Do you want to design your own beauty brand’s logo using Canva? 

Canva is an easy-to-use, free design tool that anyone and everyone can use to design pretty much anything, from social media graphics to presentations, flyers, and everything in between. Small businesses can create trendy designs from pre-made templates that look great. This is similar to what we offer here at Daring Creative, which is 5 Free Brand Identities that come with color palettes, font selections, mood boards, and more. You’re able to customize all of this right in Canva to fit your beauty brand’s vibe . 

Canva is an incredible tool for new and emerging businesses, but as your business grows, you should keep the following things in mind. 

We love Canva because it’s an excellent tool for A LOT of things. We use it to create social media templates for our clients, develop stunning presentations, and even short-form videos. One thing we DON’T use Canva for is designing a professional brand identity for your beauty business (we’ll get into the reasons why not below!). 

There are critical times in a beauty business owner’s life when they would benefit from hiring a professional to help with their branding, and strategic brand design is one of them. When should you look into investing in professional branding?

When you’ve been in business for a few years and start thinking about expanding, growing, trademarking, etc., it’s time to think strategically. Ultimately, Canva has limitations that can hurt your brand’s ability to scale. 

So, before you spend a ton of hours designing and redesigning your logo for your business in Canva, here are a few things you should keep in mind…

Canva Design Can Limit Your Creativity 

Canva has a lot of pre-made templates and shapes that you can use to create a logo, but these are all generic. You can use them as is or modified by adding/removing elements and changing colors. If you want to make something unique for your beauty brand, then Canva might not be your best option.

The reason why it’s essential to go beyond basic design in your beauty business is because it conveys an image of professionalism. When people see a beautifully designed logo on social media or anywhere else, they know that this person takes pride in their work and takes care of quality control, so they don’t have to worry about receiving poor products.

In addition, having a professionally designed logo also gives customers confidence in purchasing products from a brand that takes aesthetics and quality seriously.  The same goes with an expertly crafted website; if visitors feel like everything looks professional, they’ll trust whatever comes out next!

Your Beauty Business’ Brand Identity Should Be Unique to YOU 

Your beauty business’ brand identity (visuals like logos, color palette, patterns, icons, etc.) should reflect who you are, what values you stand for, how others perceive your brand, and how people feel about YOUR business when they see it. 

In other words, your brand identity should be as unique as possible. Canva is template-based, meaning that other beauty businesses can have the same design pattern, colors, and shapes as you do with their own Canva-created logos. This defeats the entire purpose of having a custom-designed beauty brand logo. 

There will be hundreds, if not thousands, of other businesses out that can have a logo that looks just like yours. The risk of this? Not standing out from the competition. Not being memorable in a sea of noise. Not moving or inspiring people to take action with YOUR brand. . The best way to avoid this is to create a strategic and intentional brand identity that represents your business, represents what your target audience is looking for, and excites people to fall in love with your brand. 

You Cannot Trademark a Canva Logo 

Since Canva’s templates are pre-made and available to anyone who wants to use them, you cannot trademark or claim the logo you created for your beauty business as your own. Therefore, even if another company has a logo that looks like yours or similar but is still in a completely different industry, you cannot legally trademark your logo. 

The only way you’d be able to trademark a logo made in Canva is if you use simple shapes and text. The second you use a graphic or stock photo from the Canva library or one of their templates, it is no longer yours to claim. What does this mean? If down the line, you want to trademark your logo to ensure no one else in the beauty industry can use it or take elements from it, you can’t. 

If you want to trademark your logo at some point, Canva is not the way to go.  

Canva Cannot Provide Vector File Formats  

Vector file formats are best for printing because they don’t lose quality when you scale them up or down in size; however, Canva can only export JPEGs (or PNGs if you have a pro account). Because of this limitation, your logo will become pixelated when printed on more extensive materials like posters, signs, billboards, etc., because it becomes very blurry or illegible.

While some advantages come with creating your logo in Canva, like having access to their extensive library of fonts and icons/graphics/textures—it’s not worth sacrificing the quality of your design just so that it looks decent on social media sites like Instagram or Facebook. That’s not where your focus should be when looking to rebrand your beauty business and logo. 

Canva’s Licensing Agreement Limits What You Can Do

Canva’s licensing agreement is pretty straightforward and to the point when it says what you can and can’t do with a design using their elements and graphics: you cannot use features from their image library, even if you have the paid version. 

The only elements you can use from Canva for your logo are basic shapes, lines, default fonts (so you can’t use anything that goes beyond this, even if your beauty brand uses other fonts currently), and any of their premade logo templates – which again, anyone can have as well. 

There isn’t much wiggle room for you to do more than a simple, basic design that doesn’t match what your brand is all about. 

The Takeaway

So, can you use Canva for logos or is it out of the question to design your beauty brand’s logo and brand identity? No. It has many elements that can be used and trademarked as long as you stay within their guidelines, which you can find here. Remember, though, that these are mainly generic and won’t give customers that “wow” factor or help them recognize or remember your business when they see that logo. 

We’re not saying you absolutely cannot use it. However, suppose you want a professional, polished brand identity for your beauty business that will stand out among the competition and represent everything that makes your brand unique while taking it to the next level. In that case, you will want to bring on branding and graphic designers that help you create strategic branding assets that stand the test of time.

Your brand deserves better than a cookie-cutter logo, and that’s something we can help you with and talk about during a complimentary discovery call. 

Remember, if you are just starting out and aren’t ready to invest in professional branding, Canva is a great way to get started. You can snag our 5 Free Brand Identities that you can totally customize right in Canva – and yes, it’s FREE! Grab it here.