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

What happened

Canva announced Canva Craft on October 22, 2026. Until now the images in Canva's AI tools came from models made by other companies; Craft was built and trained by Canva Research, the company's in-house lab, and Canva calls it the lab's first foundation model made from scratch. It went live the same day in Dream Lab, Canva's image generator, for all users worldwide.

How it works

• Plan first, then draw. Craft runs in two stages: a planning model works out the composition and any text that should appear, and a rendering model then draws the picture. That is aimed at the thing image models still get wrong most often in design work: lettering that is spelled right and sits where it should.
• Text in 55 languages. You can prompt in any language, and Canva says it renders text in 55.
• Up to 2K, in more than 30 preset aspect ratios or a custom one.
• Trained on design. Canva says it used millions of human-made templates from its own library, and that designers compared more than 25,000 pairs of images against other models during development.
• Editable afterwards. A Craft image can go straight into Magic Layers, which splits a flat picture into separate elements you can move and change.

How good Canva says it is

Canva's claims all come from DesignArena, a public leaderboard where people vote between two images. Craft entered at fourth place overall, and Canva says it ranks first for People & Portraits (out of 87 models) and Landscapes & Nature (out of 85), second for Abstract & Patterns and fourth for Products. Those are Canva's figures from launch week; leaderboard positions move as votes come in, so check the current standings before you rely on them.

For developers

Craft is also in Canva's Connect API as a preview: model craft_v1_2k on POST /v1/image-generations. Canva's developer post warns that breaking changes may come, that a job takes about 50 to 60 seconds from start to finish, and that only square, landscape and portrait shapes work in the API for now. Each job spends the user's AI credits, like Canva's other models. Support in Canva's MCP server is listed as coming soon, as are two cheaper variants, Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast.

What it means for you

1. Price. Canva named no new price. Craft draws on the AI uses your plan already includes: 20 a month on Free, up to 200 Premium uses on Pro. Canva hasn't said which tier a Craft image counts as, so watch your counter the first week.
2. Try it on text. If you make posters, social posts or thumbnails, the planning stage is the part to test: give it the exact words and see whether they come back spelled right.
3. Keep the rest of your stack. For photo editing with your own picture, Nano Banana prompts still cover more. For a side-by-side of the image tools, see AI image generators.

Our Canva review has the plan limits, and the AI image prompts run as written in Dream Lab.

Try it

A clean event poster for [event name] on [date] at [place]. The headline reads exactly "[headline, up to 6 words]" in large bold letters at the top; under it, the date and place in a smaller line. Background: [simple scene or colour], with plenty of empty space around the text. Flat modern design, two main colours plus white. Portrait 4:5. Spell every word exactly as given, and add no other text.

A square social media post announcing [what you are announcing]. Top half: a photo-style image of [subject] in soft daylight. Bottom half: a solid [colour] band with the line "[your line in English]" and, under it in smaller letters, "[the same line in a second language]". Both lines centred, nothing else written anywhere in the image.

Sources

• Canva Newsroom, Introducing Canva Craft, October 22, 2026
• Canva Developers Community, Connect API: Canva Craft is now available for image generation, October 22, 2026
• TechCrunch, Canva releases its first image generation model, October 22, 2026