Time is your most precious resource and so today I’m going to show you some of my absolute favorite Canva keyboard shortcuts and time-saving tricks. Canva is an amazing online tool (and there’s an app) for designing graphics and it has become an essential part of my workflow.
As a blogger and business owner in the age of the internet and social media, there are more marketing channels than ever. This is both a good thing and a great challenge. You have more ways than ever to reach your ideal readers and potential clients, but you also still only have a finite amount of time to juggle a seemingly ever-increasing to-do list. It can’t be daunting, I know. But I also know that failure at marketing can mean your blog and business never reach their full potential and that’s why I have come to love Canva,
Canva excels at making the process of graphic design easy by giving you thousands of amazing starting points for almost every project type you can think of, but today I’ll show you how to make your Canva workflow even easier by showing you some of my favorite Canva keyboard shortcuts and tips for saving time.
Alright, let’s get right to it!
A solution for tough to select elements in Canva
I’m starting with this Canva keyboard shortcut because it’s my absolute favorite and has saved me from more than a few headaches. Every now and then you end up with an element in Canva that is tough to select either because it is framed by another element or because it’s actually hidden behind another element. Either way, trying to select the element can be maddening unless you know the following Canva keyboard shortcut:
With any object selected you can use command/ctrl + alt/option + either of the brackets keys ([ or ]) and you will be select the previous or next element in the layer stack, even if the object is hidden! This is SO helpful and I use this one all the time! Without this keyboard shortcut, you’ll find yourself moving elements out of the way just so you can select hidden or framed elements to make changes. In other words, you’ll waste time and probably go a little crazy. Never again! Use this trick to easily select ANY element in your project.
The second Canva keyboard shortcut shown in the above gif, and another of my favorites, gives you the ability to move any element forward or backward in the layer stack. I often use this one is concert with the first shortcut described above because it’s a great way to reveal hidden elements. If you have a text element hidden behind a circle or some other element, you first select it using alt + ctrl + [ and then use ctrl + ] to bring it to the top of the layer stack. Awesome!
Let’s move on and look at a few other great Canva shortcuts for selecting and moving elements.
Grab the print-friendly .pdf of Canva tricks and keyboard shortcuts so that you can always have it handy as an easy reference.
Selecting and moving elements in Canva
You can select all element on any given page by using command/ctrl + A. The same thing can be accomplished by doing a click and drag selection over all elements, but ctrl + A is just faster and also ensures you don’t miss anything. The counterpart to ctrl + A is the escape key which deselects all elements.
If you just want to add one additional item to your existing selection then the shift key is your best friend. Hold down the shift and click a new element to add it to the current selection. Both this keyboard shortcut, the aforementioned ctrl + A select all shortcut, and several of the other ones mentioned in this post are keyboard shortcuts that are common in other programs as well. This is one of the reasons why I love keyboard shortcuts as they constantly prove useful and can build your overall efficiency. I’m kind of an efficiency geek, but with 3 homeschooled kids and a finite amount of time in each day you kind of have to be. 🙂
When moving selected elements, you can nudge them one pixel at a time using the arrow keys or 10 pixels at a time when you combine the arrow keys with the shift key. This can be very useful as it allows for absolute precision. When moving elements with the mouse it’s harder to constrain the movement to one direction and to get distances exactly the same each time. Canva does a good job at providing smart auto-align and snapping features, but when those fail you the arrow keys can prove super useful.
Canva Keyboard Shortcuts for Working with Text
Text is often a crucial element in many designs so the following text-related Canva keyboard shortcuts are a must:
Lowercase to Uppercase
There’s a text menu button for this as well, but I find keyboard shortcuts are even faster than having to navigate your way up to the menu bar. It may not seem like a big deal, but seconds can add up quickly so any amount of time saved is always a win.
How to Underline Text
You won’t find a menu item for this one so good luck trying to underline text in Canva if you don’t know this trick.
Aligning Text in Canva
Easily cycle through through text alignment options with the following keyboard shortcuts:
Adding and Sizing Text Borders in Canva
Here’s another fun Canva trick, creating a border around a text element, that you won’t find anywhere the Canva menus. I love this keyboard shortcut because a border can be such a quick and easy way to increase the impact of a text element within a design. And as an added bonus, you can also quickly then easily resize the border with additional shortcut keys.
This is my absolute favorite way to copy items in Canva and it works in a lot of other programs as well (Photoshop, for example). I use it a lot when I want to make a new text element, but I want to keep the text formatting or when creating repetitive design elements. You can also use this trick on grouped items if you’d like to copy the entire group.
Grab the print-friendly .pdf of Canva tricks and keyboard shortcuts so that you can always have it handy as an easy reference.
And there are keyboard shortcuts for grouping and ungrouping items in Canva as well:
Below is one of my absolute favorite reasons for grouping items. Not a keyboard shortcut, but a must know tip when you want to have a background element expand to accommodate text.
Pretty awesome, right? It’s really helpful when creating templates that you want to be flexible enough to accommodate text elements of varying length.
Below are a few more must know items I rely on a lot when designing in Canva.
Use the same Canva keyboard shortcut that you use to change the size of a text border to change grid spacing.
Quickly size an item to the page size:
Show a design grid that can be helpful when aligning element within you’re overall layout:
A few more really useful common keyboard shortcuts that work not just within Canva, but within a lot of programs:
And finally, how to constrain proportions when resizing a grid or a photo, tasks that require different shortcut keys!
Grab the print-friendly .pdf of Canva tricks and keyboard shortcuts so that you can always have it handy as an easy reference.
f you master the above Canva keyboard shortcuts you’ll definitely improve your Canva workflow and I guarantee you that you’ll save time!
I hope you enjoyed this list! Which of these tips or shortcuts keys is your favorite? Do you have any of your own tricks that were not included above? Please share your answers in answers below as well as any other Canva questions you might have. Happy designing!
cheers,
Greg
