Canva has already democratized the process of graphic design, simplifying things with templates and asset libraries to the point that anyone with a web browser can design something functional, even attractive—if not exactly original. Pairing Canva with new AI technologies only makes sense, as, to put it charitably, AI seeks democratize all digital work.
Canva is not alone here: Microsoft offers its Copilot AI features, and Adobe has Firefly technologies, though neither is available yet. Canva’s features, on the other hand, have already started slowly rolling out, and you can try them now, for free. Yes, users on the free plan get limited access to the AI features, but you can upgrade to the $12.99 per month Canva Pro plan to try out all of them.
You’ll spot Canva’s AI-powered tools by their “Magic” tag. The tool set includes Magic Eraser, Magic Edit, Magic Write, Magic Design, and more. As of writing, all these features are all in beta, and you’ll find them highlighted at the top of every relevant section. (For example, Magic Design will be at the top of the sidebar when you go to create a new presentation.)
Let AI design the whole project for you
The Magic Design feature has the potential to massively reduce the time you spend designing social media posts. Find the feature in Templates and hand it an image. The tool will analyze the image and create a design using text titles, all on its own. You can help it along by giving it a title. Scroll around and you’ll find a few different designs, each featuring your image, eye-catching graphics, and bold text.
Automate presentations as much as possible
“Instant Presentations” promises to generate a presentation for you from a single prompt. Sure, it won’t output a complete deck, but it’s astonishing how close it can get. Once it’s done, all that’s left for you is to fill in the details.
Instant Presentations does a lot of the drudgery for you. Give a prompt, pick a design style, and it will create a deck with multiple slides. Because it’s using ChatGPT-like generative AI, it will add additional context in slides. When I asked Canva to create a presentation about practicing Yoga, it created a nine-slide deck with relevant images, including slides dedicated to the advantages of yoga, types of yoga, and more.
A solid text-to-image generator
Canva now has a pretty great built-in text-to-image generator. It works just like DALL-E, Bing, or Midjourney, and is based on the Stable Diffusion model. You give it a description, and up pop four different images. You can then choose to add an image to your designs. Like every other image generator tool, our advice is the same: Be verbose with your prompts. The image will only be as good as your description.
You’ll find this is Apps > Text to Image in the sidebar.
Seamlessly remove objects using Magic Eraser
One of the hardest things to do in Photoshop is identify and erase an object. I remember taking classes dedicated to this very subject—but now, it’s as easy as pressing a button, thanks to Canva’s Magic Eraser feature, which works both for identifiable objects as well as backgrounds.
Select the object that you want to remove, then choose the Magic Eraser tool. Paint over the offending objects and wait while Canva does the scrubbing for you. You see the best results against a relatively un-busy background.
Generate copy anywhere
Just like Notion, Canva has also integrated an AI writing model, and it’s available on any design, not just in the new documents app. Type /, select the Magic Write option, and give it a prompt. Being Canva, it’s great at generating social media copy, captions, and email descriptions. Again, the more verbose the prompt, the better the results. In our testing, the Magic Write feature capably created social media captions and gave us relevant hashtags.
Edit parts of an images using text prompts
The Magic Edit feature sometimes really does feel like magic. Because the AI features are deeply integrated in all parts of design documents, you can actually ask Canva to edit a part of the image for you—perhaps to change the color of a bike in the background, or make the sky bluer. And it will do it for you.
[Zapier]