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

Canva Research has released Craft, its first in-house image generation model, built and trained from scratch. Craft uses a two-stage architecture: a planning model writes a detailed composition plan, then a rendering model produces images up to 2K across more than 30 aspect ratios. It was trained on millions of Canva design templates and refined with feedback from professional designers. Craft is available in Canva and through a public API, with faster Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast variants announced as upcoming.

Key takeaways

• Craft uses a two-stage design: compositional planning followed by image rendering.
• Craft ranked fourth on DesignArena at debut and first for People & Portraits and Landscapes & Nature.
• Training emphasized design templates, and designers reviewed more than 25,000 image pairs in internal evaluations.
• Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast variants are planned to lower cost relative to frontier models.

Why it matters

Craft shows a platform company building a proprietary image model tailored to layout and typography, and exposes it to developers via API and agents via MCP, which could shape how design tools integrate generative AI.

Read with care

Rankings come from Canva's own description of DesignArena results and internal evaluations; source claims not independently checked.