How to Group Elements in Canva (Ctrl+G)

Selecting multiple elements — by clicking one, then Shift-clicking additional ones, or dragging a selection box around several at once — and pressing Ctrl+G on Windows, or Cmd+G on Mac, combines the entire selection into a single group. **What changes once elements are grouped**: dragging, resizing, or rotating the group affects every element within it together, as a single unit, rather than needing to individually reposition each piece separately — genuinely useful for a cluster of elements meant to always move and scale together, like an icon and its accompanying caption text, or several elements that together form one visually cohesive logo-like unit. **Selecting a group versus an individual element within it**: clicking anywhere on a grouped cluster selects the whole group by default; to select and edit just one specific element within an existing group without ungrouping everything first, double-clicking that specific element (in many Canva versions) selects it individually within the group context, letting a targeted adjustment happen without needing to fully break the group apart and reassemble it afterward. **Ungrouping**: Ctrl+Shift+G (Cmd+Shift+G on Mac) reverses the grouping entirely, breaking the set back into individually selectable and editable pieces — necessary when the grouped elements genuinely need to be repositioned or resized independently going forward rather than as a fixed unit. **How grouping interacts with layering**: a group is treated as a single unit within the page's overall layering stack, meaning bringing a group forward or sending it backward moves every element inside that group together as one block relative to everything else on the page — the individual elements within the group don't separately interleave with other, ungrouped elements around them while the group remains intact. **Grouping versus Canva's Frame or Combine features**: it's worth distinguishing grouping, which is purely about treating multiple elements as one movable/resizable unit, from Canva's separate frame and image-combination features, which serve different purposes like cropping an image into a specific shape — grouping doesn't change how any individual element looks or is cropped, only how the group as a whole is manipulated together. **Related shortcuts**: Ctrl+A selects every element on the current page at once, which is commonly followed by Ctrl+G to group an entire page's layout together before, for instance, duplicating that whole grouped layout onto a new page as a single starting point. **Mistake to avoid**: grouping elements prematurely, before their individual positioning is finalized, and then needing to ungroup, adjust, and regroup repeatedly — it's generally more efficient to finalize each element's rough position first and group only once the overall arrangement is close to its intended final layout, rather than grouping early and fighting the group's combined-movement behavior while still actively repositioning individual pieces. **Nested groups**: a previously grouped set of elements can itself be grouped together with additional elements or other groups, creating a nested group structure — ungrouping in this case only breaks apart the outermost, most recently created group level, leaving any groups nested within it still intact, which sometimes surprises someone expecting a single Ctrl+Shift+G press to fully separate every element back to its individual, ungrouped state in one step. **Grouping and resizing proportions**: resizing a group by dragging one of its corner handles scales every element within the group proportionally together, maintaining their relative sizes and positions to each other — this differs from resizing an individual ungrouped element, which affects only that one element in isolation, making grouping a genuinely useful technique specifically when a cluster of elements needs to scale up or down together as a cohesive unit, like enlarging an entire logo-and-tagline combination for a different design without distorting the relationship between its individual pieces.