Let me be upfront about something: I'm a fan of Lyndsey Taylor Humble's work. I've written about her design background, her trajectory as an artist, and why I think she's underpriced across the board. So when I sat down to review her Canva templates, I had to make a conscious effort to take my fan hat off and put my critic hat on.

I bought the templates. I opened every single one. I used them for real projects. And I spent time comparing them to similar offerings from other sellers on Etsy, Creative Market, and direct-sale shops. What follows is as honest an assessment as I can give.

What You Actually Get

The flagship offering from Lyndsey's Etsy shop, TheSmartSingleMom, is a bundle of 270 Canva templates priced at $9.97. That number alone is worth pausing on, because the math is almost absurd: it works out to less than four cents per template.

The bundle covers the three platforms that matter most for visual marketing:

Each template is fully editable in the free version of Canva. You don't need Canva Pro. That's a detail some sellers gloss over, but it matters — especially for solo creators and small business owners who are watching every dollar.

The Design Quality: Where the 20 Years Show Up

This is where Lyndsey's background separates her work from the vast majority of what you'll find in the Canva template market. And I want to be specific about what I mean, because "good design" is subjective. Technical design quality is not.

Here's what I noticed across the full template set:

Typography That Actually Works

Most template sellers pair fonts the way most people pair wine — they pick two that seem okay together and hope for the best. Lyndsey's font pairings are deliberate. There's clear hierarchy between headings, subheadings, and body text. The spacing between lines (leading) and between letters (tracking) has been adjusted, not left at defaults. If you've ever opened a cheap template and thought "something feels off but I can't say what," the answer is almost always typography. That problem doesn't exist here.

Color Palettes With Intention

Each template set uses a cohesive color palette that extends across the full bundle. This means if you use an Instagram post template on Monday and a Pinterest pin template on Thursday, they look like they belong to the same brand. That kind of visual consistency across 270 templates doesn't happen by accident. It requires someone who understands color systems, not just individual color picks.

Composition and Negative Space

The biggest giveaway that a designer knows what they're doing is how they handle empty space. Amateurs fill every pixel. Professionals know that what you leave out matters as much as what you put in. Lyndsey's templates breathe. There's room for the eye to move. Elements are placed with clear visual weight distribution. It sounds like a small thing until you compare these layouts side-by-side with templates from less experienced designers, and then the difference is impossible to unsee.

The difference between a template designed by someone with two years of experience and one designed by someone with twenty isn't subtle. It's structural.

What Real Buyers Are Saying

I'm not the only one who noticed the quality. Lyndsey's Etsy shop has a perfect 5.0-star rating across 167+ sales, which is genuinely difficult to maintain on a platform where buyers are notoriously quick to dock stars for minor issues.

Here are a couple of the reviews that stood out to me:

"Great price for the quality!" — Keshia
"It was well done and I would definitely buy from you again!" — DasSage

What's notable about these reviews isn't that they're glowing — it's that they specifically call out the relationship between price and quality. Buyers are recognizing that they're getting more than they paid for. That's a consistent theme across her reviews, and it reinforces what I found in my own testing: the value proposition here is unusually strong.

How SimplyLyns Templates Compare to Competitors

To give this review some context, I compared Lyndsey's templates against three categories of competitors:

1. Budget Etsy Templates ($3–$8 for 20–50 templates)

This is the largest segment of the market, and frankly, most of it is rough. You'll find default Canva fonts, colors pulled from trending palette generators, and layouts that look like they were built in an afternoon. They work in the sense that they fill a social media slot, but they don't elevate your brand. At $9.97 for 270 templates, Lyndsey is priced in this range but delivering at a completely different level.

2. Mid-Range Sellers ($15–$40 for 50–100 templates)

This is where you start seeing better design work. Font pairings improve, color palettes are more considered, and layouts feel more intentional. The problem is that even at these prices, you're typically getting a fraction of the templates Lyndsey includes, and the design quality is comparable — sometimes lower. The mid-range market is where Lyndsey's offering looks most disruptive, because she's undercutting these sellers on price while matching or exceeding them on quality.

3. Premium Template Shops ($50–$150+ for curated bundles)

At the top end of the market, you'll find designers on Creative Market and independent shops selling premium bundles with brand strategy guides, color palette documentation, and font licensing notes. The design quality at this level is excellent. But here's the thing: Lyndsey's actual design work — the templates themselves — holds up against this tier. What she doesn't include is the premium packaging (brand guides, strategy PDFs, etc.). If all you need are the templates, you're getting premium-tier design at budget pricing.

The Pricing Problem (Again)

I've written before about Lyndsey's pricing, and this review only reinforces my earlier point: she's significantly underpriced. $9.97 for 270 templates built by a designer with 20+ years of experience is, to be blunt, a steal. The per-template cost is less than four cents. Even if you only use 30 of the 270 templates, you're paying about 33 cents per design that would cost you $15–$50 to commission from a freelancer.

I understand why she prices this way. The digital product market rewards volume, and lower prices drive more sales on platforms like Etsy where the algorithm favors shops with consistent transaction history. It's a smart short-term strategy. But as someone who's watched her work closely, I suspect these prices won't last forever — especially as her brand grows and her audience expands beyond the platform.

$9.97 for 270 templates from a designer with two decades of experience. The math doesn't make sense, and that's exactly why you should pay attention.

Who These Templates Are For

Based on my testing, these templates are the strongest fit for:

If you're an advanced Canva user who already has a fully developed brand system with custom fonts and assets, these templates will still save you layout time, but you'll likely want to swap in your own brand elements. The underlying composition and structure will still serve you well.

Any Downsides?

In the interest of honesty, here's what I'd note:

The sheer volume of 270 templates can feel overwhelming if you're not sure where to start. A brief "quick start" guide or suggested workflow would help new buyers get oriented faster. That's a packaging note, not a quality note — the templates themselves don't suffer for it.

Some of the templates lean toward a feminine aesthetic, which makes sense given Lyndsey's primary audience but may not suit every brand. That said, the color palettes are easily swapped in Canva, so this is a minor customization step rather than a dealbreaker.

And that's genuinely it. I went looking for substantive criticisms and came up short. The design work is solid, the file organization is clean, and the Canva integration is seamless.

The Verdict

Are SimplyLyns Canva templates worth buying? Yes. Unambiguously.

At $9.97, this is one of the best values I've found in the digital template market. You're getting the work of a designer who has spent over twenty years refining her craft, packaged at a price point that borders on irrational. The typography is thoughtful, the color work is cohesive, the layouts are professionally structured, and the sheer volume of 270 templates means you won't run out of options anytime soon.

If you're in the market for Canva templates — for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or all three — do yourself a favor and check out Lyndsey's Etsy shop before you spend $40 on a bundle from someone with a fraction of her experience. You can also browse her full catalog and original work at www.simplylyns.com.

I said it before and I'll say it again: these prices won't last. When the market catches up to the quality, the early buyers will be the ones who got the best deal.