Plus, follow these three pro tips for maximizing Canva’s capabilities at your FI.
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, visual content is essential for capturing attention and communicating your brand’s message. Canva is a user-friendly online graphic design tool that’s become a popular choice among businesses, including financial institutions, aiming to maintain brand consistency while creating professional-looking content quickly.
At Mills, we help our clients maximize Canva’s capabilities by providing guidance, templates, and setup support.
Why Canva?
Canva gives users with little to no design experience a platform to easily create social media posts, presentations, videos, posters, and more. Canva offers a variety of customizable templates and drag-and-drop features.
To use the program effectively for your brand, it’s important to understand its strengths and limitations.
Setting Up Your Brand Kit
One of Canva’s most powerful features is its Brand Kit, which lets you upload your brand’s fonts, logos, colors, and imagery to ensure consistent use across your content. However, there are a few key details to remember when using this feature:
1. Supported File Types. Canva supports the following file types:
- Graphics - JPG, PNG, SVG, PDF, AI (saved as “PDF-compatible format”)
- Audio - MP3, WAV
- Video - MOV, GIF, MP4
- Fonts - OTF, TTF, WOFF
2. Color Management. Since Canva is a digital app, it uses RGB by default. When CMYK is required, it auto-adjusts the RGB values to CMYK. The CMYK values should be double-checked as they may not align with your brand standards. PMS color matching is not an option.
3. Font Use. Custom fonts can be uploaded, but AdobeTM fonts aren’t supported. If needed, designers can embed text as graphics, although this removes the ability to edit it. Another solution is to select a digital brand font that can be used in Canva for maximum flexibility.
Pro Tip #1: Add guidelines around Canva usage in your brand standards to ensure consistency across designs.
Templates for a Seamless Workflow
At Mills, we design branded templates to help clients maintain consistency across digital platforms. These templates may include:
- Social media posts (e.g., employee spotlights, announcements, community events)
- Notices (e.g., holiday closures, new blogs)
- Internal communications
Templates empower your team to stay on-brand without reinventing the wheel every time.
Understanding Canva’s Limitations
While Canva is an excellent tool for digital content, it has some drawbacks – especially for print:
- No PMS Color Matching
- Unreliable CMYK Conversion (unless part of Brand Kit)
- No Print Quality Checks
Pro Tip #2: We recommend using Canva primarily for digital content (excluding paid digital ads) and not professional printing.
Other limitations include:
- Limited customization on elements and frames
- Basic video editing tools (ideal for quick edits, not complex animation)
Choosing the Right Canva Plan
Canva offers four plans: Free, Pro, Teams, and Enterprise. For businesses, the Teams plan is the best option – it allows multiple users the ability to collaborate effectively. Once your team account is set up, simply add a Mills designer to help create and manage branded templates.
We're here to help!
With professional guidance, Canva can be a powerful supplementary tool for marketing teams, but it’s not a replacement for more advanced software. By setting up your Brand Kit, using tailored templates, and knowing its limitations, you can create high-quality digital content that genuinely represents your brand.
Our team assists with account setup and optimization to ensure ease of use and brand consistency. After setup, we offer staff training so you can confidently operate the platform.
Pro Tip #3: Work with a pro (Mills) when using Canva to create branded content for your financial institution.
Ready to get creative with Canva? Let’s talk!
