Canva, the widely-used online design platform, announced several new features and introduced a new subscription tailored for businesses at its inaugural international event, Canva Create, held in Los Angeles on Thursday. The platform revealed its most significant redesign in over a decade, encompassing a fresh homepage and editing experience for all users. Additionally, the company introduced Canva Enterprise, a new subscription targeted at large organizations. Furthermore, multiple new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features were unveiled within Magic Studio and Visual Suite.
Details of Canva Platform Redesign A major highlight of the event was Canva's decision to overhaul its platform, including the homepage and editing suite. The company claims that the redesigned user interface aims to streamline workflows and enhance workplace productivity, incorporating the following changes:
- A new contextual editing toolbar providing access to one-click background remover and Magic Studio AI tools directly from the front.
- A customizable homepage allowing users to bookmark designs, folders, and brand templates.
- Organizations can prioritize company or team-wide content by pinning it to the top of the homepage.
- An improved search interface featuring multiple filters.
- Enhanced navigation facilitating seamless transitions between projects and access to assets and resources for teams.
Melanie Perkins, CEO and Co-Founder of Canva, expressed enthusiasm about the revamped Canva experience and the introduction of new products, aiming to empower every organization to design. She emphasized the increasing demand for visual content and the growing complexity of navigating organizational structures. Perkins stated that Canva's goal is to unify the fragmented ecosystems of design, AI, and workflow tools to meet the needs of organizations in the coming decade.
Canva announced that the new homepage and editing toolbar will be accessible to the first one million users who discover a secret portal hidden in the Canva homepage. For others, the redesigned platform is scheduled to launch in August.
Canva Enterprise, a new subscription service tailored for large organizations with brand management, administration, reporting, and complex security needs, was also unveiled. This subscription enables businesses to create large quantities of designs and templates and facilitates internal collaboration at scale. It includes admin tools to secure brand assets and features:
- Scalable cloud storage for storing designs and providing secure access to employees.
- A centralized account with consolidated design, content production, collaboration, and AI tools for easy subscription management.
- Security tools like Canva Shield, SSO, SCIM, and MFA to safeguard organizational data.
Canva introduced six new features for its AI-powered editing suite, Magic Studio, which has been utilized over 6.5 billion times since its launch in October 2023:
- Magic Media: An AI-powered text-to-image generator for creating graphics, icons, and illustrations.
- Magic Design: Capable of generating high-quality presentations.
- Resize and Magic Switch: Convert designs to custom documents with a text prompt.
- Styles & Layout tool: Applies brand colors and templates to entire designs with one click.
- Improved AI-powered photo editor.
- Highlights feature: Cuts and selects aesthetic clips from long videos, enhancing voice and reducing background noise.
Canva also introduced enhancements to Visual Suite, allowing users to track changes and collaborate on past edits, access asset libraries and templates approved by Amazon ads, Google, and Meta, utilize the Data Autofill feature to import data from third-party platforms, and use Bulk Create to quickly update images, text, and graphics across designs.
Expanding its product offerings, Canva introduced Work Kits tailored for different teams such as marketing, human resources, sales, and creative departments. These customisable tools can be branded using Canva's Brand Kit.
Additionally, Canva Courses were unveiled to provide interactive courses for users to learn and improve their design skills across various formats, managed from a central dashboard. Affinity, a full-stack desktop design app acquired by Canva, launched a new version with features like Variable Font support and Stroke Width Tool, along with support for ARM64 chipsets. Eligible teachers, schools, and non-profits can sign up for a waitlist to access Affinity for free, with licenses to be provided by Canva in the coming months.
