Canva Unveils Major Upgrades: Revamped Platform, Affinity and Enterprise Focus

New Delhi: Canva, the popular online design platform, announced several new features and a new business-focused subscription at its first international Canva Create event in Los Angeles on Thursday. The platform unveiled its biggest redesign in more than a decade which includes a new homepage and editing experience for all users. Further, a new Canva Enterprise subscription aimed at large organisations was also introduced by the firm. The design platform also released multiple new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features within Magic Studio and Visual Suite.

Canva platform redesign:

At the first international Canva Create event in Los Angeles, Canva, the popular online design platform, announced a comprehensive revamp of its platform, including significant updates to the homepage and editing suite. The company aims to enhance workflow efficiency and workplace productivity with a redesigned user interface.

Key changes include:

• Contextual Editing Toolbar: This new feature provides quick access to tools like the one-click background remover and Magic Studio AI.
• Customisable Homepage: Users can now favourite designs, folders, and brand templates, while organizations can pin company or team-wide content at the top.
• Improved Search Interface: Enhanced with multiple filters for more efficient searching.
• Easier Navigation: Simplified access to projects, assets, and resources for team collaboration.

Melanie Perkins, CEO and Co-Founder of Canva, emphasized the platform’s mission: “We are excited to introduce a revamped Canva experience and a suite of new products to empower every organization to design. As demand for visual content soars, navigating organizational complexity is more challenging than ever. We democratized the design ecosystem in our first decade and now look forward to unifying the fragmented ecosystems of design, AI, and workflow tools for every organization in our second decade.” The new homepage and editing toolbar will initially be available to the first one million users who discover a hidden portal on the Canva homepage. The redesigned platform will be rolled out to all users in August.

Canva Enterprise launched:

At its first international Canva Create event in Los Angeles, Canva introduced a new subscription service, Canva Enterprise, specifically designed for large organizations with complex brand management, administration, reporting, and security needs. This new offering aims to facilitate the creation of large quantities of designs and templates, while providing tools for internal collaboration at scale.

Key features of Canva Enterprise include:

• Scalable Cloud Storage: Ample space to store designs with secure access for organizational employees.
• Centralized Account Management: Consolidates design, content production, collaboration, and AI tools for streamlined subscription management.
• Enhanced Security Tools: Features such as Canva Shield, Single Sign-On (SSO), System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM), and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to ensure robust data protection.

Canva claims that Canva Enterprise will empower businesses to efficiently manage their brand assets and collaborate seamlessly within their teams.

Canva Magic Studio gets new AI features:

Highlighting that Magic Studio has been used more than 6.5 billion times since its launch in October 2023, Canva introduced six new features for its AI-powered editing suite at the event on Thursday.

• Magic Media: It is an AI-powered text-to-image generator capable of creating graphics, icons, and illustrations
• Magic Design: It can generate high-quality presentations
• Resize and Magic Switch: It can convert designs to any custom doc with a text prompt
• A Styles & Layout tool to apply brand colours and templates to an entire design with one click
• An improved AI-powered photo editor
• A Highlights feature that cuts and selects aesthetic clips from long videos
• Enhance Voice: It enhances audio and reduces background noise in videos

Improvements to Canva Visual Suite: 

Canva has also introduced several new features to Visual Suite. Users can now track changes and collaborate on past edits, get access to asset libraries and templates approved by Amazon ads, Google, and Meta, a Data Autofill feature that lets businesses import data from third-party platforms such as Salesforce and MLS (Multiple Listing Service), and Bulk Create that lets users upload a CSV or Excel file to quickly update images, text, and graphics across various designs. Expanding its product to fill workplace needs, Canva introduced a range of tailored tools dubbed Work Kits for different teams such as marketing, human resource, sales, and creative departments. Work Kits are customizable and can be branded using Canva’s Brand Kit.

Canva Courses and Affinity: 

The company also unveiled Canva Courses, which provides interactive courses to help users learn and upskill their design skills across formats such as presentations, documents and videos. Progress from Canva Courses can also be managed from a central dashboard. Affinity, a full-stack desktop design app recently acquired by Canva, launched a new version of the platform with new features such as Variable Font support, Stroke Width Tool, and support for ARM64 chipsets. The company also announced that eligible teachers, schools, and non-profits can sign up for a waitlist to get access to Affinity for free. Free licences to the eligible candidates will be provided by the company in the coming months.