Global creative suite company Canva has announced a significant evolution of its platform, launching its own proprietary design model built to understand design layers and formats. The update also introduces a host of new AI-powered features, an all-in-one marketing platform, and makes its professional-grade Affinity suite free for all users, signaling a major move in the competitive design software market.
A New Era of Design with Canva’s Foundational Model
At the heart of the announcement is Canva’s new foundational model, trained specifically on its vast library of design elements. Unlike traditional diffusion models that generate flat images, this new model produces designs with editable layers and objects. This allows users to start with a text prompt and receive a complex, multi-layered design across various formats—from social media posts and presentations to websites—that they can then directly manipulate and iterate upon. This approach aims to bridge the gap between AI generation and hands-on creative control.
Enhanced AI Capabilities Across the Platform
Canva is embedding its AI assistant more deeply throughout its interface. The assistant, which can be prompted via a chat-like interface, is now accessible in the design and elements tabs. In a boost for collaborative workflows, users can now @mention the AI bot in comments to receive text or media suggestions. The AI’s capabilities have also been expanded to generate 3D objects and copy the artistic style of any existing design, streamlining the creative process for users of all skill levels.
Introducing Canva Grow and New Business Tools
Leveraging its acquisition of ad analytics firm MagicBrief, Canva is launching Canva Grow, an integrated marketing platform. This new suite uses AI for both asset creation and performance analytics, allowing marketers to design, publish, and measure ad campaigns directly on platforms like Meta from within Canva. The company is also rolling out new productivity tools, including Canva Forms for data collection and a dedicated email design feature, enabling users to create on-brand marketing and transactional emails.
Affinity Suite Becomes Free and Deeply Integrated
In a direct challenge to competitors like Adobe, Canva announced it is making the entire Affinity suite—a professional-grade collection of photo editing, graphic design, and publishing software—free forever. Following its acquisition last year, Canva is redesigning the Affinity interface to merge vector, pixel, and layout tools seamlessly. The integration will allow designers to create assets in Affinity and easily move them into Canva, and even leverage Canva’s AI tools within the Affinity environment.
Relevance for MENA Startups
For startups and SMEs across the MENA region, Canva’s latest updates present a powerful opportunity to level the playing field in marketing and design. With lean teams and tight budgets, access to a free, professional-grade design suite like Affinity can significantly reduce software overhead. The new AI-powered features in Canva Grow can empower small marketing teams to create, launch, and analyze campaigns with greater efficiency and sophistication. As the regional ecosystem continues to digitize, these accessible and powerful tools will enable MENA-based founders to build strong, visually compelling brands and accelerate their content creation workflows without requiring extensive design expertise or resources.
About Canva
Canva is an Australian multinational graphic design platform that is used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. The company has announced that it intends to compete with Google and Microsoft in the office software category with website and whiteboard products.
Source: TechCrunch
