Web-based design platform Canva introduces a colossal suite of new brand management products and AI-powered design tools aimed at helping entire workplaces streamline their content creation process. Announced today at Canva’s Create event, most of these new features aim to make creating content such as social media graphics, presentations and promotional materials more accessible to those without professional design experience. The idea is that this would free up the graphic designers to focus on more pressing tasks. The number of features announced is impressive and could challenge Adobe’s ubiquity in some offices.
A new Brand Hub is being added to Canva’s visual worksuite, providing tools designed to help users stay consistent with their company’s visual identity. Instead of a shared drive and endless Slack messages to designers, users would now create a brand kit with company-specific assets like logos, fonts, colors, and design guidelines. Brand folders would be set up to group assets for specific events, campaigns, and projects, and brand templates would allow designers to create pre-built, reusable templates for repetitive tasks like email campaigns.
So far, this sounds a lot like Google Drive, but with the word “brand” added. However, Canva has some additional tricks that set this apart from other cloud storage solutions. Admins can set some permissions to ensure all content created in Canva stays on-brand by restricting unapproved fonts and colors. Admins can also approve workflows directly in Canva before publishing, to prevent multiple drafts from being saved and reviewed elsewhere. There’s also a new “Magic Replace” tool that lets you replace an element in all your designs with one click when you just need to update an outdated logo or branding graphic.
The Magic Replace tool is just one of several new AI-powered features available in the Canva visual worksuite. All of them are titled “Magic” which can be a bit confusing when some of the descriptions are so similar. “Magic Eraser” should be able to remove anything you don’t want in an image, whether it’s people in the background or an unnecessary object, while “Magic Edit” allows users to completely clean up an object replace generative AI with something else.
There’s also a “Magic Design” tool that generates a curated selection of personalized templates (like posters or birthday cards) from any image you upload, as well as an AI-powered copywriter assistant that can generate written content from a text prompt that You can use in presentations and website texts. If you don’t have time to throw your own slides together, there’s even a tool that creates entire branded presentations for you.
A new translation feature automatically translates any text in a theme into over 100 different languages, and video footage can be matched to the beat of a soundtrack without manual editing. Canva said it uses a mix of different AI models as the basis for these features, in addition to building its own systems. Finally, 953 new fonts and a variety of non-workspace-specific tools will be added to the design platform, as requested by the wider community. New editing features for layouts, layers, styles, and gradients are available to spice up your designs, and alt text can now be generated for images directly in Canva.
Check out the Canva website for more details if you need a breakdown of some of these features, which isn’t unreasonable given the sheer size of this update. There’s a lot to digest here. Canva already advertises it as an “all-in-one” creation tool, and it’s honestly hard to disagree, especially considering how easy it is to use for everyday graphic design projects compared to more specialized professional platforms.
There are numerous other web-based design services that offer a similar experience (including Adobe Express), but Canva is the industry titan. The company claims it currently has over 110 million monthly users — an increase of 30 million since the launch of its visual worksuite last September. Adobe’s solution to Canva’s rising popularity appears to be beating it in its own accessibility game, having recently announced new integrations and AI capabilities for Adobe Express earlier this week. But more may need to be done.