At its inaugural international Canva Create event in Los Angeles today, Canva, the world’s leading all-in-one visual communications platform, unveiled its most significant platform renovation in a decade, alongside a suite of new workplace products and services poised to revolutionize the way millions operate.
“We’re thrilled to present a rejuvenated Canva experience and a lineup of fresh products aimed at empowering design across organizations,” remarked Melanie Perkins, Canva’s Co-founder and CEO. “As the demand for visual content skyrockets, navigating the complexities of organizational design is more challenging than ever. In our first decade, we democratized the design ecosystem, and now, in our second, we aim to integrate the fragmented realms of design, AI, and workflow tools for every organization.”
As visual communication becomes ubiquitous, Canva’s latest Visual Economy Report revealed that 92% of business leaders now expect non-design roles to possess design skills. Canva’s new products, unveiled at the Canva Create event, directly address this demand, providing access to design capabilities to the 99% of employees without professional design training.
With over 185 million monthly active users and annual revenue exceeding $2.3 billion, Canva has witnessed remarkable growth. Within just over 18 months since the introduction of Canva’s workplace-focused Visual Suite, the platform has welcomed over 95 million new users, a feat that previously took the company nearly nine years to achieve.
The latest additions to Canva’s workplace solutions, already embraced by teams at 95% of Fortune 500 companies, mark a significant milestone in the company’s business strategy, solidifying its position as a frontrunner in visual communication.
Canva Business Unveiled
In today’s world, inundated with information and technology, visual communication stands out as a surefire method to enhance engagement, productivity, and brand expansion. Canva Business meets this demand with a subscription offering tailored for large organizations with intricate security, reporting, administration, and brand management needs.
Canva Business enables large organizations to create a plethora of visual content while facilitating seamless internal collaboration. This offering also incorporates advanced security and management controls to safeguard assets and maintain brand alignment. Key features of Canva Business include:
- Scalable Growth: Accommodate the needs of global organizations with scalable cloud storage and expandable team creation within an organization, ensuring secure access for all members.
- IP, Cost, and Application Consolidation: Streamline design, content production, AI, and collaboration tools into a centralized account, amplifying impact while minimizing costs and complexities.
- Advanced Brand Controls: Ensure brand consistency through robust controls overseeing all brand aspects, including access to Canva library items and templates, as well as content sharing permissions.
“Canva has emerged as a potent tool across FedEx. With its intuitive interface and extensive template and graphics library, our teams can swiftly create compelling visuals, enhancing the quality and efficacy of our visual communications,” shared Rebecca Janes, Creative Designer and Environmental Brand Strategist at FedEx.
New Canva UI Geared for Work
For the first time in a decade, Canva revealed a comprehensive redesign of its core product experience. The revamped user interface, meticulously crafted to foster creativity and productivity in the workplace, streamlines workflows and enhances focus. Key features of the new interface include:
- Optimized Editing Experience: A redesigned contextual editing toolbar maximizes space and fosters concentration, spotlighting beloved features like Canva’s one-click background remover and Magic Studio AI tools.
- Customizable Home Page: Users can now personalize workspaces, favoriting essential layouts, folders, and branded templates, while organizations can pin company-wide or team-specific content atop the page. A robust search interface with advanced filters expedites content discovery.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Improved navigation facilitates seamless movement between projects, access to critical assets and resources, and adherence to brand guidelines. Users can efficiently collaborate through features like filterable comments.
The redesigned home page and editing experience will be accessible today for the first million users to uncover the hidden portal on their Canva home page, with general availability commencing in August.
Tailored Tools for Every Team
Canva also introduced a suite of tailored tools for various teams, comprising specialized products, resources, and templates customized for Marketing, HR, Sales, and Content Creation departments. This includes Canva Work Kits, comprehensive collections of industry-specific templates enabling teams to scale their production effortlessly. Fully customizable, these kits can be personalized with the Canva Brand Kit with a single click. Starter Kits encompass resources such as:
- Human Resources: Onboarding presentations, company newsletters, and job advertisements.
- Sales: Promotional presentations, sales reports, and proposals.
- Marketing: Campaign content calendars, social media posts, and reports.
- Content Creation: Creative briefs, production request forms, and brand strategy templates.
Canva Courses, another new offering, is designed to empower workplace learning. With Courses, Canva transcends from a conventional design platform to an end-to-end content creation and consumption platform. Users can transform existing designs, such as presentations and documents, into interactive courses, assignable across the organization, with progress tracking centralized on a dashboard.
Enhanced AI Suite: Magic Studio and Estudio Mágico
Canva continues its AI-driven strategy with the expansion of Magic Studio, utilized over 6.5 billion times since its October 2023 launch. Updated features include:
- Magic Content: Text to Illustration: Generate graphics, icons, and illustrations from text in various styles.
- Magical Design: Enhance presentations with 3x higher quality, courtesy of improved AI design technology.
- Magic Resize and Redesign: Transform any layout into a custom document by inputting a message or selecting from new options like video scripts, LinkedIn posts, or presentation outlines.
- Styles: Apply brand colors and templates to an entire design with a single click.
- Improved Photo Editor: Seamlessly move, delete, or edit any object in an image with AI-powered precision.
- Video Updates: AI-powered Highlights trim eye-catching clips from longer videos, while Voice Optimization enhances audio clarity by reducing background noise.
Enhanced Products to Bolster Work
Canva has upgraded its Visual Suite with several highly requested features tailored for teams and organizations, including:
- Suggested Edit: Users can now track changes and collaborate on edits within the 375 million Canva Docs created since its 2022 launch.
- Amazon Ads, Google, and Meta Apps: Instant feedback on designs and seamless access to approved templates and asset libraries from leading advertising platforms.
- Automated Data Fill: Populate Canva layouts with business data from third-party sources like Salesforce and MLS to generate custom assets at scale.
- Batch Create: Accelerate marketing workflows by quickly updating images, text, and graphics across multiple layouts via CSV or Excel file upload.
Affinity Integration Reinforcement
Canva’s recent acquisition of Affinity positions the platform as a comprehensive solution for all designers, including professional graphic designers, illustrators, and typographers. Affinity version 2.5 introduces advanced editing options to elevate professional editing performance, including:
- Variable Font Support: Unleash a new realm of typographic design possibilities.
- Stroke Width Tool: Edit the pressure profile of any curve within the document.
- ARM64 Chip Support: Optimized for the latest Windows PCs, making Affinity the first creative software with native end-to-end ARM support.
