Creating marketing and social media content for your business can often be time-consuming and heavy on your resources. However, with the widespread adoption of AI in recent years, things are much different. Think about it, tools like Canva powered by a machine learning algorithm? It does not get better than this.
Canva has always been a quite straightforward and go-to design tool for pretty much every business, big or small. But if you have not given it a try, now may be a good time. Or not. Either way, let’s do a long-overdue review of this platform and see if its Magic Studio feature is really worth it.
Are you ready?
What is Canva?
Introduced in 2013, Canva is an online graphic design platform built to help anyone create a wide range of visual content, including presentations, posters, social media graphics, documents, and more. Used by over a hundred million monthly users in 100+ languages, its simple drag-and-drop interface has been its secret sauce. But in the last few years, Canva added a series of AI-powered features, making this tool much easier and more powerful than ever before.
Let’s take a quick look at what these features are and see how they hold up when it comes to creating professional-looking, on-brand content.
Magic Design
Let’s imagine you're facing a blank page, whether it's for a social media post, a video, or a presentation. It can be overwhelming, right? Well, that's where Magic Design comes in handy. All you need to do is give it a simple prompt or upload your media, and bam! It works its magic and creates fairly impressive designs for you in a matter of seconds.
And here's the interesting part – Magic Design is like a wizard for videos too. If you're struggling to keep up with the demand for video content, it can help you out. Just throw in your images and videos, tell it what kind of video you want, and voila! It crafts a professional video with music and perfectly timed beats, taking all the editing stress off your shoulders.
Got a presentation looming over you? Just type in a few words about your idea, and Magic Design instantly generates slides with a cohesive story and even applies your company's branding. You can even make changes to the designs it generates for you.
Magic Write
Forget design, Canva can also be your writing sidekick - thanks to Magic Write. You just give it a little nudge (a quick prompt), and boom! It whips up a first draft for you or helps you tweak and expand your existing text. And quite frankly, it does a good job.
Besides, it not only auto-generates your draft but also checks your writing against your brand's unique style. That’s right. Simply add your Brand Voice with your Canva Brand Kit by quickly describing your tone. In fact, you can also edit it any time you want. Thus, whether you're working on a social media post or a company-wide newsletter, Magic Write makes sure your words match your brand's vibe every single time. Not bad, huh?
Magic Edit
When designing a creative, your image often needs a change, for example, a different background or color. This is where Magic Edit comes into the picture. It is a pretty straightforward feature. Just touch the areas that need a change and you are good to go. It is accompanied by a couple of other handy features.
For example, Magic Grab lets you select and separate objects in your photos so that you can edit, move, and resize them. Magic Expand can fix the framing, make zoomed-in pics bigger, or turn a vertical shot into a horizontal one. It's like getting more of the picture without taking a new photo.
And then there is Magic Morph. It can add special effects to text or shapes, making your design unique. Plus, it can give a consistent style to all your elements, making everything look awesome together.
Magic Switch
Say you have a design, like a presentation or an ad, and you want to use it in different ways or on various platforms without spending a lot of time redoing everything. Well, Magic Switch can magically transform your design with just one click.
With Magic Switch, you can easily turn your presentation into a summary document or a blog post, or adapt it for different platforms. You can even translate your designs into different languages without leaving the page. It is simple: you'll have more time to focus on being creative and less time on the boring stuff.
Magic Media
This feature is like having Mid-journey built within Canva’s platform. If you want any specific images or videos for your project but don’t have the necessary skills to produce them yourself, feel free to let Magic Media do its magic. It can turn your simple ideas into professional-looking images or short videos.
Just type in a description in the prompt box, as you would in Mid-journey or DALL-E. And once you've got your image, you can fine-tune it using Canva's Photo Editor to make it exactly how you want.
Magic Animate
You know how when you see something moving or animated, it grabs your attention? Well, Magic Animate breathes life into your designs with animations and smooth transitions. It is perfect for your marketing content to stand out and impress your audience.
The best part is you don’t have to lift a finger. It gets the job done with just a click and even gets the animation timing right. In case there is something that is not to your taste, you can always tweak it later. So, whether you're doing a presentation or making a video, Magic Animate is here to make your work look polished and professional.
App Marketplace
The Marketplace is a library that brings together all the handy partner-made apps that use AI to make your designs even better. Google and OpenAI are among the popular ones. Others are Murf AI, Soundraw, Heygen, D-ID, Mojo AI, and more – each offering a different functionality within the Canva interface.
With the right apps, you can add high-quality music to your designs, use unique illustrations, create talking avatars, and tons of other awesome stuff.
Pricing
Canva offers three pricing plans - Canva Free, Canva Pro ($119.99/year for one user), and Canva Teams ($300/year for 5 users).
Even if you are on a Free plan, you get access to pretty much everything except for premium templates, stock library, and high-end AI features.
Bottom Line
Overall, Canva is a quite handy tool to have in your arsenal if you need graphic content with almost zero effort. Sure, it heavily relies on templates and pre-designed elements but it gets the job done as long as you are not looking for something very specific.
In terms of pricing, it is quite affordable for businesses of all sizes, considering all the AI features. But again, if you are not comfortable paying for it, we suggest you get your hands on the free trial and see if it is a good fit for your business.