How To Make A Gift Guide Collage on Canva

Gift guides are the easiest way to recommend to your readers what to gift their loved ones for a special occasion. This can of course be during Christmas & Hanukkah. But you’ll also most likely need to create gift guides for tons of other holidays including Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, & Valentine’s Day. Gift guides are a great way to give your readers quick shopping inspiration and insight into the gift-giving thought process. Also, it can potentially help small businesses way more if you’re feature products from their catalogs!

Building collages can seem like a complex task at first. You might think you need a professional graphic designer or someone knowledgeable in Photoshop. However, it’s actually super simple using Canva. Canva is one of our favorite DIY tools for blogger graphics. It has a killer free subscription option, a user-friendly interface, and thousands of stunning free templates! It’s the perfect design tool to create gift guide collages in record time if you’re a busy blogger. So let’s dive into this step-by-step guide on how to make a gift guide collage on Canva to incorporate into any blog post!

How To Make A Gift Guide Collage on Canva

1. Create a Canva account.

Creating a Canva account is super simple and takes you less than 5 minutes! First, you need to open your browser and go to www.canva.com. There you can sign up with your email address, Gmail, or Facebook account. Set up all of your account’s preferences and click on “Get started!”. That’s it, you now have access to a free Canva account! This tool will also help you tons when creating Pinterest and other social media content. 

2. Create a new design with a custom size of 1000px by 1500px.

To create a new Canva design, you can select one from thousands of stylish free templates or make your own from scratch. In this case, we recommend creating your own template by clicking on “Create a design” and choosing your design’s size. This will be 1000px by 1500px. If you need more space because you have a ton of items, you can adjust the size later. Once you’ve put in the desired dimensions, you’ll be taken to the editing interface to start designing!

3. Pick a background for your collage.

All solid collages need a beautiful background that enhances the products! You can select one from the dozens of free Canva backgrounds (which come with plain colors, textures, or subtle images) or look for your own in Unsplash or other stock photo sites. Another option is you can simply use one of your brand colors as the background, then decide any details you want to add. Sometimes it’s fun to add a border, separate a title section, or strategically placed background images in the corners or on the sides of your collage. 

4. Upload your product images to the Canva editor. 

Now you need to upload your product images to the Canva editor! For any products you’re sharing, you’ll likely want to include images of them in your gift guides. So take a screenshot of the product recommendations or download the product images from the retailers’ websites. Then go back to Canva. Simply click the upload icon on the left sidebar and select “upload media”. Make sure you give Canva access to your personal media files. From there, just upload the product pictures to the editor and you’re all set!

5. Remove image backgrounds. 

This step is completely optional! It depends on your style, but removing the backgrounds can help if some of the products have one that clashes with the rest of the design. Every retailer is different. Some use plain white backgrounds, some use colorful or natural backgrounds. So removing them helps keep things cohesive. 

For this, you’ll need to have a premium Canva subscription. Click on the image in the editor and select “Remove background”. Then the design tool does all the work for you! You can do a little touch-up if you need to. Sometimes this is required for more complex images with detailed backgrounds. If you want to do this without spending money on a Canva subscription, you can go to remove.bg and do it over there for free! Though you’ll need to re-upload the images to the Canva editor afterward. 

6. Write an engaging and specific title for the gift guide. 

The topic of the gift guide should tell your readers who the featured products are for! The title sets clear expectations and lets everyone know what the guide is all about. You can have fun with it, or get specific and detail-oriented. It’s all about discovering your blogging voice! Of course, you can always add your personal flair to the title, design-wise. Choose your fonts, sizing, and change the colors. You can also edit if you want to add a background behind the title or add anything unique.  Once you know what your title will be, just choose your preferred font and write it down. You can pick different font types, effects, and sizes so you never have to repeat your designs!

7. Arrange the images & add your branding.

There are different ways you can go about adding the product images to the gift guide collage. If you have an eye for composition, just arrange them in a way that feels natural and stylish. For our example, we choose a specific layout that we’re sticking with. However, we did slightly change the sizing of the text, sizing of the images, and moved things around slightly so it all fit. We also changed the colors, fonts, and font sizing on the entire image to fit our branding. 

8. Add your blog’s URL, logo, or both. 

Brand awareness is key, so you need to make sure everyone knows you created this gift guide collage! So get in the habit of adding your logo, brand name, or URL, whichever you prefer. You can upload your logo as an image and then easily add it to any photo. Or you can simply type out your brand name or URL in your fonts if you prefer that. Then add your blog’s URL and logo to all product collages you make on Canva. It takes two seconds and enhances the design by a long shot! 

9. Incorporate any details into the design that enhance your branding/aesthetic.

So far, your collage should be almost good to post on your blog and social media channels! Now all you have to do is add any other elements that fit the theme of the gift guide collage and your blog’s branding. Canva has hundreds of elements to choose from, including stars, gift stickers, and even gifs! So get creative and play around with a few elements until the design feels complete. 

10. Make any final necessary changes to your collage!

We feel like the final edit is typically the most important. Move things around, and play with the way it looks. So you feel really good about the final product. Sometimes after you see it all come together, you’ll know more changes need to be made. So just give it a final brush through. Here is our final product on this quick gift guide example we made for you guys. It literally took about 15 minutes. And as bloggers, we know with your creative eye you can create images 10 times better than this with Canva!

What gift guide collages will you create this holiday season?

That’s all you need to know about creating a gift guide collage on Canva! Now that the holiday season is coming up, you definitely want to nail this type of content. A collage is the perfect easy-to-make visual representation of what your readers can give to their loved ones this year! And with this guide, the process should be super easy! If you have any more questions about gift guide collages, feel free to shoot us a DM on Instagram or leave a comment below. Good luck creating your collages on Canva!