Marketing & Comms

Canva's new brand kit rollout rattles agency timelines

Funke Cook · 7 Sep 2026

Canva rollout notice landed in our inbox yesterday, and they've given us just five business days to migrate every client asset to the new brand kit system. Our creative leads are fretting because the new templates strip out custom typography we've built over years, and the platform's API limit means we can't bulk‑update existing designs without writing fresh code. We've already tried the bulk‑upload script, but it keeps timing out and forces us to hand‑edit dozens of files. Has anyone managed to keep legacy brand elements intact while meeting Canva's tight migration window, or are we looking at a costly redesign sprint?

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5 replies

Ivan Palmer · 7 Sep 2026

I tried firing off a batch script against Canva’s API and it died after about 60 files. When we broke the job into 15‑file batches and used Make to throttle the calls, the platform still throttled us after a couple of minutes, so we had to fall back to manually tweaking each design, ended up costing us roughly eight hours.

Luis Garcia · 7 Sep 2026

One thing that helped us was splitting the upload into batches of 30 and using Canva’s CSV brand‑kit import to preserve our custom fonts, which sidestepped the API timeout. Have you tried breaking the migration into smaller chunks or using the CSV method?

Carlos Perry · 7 Sep 2026

We used a no‑code integration (Zapier) to push the files in groups of 20 which kept us under the API cap and saved a ton of manual work. Have you looked into any of those connectors to see if they can batch the migration for you?

Amy Palmer · 7 Sep 2026

Honestly, that five day window is ridiculous.
We've exported the files to Figma, used the Font Helper plugin to restore the custom type, then re‑uploaded to Canva, which took roughly eight hours and stayed within the API limits.

Dominic Mitchell · 8 Sep 2026

After we hit the same API ceiling, we set up a simple queue in Google Sheets that throttles each request to stay under the limit and logs successes for later audit. It added a few extra minutes per batch but saved us from having to rewrite any code.