Canva Craft: Canva's First AI Image Model

On October 22, 2026, Canva launched Canva Craft, its first in-house model for generating images with AI. It is available from that day to every Canva user worldwide and to developers through Canva's public API. Canva says it produces images up to 2K with legible text, which matters to any business that builds its banners, posts and web graphics in Canva.

What we know

What it is: according to Canva's announcement, it is the first foundation model that its in-house lab, Canva Research, has built and trained from scratch, and it is designed for design work.
Where to use it: Canva says it is available to all users from October 22, in the Dream Lab tab of the left-hand panel. It is also offered through Canva's public API, while access from AI assistants through the Canva MCP Server is listed as "coming soon".
What it makes: images up to 2K resolution in more than 30 aspect ratios, or a custom size. The announcement says prompts can be written in any language and that it can render text inside the image in 55 languages.
How it works: Canva describes two stages. First, a planning model writes out the composition: which elements appear, where, at what scale and with what text. Then a rendering model draws the image from that plan. The company says this lets you change one part of an image without redoing the rest, and turn the result into editable layers with its Magic Layers feature.
What it learned from: Canva says that, unlike most image models, which are trained mainly on photographs, Craft puts much more weight on design: its training data includes millions of human-made templates from its library (posters, social posts, presentations, infographics, menus), and that its designers compared more than 25,000 image pairs against other models.
How it ranks: the company says Craft debuted fourth on DesignArena, a crowd-voted leaderboard, and first in the portraits and landscapes categories. Those figures come from Canva itself, about a third-party ranking.
What's next: Canva announced two faster, cheaper variants, Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast, with no date. The announcement gives no pricing and doesn't say how many images each plan allows.
Where it comes from: according to TechCrunch, researchers from Leonardo.ai, which Canva bought in 2024, worked on the model.

What changes and what doesn't

What changes: a tool that many businesses already use for their website and social media now ships its own image generator, with text inside the image and in whatever size you ask for. For a small team, that shortens the path from a banner idea to a finished file.

What doesn't change is how Google understands the images on your site. Google's image guide still calls alt text the most important attribute for describing an image, and it advises against using an image with text as a page's preferred image in structured data or `og:image`. There is also no pricing or per-plan limit yet.

What to check before these images go on your site

Keep key information in text too. If the image says "20% off" or shows your opening hours, put that in the page text as well. Screen readers can't read text inside an image, and you shouldn't rely on a search engine pulling it out.
Write descriptive alt text. Say what the image shows and why it's on the page, in one sentence. Google's guide warns against stuffing `alt` with keywords.
Watch the file size. A 2K image is larger than almost any web page needs. Resize it to the size it's displayed at and convert it to WebP before uploading, so the page loads faster on mobile.
Proofread. A model that writes in 55 languages can still make mistakes. Check spelling, accents and numbers before you publish.
Don't pass it off as a real photo. For product pages or team photos, use real photographs. A generated image that looks like a product shot can set expectations the product doesn't meet.
Pick the ratio for each placement. A site header, a feed post and a story need different shapes. Generate each format separately instead of cropping one.

Sources

Updates: if Canva publishes pricing, per-plan limits or a date for Craft-fast, it will be added here with a link.