Canva Launches Craft, Its First In-House Image Model: Can It Write Arabic?

Canva has stopped relying only on other companies’ image models. This week it launched Canva Craft, the first image generation model built and trained from scratch by its in-house lab, Canva Research. It is live for every Canva user worldwide in Dream Lab and for developers through Canva’s public API. Canva’s announcement leans on leaderboard rankings, but if you design for Arabic-speaking audiences the more useful question is whether it can put readable Arabic inside an image. Canva hasn’t said, so below is a quick way to check it yourself.

What actually changed

Most image models go straight from prompt to pixels. Craft, according to Canva’s own announcement, splits the job in two. A planning model first reads your prompt and writes out a composition plan covering which elements appear, where they sit, how big they are relative to each other, what matters most visually, and any text that should appear. A separate rendering model then turns that plan into an image at up to 2K resolution, in more than 30 preset aspect ratios or a custom one.

The training data is the other difference. Canva says Craft leaned on “millions of human-made templates” from its library (posters, social posts, presentations, infographics, menus) rather than mostly on photographs. The bet is that a model which has seen thousands of real layouts will handle hierarchy, spacing and type better. TechCrunch reports that researchers from Leonardo.ai, which Canva bought in 2024, worked on the model, and notes that an in-house model should also cut what Canva pays outside providers.

There is a practical payoff too. Canva says Craft’s output works well with Magic Layers, which splits a generated image into editable elements, so you can move a headline or recolour a background without regenerating the whole thing.

What it costs

The announcement gives no Craft-specific price and doesn’t say whether Craft counts as a Premium or an Ultra AI tool in Canva’s allowance system. The pricing page sets out the general rules. AI tools draw on a shared monthly allowance. Canva Free gets up to 20 uses of Standard or Premium AI tools a month and no Ultra tools. Pro gets up to 200 Premium uses or 20 Ultra uses, and Business doubles that. Pro showed as US$144 a year when we loaded the page from a US server. Prices vary by country, so check the figure in your own account.

In practice, free users can try Craft today, but 20 attempts disappear quickly when you’re refining a prompt.

The Arabic question

Canva says you can prompt in any language and that Craft “can create text in 55 languages.” The announcement doesn’t list them, and we found nothing there confirming Arabic is one. Arabic lettering is where image models usually break down: letters that don’t join, text running the wrong way, dots in the wrong places. Canva also admits fine print and technical drawings still need work.

Before you use it for client work, run this test:

• Ask for a poster with a short Arabic headline of two or three words, such as «عرض نهاية الأسبوع» (“weekend offer”). Zoom in and check that the letters connect and the dots are right.
• Repeat with a sentence of six words or more, and with a dialect phrase. Longer lines and colloquial spellings are harder for every model.
• Run the same prompt in Ideogram or Leonardo and compare.

If the lettering comes out broken, generate the image with no text and add the headline with Canva’s ordinary text tool, which sets Arabic in real fonts.

Who should care

Craft looks most useful to small shops, social media managers and anyone who turns out quick posts and ads, since that kind of design is exactly what it was trained on. Developers can call it through the API now. Canva says MCP access for AI assistants is “coming soon,” along with two faster, cheaper variants, Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast, but gives no date for either. If you’re deciding between Canva and a dedicated generation tool, see our Canva vs Adobe Firefly comparison.

To try it, open Dream Lab from the bottom-left panel in Canva, or go to canva.com/dream-lab.

Sources

• Canva: Introducing Canva Craft
• TechCrunch
• The Verge
• Canva pricing