Over the Easter break, I watched the recorded keynote presentation from the Canva Create event. I’ve recently started integrating Canva into my teaching toolbox. I wouldn’t call myself a power user… more of a Canva enthusiast who’s excited about its potential. Here are a couple of examples of how I’ve been using Canva:
So when I saw that Canva’s live event was coming up, I was beyond excited. After watching the keynote, I spent a couple of weeks experimenting with the new features. Here are my thoughts on some of the standout updates:
‘Code with AI’ allows us to prompt an AI model to create dynamic and interactive web apps that can be published into webpages. I was first told about this concept in Claude.ai’s “Artefacts” feature and noticed something similar in ChatGPT’s new Canvas apps. Canva’s take on this, however, stands out.
The code it creates are easy to understand and this makes it super easy to suggest improvements and makes changes through prompting. The model seems to use Tailwind for styling, which is really interesting and leads to very aesthetic looking widgets. The complexity of the widgets is vastly greater than Claude.ai or ChatGPT, and I haven’t seen a generation-limit which was a problem I encountered with the other two solutions. So far I’ve generated an app made of around 1500 lines of code and had upwards of 10 back and forth prompt iterations. More testing required to see what the upper limit of this is.
I am drafting a post that talks about these web widgets in more detail, and with some of my real examples. Stay tuned for that.
Although not a feature that was at the top of my list, 'Visual Suite 2.0' presents an interesting way of organising documents. Canva advertises that you can feature docs, presentations, videos, images and sheets, all within the same document. This makes it a lot closer to a powerful document hub than a design suite.
In a practical example, we can now have a lesson plan, a lesson presentation, and lesson resources, and marking data, all within a single document. While I still rely on GSuite and Notion for core planning and documentation, Canva’s multi-doc setup shines for graphic-design-based projects especially where visual and data elements need to live together, and lots of elements are being juggled. Perhaps for preparing marketing materials for my more extracurricular projects, this can be an incredibly powerful tool, with its ability to centralise and handle all of the assets.
Spreadsheets within Canva. Not a feature that I knew I needed, but a welcome addition. Combining this with the ‘Multiple Doc Types’ feature really lends towards the power as a tool for preparing marketing materials. Powered with AI, it can autofill and more testing is needed to find the best way to utilise this technology.
Canva have implemented more diverse range of charts, through their partnership with Flourish. I’ve encountered Flourish before when I was building HTML presentations with Reveal.js, and their graphs and data representation tools are powerful. Seeing this in Canva is a welcome addition. However, it’s not a feature that is immensely useful for my use-case but I suspect that for business and industry, it’s fantastic.
This is all about using AI to generate Canva designs. Unfortunately, this has been the least successful feature so far for me, producing quite bland and ‘odd’ designs and restricting (or limiting) me from making changes to the design after generation. As with any big announcement, there is always a weaker or less useful part and my main hope is that it will improve over time.
Overall, these updates position Canva as more than just a design tool, it's barrelling into a multifunctional creative workspace, which I cannot wait for. I'm especially excited to see how the AI features develop, from both an academic AI experimentalist and what educators and creators will build with them.