Canva Craft

Canva Craft is Canva's first state-of-the-art image generation model, developed and trained from scratch by Canva Research, Canva's in-house AI lab. Built specifically for design, it turns prompts into images that work as designs rather than as flat pictures, producing compositions with deliberate hierarchy, alignment, spacing, crisp edges and text that lands where it should. Craft is available to all Canva users globally through Dream Lab inside Canva, and to developers and product teams through Canva's Public API. It is intended for everyone from first-time creators to professional designers, as well as marketers and product teams who need visuals they can edit, refine and reuse. Most image generation models are trained primarily on photographs and generate pixels directly from a prompt. That approach can produce attractive pictures, but it offers little control over how an image is structured, where objects sit, how text reads, or whether the result can be pulled apart and edited afterwards. Canva Craft was designed around a different assumption: that a great deal of visual output is not photography but design work such as posters, social posts, presentations, infographics and menus, where layout, hierarchy and typography matter as much as the imagery itself. The context is significant in scale, with more than a quarter of a billion people using Canva to create over 400 designs every second, and Canva states that delivering frontier-level performance at that scale required breakthroughs in both compute efficiency and inference speed. Craft's core answer to this is a two-stage architecture that separates compositional planning from image rendering. In the first stage, an image planning model interprets the prompt and writes a detailed plan of the composition: which elements appear, their spatial relationships, relative scale, visual hierarchy, and any text that needs to appear in the image. In the second stage, a dedicated image rendering model translates that plan into a high-fidelity image at up to 2K resolution across more than 30 aspect ratios. Because the model reasons about the structure of an image before generating it, it can produce complex layouts with greater accuracy, including legible text, precise object placement and consistent visual relationships. Craft gives users direct control over what ends up in the frame. Canva describes shaping images your way by treating the whole image as an intentional composition of layered elements, and perfecting every detail, with the example of asking for a purple sky, long shadows and a lone tree and getting all three with the emphasis where you wanted it. Output size is flexible too: users can choose from more than 30 aspect ratios or enter their own, to create everything from social posts or stories to posters or banners. Prompts can be written in any language, and Craft can create text in 55 languages, which makes it practical for multilingual campaigns and localized assets. That same structure enables granular editing. Because composition is explicitly modelled, Craft allows targeted changes to individual elements without unnecessarily altering everything else. Craft outputs are particularly well suited to Canva's Magic Layers, which can transform generated images into fully editable design elements. JSON boundary boxing makes it easier than ever to convert images into editable layers with Magic Layers, with more accurate and faster results. Canva also states that this architecture provides the technical foundation for more advanced editing and reference-image capabilities coming in future releases. Craft's training places a much greater emphasis on design than on photographs. Its training data includes millions of human-made templates from Canva's content library, spanning professionally designed posters, social posts, presentations, infographics, menus and typography-rich layouts. Unlike flat images, these templates teach the model exactly how layout, hierarchy and typography fit together, giving it a deeper understanding of the principles behind effective design rather than simply what finished images look like. Following pre-training, Craft was optimised through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, incorporating feedback from Canva's professional designers to improve instruction following, typography accuracy and overall visual quality. For internal evaluations, Canva's professional designers worked alongside dozens of researchers to assess more than 25,000 pairs of images in head-to-head comparisons with leading models, and when automated evaluations and human judgments differed, Canva sided with the designer. Performance work underpins the model's availability at scale. Through advanced model distillation, Canva reduced the number of inference steps required by Craft to a fraction of the original model, and it developed a custom inference engine optimised for the planning stage, making Craft an order of magnitude faster than its first internal version. These advances underpin Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast, two upcoming variants designed to deliver high-quality image generation at a fraction of the cost of leading frontier models. On DesignArena, the largest crowdsourced assessor of AI design, Craft debuted as the fourth most advanced image generation model, ranking first globally for People & Portraits out of 87 models and for Landscapes & Nature out of 85 models, second for Abstract & Patterns and fourth for Products. Access is broad. Canva Craft is available starting today to all Canva users globally; to begin, users open Dream Lab in the bottom left panel. Craft is also available via the Public API and the Canva MCP Server, representing Canva's push to develop AI models that extend the reach of its technology beyond its core product. Developers and product teams can build Craft into their own tools, such as marketing platforms, e-commerce sites, ad builders and print services, and Canva notes the API is also the quickest way to test Craft on your own prompts and compare it with other models. Canva MCP, coming soon, connects Craft to AI assistants and automated workflows so agents can create images ready to use in a design, meaning an assistant can make a launch graphic, a product shot or a social post as one step in a bigger task. Safety is built into every stage of how Canva develops and deploys AI. Models undergo continuous testing and rigorous safety evaluations to identify and mitigate potential risks, and alongside visual quality Canva evaluates brand safety, cultural context and the potential for harmful content before release. Like all AI products on Canva, Craft is backed by Canva Shield, Canva's comprehensive approach to AI safety, which includes robust input and output moderation, privacy and safety controls, and reporting tools that allow people to flag potentially harmful or misleading content. The model is built to support a wide range of creative work. For social content and marketing assets it produces posters, social posts, flyers, presentation visuals and ads with layouts, hierarchy and text that are ready to use. For lifestyle and editorial photography it generates realistic scenes featuring people, places, food, travel and everyday moments. For illustration and digital art it covers flat, vector, painterly and hand-drawn styles. For people and characters it handles portraits, groups and fashion, including complex scenes that stay coherent. For nature and environment imagery it produces landscapes, cityscapes, interiors and architecture, and for creative and conceptual work it builds imaginative compositions that bring real and stylised elements together. The outcomes Canva describes are precision and control. Users get photorealistic images that bring together the fine detail, depth and soft transitions of real-world imagery with the thoughtful composition of design: deliberate hierarchy, alignment, spacing, crisp edges and text that lands where it should. Because generated images can become editable layers, the output feeds directly into a design workflow instead of ending as a static file, and because composition is planned first, users can make targeted adjustments rather than regenerating everything. The result is more flexibility for first-time creators and professional designers alike to bring their imagination to life. Craft's target users span marketers, creators and designers who need images that work as designs, along with developers and product teams building marketing platforms, e-commerce sites, ad builders and print services through the Public API. This first version is described as just the start: faster Craft models are already on the way, and Canva plans to keep raising the bar on quality, detail and control to improve things like fine print and technical drawings. In summary, Canva Craft's primary value proposition is that it generates design-ready images rather than mere pictures. By planning composition and typography before rendering, training on millions of human-made Canva templates, and producing 2K output in more than 30 aspect ratios with text in 55 languages, it delivers the precision, consistency and editability that design work demands, available inside Canva through Dream Lab and to developers through the Public API.