Canva gets new UI makeover, AI-powered magic studio upgrade

All-in-one visual communication platform Canva, Inc. announced its new user interface makeover, workforce tools, and upgraded artificial intelligence (AI) powered magic studio feature.

“Every part of Canva from the editor to the homepage has had a glow-up. It’s a clutter-free editor, we’ve thought about hero in your content and making sure that you can personalize the experience” Cameron Adams, Canva Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, said in a virtual press briefing on May 21.

The revamped UI design features a new contextual editing toolbar and customizable workspaces on the homepage.

Canva said users can favorite top designs, folders, and brand templates, while organizations can pin company or team-wide content to the top of the page.

“Our AI products, which were most recently launched have been used over 6.5 billion times. There’s been over 25 billion designs created,” said Mr. Adams.

Improved features

Among the newest improvements is the expansion of the “supercharged” AI-generation tool Magic Studio, which has been used more than five billion times since its launch in Oct. 2023.

The upgrade capabilities are magic media, text to graphic tool, magic design generating three times higher quality presentations, and the resize and magic switch.

This converts any design to any custom document, by entering a prompt or choosing from new options like a video script, LinkedIn post, or presentation outline.

Aside from its renowned AI-powered photo editor, the AI-powered Highlights cuts a selection of eye-catching clips from longer videos, while Enhance Voice reduces background noise.

“AI tools are very fragmented, having texts and videos and images and coding and 3d in speech means a whole another tool to learn and hold another platform… which is challenging,” said Canva Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Melanie Perkins.

Mr. Adams added that Canva “truly sees AI as the next wave of democratizing design and creating a beautifully simple but powerful experience for every type of design user.”

Additionally, the platform introduced Canva Work Kits, an industry-curated collection of hundreds of craft-specific templates, from presentations to documents.

The Work Kits offer resources customized for the needs of marketing, human resources, sales, and creative departments.

Meanwhile, upgrades on Visual Suite include suggested editing, where users will be able to track changes and collaborate in edits. There have been 375 million Canva Docs created since 2022.

Applications built by the largest ad platforms offer instant feedback on designs, data autofill, and uploading CSV or Excel files to bulk create to speed up marketing workflow.

Canva Enterprise

The newly introduced Canva Enterprise has a subscription offering designed for large organizations with complex security, reporting, administration, and brand management requirements.

“Canva for enterprise allows organizations to do that with all the security and trust they need for such a large scale and important projects,” he said.

Mr. Adams noted that Canva is the trusted platform of over 90% of Fortune 500 companies across the globe.

“FedEx has great decreased brand, review submissions by 77% and increased productivity workdays saved over 33,000 hours by implementing Canva and allowing a lot of their design to scale,” he added.

According to the company, the new homepage and editing experience will be available to the first one million users who will find the ‘secret portal’ hidden in their homepage while general availability is set to start in August.

Canva has 20 million paying subscribers which led to over $2.2 billion annual revenue.

The platform has more than 185 million monthly users across 190 countries in more than 100 languages. – Aubrey Rose A. Inosente