Canva has publicly launched its first image generation model, called Canva Craft, developed and trained by its in-house AI lab, Canva Research, the company said in a statement. Craft debuted fourth overall on the DesignArena rankings, described by Canva as the largest crowdsourced platform for assessing AI-generated design.
Canva Research built and trained Craft from scratch, making it the company's first foundation model. The lab has more than 160 scientists and engineers.
Following pre-training, Canva applied supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, with professional designers evaluating more than 25,000 image pairs against rival models in head-to-head comparisons. Through advanced model distillation, Canva cut the inference steps Craft requires by a substantial margin, and a custom inference engine now makes the model significantly faster than its initial internal version.
Craft uses a two-stage architecture: the first stage plans the composition, including element placement, spatial relationships, scale, visual hierarchy and text; the second stage renders the plan into a high-fidelity image. The model outputs images at 2K resolution and supports more than 30 aspect ratios. Canva says the two-stage architecture makes its outputs well suited to Magic Layers, which turns generated images into editable design elements, and will also serve as the technical base for more advanced editing and reference-image features in future.
Craft is available to all Canva users globally and to developers through a public API and the Canva MCP Server. Two upcoming variants, Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast, are in development, intended to deliver image generation at lower cost than leading frontier models. A planned Canva MCP integration will let Craft connect to AI assistants and automated workflows.
Canva states that safety is built into every stage of its AI development and deployment, including continuous testing, safety evaluations covering brand safety, cultural context and harmful content, and that Craft is backed by its Canva Shield framework, which includes input and output moderation, privacy controls and content reporting tools.
All existing Canva users globally can access Craft through Dream Lab within the Canva product.
Official statements: Canva
Reporting: SmartCompany
Written by Pick & Scroll News from the reporting and documents linked above.
