EP 187: Canva Magic Studio - Revolutionizing AI Design

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What if I told you that there was a generative AI program that combined the best of all these worlds, right? Like something that could do text to text and text to design and text to photo and text to video. And what if I told you it was also a program that you probably already use? Well, that magical AI program already exists and it is Canva's AI Magic Studio. And I'm so excited today to be talking about that. So we're going to talk about that and a little bit more on Everyday AI. So welcome. My name is Jordan Wilson. I am the host of Everyday AI here. And Everyday AI is a daily live stream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like me and you not just learn what's going on in the world of generative AI, but how we can all actually leverage it as well. So if you're listening on the podcast, thank you. As always, make sure to check out the show notes. You can come in and join the live conversation. And to our live stream audience, thank you as well. We are technically debuting this live, but it's pre recorded because sometimes we have very smart people from other parts of the world that 7:30am Central Standard Time doesn't always work out such as the case as our guest today. So I'm excited to talk today about Canva's AI. It's amazing. If you haven't used it, like, why the heck haven't you? If I'm being honest, I've used hundreds and maybe even more than a thousand different generative AI tools. And Canva is probably, probably one of my top three most used tools. If you're not using it, whether you're a small business owner, whether you work in, in a corporate setting, it is by far one of the most flexible, robust and powerful AI tools. Yeah, hopefully I got your attention with that. All right, so it's not just going to be me blabbing on. I'm excited to bring on our guest for today, so please help me welcome. Let's see if we can get them on there. Here we go. All right, Danny Wu, who is the head of AI products at Canva. Danny, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI Show.

Hey, Jordan, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Oh, I'm excited to have you. I've been waiting to get someone from Canva on the show. I Love the product. But first, before we dive into all of that, Danny, can you please tell everyone just a little bit about what you do as the head of AI products at Canva?

Sure. So at Canva, I work with all of our different teams and all of our different groups that's building magical AI powered products and features and then lead our teams in just developing all the magic like our Magic Studio and help help bring like the AI helping AI superpowers to life for our community and users.

That's great. So, so you know, one thing, and I don't even know if everyone has fully explored what's inside Canvas Magic Studio because there's so much. So I'm going to go ahead. You know, if you are listening on the podcast, always come back and check the the live stream because this is a more visual episode. So I'm going to go ahead and maybe pull up on the screen here a little bit of Magic Studio. So Danny, maybe can you just kind of walk us through a little bit about what all is inside of Magic Studio and what can these different kind of features or programs within the Magic Studio do?

Yeah, of course. Magic Studio is our collection of AI powered tools. And what we've done with Magic Studio is to create an all in one platform that harnesses all of the capabilities and all of the powers of AI things like Magic Write, for example, that allows you as a writing assistance tool that allows you to very much, kind of very much like give you creativity superpowers as you're writing anything from a blog post, maybe a script for a podcast or maybe a press release and get AI assistance in helping you write data and faster. But it's very. But as I mentioned, like with the all in one platform, this influences just about every single part of Canva. It's very visual, includes generative AI image features like Magic Media from not just images, but also video, as well as things that help you create videos with Magic design for video with things like beats, sync and animations and of course workplace productivity tools like Magic Switch, which is our new and upgraded Magic resize. And I'm really excited about Magic Switch for example, because this allows you to transform between all the different design types in canva. So Canva doesn't just do things like flyers or social media graphics, but it also does presentations, does documents, it does style so much more. And this lets you seamlessly convert between those doc types in just a few clicks. And in those designs you can create beautiful visuals like for example, vibrant city jungle like you see here with Magic Media as well as the images and Magic Morph, of course, it's just to apply essentially textures to create some really, really splashy and prominent text. And in addition to that, it's not just about creating, it's also about editing, which is such an important part of the design process. If you've ever had an image where it's cropped to a certain level, when you just wish there was a little bit more to the side, there's a little bit more to the bottom, Magic Expand will let you essentially turn an image and expand the canvas and canvas using some generative AI and getting whatever aspect ratio and whatever size and dimensions you want. We also have upgraded Magic Edit, which lets you select a portion of the image and choose to change anything you want, which is super, super powerful. You can start interacting with photos like the objects, like the camera designs. You have an image, you can grab the subject of the image out and then edit it, just like any other Canva element, which again, is super, super powerful. And that's not to mention things like Magic Eraser lets you move objects by just scrubbing it through Background rem, which is one of our most popular camera features that works on both photos as well as videos and Magic Animators we talked about earlier, that lets you just click a button and we'll create beautiful animations that matches your content, that matches your theme without any effort at all.

There's so much in here. We could literally talk, I think, Danny, for hours, just about all of these different features. If anyone out there, whether you are a creative person or whether you aren't a creative person, that's one thing I love about Canva and full disclosure here, right? So I've used, on and off, I've used Adobe for 20 years, right? But I don't even open it anymore. Especially after, you know, the features like we just talked about here with Danny, like background remover, Magic Eraser, all of these things. So. So, Danny, I'll ask you this. What is, especially with all of these new Magic Studio features within Canva's new AI offerings, what would you say is. Is the one AI feature that maybe people either don't know about or the one that they maybe don't use, but they definitely should, I think, like, if.

I had to pick just one, like, I would probably have to say Magic Switch. So this is like one of. This is something that we've been working for. It's actually been part of camera's vision for many, many years, and we've been working on it for quite a long Time and with the powers of, with developments of generative AI has finally became possible. And so we've always wanted to kind of build an interoperable and just interoperable and just kind of essentially cross transformative suite of docs that you're not thinking like, you're not constrained thinking in terms of one design type, like just a presentation like Doc, but for all of the, for the boundaries, we have all of those different design types to start, start to blur and start to kind of essentially merge seamlessly together. And so Magic Switch is essentially our first step in this direction. And by allowing you to convert things like a presentation or social media graphic into a doc with your custom instructions and prompt, that allows you to start working in what we see as increasingly this future world of operating beyond specific design types and just operating on design as a concept itself.

Yeah, and it seems like, you know, and if you are kind of listening on the podcast, I have the Magic Switch feature up here and it's, it's actually amazing and it is so powerful to be able to, you know, because a lot of times, you know, you might spend so much time, you know, getting a graphic or, you know, something just right and then with the click of a button to be able to put it into different aspect ratios, to be able to, you know, maybe it was a full page, you know, kind of a flyer type, and then to be able to put it into a small social graphic is huge. It's such a time saver. But Danny, you brought up the concept of going from, you know, kind of a design and then switching it over to a document. It seems like to me a big push recently with Canva is this push toward collaboration and being able to work, you know, and going from a design and then changing that design into a document and being able to work it on, on it with colleagues. What are the advantages to kind of when you combine this AI powered design capabilities with the collaborative features of canva?

Yeah, absolutely. So we added collaboration, collaboration to Canva a number of years ago and we've really seen the usage of that take off over the years, especially when you're not working on design by yourself, you're working a team, you're like, you're jamming our project together, you're brainstorming some new ideas. And with this, with our Magic Switch, for example, you might be working on a presentation and you might go, okay, I want to maybe turn this into a small social media ad creative. I need a script. And you get all my key points. You can use Magic Switch to turn this into actually a script for an social media ad or commercial actually and use this as the use as a starting off point. You can jam on this, it's just like any other camera doc. You can jam on any client design. You can jam on this live with your team, you can give feedback, you can then use all the tools like magic, right together collaboratively to, collaboratively to brainstorm ideas. So it's not just kind of not just sitting In I guess ChatGPT typing by yourself, but all the other people that's in your design can also see, see the outputs of the AI live while you do it. And it's just an opportunity for, for you to be, to work together with your team on, on AI.

You know what, let me ask you this Danny. Who is, who is Canva even for? Right? Like I, I, I think early on, you know, maybe eight, nine, ten years ago, you know, I, I, I think Canva at least in my opinion was maybe for creatives. But who is Canva for? Is it still for creatives? Is it for designers? Is it for everyone? Who would you say that Canva is for and who can use it?

Yeah, Canva is for everyone. So like even in the early days, like what got me really excited, what led to me joining Canva was that kind of our belief that design is something that benefits absolutely everyone. You don't have to be, you don't have to be a creative. And in fact even if you're not kind of in the creative industry, you should absolutely have to harness the power of design, the power of storytelling, the power of visual communication. And so currently teachers kind of is for students with kind of education kindly was for individual uses making like a wedding ISVP or invitation. It's for, it's for a small business working on social media. It's for a large company working on desks and the strategy and financial forecast. It's absolutely for everyone.

It's yeah, it's insane. You know, sometimes I'll be talking to people. Um, and at least for me, you know, cause I have a background in, in communications, marketing, advertising. So I've been using Canva since, I mean longer than I can remember if I'm being honest. And sometimes when I meet people who aren't using Canva, I just say like why? Like, like it doesn't, like it doesn't register in my head. But, but maybe you know, Danny, what you could do is, is can you walk us through some maybe common business use cases? Right? So let's say, you know, a small Small business owner. Right. Maybe they have, you know, 50 to 100 employees and maybe they haven't used Canva yet. So what would you say are some practical use cases for Canva specifically, you know, how can they use these new AI features within Magic Studio to maybe grow, promote or market their business?

Yeah, absolutely. So for us, for small, say 50 to 100 size business, I kind of spread and butter like we started off with a focus on social media graphics and that's still very much one of our core focuses. So if a small business social media presence then kind of enables you to create content but also schedule the content so across all our different socials so you can actually create post in advance, link your ex and Facebook accounts and go, oh, I have this new announcement happening next Friday. I'm going to get all my content ready. And that's a very classic use case. And with Magic Studio, for example, Magic design will let you create social media graphics even faster in just a few clicks. And something that we see in small businesses is that they often have people who are wearing many hats and you're putting on many roles. So maybe you have a dedicated copywriter, maybe you don't have a dedicated copywriter, but with Magic Write's brand tone of voice, you can actually watch your company and your brand's tone is all about and then let everyone on your team be able to use Magic Write to basically convert some text, no matter how boring or how bland, into something that perfectly sings your tone of voice. And that's something that's really, really great if you don't have even not a large enterprise with dedicated copywriters and dedicated press and comms teams that's there to do it every single time. And of course this is kind of our smaller, not so mentioned feature. But translation in Magic Switch also lets you like if your business has kind of like that's audiences in different, in different countries, in different regions. Or maybe, or maybe you just had users speak different languages, you can actually translate all of your designs, whether it's a social media post, whether it's a presentation, whether it's a doc, into more than 100 different languages to help you communicate directly to your audience whatever language you speak.

Yeah, like the, the more I hear Danny talk about what Canva can do, especially with AI, I mean I, I, I literally have been using Canva for more than 10 years. I use it every single day and I'm pretty sure Danny has already mentioned at least two or three things that I didn't even know about. So it's like I'm over here just like scratching my head, like what the heck can Canva not do? So I'll, I'll ask you this though, Danny, with, with all the different things. All the different things. Features, right, so we talked about there's text to text, right? So you have your, you know, some of those features maybe if you're using chat GPT or bard or anthropic Claude that you're used to text to text, right? And then there's the text to image features, you know, like something like a mid journey or a dolly, right? But then there's also like text to design, right? So like tome or beautiful AI Canva does everything. So, so with that in mind, what are. If I had to have you pick just one feature, one AI feature. What is your personal favorite? The one or maybe the one that you even use the most? Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on Genai.

It is super hard for me to give favorites, but I will give one and the one, the one that I use the most has to be magic media. Like that's something I think, I think that's something I really kind of, that really seems like once you combine the powers of text, image or text to video inside an all in one design platform. So whenever I'm creating a presentation or whether, even if I'm creating kind of a document and I want to kind of illustrate the point I'm making with kind of like a graphic, like I might have an idea of what graphic I want, right? If I want to talk about for example, innovation. Like I might want something to do with light bulbs and I want like one graphic I actually recently created was using tech magic media to create light bulbs that were baking in the oven to kind of communicate the idea of just allowing time for innovation. And that's something that if you go with traditional stock photography, if you go with existing artists that's being created, a photographer hasn't really shot a lot of light bulbs that's cooking in the oven. Even if they have, it's unlikely to be in your color scheme, in your brand's, I guess, our visual identity. But with, with magic media and I would actually use, I use this all the time to just create new graphics, training illustrations. And I feel like I just gained very much gained some visual superpowers that way.

Oh man, I love it. I. There's, there's nothing cooler y', all than, than hearing someone that helps build the products that you use every day talk about their favorite parts of the product. Because now I'm excited to go like check out a little bit more what, what Danny was talking about with that one. So one thing that I want to talk about, Danny, is, is maybe some, some aspects of, of Canva's AI offerings that people don't think about as much, right? Because I think the average person, you know, they think design when it comes to Canva, they think maybe, you know, flyers or, or social media graphics, right? But, but one thing that I think is, you know, super powerful is the magic, right? Frame feature, right? So not only can you kind of have that, you know, text to text type, you know, output that so many people are familiar now with, you know, using programs like Chat, GPT or Google Bard, but you also have the collaboration feature, right? So you can literally work with your teammates using a text to text generation and then design things in a live document as well. Can you talk a little bit about some of the use cases and just the power behind the AI, different AI tools that work along in this feature?

Yes, certainly Magic Write the text to text feature was actually one of our earliest AI features. We launched that all the way back in more than a year, a year and a few months ago. The use cases of that that we've been seeing and continue to increase is very much like first of all, people see starting, starting off with this during the brainstorm stage. And it's not actually always necessarily to create specific content that you want to do, but sometimes it used to kind of explore the problem space. So if you are, for example, let's say if you're working on, I guess like a communications plan for how to like announce a change to your customers, the customers who are small business. Then you can see people use magic where I actually ask questions like, what makes a good communication plan? Like, that's not something you literally write, but it's very much a way to ask AI and get some additional insights and get some, get, get some guidance. And beyond, you know, beyond kind of our brainstorming with AI, it's also very much kind of a tooling every copywriter's tool belt that lets you from things like refining paragraphs, just writing them, writing drafts completely, to even to finishing things off the conclusion. If you're not sure if you've been, you know, living in this dock for the past hour and you just don't know what you write to a conclusion, it's something like all of these use cases are things that we're seeing. And I think the cool thing for us is like, I guess we launched Magic Write as kind of a wide open sandbox. And then we have seen how people use it. And more recently we've added quick actions to our designs. We can say make it shorter, make it more fun, rewrite it with just one click. And that's always something I will continue to work on to just kind of create, create all of these like quick AI workflows that help people who don't want to prompt or don't know how to prompt effectively still, like harness all of these towers.

Yeah, and that's, that's another thing. Right. So something that just. Danny, when, when you were talking, that popped into my head is the design feature. Right? Like, like the abilities to. With text. Right, with text, to be able to create like an entire presentation. So, so can you maybe talk a little bit? And I think that people can realize and understand the power of that. Right. Like if you're not a creative person to be able to sit down and to type out 10 words and then to have an entire, you know, multiple page presentation that made for you that then you can go in and edit and fine tune. But I'm also curious on the other side of it, Danny, because you're also helping shape, you know, all these different products and how they're built. You know, especially something like that. What are the challenges of building something like that that's so robust. Right. So what are the challenges, even kind of on the more technical side of creating something as powerful as being able to design something from words?

Yeah, I'd be really happy to talk about that. So I think that we try to make Magic Studio and all of our AI features really easy and really simple to use. But there is actually so much complexity that has gone behind the scenes. And I think if you look at magic design, for example, like a really simple way to do it would just be to take your. Take a text, what you're trying to create, and use that to generate more text. And then just basically shelf this somewhere inside kind of a dummy template and then just put some text here, put some images here. And that's generally kind of like the, I guess a more like elementary, although more, I guess, first class basic approach that like a lot of you have taken with Magic design. Like we've, you know, we start with that, we tested it, and then we kind of realized, okay, this is good, but how much value is this really adding? Like, is this actually good enough? And is this something that you're actually really, really happy to use? I guess that actually does, you know, your design jobs to be done effectively. And so we've had to. The way we build AI calculation involves a lot of spiking, a lot of politicizing and exploring a lot of different potentially promising directions. Much of that doesn't pan out, and that's okay. But for the ones that pan out, it allows us to climb the ladder towards more powerful AI features. We've done a lot of spiking, we've done a lot of different approaches and built quite a comprehensive suite of technologies around design understanding to make magic design work as well as it does. So it's not just about adding text and images to some template. It's also about teaching AI about visual, visual aesthetics, about composition. It's also about annotating these things so that the AI itself understands, you know, oh, this text box is like a heading, and this is what headings should have. And this is next to this text box, which is a subheading. And that's what, you know, should be connected to this. It's only through the kind of combination of like just connecting all of these parts together and building all of this visual understanding systems that are able to make Magic design. And it's still very much early days for all of AI, like we always like to say, but there is a lot of complexity behind the scenes and I think also like beyond the feature itself. So Canva is used. Canva is used by. I think. I'm just. Sorry, I'm a little bit. Yeah. With more than 170 million multi active users, like we very much kind of are serving AI at scale here and so keeping the systems scalable and available and fast to all of our users, it's very much another challenge itself that is very fun to work on, but also very involving.

Wait, so you said 170 million users?

That's right. Canva has more than 170 million monthly active users each and every month.

That's insane. So I'm wondering this then, because I'm sure you're able to get so much data on how people are using Canva and what they're getting out of it. When it comes to the AI features, what are users using the most in the new Magic Studio? Because maybe that's a good thing. If someone's listening, hey, you can just use all this data from 170 million people, and maybe that's where you should start if you're new to Canvas Magic Studio. So, Danny, where are users spending the most time in these new AI products?

Yeah, so we're seeing kind of adoption of all of our different AI features across things like Magic, right. Which is text to text, and of course our photo generative photo tools and photo editing tools. I think some of the more popular ones would have to be around the more visual aspects, things like Magic Media, things like Magic Edit and Magic Eraser or Visual, which is not a surprise thing that, you know, we are design platform. And I think, like, if you haven't, like, my recommendation would absolutely. Checking out our new Magical Folder Editor with the collection of tools from old favorites like Background Remover to the new Magic Edit, there's a lot to explore there. And we find that, I guess from talking to our users and from our user channel, we find that there's often a discovery phase of a new. So discovering this feature, they try once or twice and then they come back a few days later when they realize, oh, hey, I could use Magic Edit to fix this folder I couldn't otherwise use. And they start becoming very much kind of active and recurring uses of the feature.

Oh, man, that's amazing. And hey, if, if you haven't used Canva or maybe, you know, you have an account, but you're not active. Danny, I do believe even on the free plan, right? Because there's a very generous free plan, but then there's, you know, the Pro, Canva Pro and Canva for teams. But I believe even on the Canva free plan, you have a lot of these, you know, magic tools. I think you have the, even the text to video, the Magic design, right? Like, there's a lot of these things that even on a free plan, you can Use.

That's right, yeah. So you know, free plan. Like we, we want everyone to, to be able to, to be able to explore and use this generative AI features even if you don't have Canva Pro. So we have, we have a credit system where as a free user you have certain number of credits that's different depending on each AI feature. And so, and, and the other thing is that if you are kind of a per customer and you have access to all of our AI features, like we're not putting this behind an additional tier, we're not putting this behind an additional paywall, but Canva Pro includes all of our AI.

Wow. So, so here's, here's my. Because we talked about a lot, Danny. But I have to know, you know, as someone who is helping build this AI that hun, you know, more than 170 million people are using like what's next? Because I, I think of Canva as a tool that is for everyone. Right. Like whether you are a designer. Right. I work with top tier creative agencies that use Canva and then I know people that don't have any creative skills and use Canva. So what is next specifically for Canva and AI when it seems like it can do everything already? So what do you focus next on as someone who's head of where Canvas going in AI?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think like what. Well, what we see as kind of the most exciting is AI being less about individual features but actually becoming embedded into people and businesses workflow. So like an example I'll give is that like you know, within like internal comms of perhaps like larger size companies, like a lot of times you have to create things like communications plans when you want to announce a change, maybe there's that kind of a restructure, maybe there's kind of a new product announcement. And that's something that takes up a lot of times of, you know, internal communications are professionals and tools like Magic Write and Magic Switch actually very much that people create customized workflows. So you might have a base template. This is like how your company's communications plans are. This is what all the content you have to include are. But then what we really see kind of AI developing is and what we're working on is making it easier for everyone like without any programming, without any AI expertise or skills to be able to actually create these workflows with AI embedded in them so that your everyday tasks you do like, you do like you know, 10 times a month just become so much easier and you're using AI and helping you get your work done without you even actively and consciously thinking about it.

Geez, I, I can't wait to see, to see what's next. So, so what is, you know, as, as we wrap up the show here, what is the one thing? Because I'm sure that just about everyone out there listening heard something from you just like me, right? I've been using Canva for forever. I use it, you know, all of our graphics that we use for the show, our live stream, it's all done in Canva. And I heard even so many things. I can't wait to go try. But Danny, maybe what's the one piece of advice that you have for someone that heard something from you today? And they're like, wow, I can't wait to go out and try, you know, this new AI feature from Canva. What's your one piece of advice that they can use practically in their business?

I think, like in a business context of one advice. I know we didn't get to talk about this too much, but the advice I'd buy that would definitely my top one to give is to very much kind of like look into your providers policies around security and around security and health and data usage and privacy. That is just like, even for, even for individual users, like, it is kind of very much an important consideration. And the AI world is, that world definitely has a lot of different providers with different policies and different kind of different privacy policies and different ways that data can be used. With Kamra, like, we don't train on any design data. We don't use it for AI training. We don't use for product improvement without your consent. And so that's part of Canva showed and I think that's a very important question to consider before, you know, sharing sensitive or potentially proprietary information that might be, might be used and might end up being regurgitated and appear like in an AI model someday. If you're, if you don't kind of, if you just kind of willingly and just like put your. I think it's on the top thing you find on Google.

Oh, so, so like that was such a good thing to add because I'm sure there's so many people out there like, oh, this sounds like I can, you know, build, you know, a financial forecasting plan or you know, the next, you know, quarterly earnings with charts and graphics. So Danny, I'm glad you brought that up. So we learned so much today. I'm so happy that you came on the show. And hey, if you are listening. Make sure there's going to be some people from the Canva team answering questions in the comments. But Danny, thank you so much for coming on the Everyday AI show. And you really taught everyone, even someone that uses Canva every day like me, how to create more magic with Canva's Magic Studio. Thank you so much for joining the show.

Thank you so much, Jordan. It was great being here and love chatting about Magic Studio. Really. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. All right.

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Thanks, y'.

All.

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