Canva’s new Features: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
You likely have seen (hopefully on Caffeinated Church’s Facebook page!) that Canva is rolling out a slew of new features. I often get nervous when major updates are announced for a product I use a lot, knowing that building new habits and processes can make for a frustrating few adjustment weeks (Perhaps most nervewracking of all is the new User Interface, which is rolling out to users as we speak and will be universal by August 2024. I do not yet have the new interface.).
The name of the game in this rollout seems to be Collaboration and AI: Working on team projects, and using artificial intelligence to maximize efficiency. Here is Canva’s overview of its new features (Complete listing of all new features is here.).
From a couple weeks of playing around, here’s an overview of some of the biggest updates and new features:
Magic Grab: Canva continues to make headway in offering more intricate graphic design functionality to allow it to compete with Adobe’s Creative Suite. We can finally grab and manipulate individual elements within an image (ala the Adobe lasso).
Magic Media: On top of the qualms around artistic integrity, Canva’s AI-fueled media generator isn’t much to write home about. Same with the new “blend” feature, which is supposed to automatically understand how a newly added graphic element fits into the existing image (IE: Placing a balloon so it looks like a kid is holding it.). There’s also a Transform Into feature that hasn’t improvied much from the classic “Magic Resize” option, where there’s little intuited or preserved about the layout of a design when turning it into something else (IE: An infographic into a blog post). All experiments with these AI-driven features were clunky, unattractive, and not very usable. I’d go ahead and avoid these three for now.
Whiteboards: While this is a functionality apparently intended to be used as a group collaboration area, I like the new Whiteboard feature because you can design without assigning dimensions to your document. In the past, if you dragged a graphic or text box outside of your document’s dimensions and actually placed it there, it would disappear. This allows you to manipulate your design elements before locking down it (For example: I used this during a brochure layout, when I had many text boxes to figure out placement of; the Whiteboard made it so I could pull text boxes aside and grab them again later.)
Brand Voice: Here’s another AI-powered tool, one that is entirely more useful. It allows you to tell Canva what your brand’s voice is (inputting a paragraph or two of example copy) and then apply that voice to your document. This can be especially useful for placeholder text — instead of Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet you can input “Put a paragraph here about new summer schedule and highlights” and Canva will generate a paragraph for you to edit and finalize later.
Video Improvements: Canva’s video editing to this point has been very “down and dirty” – simple to use with very limited capabilities. While not much as changed around more complex editing, you can now extract and enhance the audio track (I found this valuable in podcast creation – now having one place I can create both a video version for YouTube and an autio-only version for those platforms).
Auto-generated Highlights: A video feature I’m excited to play with more, this could be a game changer when it comes to taking long-form video and making several pieces of content with it.
What are you excited about? What do you still need in Canva?
