Canva Launches Magic Studio: AI Tools to Automate Tedious Design Work

This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL

This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.

Canva's New AI Tools Automate Tedious, Time-Consuming Design Work

Canva's new AI tools automate tedious, time-consuming design work.

To mark its 10th anniversary, Canva released Magic Studio—a new suite of AI-powered design tools for its web-based design platform.

Magic Studio includes Magic Switch, which automatically converts designs into different formats, as well as a tool for generating videos from text.

Canva Shield provides security tools to prevent AI from creating inappropriate content.

Canva Has 16 Million Paying Subscribers and More Than 150 Million

Canva has 16 million paying subscribers and more than 150 million global users, positioning it as a serious competitor to Adobe.

Magic Studio is a one-stop shop for AI-powered content creation tools. Image credit: Canva.

Written by Jess Weatherbed, a news writer focused on the creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess began her career covering news and hardware reviews at TechRadar.

[Full Translation] One of Magic Studio's features, Magic Switch, automatically converts your design into a blog post, social media post, email, and more—saving the time you'd spend on manual document editing.

Canva is releasing Magic Studio as part of its 10th anniversary celebration. It is a new suite of AI-enhanced design tools for the web-based design platform, aiming to make content creation more accessible to everyone regardless of prior design experience. Canva describes Magic Studio as "the world's most comprehensive AI design platform" for organizations and individual users, offering new tools to automate labor-intensive tasks such as converting designs to other media formats and instantly editing images through generative AI.

This Suite Introduces Features Such as Magic Switch

This suite introduces features such as Magic Switch, which allows users to instantly convert existing designs to different formats—for example, turning a blog into an email or social media post without manually adjusting the layout or updating copy text. The feature can also automatically translate designs into more than 100 languages without leaving the page. This is a clever way to generate multi-channel campaigns from a single design and free up designer time to focus on more demanding tasks.

With Magic Switch, you no longer need to manually move assets to convert images into blog posts, emails, or social media posts. Image credit: Canva.

Canva has added a new text-to-video feature to its Magic Media tool (formerly called text-to-image). Powered by Runway AI, this new feature can be used to generate short videos from text-based prompts or from existing images uploaded to Canva's asset library. Generated videos can be used on the platform or exported as MP4 or GIF for use in other projects. The text-to-image tool in Magic Media has also been updated, offering "a wide range of style options" for all results. For those who want to try alternatives to AI image generation apps, OpenAI's DALL-E and Google's Imagen are now also available in Canva's app marketplace.

New Photo Editing Tools Are Also Part of the Release

New photo editing tools are also part of the release, including Magic Grab (which lets you select any subject in an image and automatically isolate it for editing, repositioning, or resizing) and Magic Expand (which extends an image beyond its frame, similar to Adobe Photoshop's Generative Expand tool). A complete list of all the new tools being added to Magic Studio can be found on Canva's website.

If there's a design task you hate, chances are Canva has a "Magic" tool to make it a little easier. Image credit: Canva.

Alongside the New AI Suite, Canva Is Also

Alongside the new AI suite, Canva is also launching Canva Shield—a new set of controls for platform safety, privacy, and security, designed to prevent AI from being used to create unsafe or inappropriate content. Canva Shield includes free AI indemnification for Canva's enterprise customers and gives team administrators full control over how Magic Studio products are enabled and used across their organization.

Finally, Canva announced it will pay $200 million over the next three years to designers who consent to having their content used to train its AI models. Those who participate in the creator compensation program will receive an initial bonus, followed by monthly payments while their content continues to be used. While Canva has not provided specific figures, company co-founder and CPO Cameron Adams told The Verge that payments are "determined by a range of factors including the degree of contribution to our content library and how many times it's been used."

Adams stated that the new Magic Studio products were not trained on Canva Creators' data, and that the company has updated its contributor agreement to explain how data will be used—"providing the option to opt out first." Otherwise, creators are opted in by default with a 30-day notice period during which their data will not be used. Adobe announced a similar compensation program for Adobe Stock contributors last month, likely aimed at easing tensions between the design industry giant and creative professionals who feel AI has been unfairly profiting from their work.

Following the Rollout of Visual Work Suites and AI-Driven Brand Management Tools in Recent Months

Following the rollout of visual work suites and AI-driven brand management tools in recent months, Canva is growing into a serious competitor to companies like Adobe. The company's user-friendly design platform now has 16 million paying subscribers and more than 150 million global users. While Adobe has been adding many new AI features to its web-based design app, Adobe Express, it may need to do even more to compete with Canva's rising popularity.

Update, October 5, 4AM ET: Further clarified that Canva Creators need to opt out if they do not want their designs to be used to train the company's AI models.