When your Canva design just isn’t working
You opened Canva to create one graphic. Nothing complicated, you thought. A heading, a few details, perhaps a photograph and your logo. You’d have it finished before your coffee went cold.
Forty-five minutes later, the coffee is stone cold, and you’re still fiddling. The heading has been moved around the page, the photograph has been replaced twice, and you’ve tried several fonts, including one you knew wasn’t right before you even clicked on it. Something is wrong with the design, but you can’t work out what it is.
This is where Canva starts to feel hard.
You know how to use the platform, so it’s not that. You know exactly where to find the fonts, how to change the colours and which button will remove the background from your image. Knowing what the buttons do, however, doesn’t always tell you what your design needs.
When you can’t identify the problem, you start changing everything you can. The font might be wrong. The photograph may need to be bigger. Perhaps a coloured shape behind the heading will help. Maybe the whole thing would work better if you chose a different template and started again.
And right now, you’re no longer making design decisions. You’re shoving text boxes around and hoping something will magically fall into place.
What does your design need someone to notice first?
Before you change anything else, stop and ask yourself this one question: “What does this design need someone to notice first?”
That sounds almost too simple, but it gives you a place from which to make every other decision. If you don’t know what should be noticed first, neither will the person looking at your design. And remember, they’re scrolling, so you have only seconds.
You may need to include the date, time, venue, website address, photograph, logo and booking details, but they don’t all have the same job. One piece of information should lead. The rest should support it in an order that makes sense.
What catches your eye first?
Now look at your design without reading every word. What catches your eye first? If the most noticeable thing is a decorative shape, a stock photograph or your very large logo, but the purpose of the design is buried somewhere else, the problem is that it needs a clearer order.
Your reader shouldn’t have to search for the point. Because at this stage, you’ve lost them.
You’ve tried to help every piece of information stand out, so the heading is bold, the date is inside a bright shape, the photograph is large, the website address is underlined and the call to action is in a different colour. Each part is asking to be noticed first, and the person looking at it doesn’t know where to begin.
Sort your design into three groups
A useful way to sort through it is to divide what you’ve included into three groups:
- the main message,
- the supporting information and
- the optional noise.
The main message is the one thing someone must notice for the design to make sense. The supporting information helps them understand the message or tells them what to do next. The optional noise is everything that found its way onto the page without improving either of those things.
That last group can be surprisingly difficult to spot while you’re working. The second photograph may be lovely. The border may match your brand. The little graphic in the corner may fill an empty space perfectly. None of that means it needs to stay.
Empty space isn’t unfinished space. It gives the important parts of your design enough room to be seen.
Look at your design at the size it will be seen
You also need to look at the design at the size at which someone else will see it. Canva gives you a lovely large working area, especially when you’re sitting at a desktop computer. Your social media post won’t fill someone else’s screen in quite the same way.
Zoom out before deciding that the text is easy to read or that there is plenty of space between the elements. If the graphic will be viewed on a phone, look at it at roughly that size. The heading that seemed perfectly clear while you were working may disappear into the rest of the design. The supporting text may be technically readable, but only by someone willing to stop and squint at it.
Ask better questions about your design
This is also why asking whether a design “looks good” isn’t always helpful. After staring at it for an hour, you may not even know what good looks like anymore. You’re too familiar with every word and too aware of every adjustment you’ve made.
Ask more specific questions instead …
- Can I tell what this design is about?
- Can I see what matters first?
- Does the information follow in a sensible order?
- Can I read it at the size it will actually appear?
- Is anything attracting attention without helping the message?
Those questions give you something useful to fix. “It still doesn’t look right” sends you down a spiral for the seventy-billionth time.
Canva offers an enormous amount of choice, and that choice is part of what makes it such a useful platform. You can change almost anything within seconds. The difficulty is that every available option can begin to look like a possible solution when you don’t yet understand the problem.
Sometimes the font does need changing. Sometimes the photograph is the wrong one, the colours don’t provide enough contrast or the spacing needs attention. The difference is that you should be able to say why you’re making the change and what it will improve.
If you can’t, leave the font alone for a moment.
Go back to what the design is meant to communicate. Decide what matters most, allow the supporting information to do its job and remove whatever is getting in the way. Once that thinking is clear, Canva becomes the tool you use to build the design rather than the place where you keep searching for an answer.
Your design may not need another hour of fiddling.
It may need you to stop, step back and give it one clear job.
And if you’ve stepped back, asked the questions and still can’t see what’s getting in the way, a fresh pair of experienced eyes can help. In a 1:1 Canva session, we can work through the design together, identify what isn’t doing its job and make changes that have a reason behind them.