Canva Pro Tips For Coaches, Counsellors and Course Creators

Do you feel overwhelmed with graphic design?

Do you want to create a beautiful brand for your business, but you're not a natural designer or artist? If yes, Canva is a fantastic option.

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Before I began using Canva, I attempted to use other software because it was low cost when I was a student. But it absolutely boggled my mind. It was top tier, but far to complex for my brain to handle! Then when it came to renew after I finished my MA, I couldn't afford it.

Canva was suggested to me as an option, so I gave the free version a go. It was a total life saver for me. I was able to start creating much better content for my business without feeling overwhelmed with tech.

After a while I upgraded to Canva Pro because the additional tools were too good to miss for the price it costs.

There are a lot of fabulous features in both the free and pro version, and I wanted to share some of my favourites with you.

Understanding Canva Pro

Canva Pro is a versatile, easy to use, and responsive design tool. It offers a wide range of additional features that will both enhance and speed up your projects.

The free Canva version is in itself a brilliant app. It has so many features that you can use to improve your work and branding. If you're just starting out, or cannot afford to upgrade to Canva Pro just yet, the free version will probably be good enough.

But, if you're looking to streamline your processes and save yourself a tonne of time and energy, I do recommend upgrading to Pro. Plus, you get a free 30-day trial to try it out yourself.

Whether you are a coach, counsellor, course creator or entrepreneur, Canva Pro can be a valuable addition to add to your business toolkit.

Pricing:

You can try Canva Pro for free, for 30 days before you decide. It's then £13 per month, or £100 if you pay annually which works out as only £8.33 per month!

In the US this is $12.99 per month or annually $119.99 which works out as only $9.99 per month.

Key Features of Canva Pro

When you sign up to Canva Pro, you get access to even more graphics, photos, designs, images and exclusive, high quality templates. You also get 1TB of cloud storage, improved design tools as well as additional AI features.

All of these features and tools support improved designs, as well as supporting a more streamlined way of working, which will ultimately save you time and energy as you work.

Some of the features included here:

• Background remover
• Resizing tool
• AI tools
• 1 TB Cloud Storage
• 100 million+ graphics, photos, videos and audio
• Premium fonts
• Premium templates
• Brand kits
• Collaboration
• Improved scheduling features
• Create templates (shareable)

Benefits for Coaches, Counsellors, and Course Creators

Canva Pro is great for anyone – professionals, teachers, students – as well as coaches, counsellors and course creators.

It enables you to create a unique and personalised brand identity, using their customisable design elements. You can create engaging content for social media, brand friendly products and freebies, as well as professional looking course materials.

The features in Canva Pro also compliments those who are pushed for time, and need to batch create designs, or share with others within your team.

As busy professionals, often juggling multiple things in business, the ability to streamline these processes makes a huge difference.

Navigating Canva Pro

If you're familiar with Canva, you'll be aware of how to save designs, use folders and how to move around the system.

Inserting graphics, videos and photos is easy, with drag and drop abilities, as well as inserting images into frames and resizing them.

Once you've used Canva / Canva Pro for a while it's pretty straightforward to use. There is a menu for the tools in the left of the screen. It includes quick editing tools at the top of the design, and to the right you can find even more commands, such as saving, downloading, printing and scheduling.

On the far left of the screen you can also quickly access your projects, recent designs and your brand kit.

It has improved my productivity and focus, and my ability to create designs from start to finish in much less time.

Customising Designs with Canva Pro

As well as the fonts and colours that are in Canva, Canva Pro allows you to upload custom fonts and colours. If you already have a brand, this can again save you so much time and will mean that you can keep the consistency across all of your designs.

Exploring Canva Pro Templates

Canva has so many templates available for you to customise and create your own products and designs that fit with your brand. Canva Pro offers even more of a selection of high quality templates. For the non-designers here, it is a fantastic feature.

As a non designer, I often find that I have an idea that I can sort of visualise, but making it come to life isn't as easy. I end up wasting so much time trying to create lines that are the right length, or the right kind of layout on pages.

The ability to copy and paste part of a template into one you're working on, is something else that has helped to improve my own designs – saving me a lot of time and energy.

The template design library is vast. You can find templates for so many things, including posts for social media, journals, leaflets, thumbnails, business cards, brand design sheets, websites, Etsy store banners, logos, presentation slides and so much more!

Photo Editing Tools

Canva has some great photo editing features, which as a non designer myself, has not only improved my brand overall, it's saved me a lot of time and energy. (Common theme with time saving!!)

Some of my favourites include:

• Background remover
• Transparent Images
• Easily animate designs including text
• Resizing using Magic Resize
• Brand kit integration

The Brand Kit

The library of templates, graphics, fonts and more, is so large that it could become a little overwhelming for some. It is very easy to get lost in making things look how you want, and this was one of my biggest time stealers.

The solution to this is to create your own brand kit. Creating this helped me stay focused when in Canva, instead of wasting so much time searching for images, fonts or colours.

The brand kit is a pro feature and one that I recommend to anyone I work with because of how streamlined it makes your process.

Getting Started With The Brand Kit

It does take a bit of time to get it up and running. But, it is well worth investing the time initially, because in the long run it will absolutely save you time and energy.

inside Canva Pro you will see the option to create a brand kit (see image below).

Once you click on this, it takes you through several set up steps.

Firstly you're asked to name your brand kit. You're allowed up to 100 separate brands, which makes life so much easier when you're a multi-passionate with various different sides to your business.

Once you've created the new kit, you can then upload your brand assets. This is where you can ensure that you are creating a consistent brand look across your whole business. When you have a consistent brand look it becomes easier to stand out to your audience.

Consistency also helps to create a professional feel to your business, increasing the attractiveness of your services, offers and products.

Brand assets you can add:

• Logos
• Fonts (Text for headers / title / body etc.)
• Colours
• Photos
• Graphics
• Icons
• Brand Voice (To help Magic Write, the AI tool in Canva)
• Brand templates
• Replace logos & images across designs instantly

Brand Shortcuts

The beauty of creating a brand kit, is that if you work for a team you can all have access to the kit. This allows for seamless sharing and collaboration. If you only use specific images related to your brand, it saves you from searching each time you create a new design.

The Brand kit shortcut is also handily to the left of the screen in the menu section. Another great time saving feature so you can easily add you images, fonts etc. into your designs.

Avoiding the stop/start that's often involved in the creation process as you pause to search for something, you can remain focused and in the zone.

AI Tools – Magic Studio

Canva's AI tool Magic Studio can be used across the platform. When you upgrade to Pro you get vastly more credits / a bigger usage allowance.

Some of the features include:

• Resize and Magic Switch
• Text to video
• Text to image
• Magic expand
• Magic eraser
• Background remover

*Magic expand / animate / grab /morph / resize and switch are only available in Canva Pro

Sharing and Collaboration in Canva Pro

Sharing and collaboration with others is another key feature of Canva Pro. Not only can you collaborate with team members, but you can also work with clients inside Canva.

You can work on designs together – which is great when you're focused on a project but don't work near each other. You can see the edits being made, and it's identified by the initials of the person working on it in the moment.

Shared Design Folders

You can save all work in shared folders within Canva, another great feature if you outsource parts of your work. It keeps work in one place without the need to share links or email with updates. It's all stored in the shared folder that's accessible to the relevant people you choose to add to it.

Commenting and Feedback

You can also leave comments directly on images. I often do this when batching pins for Pinterest. It's easy to forget what designs you have / haven't used and when the last time you used them was.

If you're outsourcing work, you can leave feedback in the comments box to let the other person know if changes need to be made.

Other sharing & collaboration features:

• Team-only links
• Approvals
• Team permissions
• Ownership transfer

More Design Tools

Before we finish up, let's explore some of the other design tools available in Canva Pro.

Each of these I use frequently. It's made life much simpler, and yet again have all saved me time and energy!

Creating Templates

You can quickly turn your designs into templates that you can share with others. Once you do this you get a link and when another person clicks on it they open it in their own canva account.

The magic of templates is that it does not alter the original at all! It is a completely new design in the other persons account!

This has be a great asset when sharing designs with colleagues and clients. Not needing to save multiple copies to share is amazing. Just a click and there's the template!

Resizing Designs

Resizing designs is another one of my favourite features. If you post across different platforms it's important to get the best size. This can mean lots of time creating new designs over and over.

If you use Instagram for example, and also use Pinterest, the sizing for posts and stories are different within Instagram, and different again from Pinterest.

With the resize tool you can easily copy designs to the preferred size and tweak the posts to fit them snuggly.

Creating Journals and Planners

If you create journals and planners, especially if these are to sell via Amazon KDP, there are very specific sizing rules. Instead of starting again with projects, you can easily copy into the sizes needed.

Digital Products

As with journals and planners, when you sell digital products it's good practice to offer a variety of sizes. This is because people have different preferences, and standard sizing can differ in different countries.

For PDFs, I tend to create A4, A5 and US Letter. This feature saves me so much time, which is essential because of the time it takes to create the products and the images needed to sell them.

Tools Resources & Support

Below are some of my favourite tools and memberships. As a counsellor and a coach with chronic health issues, I had to diversify my business.

Creating digital products and focusing on growing my blog were two of my main goals for 2024, and the tools below have been invaluable.

Canva Pro – Free 30 Day Trial

A great design tool for beginners and non-designers.

Etsy – 40 Free Listings

Would you love to sell your own products? I sell digital products via Etsy and it's helping my increase my passive income. If you click on this link you (and I) will get 40 free listings! That means that for the first 40 products you add, you don't have to pay the listing free. Plus, once you do, you too can share the link to others and get 40 free listings!

Sunsama – Free trial & Free month!

Project management / time management & planner tool. This has changed my life recently! I absolutely love it, and my productivity has already significantly improved. It's very easy to use and helps to keep me on track when I'm juggling so many different things. If you choose to take the free month, I too get one and you'll also be able to share it to others!

PIPs – Blogging membership

With my focus on blog growth, Sadie at Passive Income Pathways has been amazing. I've been able to set my blog up effectively, learned how to work with SEO, create a website that's functional. Improve my writing and so much more! It's a great membership and one that I highly recommend.

Final Thoughts

I'm a big fan of Canva and have been using it for over 5 years now. I began on the free version, but soon upgraded to pro because it meets my needs so much more.

As a creator of digital products, journals and planners, I needed to be able to speed up my processes, and Canva Pro helped with this.

Whatever the needs are for your business right now, sign up for a free Canva account, or a 30 day trial to see these features in action.

If design is not a strength of yours and you want to freshen up your brand, Canva is a great tool that is both user friendly and produces some great quality designs.

You can grab your free trial here, and if you have any questions, please do feel free to email me [email protected]

If this post helped or you enjoyed reading it, please share one of the images below as it really helps my blog – Thank You!

Meet Lynsey

Hey there! I'm Lynsey, a coach, counsellor, and mentor for low energy, introverted or low confident female coaches & small business owners. With over 5 years’ experience of running businesses, and over a decade as a tutor and trainer, I've learned the value of effective time management that energises you through working with your energy.

I've lived with chronic illness – ME/CFS since 2011 and since then I re-trained as a counsellor, and achieved a distinction for my MA in Counselling and Psychotherapy Practice; all while running 4 businesses! I want that for you as well & it is possible with the right support and pathway to success.

Improving your mindset, finding acceptance and developing a solution-focused approach to achieving your goals is my passion. Blending mental health support where needed, as well as a supportive space and methods to manage your work more effectively.

If you'd like to know more about working with me, you can email [email protected] or find me on socials (links in the menu)

Have you seen my online store Shop.QuietlyConquer? Find DFY templates, downloads & more!