why? The first thing is because branding builds trust. Think about some of the businesses you buy from regularly. Chances are they have a recognizable look and feel when people see a post from you.

Speaker 2: 1:57

You want them to know that it's yours before they even see their name you. You want them to know that it's time to turn down the hustle. Here's your host. Digital marketer, cold brew lover, t-shirt maker, freckled hype girl and owner of Sunkist Virtual Assistant, amy.

Speaker 1: 2:13

How many times have you been scrolling your feed? See something funny, read it, go to tag somebody and then, before you realize it, the person that you would have tagged is actually the person that shared it. So, for instance, my friend Caitlin. There's things on Facebook I see all the time and I go to tag her and then I laugh whenever I realize wait, she shared it. My point on that is that we want your customers to have the same feeling. We want them to be able to recognize your post, your brand, your products before they even have to take a second to scroll up a little bit more to confirm. Also, number two, that brand kit makes marketing effortless. Have you ever stared at a blank Canva design, wondering where to start, what colors to use, what font, what layout, things like that? Or maybe you found yourself using 10 different fonts in a single post, or you make a post in one font, next font for the next post, and you just don't know which one you like best. A brand kit will eliminate that guesswork because it has you narrowed down what colors are you going to use and stick to? What fonts are you going to use and stick to? You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. Which leads me to the third reason. It saves you time. Again, you know, a theme here is working smarter, not harder, and building that brand kit means you can create content faster, including social media posts, your product mock-ups or any graphics that you need to use for marketing, and you can do that without reinventing the wheel every single time.

Speaker 1: 3:50

Let's move into how to set up your brand kit in Canva If you don't already have a Canva Pro account. This is one of the features that makes it worth it. The brand kit is a built-in tool that allows you to save all of your branding elements colors, fonts, logos and now, at the recording of this episode, even preset templates so you can easily access. So I want you to log into Canva and then on your far left menu you're going to see it's the fourth icon down that says brand. I want you to select that. The first thing that will open up for you is your brand kit, so click that and then you can set up multiple different brand kits. So ideally, you have one that is just set for your business. These are your business colors, it has all of your logos, all of those good things. But if you run any unique promotions or for certain events where maybe the brand is skewed a little bit with different colors, then you can also build that within the brand kit. So I want you to go to the far right and select add new. From there, you can name your brand kit whatever you want to name it.

Speaker 1: 4:56

Once you have it open, you'll be able to now organize, versus back in the day, we should just upload all of our logos in the photo section of Canva and then have to scroll down to try to find them all the time. But now you can take all of your logos. To my knowledge, there isn't a limit to how many logos you can have. I currently have 22 different variations. Upload all of your logos there.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Moving down to your colors, this is where you're going to add all of your colors by color palette. Name the hex codes to make sure you get them spot on. Moving on to your fonts, so if you have a special font that you've bought, you can upload them here. You can even add your brand voice, because there's some cool apps that are added to Canva with some AI and you can tool with those. And then the last few sections are photos, graphics and icons. So if you have certain things that you want to add to those sections, you can. For instance, in the graphics area, I have all of my branded shirt tags, so they're not like a watermark, but I am constantly adding them to my gang sheets to get printed with the different sizes, in case someone rips out the sizing tag. They'll have that there, so I save those in the graphics section.

Speaker 1: 6:17

When you're thinking about your brand colors, I want you to stick to three to five colors that represent your brand. Think about your vibe. Are you bold, high energy, maybe some brighter colors and vibrant, or are you more neutral, modern, boho? Maybe you want to go for more earthy tones or pastels. And again, don't forget to grab those hex codes and save them there.

Speaker 1: 6:40

Working back to those fonts, when you're working through those fonts, I want you to have two. You could have maybe a third for an accent font, but really those main two. One is going to be for headlines Think bold and lettering so it's easy to read whenever someone's scrolling and then one body text. This has to be easy to read, very clean and simple. While it might not grab attention, it will allow someone to easily read what you have typed out, probably for your body text. This is not one of the texts or one of the fonts that you have bought online. It's probably just a very generic font and then, like I alluded to, you can have an accent font, maybe something cursive, but it complements the others, but it's not too fancy because, again, too many of the script fonts are very hard to read.

Speaker 1: 7:37

When you're uploading your logo, think about a full color logo. Think about, maybe, a black and white logo. Make sure that background is also transparent. I like to have logos that are all white, logos that are all black. So, depending on the background that I use, I can pull different variations of my logo onto the graphic.

Speaker 1: 7:57

And then, lastly, what I'll talk about is the brand templates. This is really cool. These are like set Canva designs. You can mark them as a template. So if you're finding yourself constantly duplicating and reiterating different versions and creating different things, okay. The last thing is brand templates. So if you find yourself constantly saving as copying, copying for different designs that you have, you can actually just set one master Canva template and then just duplicate from that template all the time. Okay.

Speaker 1: 8:32

So now that you have everything set up, it's time to put it to use for your content creation. So first you can start to create some templates for social media. Set up just a few of these go-to posts. Again, these can go into your brand templates. Think about quote graphics, new arrival posts, promotional posts, all of that good stuff. That way, all you have to do is swap out the text and images, while keeping everything on brand.

Speaker 1: 8:59

You're also going to be able to work through your content a lot faster, because now, whenever you're working from a design, when you click that brand button, all you have to do is select your colors, your fonts. They're right there in that left column. You don't have to hunt for them anymore. And remember, when you keep all of your consistent coloring, fonts and brand, that consistency aids in building trust and enhancing that professionalism, not to mention keeping everything cohesive, which I love, which I love. All right. So that's it. In summary, your brand kit is that shortcut to consistency and it also will help you create high quality content fast. Did I mention consistent? Yeah, it will all be consistent. No more wasting time searching for fonts, colors or logos. It's all organized and ready to go inside of your brand kit. You have to set up a brand kit inside of Canva. Until next time, keep turning down the hustle.