Canva Revamps Platform and Editing Experience; New Affinity Apps, Canva Enterprise Launched

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

One of the major talking points from the event was Canva’s decision to revamp its platform including the homepage and editing suite. The company says the new user interface is designed to speed up workflows and improve workplace productivity, and highlighted the following changes making their way to the service.

• A new contextual editing toolbar with access to one-click background remover and Magic Studio AI tools on the front
• A new customisable homepage where users can favourite designs, folders, and brand templates
• Organisations can pin company or team-wide content to the top of the homepage
• An improved search interface with multiple filters
• Easier navigation to allow teams to move between projects and access assets and resources

“We are excited to introduce a revamped Canva experience and a suite of new products to empower every organisation 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,” Melanie Perkins, CEO and Co-Founder of Canva said in a prepared statement.

Canva says the new homepage and editing toolbar will be made available to the first one million users who can find a secret portal hidden in the Canva homepage. For everyone else, the redesigned platform will be available in August.

Canva Enterprise launched

Canva Enterprise
Photo Credit: Canva

Canva Enterprise was also announced as a new subscription service aimed at large organisations which have brand management, administration, reporting, and complex security requirements. Canva claims it will allow businesses to create large quantities of designs and templates as well as tools to collaborate internally at scale. Further, it also comes with admin tools to secure the brand assets. Some of its features include:

• A scalable cloud storage to offer enough space to store designs and to provide secure access to employees of an organisation
• A centralised account with consolidated design, content production, collaboration, and AI tools to manage the subscription with ease
• Security tools such as Canva Shield, SSO, SCIM, and MFA to keep the organisation’s data safe

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.

Canva AI editor
Photo Credit: Canva

• 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.

Canva Work Kits

Canva workplace features
Photo Credit: Canva

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 customisable 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.