At its Create event, Canva announced a new suite of brand management features and AI-powered design tools, designed to help businesses large and small work faster.
A new Brand Hub keeps all the tools and features that teams need to ensure consistent branding in one place.
Users can create a Brand Kit with logos, colours, fonts, icons, imagery, graphics, and brand guidelines. Magic Replace can instantly update brand assets across an entire company with a single click.
Brand Templates let users design and share templates for teams to create on-brand content. Brand Folders can group unique branding for specific events, campaigns, teams or projects.
Organizations’ brand guidelines be automatically and contextually surfaced within the Canva Editor as teams create designs, ensuring everyone is equipped with the knowledge to best represent their brand. Admins can limit fonts and colours, with Brand Controls, eliminating the need to check hex codes or look out for unapproved fonts. Finally, admins can also dictate what creative work gets published with Approval Workflows — there are two options, either mandatory or the more ominous-sounding “recommended.”
Onto AI, now.
Canva’s chief marketing officer, Zach Kitschke, explained to B&T that while he’s “really conscious that people don’t come to Canva to use AI,” the new AI tools can improve people’s workload and efficiency — making for better creativity.
If a user uploads an image, the Magic Design tool will create a curated selection of personalised templates ready for them to download and customise further. Magic Edit, meanwhile, can add or replace anything in an image — handy for removing recently departed co-workers from staff photos. Magic Eraser, meanwhile, will clean up unwanted details in images.
It has also baked in some generative AI tools, as well. If a user prompts the presentation editor with what they want, it can generate on-brand presentations with an outline and content on each slide. The new Magic Write is, effectively, ChatGPT in Canva and actually uses the OpenAI software. Though Canva assured us that it has some remarkably strict content rules which we duly tested.
Canva Assistant lets you search around for elements, recommendations for images and layouts, or generate custom AI content to elevate your designs. Beat Sync is a genuine time saver and can automatically match video footage to the soundtrack. Plus, Canva now has an auto-translate tool with support for more than 100 different languages.
And, proving that companies do, in fact, listen, Canva has introduced some oft-requested features from its user community.
Draw offers freehand drawing, underlines, or annotations. Plus, with AI, users can sketch a simple shape, like a circle, and Shape Assist will transform it into a proper circle.
Users can add content to a page and be recommended layout ideas for a design. AI can help you develop a signature look and feel by matching current designs to previous work. Layers — yep, you now get layers just like Photoshop. Custom gradients are available now, letting users add more colourful fun to shapes and the like.
Customised and precise positioning, alignment, spacing, and sizing are all new, as is alt text for media, images and elements.
Smart Design Imports let users drag and drop any file straight into the editor to transform it into an editable Canva design. And finally, for all you typography nerds, 953 of the world’s most popular fonts are now available including Arial, Avenier, Courier, Helvetica, and Times New Roman.
“Ten years ago, we launched Canva driven by a vision to empower everyone to design anything, no matter their skills or experience,” said Canva co-founder and CEO, Melanie Perkins.
“Today, we’re thrilled to advance that vision by introducing a whole new range of features, focused on empowering brands to scale their creative outputs. As technology continues to advance, we are reimagining the design process by making it even easier to take what is in your head, get it onto a page, and out into the world, faster than ever before.”
