Once you’ve created a Canva project, printing your design isn’t always as easy as clicking a button. There are a few things you need to check before you print. Margins, bleeds and color palette are all considerations to be set before printing.
Luckily, with a little know-how, Canva has a streamlined process for getting projects print-ready.
Configure your Canva designs for printing
Before printing a design from Canva, you need to modify your configuration settings.
Design Margins and Bleeding
The first thing you want to be aware of are your margins and your bleed. First, enable your visual margins to ensure that nothing gets cut off when the design is printed.
Once you’ve activated visual margins on the design, look at the field of view. There should be a dashed line running around the inside of the design. Make sure there are no important design elements or text running after those dashed lines.
These lines represent the edge of the printable surface, meaning that anything beyond them may be cut off during the printing process. If an important design element falls outside the frame, rearrange things until they fit back in.
Once you have selected this option, you should check the outer edge of your design. If you see a white stripe around any of the outer edges, this is a sign that your design is not extending to the edges of your paper.
To correct the error with the bleed, you can make your background slightly larger than the canvas. Dragging the background will correct the white space and ensure that your design extends to the edge of the page.
canva color setup
Once you’ve checked that your completed design will appear on the page when printed, you’ll next need to configure your color settings. Most monitors use the RGB color scheme, but most printers use the CMYK palette. Making sure your monitor is calibrated is a good idea.
Printing your work without color changing first will result in different colors appearing on the paper than the colors on the screen. There are two different ways to change your color scheme.
The first is to use CMYK colors from the start of your project. Canva has a detailed tutorial on how to convert the elements to the proper palette.
The alternative option is to download a CMYK color copy of your design. We’ll discuss everything you need to know about downloading designs in the next section.
It’s worth noting that if you’re planning on printing a design directly from Canva, you’re better off with option one. This will mean that you will have to enter all your colors manually, which will take longer to set up, but you won’t have to worry about changing them later.
download your canva design
Once your design is all set up, and you are certain that your bleed and margin settings are properly configured, you need to prepare for printing. If you plan to print your design elsewhere, or if you want to distribute it to a different system before printing, you will need to download it.
At the top right corner of the screen, click the Share button to pop up a set of options for distributing your design. At the bottom of the list you will see a Download button. Click on it to bring up the download settings.
Here you can see several configuration options in a pull-down menu that will change the file you receive. Select PDF Print as your file type.
After choosing your file type, you’ll need to choose CMYK from the Color Profile dropdown if you designed your project with standard colors (which requires a Canva Pro account). Depending on your end goal, you can also choose to show crop marks and bleed.
The Crop Marks and Bleed option will add dashed lines to the end product, showing you where to cut once you print.
print your canva designs
Once you’ve created your design, you can either print it at home or send it to a professional printer. Which option you choose will depend largely on the needs of your project. If you can print on standard paper, and don’t need large copies, an at-home print job will certainly suffice.
If, however, you’re printing something that requires special paper, something is too large to fit on printer paper, or you need tons of copies, a Pro may be better.