Canva released its first image generation model, Canva Craft, developed by its research team to compete with comparable models from Google, OpenAI, ByteDance, and Meta. The company described the model as working in two stages. In the first stage, it interprets a user’s prompt and builds a plan that includes details such as spatial relationships between elements, relative scale, visual hierarchy, and information needed for text generation. In the second stage, the model produces an image at up to 2K resolution across a possible 30 different aspect ratios for various platforms. Canva said this approach enables accurate details of objects, legible text, and precise edits that do not change other parts of the image.

A notable difference in training data is that Canva says it did not use photographs, but rather human-designed templates from Canva’s library, including posters, social posts, presentations, infographics, menus, and typography-rich layouts. As a result, images generated with Canva Craft can be converted into layered designs using Canva Magic, the company’s image-to-design transformer. This builds on a model Canva released last year that understands designs and layers.

Canva Craft is available to all users on the company’s platform from the Dream Lab tab, and it will also be available through the Canva API. Canva additionally plans to support image generation in third-party chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini through Canva’s MCP. The company has previously relied on a range of image models for generation in its platform, and it said the new model will help save API costs while also giving the platform better control over quality and speed.

In 2024, Canva acquired media generation platform Leonardo.ai, and Canva said researchers from Leonardo contributed to the new image model. Canva is also developing two cost-efficient versions of the model, called Craftfast and Craft-ultrafast, which are expected to be released soon.

The article also includes company context: Canva was on track for $4 billion in revenue last year, but it cut its growth forecast for 2026, and its valuation reportedly fell from $42 billion to $35 billion, according to external analysts.