Canva tackled digital design — and now the office suite is next

Canva is introducing a plethora of updates that aim to make its design ecosystem more attractive to professional teams and workspaces. The company has redesigned the platform to make new and existing editing tools easier to find and announced a specialized tier for Enterprises that provides more control over collaboration, brand management, and security for larger organizations.

“We are excited to introduce a revamped Canva experience and a suite of new products to empower every organization to design,” said Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins in the press release. “We democratized the design ecosystem in our first decade and now look forward to unifying the fragmented ecosystems of design, AI, and workflow tools for every organization in our second decade.”

The redesigned homepage and editing experience will be available today but, strangely, only for the “first one million users who discover the secret portal” hidden on the Canva homepage. Otherwise, the updated Canva experience will be generally available in August.

Most of the updates are business-focused, such as AI-powered style matching for brands, allowing users to customize what folders are displayed on their Canva homepage workspace, and adding the ability for teams to “star” designs, folders, and brand templates to provide easier access to specific projects. Canva Docs — the company’s equivalent of Google Docs or Microsoft Word — now has a “suggestion” mode for editors to leave recommended edits and colorful new highlight blocks to emphasize specific areas of text.

There are a lot of new capabilities and improvements included in this update, so you can check out all of Canva’s new features over on its website, but here are a few that stuck out:

The refreshed editing panel now automatically collapses when not in use to prevent it from obstructing in-process design projects, while a new “quick action” toolbar along the top of the page adds more of Canva’s most popular design tools — such as the color selection wheel and background removal feature.

There are also new “Magic Studio” AI tools, such as automatic clip highlighting and background noise reduction for video editing, and a new text-to-graphic image generator for producing icons, graphics, and illustration-style designs.

Canva co-founder Cameron Adams says these updates (and future ones) are focused on reducing organizational complexity and “app sprawl” — effectively offering companies a one-stop creative shop to replace all the dedicated design, AI, and workflow tools they currently pay for, like Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, Figma, and Google Workspace. “The next decade for Canva is about integrating all these solutions into one platform,” Adams told The Verge.