Visual storytelling plays a huge part in how we learn and do business.
Now more than ever, we rely on compelling online content and design to catch the attention of our target audiences.
Whether you work for a tiny startup, a school, or an enterprise-level company, chances are, you’re incorporating graphic design into what you do.
When it comes to creating engaging graphic design, Canva is one of the best known and highest regarded platforms available.
From its humble beginnings in 2013 as a team of three people in a living room, the Australian design company has skyrocketed to international success and global acclaim.
Canva is now worth around $24 billion, and it’s used by about 85% of Fortune 500 companies.
Users can work together to create and design documents, websites, presentations, videos, graphics, and more.
With its easy-to-use features and incredible array of fonts, templates, and images, Canva empowers everyone to create and design.
The company’s success is partly due to their dedication to making online design easy, intuitive, and fun. Canva is also devoted to keeping their platform innovative.
This year, the company unveiled a number of exciting new features at their annual Canva Create event recently.
Co-founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adams took the stage in Sydney, Australia to reveal all of the new ways Canva is unlocking creativity this year.
From powerful organizational tools to exciting new AI-enhancements, the event focused on Canva’s unique ability to become the home for any sized brand.
Read on to learn more about how Canva is ushering in its “Brand New Era” with these fascinating features.
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Tools for Building a Brilliant Brand
Canva makes it easy for anybody to create stunning visuals for a wide range of applications, including marketing materials, worksheets, presentations, social media posts, banners, and more -- no design experience required.
Canva Pro
Many of the newest attributes Canva unveiled are related to keeping your brand’s content centralized and on-message.
This is an area of growing importance, as even smaller brands are expected to produce a high volume of content across a number of different channels.
These demands can make consistent branding a challenge, but Canva aims to simplify the process with their streamlined Brand Hub.
Learn about what the updated Brand Hub includes below.
The Brand Kit
Canva’s signature Brand Kit serves as a one-stop location for all of your brand’s logos, colors, graphics, icons, templates, and more.
Users can access all of these essentials in the Brand Kit from any device, making it easy for team members to keep content consistent.
There’s no need to waste time searching for the correct font family or color palette since all of these designs are saved, organized, and available with a few quick clicks.
Brand Templates
In keeping with Canva’s focus on saving time, users can create and then reuse brand templates across their organization.
A vast library of premade templates makes it even easier to customize, build out, and save the perfect template for your brand.
Easy access to templates makes it possible to cut out repetitive tasks. Instead of recreating and rebuilding, users can produce more content with less effort.
Brand Folders
In the name of staying organized, Canva also offers sophisticated Brand Folders to manage groups, projects, and progress.
Keep track of specific branding for special events, posts, or campaigns by making a folder for each of your company’s endeavors.
Folders can be assigned to different group members to help everyone stay in the loop and keep all of your creative designs in the right place.
Brand Controls
As teams grow and flourish, it can become difficult for supervisors to keep up with all of their teams’ designs.
No one wants to waste time backtracking and correcting designs with incorrect visuals.
Canva’s Brand Controls allow designated users to set limits on fonts, colors, and other graphic elements to make sure all new designs fit the brand’s vision.
Brand Controls help admins keep their teams’ designs on track with minimal effort and confusion.
Brand Guidelines
Brand Guidelines exist as another safeguard against wasted time.
Admins can insert their brand’s guidelines directly into the design process, so directions and suggestions will automatically appear as users build new content.
This makes consistency a snap and builds user confidence, as Brand Guidelines clarify potential issues before they become problems.
Approval Workflows
When a design is complete, Canva offers direct approval workflows to make sure an admin can review the finished product.
Canva’s approval workflows prevent anything from being published before it’s gotten proper approval, a feature that will benefit small and large-scale businesses alike.
Smooth approval workflows promote better turnaround and help your brand maintain high quality content.
Magic Replace
A competitive brand is one that continues to grow. Canva anticipates your need to evolve by supplying a Magic Replace feature that allows you to update content across your brand.
Need to integrate a reimagined logo, new font choice, or improved color palette?
The Magic Replace option will seamlessly update all of your saved designs with the desired changes.
This is a huge timesaver and frees up your ability to remain creative without the fear of spending hours (or days) manually updating your content.
AI That’s Awe-Inspiring
This year’s Canva Create also included a variety of new AI offerings aimed at making the design process itself more streamlined and enjoyable.
Equipped with all of the aforementioned organizational tools, users can also let their creativity run wild with powerful new AI developments.
Read on to learn more about how these features can take your Canva designs to the next level.
Magic Design
Creating a beautiful design has truly never been easier.
Upload an image, choose a style, and watch as Canva’s Magic Design auto-generates a variety of templates for you to play with and personalize.
Magic Design can also create whole presentation templates, complete with an outline and content for each slide.
This spiffy new feature saves time by doing the legwork for you.
Once you’ve found an appealing template, all that’s left is the fun stuff: tweaking the colors, font choices, content, and graphics just the way you want them.
Magic Design is a great way for newer designers to build their confidence.
It’s also a time-saving asset for larger-scale businesses seeking to design compelling visuals at a high volume.
Magic Edit
Again: it’s never been easier to edit, crop, remove, and replace.
With Canva’s Magic Edit, simply describe the element you’d like to change, and watch it happen.
For example, users can click on the image of a daisy and describe the change they’d like to see, i.e. “Turn this into a red flower.”
Within moments, Magic Edit will make the change… no pesky image search or manual editing required.
Magic Erase
There’s a reason these features are all referred to as “magic.”
Magic Eraser allows you to seamlessly remove any unwanted details in your image with a few clicks.
Simply brush over the areas you’d like to wipe away and let Magic Eraser do the rest.
This makes it easy to clean up your visuals without having to do extensive digital altering.
Magic Write
As AI-powered writing becomes more and more commonly used, Canva has incorporated their Magic Write option across presentations, videos, and documents.
Simply describe the kind of text you’ll need to Canva’s Magic Write AI copywriter tool.
The assistant will generate the words in seconds for you to review and refine.
Magic Write effectively simplifies all of your brand’s writing needs, from video summaries to seminar descriptions and even website copy.
Beat Sync
Visuals aren’t the only thing Canva has leveled up this year.
Beat Sync is a new feature that allows users to seamlessly match video footage to a soundtrack.
The AI-powered tool will automatically identify moments when the beat for your soundtrack should begin, so you can save time parsing through your footage to figure it out.
Instead, simply play with the options created by Beat Sync until your sounds and images mesh perfectly.
Translate
In today’s global market, an AI-powered translation tool will make it easy for your brand to reach audiences anywhere in the world.
Canva’s Translate option eliminates the need to separately translate your copy.
Instead, you can directly switch the text in your images and designs with the click of a button.
With hundreds of languages readily available, Canva’s Translate means international design connectivity just got a little bit easier.
Canva Assistant
The Assistant feature unveiled at Canva Create is something of a catch-all for any needs not already covered by other features.
Your Canva Assistant can recommend design elements, layouts, or images as needed.
It can also generate specific content for your design needs with the click of a button.
The speed and ease of the Canva Assistant makes it easy to test-drive and explore new ideas in real-time as you design.
Final Thoughts on Canva Create
Canva Create also presented some design elements specifically requested by loyal users in their global community.
Improved freehand drawing, faster design imports, and hundreds of new fonts are among the updated goodies the company mentioned for 2023.
Options for layers, color gradients, and alt text were also unveiled, aimed at making your graphics both more appealing as well as more accessible for all users.
With unbeatable organizational tools, time-saving AI creativity hacks, and user-requested improvements, Canva Create established that this company is all about making their platform the best it can be.
This makes it possible for your brand to be the best it can be, too.
Want to experience all that Canva has to offer? The first step is to create a Canva account if you don’t already have one.
It’s free to create a Canva account, but with an upgraded Canva Pro account, you can enjoy its unlimited features and premium content. You can get a free trial to see if it will work for you before paying a thing.