“We are moving from the information era, to the imagination era,” said Melanie Perkins, co-founder and chief executive officer of Canva. The unique designing and content creation platform embarks on its next big update, one that is substantial enough for the company to dub it “Your Creative OS”. Key to this, Perkins said, is the triple layer structure which has the platform (this includes the world’s biggest content library, collaborative design engine and an app ecosystem), Canva AI (or artificial intelligence), and the Visual Suite that is underlined by width of utility including Docs, Photo Editor, Video editing and Social tools. This comes as Canva, valued at $42 billion, said they now have more than 260 million monthly active users, of which more than 29 million are paying subscribers, and the company recorded $3.5 billion in revenue.
The new feature set includes a revamped video editing, something Perkins said Canva has been “investing very heavily” in. Called Video 2.0, there is a distinct push towards a more “pro” focused editing suite with a redesigned timeline for managing video streams, as well as an option to upload clips and selecting a template. “Canva does the heavy lifting and you can literally go from raw footage to a share worthy story in 60 seconds,” explained Alli McKee, Canva’s head of Design Experience.
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The updates add more flexibility will creating Forms for online, Email Design for teams, AI at Work that adds an ability to create visuals or 3D graphics that are animatable and rotatable, as well as an Ask@Canva which is supposed to be a design partner for design advice or even generating variations. Canva Code, released earlier this year, is now adding a layer of data as well. “You can add a data backend to your Canva Code creations by connecting them directly into Canva Sheets, which unlocks a whole new set of use cases that our community has been asking us for since we launched,” explained McKee.
“Canva users have used the AI tools more than 22,00,00,00,000 times”, said Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer. The creative suite’s underlying AI layer includes in-house models as well as those from OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, Google, Anthropic as well as Canva’s recent acquisition, Leonardo.Ai. It was this summer that Canva announced the first design deep research connector for OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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The company is now rapidly moving towards a Design Foundational Model, which Adams said, is a world first. He pointed out, “the first wave of AI, driven by the diffuser models, did a great job of generating images, but the output was static, it was flat, and it was uneditable.” The subsequent Omni LLM models got better with image layout, but still produced results in a static format. He said that the important thing about Canva’s Foundational Design Model is that they “are now unlocking a whole new paradigm of creation and collaboration by understanding all of the layers and the complexity of design.”
The complexity with design usually stems from having to balance many elements. Depending on what a user may be designing, this could include images, brand assets, text content, audio, video layers and often animations, depending on the level of design. Canva said they are going to integrate this new model into different elements of the Visual Suite, across functionalities and use cases. “With our new foundational model, we’ve been able to use our expertise in design to create something that orchestrates this whole process. And this is really exciting because it means we’re able to bring this foundational model into all of the places where design happens today,” adds Adams.
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The Affinity trump card
Ashley Hewson, CEO of Affinity, which makes a suite of creative applications designed for professionals, said their vision with the newly crafted Affinity app will “change the game for creative professionals forever”. This is something that would worry competition including Adobe which has the Creative Cloud suite. The new Affinity app brings together the company’s different apps and their functionality, into a single interface.
“You’ve had vector design apps, professional photography apps, and those for publishing and layout. What we’re doing for the first time ever is actually bringing all of these tools together into a single space to offer a completely revolutionary workflow,” explained Hewson. In case you are wondering about the price or subscription costs, the Canva-owned Affinity (this acquisition was completed in early 2024) said this new app will be “free forever” and that includes future core Affinity app updates. The scope of functionality will include Vector, Pixel and Layout design tools.
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The linkage between Canva’s suite and the new Affinity app is clear — anyone who has subscribed to Canva’s premium subscription, will get the Canva AI functionality within Affinity as well. This would include Generative Edit and Fill, background remover and 4K image generation. Hewson demoed the app’s ability to handle documents with really big file sizes, including zooming into one at 10000000%, or ten million percent. He this is just the first in many steps that Canva and Affinity are building towards connecting professional design tools with everyday creation use cases.