How to Easily Highlight Text in Your Canva Designs

As any seasoned graphic designer knows, sometimes it‘s the subtle details that make the biggest impact. Strategically highlighting words or phrases is one of those seemingly small tweaks that can take your designs from bland to brilliant.

By adding pops of color behind your text, you can draw your audience‘s eyes to the most vital parts of your message — whether that‘s a compelling headline, an urgent call-to-action, or need-to-know facts and statistics. When done well, highlighting helps create visual hierarchy, making your designs easier to scan and understand at a glance.

While advanced design software like Adobe InDesign has dedicated tools for this purpose, you might be surprised to learn that it‘s incredibly quick and easy to achieve a similar effect in the beginner-friendly Canva app. With just a few clicks and drags, you can make certain bits of text appear as if they‘ve been marked with a classic fluorescent yellow highlighter or a more stylish pastel alternative.

In this step-by-step guide, we‘ll walk you through the process of highlighting text in Canva like a pro. We‘ve included detailed instructions, helpful visuals, and expert tips for ensuring your highlights look natural and intentional, not clunky or amateurish.

By the end of this article, you‘ll be able to confidently add custom text highlights to your designs and know how to avoid common mistakes that can sabotage your hard work. We‘ve also rounded up some creative examples to get your inspiration flowing and help you discover new ways to use the technique for maximum impact.

Ready to level up your Canva designs with better, bolder text highlights? Let‘s get started!

Step 1: Set Up Your Canva Design for Successful Highlighting

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of creating the highlights themselves, it‘s important to lay the groundwork for success by setting up your Canva file properly. This includes choosing the optimal document type and size for your project and adding your text in a way that will make the highlighting process smoother.

If you‘re starting from scratch, click the "Create a Design" button in the upper right corner of the Canva homepage and select the format that best fits your needs. Canva offers an extensive library of pre-made templates for everything from social media graphics and digital ads to presentations, posters, flyers and more. Using a template is a great way to kickstart your design if you‘re feeling stuck, but you can also opt for a custom size if your project calls for it.

With your blank canvas open, navigate to the "Text" tab in the left-hand menu to start adding your own words. The Canva text editor gives you three options for inserting text — heading, subheading, and body text — each with its own default font style and size. However, you can easily customize these settings via the top menu bar to change the look and feel of your copy.

Since we‘ll be adding highlights later on, this is a good time to think about how your choice of font could impact the final result. As a general rule of thumb, sans-serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica and Open Sans tend to work best for large blocks of text as they‘re clean, modern and easy to read. Serif fonts like Times New Roman, Georgia and Garamond are better suited for titles and short phrases where the decorative details are less likely to get lost.

Here are a few more tips for prepping your text:

• Aim for a body font size of at least 12pt for print designs and 16pt for digital to ensure the text is legible on all devices
• Left-align longer text and use center-align sparingly to avoid awkward gaps and uneven line lengths
• Break up walls of text with subheadings, bullet points or images to make the content more visually appealing and scannable
• Double-check your spelling and grammar before moving on to the design phase to avoid embarrassing errors

Step 2: Add a Shape to Create the Highlight Effect

With your text in place, it‘s time for the main event: adding the shapes that will form the base of your highlight effect.

In Canva, you‘ll find the shapes tool nested under the "Elements" tab in the left sidebar. Clicking it will expand a collection of pre-made vector shapes ranging from basic geometric forms to fancy flourishes, arrows, icons and more.

For our purposes, you‘ll want to choose a shape that will work well as a highlighter mark. Some popular options include:

• Rectangles and rounded rectangles: These versatile shapes mimic the look of classic chisel-tip and flat barrel highlighters and can cover longer phrases or even entire sentences.

• Ovals and pill shapes: Opt for a softer, more organic shape with an oval to recreate the fluid lines of a marker. These work best for short bits of text that don‘t exceed one line in length.

• Squiggles and doodles: Get creative with hand-drawn underlines, brackets and scribbles to make it appear as if you‘ve highlighted the text the old-fashioned way. The wonky lines add personality to your design.

Once you‘ve settled on the perfect shape, simply click to add it to your canvas, then use the corner handles to stretch and resize it as needed. Drag the shape into place over the text you want to highlight, using the grid and smart guides to align it just right. If you need to adjust the proportions while maintaining the original aspect ratio, hold down the Shift key while dragging the corners.

Pro tip: If you plan on emphasizing multiple bits of text, copy and paste the shape and move it into position to ensure the size and style remains consistent throughout your design.

Step 3: Customize the Appearance of Your Highlight

Now that you have your highlighter shapes roughly where you want them, it‘s time to play with the appearance settings to really nail that hand-drawn effect.

Let‘s start with color. With the shape selected, click the color picker in the top menu bar to bring up Canva‘s palette options. Here, you can either choose one of the preset colors, use the eyedropper tool to sample a hue from elsewhere in your design, or type in a specific hex code to get an exact match.

For an authentic highlighter look, opt for a bright, fluorescent shade like lemon yellow, hot pink or electric blue. If you‘re aiming for something more subtle, try a pastel tint that complements your overall color scheme. You can also use a branded color to reinforce your visual identity across your marketing materials.

Next, head over to the transparency tool, which looks like a checkerboard pattern next to the color picker. Dragging the slider to the right will increase the opacity of the shape, allowing more of the text underneath to show through. For a freshly-inked effect, aim for a transparency of 50-75%. You can go even higher for a softer, more ethereal vibe.

To complete the look, consider rounding the corners of your highlight with the "Corner Radius" toggle. A radius of 10-25 will give your rectangles an organic, imperfect appearance as if you‘ve used the broad tip of a marker. Leave this setting at zero for crisp, clean lines.

Feel free to experiment with different combinations of colors, transparencies and corner treatments to find the perfect formula for your design. Mix and match styles or stick to one cohesive look throughout — there are no wrong answers here. The goal is to have fun and create something that feels authentic to your brand.

Step 4: Ensure Your Text Remains Readable

You‘ve put in the effort to create beautiful, eye-catching text highlights — but there‘s one last crucial step to ensure they fulfill their intended purpose. And that‘s making sure your copy is still easily readable through the colorful shapes.

Even with the transparency settings cranked up, it‘s possible for your text to get lost if there‘s not enough contrast between the highlighter color and the color of the text itself. Light text on a dark background or dark text on a light background tends to work best for maintaining legibility.

Here are a few color combos that are guaranteed to make your text pop:

• Black or charcoal gray text on yellow, orange or pink highlights
• White text on blue, green or purple highlights
• Navy blue text on mint or baby blue highlights
• Maroon or burgundy text on pale pink or lavender highlights

If you‘re not sure whether your text is readable, try the squint test. Take a few steps back from your screen and squint your eyes slightly. Can you still make out the words, or does everything blur together?

It‘s also a good idea to preview your design at the actual size it will be viewed to ensure the highlighted text is easy to parse at a glance. You can do this by clicking the "View" button in the top right corner and selecting "Actual Size" from the dropdown menu.

If you find your text is too small or pixelated when viewed at 100%, try increasing the font size, reducing the amount of text within each highlight, or simplifying your word choice for maximum impact. Your audience shouldn‘t have to strain to decipher your message.

Step 5: Experiment with Variations and Add Finishing Touches

Congratulations — you‘ve officially mastered the art of highlighting text in Canva! But why stop there? Now that you‘ve got the basic technique down, it‘s time to take your designs to the next level with some clever tweaks and finishing touches.

One easy way to add visual interest is to vary the color and thickness of your highlights throughout the layout. Using the same yellow over and over can start to feel monotonous, so try alternating between a few different shades or even incorporating a full rainbow of hues.

Similarly, you can create a sense of depth and dimension by layering multiple transparencies on top of each other for a double or triple highlight effect. This is a fun way to show relationships between different bits of text or emphasize key points in a bulleted list.

If you really want to get fancy, you can experiment with adding gradients, drop shadows or outer glows to your highlighter shapes via the "Effects" menu in the top toolbar. These extra embellishments can make your highlights appear to be shimmering, glowing or even levitating off the page — perfect for adding a touch of magic to more whimsical designs.

When you‘re happy with a particular highlight style, be sure to save it for later by clicking the three-dot icon in the upper right corner and selecting "Add to Templates". This will allow you to access your custom creation across all of your Canva designs without having to remake it from scratch.

Bonus: Creative Ideas and Inspiration

Still feeling stuck? Here are a few real-world examples of clever highlighting in action to get your creative juices flowing:

• Wrap the bottom of your highlight into a swoosh or arrow to point to other key information like a website URL or page number (perfect for presentations and infographics)

• Use neon highlight colors in an email header as a bold background for your main message or calls-to-action

• Create a text color-coding system with different highlighter shades to organize content into categories (great for study guides and how-to manuals)

• Build a text logo by highlighting the first letter of each word in your brand name in a bright, eye-catching color palette

• Turn a testimonial or pull quote into a stylish graphic by highlighting the juiciest bits and adding the person‘s name and headshot below

The only limit is your imagination — so don‘t be afraid to think outside the (highlighted) box! If you‘re looking for even more ideas and inspiration, check out these other helpful resources:

• Canva‘s Design School: In-depth tutorials and articles on all things graphic design
• Dribbble: A social platform for designers to share their latest work and find inspiration from others
• Pinterest: Curated collections of stunning graphic design examples for every style and occasion

Make Your Message Shine with Canva Text Highlights

We hope this guide has shown you just how simple it can be to add professional-looking highlights to your text in Canva. To recap, all it takes is five easy steps:

1. Set up your design with clear, legible text
2. Add a shape like a rectangle or oval over the words you want to highlight
3. Adjust the color, transparency and corner radius to customize the appearance
4. Double-check that your text is still readable through the tinted overlay
5. Experiment with different variations and effects to take your highlights to the next level

By keeping these tips and techniques in mind, you‘ll be able to create stunning text highlights that draw your audience‘s attention right where you want it. Whether you‘re designing social media graphics, presentations, posters, or other marketing materials, a few well-placed pops of color can make all the difference in getting your message across loud and clear.

So what are you waiting for? Fire up Canva and start playing around with text highlights in your own designs. We‘d love to see what you come up with, so feel free to share your creations (or any other handy tips we may have missed) in the comments below.

Happy highlighting!