Canva Unleashes AI Design Tools and New Platform Features
▼ Summary
– Canva launched its own foundational design model that generates editable layered designs across formats like social media posts and presentations.
– The company expanded its AI assistant to work across screens, generate 3D objects, and allow style copying, plus it can be mentioned in comments for suggestions.
– Canva introduced a full-stack marketing platform called Canva Grow, integrating AI for asset creation and analytics and enabling direct ad publishing on platforms like Meta.
– New products include forms for gathering input and email design tools for creating branded marketing or tracking email templates.
– Canva made the Affinity design tool free forever, redesigned its interface to combine vector, pixel, and layout tools, and integrated it with Canva AI for generating designs.
Canva has significantly expanded its creative toolkit by introducing a proprietary design model and a suite of new platform capabilities. This foundational model, developed in-house, moves beyond generating simple flat images to produce designs with fully editable layers and objects. It functions seamlessly across various formats such as social media graphics, presentations, digital whiteboards, and websites, giving users greater control over their creative output.
According to Robert Kawalsky, Canva’s global head of product, earlier AI tools relied heavily on text prompts to manipulate flat images, which could be limiting in a visual context. He explained that the new approach blends the efficiency of AI-generated starting points with the flexibility for users to make direct, hands-on adjustments. This combination allows creators to iterate more intuitively without being confined to text-based commands.
The platform is also enhancing its AI assistant, making it accessible across different sections like the design and elements tabs. Users can now mention the assistant directly in project comments to receive text or media suggestions while collaborating. Additional upgrades enable the AI to generate three-dimensional objects and replicate the artistic style of an existing design, offering more ways to maintain visual consistency.
Earlier this year, Canva introduced a spreadsheet tool and a feature for building mini-apps via prompts. These two products are now interconnected, letting users pull data from spreadsheets to create custom widgets that deliver repeatable insights. This integration simplifies data visualization and supports more dynamic project workflows.
In a move to support marketers, Canva has launched Canva Grow, a comprehensive marketing platform that combines AI-powered creative asset development with performance analytics. This new offering builds on the company’s recent acquisition of the ad analytics firm MagicBrief. Through Canva Grow, marketing teams can design, analyze, and publish advertisements directly on major platforms like Meta without leaving the Canva environment.
Beyond AI, several new products are joining the platform. Users can now build custom forms to gather input from clients or audiences, providing an alternative to services like Google Forms. An email design feature has also been added, enabling the creation of branded templates for marketing campaigns or transactional emails such as package tracking notifications.
Following its acquisition of the professional design software Affinity, Canva has announced that the tool will remain free for all users. The company is redesigning Affinity’s interface to unify vector, pixel, and layout tools into a single workspace. Tight integration with Canva allows designers to move assets created in Affinity directly into Canva projects. Additionally, users can leverage Canva AI to generate images and designs from within the Affinity application itself.
(Source: TechCrunch)
