The Dangers of Pre-Made Logos

Hands up who has used Canva or another free to use design tool? *my hand’s up*

It is such a time saver with those easy to edit templates and quick resize tool.

As with most things in life, things that are free they tend to have a hidden cost and this is true with the popular Canva.

How bad could it be if so many people are using it to quickly whip up their business designs?

Let’s read the 4 points below before you go to town in Canva and waste your time whipping up your DIY design.

You don’t own your logo.

That’s right! You can never trademark your design made on Canva.

Nor should you be able to if you used a template but even if you used some of the available fonts you could run into legal troubles.

Check your licensing agreements, it’s not always clear or easy to understand. Canva states your logo cannot contain elements from Canva’s image library (either free or paid). So you are left with shapes and lines and very basic free font choices and the overused “free” templates.

It lacks originality and doesn’t reflect your brand.

Anyone that has internet access can use the same design, Canva has over 4 million users so, they can all be getting around with the same logo mark. Is that how you want to represent your business? A tired, overworked design that might feel familiar but in a cookie-cutter, basic way. Professionally speaking I advise against having a design someone else has to ensure a unique brand identity that will get you noticed on face value.

A logo does not a brand make

… Meaning you need SO much more to develop a well-rounded brand. Brand identity is not just one logo design, my logo suites offer a range of designs so that you can brand everything easily to create a recognisable brand. Some examples of additional designs are alternative layouts of the logo – stacked, landscape, with and without a tagline, icon, submarks, illustrative elements. Branding should also include a colour palette that is strategically selected for your industry, branded fonts and complimentary fonts for all your marketing collateral.

If you want to know more about branding and the 8 elements, you should bookmark ‘what is branding’ for your next lunch break reading.

It’s just not good quality.

I am not just being shady here, it’s a FACT! It’s just not the same quality as a professionally designed logo suite. You can’t export true vector format, for those that are scratching their heads at this, this means your logo will become pixelated when you try and scale it up for print on larger materials. Also, it’s only in RGB colour so not great designed for print purposes either. It will cheapen your brand if you are trying to make Canva quality designs work for you professionally in print, please don’t. There are so many affordable designers out there that are willing and able to work with you and your budget.

The ways you can use the Canva logo is limited to small online use. A professional logo suite gives you folders of logos for use for online and in print, scalable formats like SVG, PDF, EPS are made available and in various sizes and colour ways. See my brand identity package here.

To summarise there is a place for Canva but it will never replace professional design nor can you compare the two.

Tell me, do you use Canva? Where you aware of the limitations?