Design platform Canva has released its first image generation template, called Canva Craft, developed by its research team to compete with peer-reviewed templates from Google, OpenAI, ByteDance and Meta.
The company said its model works in two stages. First, it interprets user prompts and creates a plan with details such as spatial relationships of elements, relative scale, visual hierarchy, and information for text generation. In the second stage, its model generates an image with a resolution of up to 2K in 30 different image formats possible for different platforms.
Canva said this approach allows it to create images with precise object details and readable text. Additionally, users could make precise edits without changing other parts of the image.
The company noted that instead of using photographs, it used designs to train this model using human-designed templates from Canva’s library, including posters, social media posts, presentations, infographics, menus, and typography-rich layouts.
This means that images generated with Canva Craft could be converted into layered designs using Canva Magic, the company’s image-to-design transformer. Last year, the platform released its own template that includes designs and layers.
Canva Craft is available on the company’s platform for all users, who can access the template from the Dream Lab tab. The template will also be available via the Canva API. Additionally, the company plans to support image generation in third-party chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini through Canva’s MCP.
Canva has used a number of image templates for generation on its platform. It is therefore likely that the new models will help reduce API costs for the business. Besides costs, the new model also allows the platform to have better quality and speed control.
In 2024, Canva acquired media generation platform Leonardo.ai. Leonardo researchers are said to have contributed to the new image model.
Canva said it is developing two cost-effective versions of the template, called Craftfast and Craft-ultrafast, which will be released soon.
The company was on track to generate $4 billion in revenue last year. However, it cut its growth forecast for 2026, which would have caused its valuation to fall from $42 billion to $35 billion, according to external analysts.
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