Canva launches Canva Craft, its first in-house image foundation model

Canva Research has released Canva Craft, the company’s first proprietary image foundation model built and trained from scratch. Rather than relying solely on web-scraped photo captions, Canva trained the model on millions of human-made Canva design templates spanning posters, social posts, presentations, infographics and menus so that generated images respect graphic design hierarchy and negative space.

The architecture separates generation into a two-stage plan-then-render pipeline. First, an image planning model converts a user’s prompt into a structured compositional plan covering elements, spatial relationships, scale and typography, running on a custom inference engine an order of magnitude faster than Canva’s initial internal prototype. Second, a distilled rendering model produces the final image at up to 2K resolution across more than 30 aspect ratios, with legibility across 55 languages and compatibility with Canva Magic Layers for post-generation editing. Two faster distilled variants, Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast, are in development.

On the crowdsourced DesignArena image leaderboard, Canva Craft debuted fourth overall, making Canva Research the second-highest-ranked AI image lab, while ranking first out of 87 models in People and Portraits and first out of 85 models in Landscapes and Nature. The model is live globally in Canva Dream Lab and in preview on the Canva Connect REST API via POST /v1/image-generations (model ID craft_v1_2k), where asynchronous jobs complete in 50 to 60 seconds using standard user AI credits.