Canva’s New Vision-Language Model Lets You Edit, Refine Designs Using Prompts With Lower Editing Costs

Canva announced a new vision-language model for powering its AI design tools on Friday. Called Canva Brush, it is said to help edit and refine existing creations within Canva while preserving their original elements. According to the company, the model can operate on natural language instructions and can make changes from a single line of text to an entire presentation. Canva Brush is initially available for supported design edits to Canva Pro subscribers.

Canva Brush Vision-Language Model

In a blog post, the company said that Canva Brush has been developed by its in-house Canva Research team. It can understand an existing design's structure and make requested changes while keeping other elements intact, unlike other tools that primarily focus on generating images.

Canva Brush is claimed to be capable of editing individual lines of copy as well as multiple slides in a presentation. The company claims it has been designed to handle complex design tasks that require consistency across pages. These include maintaining typography, colours, spacing, imagery, and layouts.

Citing an example, Canva explained that users can ask Canva Brush to create a three-page pitch deck for a bakery with Art Nouveau visuals and backgrounds. The model can plan the narrative across pages, generate and position text, select imagery, and work to maintain a consistent visual style.

The vision-language model is said to use an agentic process that writes and runs code to adjust design elements, then inspects the resulting page to guide further changes. According to Canva, all the elements it creates remain editable. This means users can modify text, imagery, colours, and layouts manually at any time.

On the performance front, Canva Brush is claimed to be up to 69 percent faster at general design editing tasks and 46 percent cheaper per edit task than its previous design agent. The company also carried out internal testing where Brush is said to have matched or exceeded the quality of its previous setup on most editing tasks. It delivered particularly strong results when restyling designs and adapting them to different formats.

Canva Brush is available starting today for supported design edits in Canva AI for users on Canva Pro plans. Users can open an existing design in the editor or attach or link a design within Canva AI. They can then select Brush from the dropdown menu in Canva AI to use the model for editing.