Name: Why SVGs are better for scaling in Canva
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T19:02:32.000Z
Duration: 3 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There are many scenarios where we need to resize and scale creative assets so they match the type of design we're working on.

Whether we're printing a large billboard or creating a little banner for the web, the formats we're working with can determine the final quality of our design.

In this lesson, you'll learn about the concept of SVGs in the context of Canva and how you can change colors and sizes for those type of assets.

On the page in front of us, you have two small icons of a martial arts character.

They seem to be of an identical image quality.

However, let's try to resize them and see what happens with the quality then.

Well, you can see the left one looks super crisp.

The one on the right hand side, not so much.

The image is blurred and looks distorted.

The image on the right is a simple JPEG that I've uploaded to Canva.

JPEGs are bitmap images which define what color each pixel is.

Therefore, when you scale them, quality deteriorates.

The image on the left, however, is an SVG which stands for Scalable Vector Graphics.

In other words, the image is generated by code instructions which are then processed by the rendering software.

In summary, SVGs are great for designs on different platforms and devices because their quality remains high no matter how much you scale them.

Let's look at a scenario where SVG graphics can be super helpful.

On the next page, you can see the logo of my company.

A lot of times, I would have to change the logo colors to fit a presentation deck or a partnership proposal.

Instead of doing that in an editing software and then re-uploading each version back to Canva, I can use a single SVG file of my logo.

Canva then recognizes the colors of each element specified in the SVG code and you can see two color options for that element.

If the logo needs to be in a black background, I can change both colors to white and get a nice contrast between the background and my logo.

If you have a lighter background and you want your logo to stand out, you can change the colors to black.

A single SVG image can work for any design.

The incredible thing about Canva is that it supports both the uploading and downloading in SVG format.

If you click on the download button and expand the file types, SVG is right there.

However, be mindful that Canva supports SVGs with up to five colors.

If you have more than that, your asset will be turned into a fixed image.

I highly recommend you work with an experienced graphic designer if your goal is to create complex SVGs suitable for Canva. you