How Canva Is Bringing Vibe Coding and Design Features to Entrepreneurs

Design software firm Canva just announced a host of new AI features aimed at streamlining the process of creating anything from video clips to marketing campaigns. The company is touting the product updates as nothing less than the dawn of a new era of creativity.  

“For the last couple of decades, it’s been all about democratizing information and giving people access to as much information as possible,” Canva chief product officer Cameron Adams told Inc. in a video call ahead of a launch event in Sydney on Thursday. 

Now that most people around the world have all the information they could ever want at their fingertips, the “information age” is giving way to the “imagination era,” says Adams, who co-founded Canva in 2013 with Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht. “With the rise of AI, it’s not so much about the information, but what you do with it,” Adams says. “It’s about the vision that you set for yourself and for the team around you. How do we bring our imagination to life and put it into action, so it has a real impact on the planet?” 

Sydney, Australia–based Canva is certainly not alone in introducing more AI features. Both TikTok and Instagram rolled out new AI editing features in recent weeks. But Canva, which has spent close to a decade building its AI team, is baking AI features into nearly every part of its interface.  

Canva reported $3.5 billion in annualized revenue in October and says it has more than 260 million monthly active users. While it first caught fire with social media managers and college students, it’s increasingly infiltrating the corporate world, with enterprise customers like LinkedIn, Stripe, and Snowflake.  

Its flexible design tools can create anything from Instagram posts to spreadsheets in seconds, and its visual, drag-and-drop interface makes it a favorite of non-designers who want to create nice looking products in a hurry. 

“We spend a lot of time talking to our real estate agents about how important it is to build personal brands,” says Wendy Forsythe, the chief marketing officer of eXp Realty, the largest residential real estate firm in North America and another enterprise customer. “It’s part of what helps them differentiate themselves on why a buyer or seller would choose to buy a home or sell a home.”  

With Canva, eXp Reality’s more than 80,000 agents can create their own Instagram posts, open-house fliers, and marketing materials. They can also quickly erase things like cars in driveways from photos or translate materials into multiple languages with a few clicks. As of Thursday, they can also create branded emails using drag-and-drop design tools. 

In its latest product update, the company is doubling down on artificial intelligence, upgrading many existing features and introducing Canva Design Model, which the company says is the first AI model that understands the elements of design.  

“When you think about a design, it’s actually quite complicated. It brings together hundreds if not thousands of different elements and aspects into something that communicates a message effectively,” says Adams. The AI needs to understand the different elements like text and images that might go into a design, the intended audience, and the end use—and how all the pieces work together. 

Alongside its free, pro, and enterprise tiers, Canva also just launched Canva Business, a plan created for solopreneurs and small teams, which costs $20 a month per user.  

Here are a few of the new features that can help small business owners create everything from ads to websites more efficiently.  

While existing AI models can generate lifelike images and videos, Adams says Canva Design Model is the first that allows users to easily edit and customize designs such as fliers, ads, or menus. Users can specify their own brand guidelines, and once a design is generated, they can manipulate individual elements through prompts or by using Canva’s design tools. They can also generate new designs or slides based on an existing file, or ask Canva’s chatbot for tips. 

Marketing campaign help 

A new feature called Canva Grow helps streamline the process of creating marketing materials. The tool helps generate ideas and break down the necessary steps for a campaign. Then it helps design the elements, which can be published directly to platforms like Instagram. Once those campaigns are live, Canva Grow helps track performance and allows users to update their campaigns based on those metrics. 

An easier way to collect data 

Vibe coding tools have soared in popularity in recent months. But while they’re helpful for creating apps and web features, there’s often no straightforward way to collect information from those widgets on the back end. Canva just introduced the capability to link forms and other interactive designs to Sheets, the company’s spreadsheet product. The data can be collected and sorted, and also incorporated into products such as slide decks, which are automatically updated as new data comes in.