Create Soft, Dreamy Designs with Transparent Images

Do you want your design to be as gentle as an Anthropologie catalog spread? Sometimes a design can be like a ramshackle student film production, with every shape and color elbowing for screen time. Great designers know that a well-made backdrop helps the foreground shine all the brighter. Give your designs an elegant backdrop with transparency!

Every element of a Canva design has adjustable transparency. Simply select an element, then click the down arrow to reveal the transparency slider. Move the slider to the left to gently reduce the level of opacity until the element becomes entirely transparent and disappears. There’s just so much you can do with the transparency slider:

Looking for a place to begin? Try out the transparency slider by giving a veiled look to some photos. You can adjust the transparency of any photo or illustration to make create faint, delicate impressions, perfect for pairing with spacey text with plenty of leading. You can even combine semi-transparent images with other design elements to create captivating overlays and textured effects. The possibilities are endless.

Textholders are carefully curated text in our image library that feature perfectly paired fonts and styles that you can drag right into your designs. But you can make your own textholders too! Try starting with a shape from our image library, and then adjust the transparency slider to turn the default bold colors into gentle pastels. Next click on the “Text” pane to choose a font and craft your message. You can even drag a selection box around your text and shape to move and scale them together, just like a textholder from the image library.

We have plenty of open, spacious background images to choose from in the “Background” pane, but why stop there? Any photo can be a background! Resize your photo to fill up the page, and then open up the transparency slider. Slowly move the slider to the left until your text, photos, and all your important design elements stand out nicely. Next, experiment with photo effects to make your background even more subtle, or provide complementary colors for your design.

Want to make sure that everyone knows where the next landmark viral image came from, without a big, gnarly logo getting in the way of your design? Try a transparent watermark! After you’re done designing, drag and drop a logo from your website, company, or brand into your image. Move your logo to a corner or some other unobtrusive place, and then apply transparency until your logo is only faintly noticeable. Now you’ve signed your work without ruining its impact!

Whether they represent faint whispers or convey subtle, emotive inspirations, transparent text is a remarkably expressive way to bolster your design. Use the text tool to add words to negative space in a photo or layer them on top of your photos’ subject. Choose your font, size, and style, then adjust the transparency slider until your text just barely dips into the background. For an artsy look use several text samples in the same design with different styles and levels of transparency to create a beautiful text mosaic. Design whenever and wherever inspiration strikes by downloading Canva on your iPhone, iPad or Android devices.