Key points
- Canva released Canva Craft, its first in-house image model, to all users globally; access is through the Dream Lab tab.
- It plans layout, scale, hierarchy and text first, then renders up to 2K resolution in more than 30 aspect ratios.
- Trained on human-made templates from Canva's library, so outputs can be turned into layered designs with Canva Magic, per TechCrunch.
- Craft ranks fourth on Design Arena's leaderboard, behind three OpenAI models, per The Verge. Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast are coming.
Why it matters for marketers: Marketers get a model built for text-heavy assets like social posts and menus inside the tool they already use, with API and agent access planned.
Canva has released Canva Craft, the first image generation model built by its own research team. It is live for all users worldwide and can be opened from the Dream Lab option in the platform. Canva also says the model will be offered through its API.
Craft works in two stages. It first builds a plan covering element placement, relative scale, visual hierarchy and text details, then generates an image at up to 2K resolution in more than 30 aspect ratios. Canva says this yields more accurate objects, legible text and edits that leave the rest of an image untouched.
The training data is unusual: rather than photographs, Canva used human-made templates from its library, such as posters, presentations, infographics and menus. TechCrunch reports that this lets Craft images be converted into layered designs with Canva Magic. Researchers from Leonardo.ai, which Canva acquired in 2024, contributed to the work.
For marketing teams, the draw is a model tuned to layouts with readable copy, the kind of asset that general image models often struggle with. Performance is competitive but not top of the table: The Verge reports Craft ranks fourth on Design Arena's crowdsourced leaderboard, behind three OpenAI models.
Watch for two things. Canva plans to let third-party chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini generate images through its MCP, and it says cheaper Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast versions are coming soon. TechCrunch also notes the model could help Canva reduce the API costs of using outside image models.
Sources
This brief is our own summary. Read the full reporting at the source.