- Craft is Canva's first publicly available AI image generation model
- It was trained on existing templates so it understands layers
- Developers can access the model via an API
Canva has launched its first-ever publicly available AI image generation model, and it's already proving to be hugely successful.
Looking to take on the likes of industry giants such as OpenAI and Google, 'Craft', its image generating model, debuted at number four on DesignArena's leaderboard, falling short of three leaders from OpenAI but coming in better than a number of other GPT, Grok and Gemini models – including Nano Banana 2.1.
With such high performance, Canva is proudly boasting that Canva Research, its internal research division, is now the second-highest performing AI lab in terms of image generation models behind OpenAI, which is a big deal.
Canva Craft
The launch follows significant investment from the company into its own internal lab, which has tripled in size over the past year.
But besides placing fourth overall for image generation, Canva Craft actually came in first place of 87 models for people and portraits, first of 85 in landscapes and nature, and second for abstract designs and patterns.
The company explained that Craft workers by planning an image's composition before generating a result, which means it decides where individual elements should appear, how composition should be structured, where words need to appear and how the entire thing can come together in a cohesive, readable way. Something that's especially important for the type of work Craft is likely to conduct, particularly around generating marketing materials and social media graphics.
The model's success likely stems from training – it was trained on millions of human-made templates in Canva's library, so it understands layout, visual hierarchy and typography unlike models that were trained on flat images.
Craft came about because Canva is a firm believer that developing its own in-house models gives it greater control over the economics of generative AI, rather than having to rely on third parties, and we're already seeing how unpredictable agentic AI costing is impacting enterprise-grade users.
But Craft isn't being locked into the Canva ecosystem, because the company is also making it available via an API to let developers integrate the model into other platforms.
As for the next steps, Canva already promises it's working on future generations of Craft with faster and more affordable options on the cards.
