Creating an AI-powered Magic Studio

Canva is a visual communication platform, enjoyed by more than 175 million people monthly to make presentations, videos, documents, websites, social media graphics and more. A majority of the world’s knowledge workers lack design training, but Canva’s combination of an easy-to-use interface, vast libraries, and time-saving tools allows anyone to create visually compelling content.

Canva believes that AI can transform and accelerate the creative process, making design more intuitive and faster for all skill levels. To quickly put AI in its users hands, Canva tapped OpenAI as the foundational model for developing several of the tools for its AI suite, Magic Studio.

Canva aimed to make Magic Studio a unified creative suite that consolidates the best AI technology available into a single platform. While Canva has leveraged AI in its product for years, integrating generative AI tools was a delicate challenge because it required adding more capabilities without complicating the product. After all, Canva’s reputation is based on providing a simple way to produce high-quality content, even for non-professional designers. 

Magic Studio had to ensure that various modalities—text, image, video—could work together effectively without overwhelming the user. OpenAI’s GPT‑4 excels at incorporating multimodalities into a single workflow, making it possible for Canva to deliver on advanced AI product options while maintaining an intuitive user experience. 

“Providing powerful and safe AI technology is critical to Canva’s ability to further the world of design. OpenAI has empowered us to supercharge Canva’s AI vision at speed,” says Danny Wu, Head of AI Products at Canva.