How teams can improve their efficiency and workflow with Canva Pro

Collaboration is supposed to be about things like teamwork, cooperation, and productivity. But in real life, collaboration isn’t always easy.

When you have supervisors, marketing staff, creative team members, clients, and others all weighing in on the same project, things can get a little chaotic.

Recently, we surveyed 500 owners of small to medium sized businesses, and 87% said that they wished the design process were more efficient at their companies. We spoke to them about their challenges and found a number of recurring answers, including:

• Time was being wasted sending graphics back and forth for minor edits such as text changes.
• Resizing a design for various social media platforms was difficult and time consuming.
• Businesses weren’t producing as many visual resources as they wanted to (such as marketing materials, presentations and pitch decks) because they didn’t have the resources or the skills.

We listened to this feedback and used it to inspire the core features behind Canva Pro. Canva Pro’s goal is to make collaboration on design projects simple and easy.

In this article I’ll outline five ways teams can use the new platform to avoid collaborative mistakes and create great work.

When designing graphics for social media each platform requires different dimensions. However, designing a new graphic for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and X (Twitter) can be very tedious. Canva Pro allows all of your team members to make these changes instantly, without the hassle of manual dimension variations.

With Canva Pro you can create a single design and then click “Magic Switch” to automatically resize your graphic to fit any format you like, whether it’s for different social networks, to create different ad sizes or to use the same campaign across different marketing materials. You can make any tweaks and then download the design your design to save and use.

Have you ever been about to wrap up a campaign only to be told that the logo on one of your graphics is out of date, or your colors are all wrong? When you’re working with multiple people within an organization, ensuring all of your visuals are on-brand and consistent is no small feat.

Canva Pro addresses this conundrum by allowing you to create a universal Brand Kit before you start designing. Your chosen fonts, colors and logos will then be automatically available when any member of your team is creating their designs on the Canva platform.

You can set-up and maintain your Brand Kit within the “Your Brand” section of the Canva Pro platform. Choose your colors and fonts and upload your logo and your team is ready to start building a consistent brand identity.

Nothing slows a high octane team down faster than having to create the same documents and visuals over and over again.

Canva Pro allows teams to create templates to be shared between members and used repeatedly, which keeps the design work quick and the designs themselves consistent. Building templates is easy— just create a new design and when you go to share it with your team you just select “Publish as template”. It will then appear in the “Templates” section under the “Your Brand” tab of your Canva Pro account. Here’s some ideas to get you started:

Social Media TeamsFacebook Post Instagram Pinterest Graphic X (Twitter) Post Blog Graphic

Sales TeamsFacebook Post Instagram Pinterest Graphic X (Twitter) Post Blog Graphic

Sales TeamsPresentation Proposal Letterhead Business Card

Content TeamsBlog graphics Email Headers Facebook Ads

Marketing TeamsPresentations Flyers Posters Proposals Online ads Event Proposals

JournalistsBlog Titles Quote Graphics Social media

Misplaced or unorganized assets can lead to missed deadlines, inconsistent branding and poor quality graphics. When you’re working with multiple people, ensuring your visual assets are stored in one central location is key to maintaining an effective design workflow.

Canva Pro allows you to keep all of your important photos in the one place and share them easily with everyone who needs access to them.

Tip: You can easily map your business process with Canva's workflow diagram.

A highly effective way to get your design flow running smoothly is to get a graphic designer to build your visual brand. Once your colors, fonts, logo and templates are set up, Canva Pro makes it easy for anyone within an organization to create beautifully on-brand, consistent graphics.

If you work in a marketing department, you could give your designer the following checklist:

• Set up a font palette
• Choose custom fonts
• Upload your company logo
• Upload on-brand images
• Create templates for commonly used design types such as: social media graphics, presentations, email headers, letterheads, blog banners and more

If you need some help enhancing your visual brand or want to know how to build one from scratch, check out our free branding e-book for tips and inspiration.

We’re really excited about how Canva Pro will help teams improve their design flow, but we’d love to hear from you with any thoughts and feedback you may have. Our goal is to empower every business to create stunning visuals – regardless of their design skill level or resources.

In the meantime, happy designing!