Grow With Google: A Free Branding Exercise for Any Business - Using Canva
Google and Canva have done it again! We live in a world that keeps pushing boundaries. Canva has made it ever so easy for anyone to be a designer. Their application for branding of all sorts has never been more convenient. If you’ve got an hour, I highly suggest you take this class to learn more about branding and remind yourself of why you are doing what you are doing. It’s a free class Google released for small business week. It’s also an excellent tutorial for how to use Canva, whether you are a newbie or an expert.
Sidebar: If your colors need to be spot on, Canva is not the tool for you. Stick to the pros for corporate colors.
My favorite parts of the class
Purpose and Values:
What is your purpose and what are your values? This class leads you though a process to think about what fuels you.
Color Theory and Branding Guidelines:
Style guidelines are so important to your brand’s identity. Your brand is not a logo… it’s your brands personality. Whether you’re posting an image to instagram or making a brochure and business cards, it’s important to be consistent and have the same imagery style. This can be challenging for small businesses. As small businesses in West Michigan, many times we are looking for content and want to post whatever is possible. I personally struggle with that for Swift Printing’s social media channels. We want to share our culture and our community involvement, but also want to share our printing capabilities such as business card printing, digital printing, envelope printing, letterpress printing, and large format printing in Grand Rapids, Michigan and it can sometimes come off “all over the place.”
Tips on prepping files using Canva:
The last 30 minutes gives a full tutorial on using Canva for creating a logo and developing your branding guidelines. You can put everything into your Brand Kit whether you’re using Canva Pro or a free account. You can then access all the branding elements for everything you create.
In my opinion, the best part is that they make it easy for you to download your creations ready to print and have the option to add crop marks and bleed. Swift is happy to print all of your designs! Please follow our helpful tips here for the best way to download your files from Canva for your Grand Rapids based printer. The way you prepare files to print are different from the digital world and we’re always happy to answer any questions you may have for preparing your files to print.
Do you use Canva? What are you favorite features? Shoot me a message at jes@swiftprinting.com
Download Googles Free Workbook on the class here.
