How Canva Templates Can Damage Your Brand
How Canva templates create brand problems, and why custom templates are life-savers
It’s not just me… the Canva *vibe* is controlling our brains.
Or maybe we just need to rethink how we use templates.
I love a template. Ready to go. Plug and play. Pop in your copy and move the fuck on with your day. Marcel Duchamp would have a laugh about them. What’s not to like?
I use templates all the time in my own business. I make them for clients. I scroll through the internet looking at pretty ones. I use them for my own brand assets. There’s nothing wrong with using a template. Only a snobby designer would say not to use a template. No one likes snobby designers, even when they’re right (which, in this case, they’re not). Templates are incredibly practical and make everyone’s life easier. I am pro-template.
How Templates Can Help Your Brand
I always offer templates as options for brand identity clients. While they’re not a necessity for everyone, I find there’s usually some area of most people’s business where a template comes in handy in a big way. There are so many reasons to incorporate templates into brand design:
Templates Save Time
I don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time a client needs a thing. My clients don’t want to have to make a million decisions every time they have to come up with marketing collateral or send an email to their subscriber list. And sometimes, I honestly just need to crank out a piece of content or a document and don’t have time to mess with type size and margins. Templates save time and take unnecessary decision fatigue out of the equation.
Templates Save Money
My clients are small businesses who aren’t working with bottomless budgets. If they need me to jump in every single time they need a little bit of copy changed, those hours add up. I’d rather set them up with a template that allows them to make small changes themselves, and if something needs more major adjustments, I’m there.
Templates Encourage Consistency
Consistency is one of the major pillars of a functional brand, and it takes work. Templates help create and maintain consistency. When you have branded templates for all your needs to work together across platforms, people will begin to associate those graphic elements with your brand. This is brand recognition. Hallelujah.
Templates Help You Stay Organized
Templates are designed around a particular purpose, and organize information based on that purpose. A template for an email marketing campaign will organize information differently than one for a presentation. A well-designed template helps you organize information to convey the message clearly: making sure it’s in the right order, with the emphasis in the right place, and with an intuitive flow.
But...
But.
There’s a catch.
When I say “template”, I mean a custom template. Designed by a designer. For you. For your specific needs. For a specific purpose. For your specific brand. I do not mean a random downloadable template from a Google search.
And I especially do not mean a premade Canva template.
The Canva Trap
Ah, Canva. So much to say about this platform. It’s made the basics of having an online presence so much more accessible for non-designers. I love that about Canva. Democratization! Yay!
From a designer standpoint, Canva is incredibly practical. It allows designers to collaborate with their clients because it’s a platform both parties can use. It’s intuitive and streamlines the implementation of digital collateral (even print, in some cases, though I rarely use it for that).
Canva as a functional tool is not the problem.
The big problem is relying on the premade templates. These designs can work okay in a pinch, but they’re not a design solution. Not even close.
Canva templates have created a serious homogenization problem. Because so many people use this platform, everything online looks like it came from a Canva template. It’s affecting design at large, and not in a cool way.
What I call the “Canva Aesthetic” has become a standard not just for social media marketing, but for everything. Businesses have started adopting this look across all their brand assets, even their logos and product packaging. Besides being creepy in a Girl-Boss-In-Pleasantville sort of way, it’s created a world where everything looks the same.
As a brand designer, it’s my job to guide clients towards differentiation. I’m not talking a totally groundbreaking overhaul of everything we thought possible. Just the simple act of letting a person’s individuality shine through and catch the eye of the people who are a good fit. That’s the beauty in the work: helping people expressing themselves through design.
Homogeneity is the Brand Killer
The universal Canva-fication of everything isn’t a designer problem. It’s a brand problem. Our culture is so oversaturated with similar products it’ll make your head spin. It’s even more obvious online. People are bombarded with the same types of images day after day, and are rightfully ignoring most of it. If you’re falling into the Canva Aesthetic Trap, they might be ignoring you, too.
Prmade Canva templates are a sure way to fall into this trap. Here’s why:
Canva is full of generic design
Canva templates inherently lack specificity. Even most of the cute ones are generic. They’re designed this way on purpose because they’re intended for anyone to use them. Like the generic brand of ibuprofen at the pharmacy, these designs have nothing in particular to say other than “this is a design”. Design is meant to convey a message or a feeling or and idea. The reason we respond strongly to branding is because it subtly (or not-so-sutbly) conveys some sort of emotion or idea. Generic design conveys… pretty much nothing. It makes you easy to forget, which is the opposite of what you want, in case you weren’t sure.
A premade template is not targeted
This goes hand-in-hand with the generic design problem. A major part of brand design is getting super clear on who your audience is. And, no, your audience can’t be “everyone”. They’re the particular people who are interested in your particular thing and your particular way of delivering it. That’s what makes branding and marketing work together. Creating social media content is a form of marketing, and if your marketing is untargeted, it’s likely to fall though the cracks. It may target the wrong people (like when I’m recommended a product that has the general look of something sports-related), or no one at all. In either case, you’re getting ignored.
Canva designs are used by millions of other people
As of early 2024, Canva has about 170 million users. Great news for Canva, not so great for you. Why? Because when you are browsing premade designs, you’re seeing the same ones as everyone else using the platform. All 170 million of them. This is literally the exact opposite effect of what branding is intended to do. Here’s a personal example: I’m a yoga teacher/student, so I follow a lot of other South Asian yoga peeps. There are two who I follow who use the same premade Canva template for all their carousel posts. I cannot tell their content apart. Womp. Chances are, they both chose that template for similar reasons. So, chances are, whatever template you choose, someone else in your industry niche is using it for the same reason. You’re immediately lacking in differentiation, even if you were the first one in your niche to stumble upon the design.
Style without substance
Pretty is nice, but it’s not the point. Design is much bigger than aesthetics. Good design creates emotional resonance, tells a story, says something about the creator and the audience. There are tons of lovely Canva templates, and I’ve definitely used them for inspiration. The problem is, they lack substance. They lack meaning and intention. They’re one-size-fits all cuteness. And not in a kitsch way, unfortunately. At least that would be… something.
It’s hard to be consistent across templates
Remember earlier when I was like, “Templates are really great for maintaining brand consistency”? Here’s the fine print: you have to use the same set of templates over and over to achieve consistency, and all your templates have to work as a team. If you’re relying on premade designs, you’re stuck tailoring your content to fit the template, when it should be the other way around. You need different types of templates for different purposes. An informational carousel post uses different formatting than an event flyer or a big announcement. Suddenly, you’ve got ten different templates and none of them match, and your content is completely unrecognizable because it lacks consistency.
Relying on Canva leads to design errors
If you’re not a designer, you probably aren’t super familiar with design fundamentals. That’s fine, it’s not your job to be. But with Canva, suddenly, you are the design intern, and you have very little idea what you’re doing. Unfortunately, Canva doesn’t filter out templates that sport design problems. No one is going through the Canva library deleting templates that lack contrast, have type that’s too small, or use illegible fonts. And, if you accidentally mess up the formatting in a design, there’s no one there to point it out or help you fix it, and you’re left with a mess that will put people off.
You don’t really own what you design in Canva
There are situations where you need to have copyright ownership of your designs in order to print or sell them. In those cases, you can’t use ones you make it Canva because you don’t own them, you’re just licensing the elements. For example, some online printing services require copyright ownership of the image your printing. You wouldn’t be able to use those designs because they were made in Canva. Additionally, you can’t trademark Canva elements. That means if you use a logo template, for example, you don’t really own that logo and can’t trademark it. Whoops.
As I said, I’m totally pro-template. It’s just a matter of nuance. A template made for you is far and away a better option than one made for anyone and everyone. Here’s the final takeaway on templates and Canva:
Templates are great, but out-of-the-box templates are not long-term solutions. A good template it one that looks great, aligns with your brand, AND meets your specific needs. I highly recommend having templates custom designed for you and delivered to you in a format that you can work with easily. Canva is a fantastic option for building a branded template.
Canva is great, but it’s not a replacement for a designer. The best way to use it is as a supplemental tool. There are some things that can’t just be plug-and-play. How much DIY you need depends on your situation, and that’s a great thing to bring up with a designer. They can help you figure out what you need and can create assets in Canva that are tailored to your brand, usable by you, and editable by them as needed.