Canva launched Craft on October 22, 2026 — its first image generation model built entirely in-house by its own research team. It's live now for all users through Dream Lab, and it takes a different approach from every other image AI: it was trained on human-designed templates, not photographs.
Trained on Design, Not Nature
Every major image generation model — Midjourney, Dall-E, Imagen — has been trained primarily on photographs and web imagery. Craft was trained on Canva's own library of human-made design assets: posters, social graphics, presentations, menus, and similar layouts. The goal is to generate images that are immediately useful in actual design work — with proper text rendering, clear visual hierarchy, and compositions that fit a layout rather than just look visually striking in isolation.
A Two-Stage Pipeline at 2K
Craft uses a two-stage architecture. First, the model plans the image — deciding on spatial relationships, relative sizes, visual hierarchy, and how text should appear. Then it renders at up to 2K resolution across approximately 30 aspect ratios. This is notably different from standard diffusion models that generate pixel distributions directly from a prompt in one pass. The planning stage is what lets Craft handle text legibility and compositional precision better than general-purpose generators.
Available Now, API Coming
All Canva users can access Craft through Dream Lab starting today. Developer API access is on the roadmap through Canva Connect, currently in preview. Canva has also confirmed two faster variants — Craftfast and Craft-ultrafast — are in development, likely aimed at real-time design suggestions and batch generation workflows at reduced compute cost.
The Business Case
Canva currently relies on external AI image providers to power its generation features — a significant ongoing API cost at a platform with hundreds of millions of users. Building its own model reduces that dependency and keeps the product loop inside Canva's own stack. It's the same strategic move Adobe made with Firefly, and that Google and Meta made with their own models: stop routing revenue to third-party providers when you have the scale to build in-house.
How It Ranks
Canva claims Craft ranked on DesignArena's independent image generation leaderboard, with sources placing it anywhere from second to fourth globally depending on the methodology. Take early leaderboard positions with some skepticism — independent benchmarks on a wider task set will arrive soon. But the specific advantage Craft is designed for — design-native outputs with better text and layout accuracy — is a real gap in the current market that general-purpose models have never fully closed.
Canva Craft is available now through Dream Lab for all Canva users.