Canva's Magic Studio Is Here: A Seamless AI-Powered Design Platform That Does It All
With AI-powered design becoming a point of emphasis in creative industries last year, we are seeing more tools introduced to the market by the minute. Canva, for instance, was among the first programs to integrate AI-driven design tools over the course of the past 12 months, with the additions of Magic Edit trial and Visual Suite. Now, it has just introduced its revamped AI-charged suite for its 10th anniversary. Say hello to its new do-it-all platform called Canva's Magic Studio.
"A decade ago, Canva set out to empower the world to design by simplifying a complex and fragmented design ecosystem," Canva CEO and Co-Founder Melanie Perkins explained at the virtual launch.
From text-to-image generation to smart brand voice applications, Magic Studio's latest tools come from the brains of the company's in-house AI, together with partners like Open AI and Google. It's a suite that was meant to help users "work smarter."
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Perkins added: "As we go into the next decade of our journey, we’re incredibly excited to be taking a massive leap forward with the launch of Magic Studio—the first all-in-one suite of design AI tools created to supercharge the way teams create and scale visual content."
Among the more familiar tools in the suite is the Magic Switch. Pegged as a first in the industry for its scale, Magic Switch absorbed Magic Resize, which had initially been adopted in 2017. With it, users can transform designs into various formats. It can also be used for copywriting and translations, and is available in various languages. Presentations can turn into summaries in an instant. It can even create a blog post based on just some phrases or ideas, no matter how vague they are.
Meanwhile, image-editing tools like Magic Grab reposition subjects in images that just feel a little off. Magic Expand is neat, too, seeing as though it can basically fill in the gaps needed in a frame, whether it's inside or outside of the shot. Magic Morph can be used for those who want to describe and create an effect for their shapes and text.
As for Magic Write, users get to make use of a feature that allows them to describe their "brand voice" and generate consistent text from that specific tone and voice.
Magic Media, on the other hand, is Canva's text-to-image generation feature that comes with video generation. This means that users can come up with pegs for video concepts just from a text or image, through Gen-2 a video generation AI model by Runway.
Canva also championed the Canva Apps Marketplace, which allows users to have access to world-leading AI-driven tools, including Dall-E, Imagen by Google, MurfAI, Soundraw, and more.
Apart from the tools, Canva introduced Canva Shield. This offers a healthy collection of safety and privacy controls for Magic Studio products and content moderation. It even comes with copyright indemnification, a feature we've seen from other platforms like Adobe and Getty Images to address piracy and infringement concerns among its users.Â
The company hopes to take care of creators financially, too. Canva has pledged a $200-million commitment to take care of content and AI royalties among the members of its creator community for the next three years.
Through the Creator Compensation Program, Canva will compensate creators whose content is used to train the design platform's AI models. Each creator is given the option to pull out their data from the training if they want to (they are granted a 30-day notification period to opt-out). They will receive an initial payment for their contributions before monthly payments based on the company's calculations.
As it stands, Canva has more than 150 million users worldwide, 65 million new active users a month, and 16 million paid subscriptions. Its AI-powered tools are said to have already been used three billion times in just a few months. Of course, Canva Magic Studio is certainly going to attract more users in the near future.
Users can access some of the features for free, but to unlock the studio's full range of motion, it's advised to subscribe. Canva's Magic Studio essentials are accessible to Canva Pro and Canva for Teams users at just $14.99 (approximately P850) per month.
