How to Add a Drop Shadow (to your Text/Elements) in Canva

Canva is great for many reasons.

What I personally love best about Canva is the fact that you can do things at an amazing speed.

And Canva pretty much does it all: Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, you name it.

As easy as Canva is to use, there are some basic features that Canva has been lacking until very recently.

Effects for text objects come to mind.

One such example are drop shadows.

Luckily, Canva has now fixed this problem and added this functionality. To find out how to apply drop shadows to your text & elements, please read on.

 

How to add a drop shadow in Canva?

To add a drop shadow to your text in Canva, all you need to do is to select your text, then select “Effects” from the top toolbar and then choose “Shadow.” Until very recently, this feature did not exist in Canva. Up to early 2021, to create a drop shadow in Canva, a workaround was needed (duplicate text, then layer the texts on top of each other and adjust the text size).

 

How to add a drop shadow to certain elements in Canva?

Adding a drop shadow to a text is easy. But what about adding a drop shadow to an element in Canva?

Unfortunately, the effects tab that does some magic for texts elements in Canva, is not supported by Canva elements.

This means that adding a drop shadow to Canva elements is not as straightforward as it probably should be.

However, there are two ways to enrich your elements with drop shadows in Canva.

First of all, when searching for elements, you should always check if maybe there is already a drop shadow version of your desired element.

For instance, if you are looking for a rectangle, you will be please to see that Canva actually offers rectangle elements that already include a drop shadow.

In this case, those elements usually let you change the color of both the main element and the drop shadow.

The second “hack” to get a drop shadow for a specific element is to use a simple layering technique. Here’s how you do it:

1. Copy the element for which you wild like to get a drop shadow for
2. Now right-click on the copy and select “Send Backward.”
3. Make the copy slightly bigger than the original
4. Now drag the copy behind the original
5. Adjust the color settings for your copy. You might need to change it to black to give it that drop shadow feel

 

More text effects now available

With the latest Canva update, the effects tab now features a plethora of nice effects for text elements.

1. Shadow
2. Lift
3. Hollow
4. Splice
5. Echo
6. Glitch
7. Neon
8. Curve

And last but not least, you’ll obviously find the “shadow” effect there as well. While these are mostly very basic effects, it is very nice to see that Canva finally added them, as many of these things could only be done by using workarounds in Canva.

Not anymore.

Now, create a new Canva project and check this awesome drop shadow effect out!

Also, have a look at the video I embedded in this article (see above). You can see the drop shadow feature in full effect right there!