Today, Canva officially unveiled its first state-of-the-art image generation model, Canva Craft, developed and trained by Canva Research.
Introducing Canva Craft 🚀
Extraordinary image generation is now available to everyone, powered by our first frontier model built specifically for design.
With Craft, Canva is now the world's second most advanced AI lab for image generation on @DesignArena's global leaderboard.… pic.twitter.com/j8T6ssAHJP
— Canva (@canva) October 22, 2026
Canva Draft
Built specifically for design, Craft makes Canva the world’s second most advanced AI lab for image generation, as measured by rankings from DesignArena, the largest crowdsourced assessor of AI design.
Craft generates stunning, high-quality images at 2K resolution across more than 30 aspect ratios. With precise control and editable outputs, Craft gives everyone from first-time creators to professional designers more flexibility to bring their imagination to life.
It debuted as the fourth most advanced image generation model on DesignArena, delivering industry-leading visual quality and accurate text rendering to support a wide range of creative tasks.
Craft outputs rank #1 globally for both People & Portraits (out of 87 models) and Landscapes & Nature (out of 85 models). It also ranks #2 for Abstract & Patterns and #4 for Products, placing it among the world’s best models across multiple subcategories.
Canva has also developed a custom inference engine optimised for its planning stage, making Craft an order of magnitude faster than the company’s first internal version. These advances underpin Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast, two upcoming variants designed to deliver high-quality image generation at a fraction of the cost of leading frontier models.
Craft uses a two-stage architecture that separates compositional planning from image rendering. By explicitly modelling composition and typography before rendering the final image, Craft can generate complex layouts with greater accuracy, including legible text, precise object placement and consistent visual relationships.
The model’s training data includes millions of human-made templates from Canva’s content library, spanning professionally designed posters, social posts, presentations, infographics, menus and typography-rich layouts. This gives the model a deeper understanding of the principles behind effective design, rather than simply learning what finished images look like.
Generate images with greater precision and control
With Craft, it’s easy to:
- Shape images your way. Craft treats the whole image as an intentional composition of layered elements. JSON boundary boxing makes it easier than ever to convert images into editable layers with Magic Layers, with more accurate and faster results.
- Perfect every detail. Ask for a purple sky, long shadows and a lone tree, and you’ll get all three, with the emphasis where you wanted it.
- Create in any size, for any use case. Choose from one of more than 30 aspect ratios, or enter your own to create everything from social posts or stories to posters or banners.
- Prompt in your language. Prompts can be written in any language, and Craft can create text in 55 languages.
Craft is built to support a wide range of creative work, from polished marketing assets to imaginative visual exploration:
- Social content and marketing assets: posters, social posts, flyers, presentation visuals, ads and more, with layouts, hierarchy and text that are ready to use.
- Lifestyle and editorial photography: realistic scenes featuring people, places, food, travel and everyday moments.
- Illustration and digital art: flat, vector, painterly and hand-drawn styles.
- People and characters: portraits, groups and fashion, including complex scenes that stay coherent.
- Nature and environment imagery: landscapes, cityscapes, interiors and architecture.
- Creative and conceptual work: imaginative compositions that bring real and stylised elements together.
Like every AI product on Canva, Craft is backed by Canva Shield. This includes robust input and output moderation, privacy and safety controls, and reporting tools that allow people to flag potentially harmful or misleading content.
Availability
Canva Craft is available starting today to all Canva users globally. To start ‘crafting’, open Dream Lab in the bottom-left panel. Craft is also available via the Public API and the Canva MCP Server, representing Canva’s push to develop AI models.
Public API: Developers and product teams can build Craft into their own tools, like marketing platforms, e-commerce sites, ad builders and print services. It’s also the quickest way for those to test Craft on their own prompts and compare it with other models.
Canva MCP (Coming Soon): Craft also connects to AI assistants and automated workflows through Canva MCP, so agents can create images that are ready to use in a design. That means an AI assistant can make a launch graphic, a product shot or a social post as one step in a bigger task.
