HubSpot: Putting the Brand System Inside the Tool Marketers Already Use

Case study · Marketing 475 · Designing in Canva

HubSpot’s small design team stopped trying to make every asset itself and instead built brand kits and more than 600 templates in Canva, so marketers could produce on-brand work on their own.

The situation

HubSpot sells customer relationship management (CRM) software for growing companies. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah founded it in Boston in 2006 to help companies grow with inbound marketing. As of 2026, its website lists 306,000 customers and 15 offices around the world.

A brand that size produces a huge volume of visual content every week: social posts, emails, webinar slides, event signs and landing pages, in several languages. Most of that work is not made by designers. It is made by marketers, communications staff and regional teams on deadline.

The challenge

According to Canva’s customer story, HubSpot’s global marketing design team was small and stretched thin. Requests piled up, so marketers often made their own assets. They used desktop tools or personal Canva Free and Teams accounts that held no brand guidance. Some used outdated guidelines and old assets, and the brand started to look different from one touchpoint to the next.

Regional teams had a second problem. To adapt an English design for their market, they had to go back to the same small design team or hire freelancers. Jenn Proud, head of HubSpot’s global marketing design, summed it up: “It was hard for any marketer at HubSpot to feel empowered on their own.”

What they did

HubSpot moved about 150 Canva Teams users onto Canva Enterprise and treated the rollout as brand infrastructure, not a software purchase. Its Brand Infrastructure team, which builds design systems, put that system inside Canva. A Brand Kit in Canva holds an organization’s official logos, colors, fonts, approved assets and guidelines, and admins can add Brand Controls that limit people to those colors and fonts.

• Built HubSpot brand kits and curated folders of on-brand photography and assets
• Created a library of more than 600 templates from the latest brand guidelines, covering social, email, presentations, print, events, webinars and landing pages
• Consolidated presentation templates so one design could be used in PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides
• Opened access to marketing, creative, communications and people operations teams, with shared folders worldwide
• Let regional marketers localize templates themselves instead of hiring freelancers
• Proud demoed the setup to more than 300 employees, and the team ran a Slack channel for feedback, template requests and short trainings
• Used comments and tagging in Canva so designers could review work in real time

What happened

All of the results below come from Canva’s own customer story. They are vendor-published and self-reported, so read them as claims rather than audited figures. Canva has a clear interest in this story: when it launched its expanded Canva Enterprise plan in May 2024, it said teams at 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies used Canva and pitched brand controls and design approvals to large companies (MarTech, 2024).

• Ad hoc design requests to the design team were cut in half after rollout (Canva customer story)
• Time for a marketer to complete a design task dropped from about 45 minutes to about 15 minutes (Canva customer story)
• Brand consistency improved “almost immediately,” according to the story, and reliance on freelancers for backlog work went down
• The design team could spend more time on larger campaigns instead of one-off requests

Why it worked

The brand decisions were made before anyone opened a template. Colors, fonts, logos, photography and layouts were settled by designers and stored in one place. Marketers were not asked to make brand calls. They were asked to fill in a system that already made those calls for them.

The templates covered real, repeated jobs. A webinar promo or an event sign is made over and over. Turning each one into a template removed the most common chances to drift off brand.

Adoption was supported. A tool only carries a brand if people use the approved version. The demo, the Slack channel and the template-request process kept people inside the system instead of falling back on personal accounts. As Proud put it, “Canva is an enablement for non-designers to do on-brand consistent work.”

Where it gets complicated

The evidence is thin. Every number in this case comes from a story Canva published to sell Canva. It has no date, no baseline method and no independent check. Cutting requests in half is plausible, but students should ask how it was measured.

Templates can make work consistent and still make it bland. Canva’s template library is used by millions of people, so a lightly edited template can look like everyone else’s. HubSpot avoided this by building its own templates from its own design system, which takes skilled designers and ongoing upkeep. The tool did not replace the design team. It changed its job from making every asset to building and maintaining the system.

Control also has limits. Brand kits and controls can restrict colors and fonts, but they cannot judge whether a message is clear, whether the photo fits the audience or whether the layout is cluttered. Those calls still depend on the person editing the template.

The marketing principle

Canva is a production tool. It carries out a brand strategy. It does not create one. HubSpot got consistent work at scale because it set up the brand first, as kits, controls and custom templates, and then made that setup the easiest path for every marketer. The lesson for any team, from a global software company to a local bakery, is to build the brand kit before you design anything.

Sources

• HubSpot customer story: Canva Enterprise, Canva (n.d.)
• Our Story, HubSpot (2026)
• Brand Kit, Canva Help Center (2026)
• Canva introduces Canva Enterprise, Work Kits and adtech apps, MarTech (2024)

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