Canva Unveils AI Design Model as Part of 'Creative Operating System'
The new AI-powered Design Foundation Model and on-demand assistant aim to transform how teams create, collaborate, and scale their brands
Canva is staking its claim as the operating system of creativity. The company today took a big step towards that goal with the introduction of new tools that bring together design, AI, and marketing to better connect every part of the creative process. A key pillar of the visual communication platform’s “Creative Operating System” is its inaugural Design Foundation Model, which enables faster, smarter, and transformative design.
Oh, and there’s also a new AI assistant called “Ask @Canva” that functions as a on-demand design consultant.
Finally, a few upgrades are coming to Canva’s Visual Suite, including a new video editor, a revamped email creation tool, new ways to collect data directly inside Canva, and Canva Sheets integration with Canva Code.
“As knowledge becomes more and more accessible, we believe we’re moving from the Information Era to the Imagination Era, a time when creativity has never been more critical,” Melanie Perkins, Canva’s co-founder and chief executive, says in a press release. “We’ve been thinking about how we can empower our community to succeed in this era, which is why we’re incredibly excited to unveil our biggest launch yet with the all-in-one Creative Operating System.”
Canva’s First Design Model
Canva has built from the ground up a foundational model it claims has been trained to “understand the complexity of design.”
As Danny Wu, Canva’s head of AI products, tells me in an interview, this isn’t about creating static, rasterized images that can’t be easily edited. Instead, “if you’re actually wanting to make a design…a presentation, or make something like a website, that is a little bit more substantive. It’s something you can’t just get with one prompt or [a single] short generation. Do you want to tweak? Do you want to edit? Or maybe even add to it?” He states that Canva’s design model makes this possible, and the convergence of its editor and visual suite creates the “creative operating system for the entire design journey.”
It’s a proprietary, medium-sized model, though the company is not disclosing parameter details or sharing benchmark results. However, Wu reveals that it isn’t in the “hundreds plus of parameters of the cutting-edge large language models.” That said, that’s not Canva’s goal—it didn’t set out to build a general-purpose foundation model, nor did it want to create the best model for every single task, “from coding to general conversation chatter.” Instead, it’s focused on “design and understanding design on a layered and structured level.”
The company calls this its first design model, though it’s not its first model of any kind. The company offers Lucid Origin, a text-to-image model it gained through last year’s acquisition of Leonardo.ai, to generate images and design elements. But the new Design Foundational Model operates at a different level, built to understand how design actually works—from structure and style to spatial relationships and brand consistency.
Your Own Personal Designer
On the front end of Canva, the company is embedding its AI more deeply into the design process. Using natural language, users can input a prompt and then hit the “generate design” button, powered by Canva’s design model, and Canva AI will produce the creative. This AI-powered option will be more visible in both the design and elements tab, and also for video, code, and eventually objects.
Generation has existed on Canva for some time. Still, as Wu points out, the company has now upgraded not only the models powering it but also the user experience by “putting it right where you work.”
But what may be the most interesting is the debut of an AI-powered assistant called “Ask Canva”. Think of it as an on-call designer at your fingertips. If you want feedback, design suggestions, or smart edits without interrupting your workflow, Canva suggests posting a comment and tagging Canva like you would with any collaborator. “You can ask it, for example, for design advice, to generate images, tweak copies if you say, ‘any headline ideas?’, it’ll give you a few different options,” Wu explains. “And that’s doing that after analyzing and understanding the content of the design, including visuals.”
Could all of this be the emergence of “vibe designing,” I ask? After all, it’s creating a creative process in which AI and intuition converge. He acknowledges the term has a nice ring to it, but stresses it’s different from what we might typically think of with vibe coding. Wu comments that with vibe designing, users are more in control: “You’re not just turning a prompt into something and then continuously trying to tune and refine the prompts. Because, for example, in this image I’m generating, if there’s something I’m not happy with the image, I can just really easily edit it because the image itself is a native component. So maybe I want to make the temperature…warmer, maybe I want to adjust the tint a bit, or just increase the brightness quite a little bit.”
To him, this runs counter to vibe coding, which he believes is “still a little bit more of trial and error.”
“What we have always been trying to build here is really integrating AI into the design process in a way that is kind of just intuitively collaborative and designed to basically [have] AI partner with you while you are designing,” Wu declares.
The Designer Impact
Canva’s creative operating system may appeal to many users, particularly teams that lack dedicated design resources, by serving as a true one-stop shop for all their creative needs. Still, what effect does it have on designers who sell their work on the platform? They may see a loss of business because why would users pay for third-party design when they can have AI generate similar work?
“It’s understandable to be a bit nervous,” Wu admits before adding that what AI is really doing in design is “scaling the impact and possibilities of your creative talent and your creative skills.” He sees the technology as almost like a superpower, since it can “significantly up-level what anyone can do” while also turning ideas and imaginative concepts that might otherwise remain unrealized into something that achieves a tangible goal.
“I think it’s equally important to think about just…how much more powerful and how much more useful it is to a professional designer…that has these new, powerful tools in their belt for the job that allows them to create content so much faster at scale,” he adds. Moreover, Wu notes that professional designers are “less constrained” because of AI, with today’s tools offering far more flexibility in design compared to first-wave models.
Canva is already seeing creators use AI and is paying some of them for their work. Wu highlights the $200 million creator fund the company established in 2023, which pays royalties to designers who consent to having their work used to train its AI. It would appear that there’s not as much negative sentiment toward AI on the platform, since more creators are using these features in their designs, which are ultimately helping scale Canva’s content library.
“It’s really about unlocking imagination and empowering creativity,” Wu reiterates.
Other New Features
Canva isn’t stopping at a new foundational model and design assistant. The company is also expanding its Visual Suite, introducing marketing tools to help users grow their brands, and making Affinity free for all.
Video 2.0
The video editor has been rebuilt from the ground up. Canva lists that the application now includes professional-grade tools in a simple setup. There’s a new library of on-trend templates so users can quickly create content for Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok, just like in Adobe Premiere. There’s also a redesigned timeline that makes trimming, syncing, and layering footage easier, along with AI tools to help with production workflows.
Forms
Users can now collect feedback, RSVPs, and other data directly inside Canva. Fully branded forms can be added to websites or different designs, customized to match the appropriate visual style. Users no longer need to embed a Google Form, for example—they can now create the form directly within Canva and publish it instantly, with it appearing natively rather than being limited in customization.
Email Design
Canva calls this a “most requested product.” Users can create, customize, and export fully branded marketing emails quickly, without needing any coding or context switching. All designs are exported as HTML files that users can upload to their preferred email marketing platform (e.g., MailChimp, Constant Contact, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Marketo).
Canva Code in Sheets
Canva Sheets is now integrated with Canva Code, the platform’s code generator. This means that interactive elements created through Canva Code can pull data live from Canva Sheets. Imagine a survey on a website: When a visitor submits a response via the provided submission form, the data is stored in Canva Sheets. Then, the visualization can be produced through Canva Code. Alternative use cases include live dashboards, calculators, and learning tools.
Canva Grow
Canva is seeing companies use its platform to produce ads and marketing collateral. To help with brand, campaign, and performance management, the company is launching Canva Grow, its end-to-end marketing service. Teams can design and launch ads across platforms like Meta, track insights, and quickly refine content based on available performance metrics.
Coinciding with this release, Canva is also introducing a new business plan aptly called Canva Business. It’s made for freelancers, marketers, and small teams who don’t feel that Canva Pro provides enough and believe Canva Enterprise is too much. The plan offers expanded storage, higher AI usage, print discounts, and specialized tools.
Affinity is Free
In March 2024, Canva acquired Affinity, the makers of a suite of professional design software, as it looked to expand beyond its core audience of non-designers and establish a foothold in the professional creative space. The appeal was Affinity’s capabilities in vector illustration, photo editing, and layout design, tools that Canva felt complemented its platform.
Now, nearly two years later, the company is showing off the new Affinity, which unites the two platforms into a single offering. It still has the professional-grade tooling, but it’s under a single product and universal file type. Canva asserts that users can create assets in Affinity and easily move them to Canva to collaborate, publish, and scale their brand.
And as an added treat, Affinity is now free for everyone to use. Canva emphasized this will be the case “forever.”
Wu hopes Canva users will see these updates as helping them “accomplish what they want to accomplish”—whether that’s creating a pitch deck, generating a fundraising campaign, or tackling something they couldn’t before due to cost, skills, or accessibility. If Canva’s creative operating system can unlock these possibilities, “that would make me incredibly proud,” he declares.